These inventions were built to trick us
We live in an ultra-processed world of not just food.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Since its invention, social media has commanded an increasing share of our waking hours, says the writer,
PHOTO: ST FILE
Angela Duckworth
In the 1940s, biologist Niko Tinbergen observed that the oystercatcher bird chose to incubate only her largest eggs. He guessed that this behaviour was instinctive: the larger the egg, the healthier the chick. To test his hypothesis, Tinbergen presented a mother oystercatcher with a plaster egg several times larger than a real egg.
The mother bird was fooled, and though she could barely clamber atop it, she kept trying – tragically neglecting her eggs.