Nick Chater is a professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School.  He joined WBS in 2010, after holding chairs in psychology at Warwick and UCL. He has over 200 publications, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. 

Listed below are a few articles by Nick to get you thinking about the mind.

• What lies beneath? - The Psychologist (July 2019) - Nick reasons that we can’t uncover the depths of our own minds, not because those depths are murky or difficult to fathom: but because, there are no depths to uncover.
• Personality as tradition: The unique patterns of behaviour that make each of us special - The Conversation (April 2019) - Nick suggests it is details, not generalities, that make each of us special and that changing aspects of our personalities (if we want to) will, most likely, be slow and difficult.
• Who won the war? We did, says everyone - The Conversation (August 2019) - Nick argues our national collective memories seem to be deceiving us, and this is part of a far more general pattern.
• Would you stand up to an oppressive regime or would you conform: Here’s the science - The Conversation (October 2019) -  Nick believes a small number of us would rebel against an oppressive regime, but not primarily based on differences in individual moral character.  Instead the rebels would find different norms and ideals, shared with fellow members of the resistance, or inspired by history or literature, because breaking out of one set of norms requires that we have an available alternative.
• Curious Kids: how did humans think about things, before they had language to think with? - The Conversation (November 2019) - Nick tells us that language can express some of the results of our thinking, but it’s not the thinking itself.
• Driverless cars aren’t safe enough to share our streets - Financial Times (December 2019).
• Could we live in a world without rules? - The Conversation (February 2020) - As a behavioural scientist Nick believes it's not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem – but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit is establishing the difference between the two.
• People won't get 'tired' of social distancing – the government is wrong to suggest otherwise - The Guardian (March 2020).
• Coronavirus: are psychological biases causing politicians to make bad choices? - The Conversation (March 2020) - Nick explains that our minds tackle the future by referring to the past and we reason about the world by constructing narratives, but we have a tendency to see only one possible model.