Posts tagged psychology
This question is a little nebulous unfortunately and perhaps a bit disturbing. The evil-empire in my WIP captures Mages and breaks them down into loyal and obedient servants. The Mages aren't as d...
In my world, I plan for an alien pathogen to cause drastic mutations in all lifeforms, reshaping animals and humans alike in a scenario of near inversion of positions, with animals achieving human-...
Postpartum depression among humans is a thing that is "normal" insofar as it happens a lot, but it is not "normal" in the sense of "a thing that we don't worry about"; it doesn't happen to absolute...
In my post apocalyptic world, a virus has spread, essentially changing the roles, with infected animals gaining sentience and intellect close to a human and humans degrading into a more animalistic...
Extraversion and introversion are a central dimension in the Big Five personality model (or OCEAN model). Being introverted or extraverted may not be mutually exclusive, but, when averaging out ove...
I'm thinking about an AI similar to The Machine from Person of Interest but in a generally more advanced setting, and with a likely more broad goal of serving as a shepherd for humanity as opposed ...
To try and explain the situation the best I can imagine one of those sci-fi/fantasy situations where whenever someone is asleep they can experience new things. Whether they somehow end up in some d...
In this world, people have the legal right to fight anyone to the death, for any reason, as long as the fights are done before an official whose sole job is to regulate these duels. The officials i...
Under what circumstances could an inherently individualist species become intelligent and advanced? Usually, animals require social interaction for intelligence to develope. Or at least that's wha...
The goblins in my world are classical fantasy goblins. They aren't too smart, have primitive technology, live in tribes, and use tamed boars, wolves, and other wild animals. They usually have a bos...
Happiness is mandatory. Unhappiness is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Are you happy, citizen? - Friend computer. Welcome to Beta Complex, the little brother of Alpha Comp...
I want to make an alien species evolve without fear, or atleast not fear as we know it. Intelligent life, as I understand it, requires fear to encourage an organism to keep itself alive. What emo...
In my narrative I have these aliens that don't experience time, they don't remember and don't predict events, which makes them completely reactionary. This is supposed to make them alien and diffic...
Some kind of WW3/resource war event happens. The majority of human beings (definately over 90%, so billions) are killed by a series of bioweapon diseases used by both sides or die in the ensuing co...
Humans (even programmers :-) ) are used to having some access to natural light, but in a colony in space, on the dark side of a tidally-locked planet, or underground (for example) this won't happen...
I had an idea for a character that was stuck in a ghost-like state for a length of time after an accident. During this time, they would have very limited ability to interact with the rest of the w...
For starters, I'll describe what I'm going for with this species (I'll call them White Hairs because, you guessed it, they have white hair) They are humanoid with pale gray skin, tall and pointed, ...
So, once there was a war between the titans and the gods. In the end, the gods' leader, Anon, found a way to permanently remove the titans from the world, but the victory extracted a terrible price...
Let's say you are creating secret instructions for a new, very dangerous weapon. You have decided to encrypt the instructions. But you do not want anyone to guess that these notes are encrypted! S...
Setting: Earth, in the future, near 2060 or 2100 Technology: a bit more advanced than ours Armies and police forces are already using systems for crowd control. Some devices can generate disco...
Most aliens tend to be humans with bumpy foreheads and/or pointy ears. Even when they do have differences then usually it is an entire species being portrayed as a particular brand of human. For ex...
I'm in the rough outlining stages of this story, and found myself a bit stuck trying to turn this particular corner. Firstly, here are the basics of this world: In the future, it's a common prac...
I like the classic trope of dragons loving gold and collecting it in their lair, yet it seems poorly justified. I know that it is often used as a metaphor for greed; "dragons disease" to show how m...
In fiction that tries to provide a wide diversity of cultural stances on the collectivism-individualism stances, there is often a trope that self-reliant, no-nonsense, rugged individualists (as a d...
The humans in this setting are telepaths who are able to communicate with each other through their minds. This form of telepathy transfers simple phrases, symbols, or emotions to the designated per...
I am toying with an idea which requires a human to be stuck in a dark box for the rest of their life. They receive regular exercise of the arms and legs, air, food and water and their bodily funct...
In a world where people can feel each other's thoughts and emotions, is it possible to lie? Is it possible to think something different from what you really think? It doesn't make sense... When yo...
This one's more sociological, and it seems like a shoe-in to me, but sociology was never my strength. Given how pronounced the Coriolis effect of a smaller Von Braun wheel would be, does it seem ...
This is part of my Alien Message series: Recognizable natural numbers for alien message? Alien message: "Invitation" I recall a TV show featuring a discussion on the design of warning messages ...
Fear has been a helpful trait that has kept our race alive since back in the day. It continues to be necessary for survival as a species. However, it can be just as harmful. When faced with death o...
How long can a man survive underground without going insane? A traveler is buried under stones in a cave system. His only sources of food are mushrooms and creatures that live in the caves. Some o...
When you have around 500 soldiers with state-of-the-art equipment and superhuman reflexes, you might also want to invest in a reliable way of controlling them without hampering their ability to thi...
Vampires don't die from old age; They aren't born, and all vampires were humans at some point in their life. After being bitten, a human can turn into a vampire (although the chance is very low, o...
Set in near future. Human population is at most a hundred thousand. Everyone lives in mountainous regions to escape deadly miasma. The air is infected by nanites which can cause cardiac arrest in ...
In a magical world there is a tribe of people divided into termite-like castes. They live in the wilderness, far from most regular humans. They are effectively human; fully conscious and conscien...
(This question goes more in depth from a previous question.) Imagine This: The "Black Box" is a mind vault for a few humans who created it, the humans wanting to survive a nuclear war happening...
This is a follow-up to my previous question, based on one of the comments that was made. While the answers to the original make it quite reasonable that there will be no permanent effects manifeste...
Meet Greg. Greg was born with pretty average genetics. It seems like he was destined to have average intelligence, average strength, and be average at everything. There was one particularly though:...
500,000 people have been kidnapped from all over the world by aliens. The aliens want to see if humans have empathy, and they can't understand our languages, as we speak they hear just random nois...
So aliens find Earth to be suitable for colonization and disregard humanity's claim. Not because they are racist, but because they are so different biologically and psychologically that humans simp...
I want to popularize the following or a similar belief. In many thousand years people will travel back in time to give us an afterlife, if we make it possible, by going the steps, that will lea...
I'm writing a novel about a (small) group of people with extraordinarily long lifespans. Now I am wondering on the psychological aspects of that, which has been a side-topic here and there in simi...
Usually when a population overgrows it expands in search of new land and if the fields are virgin and empty they become farmland and cities, but if the fields are already occupied and the resources...
A planet is in the brink of destruction with constant wars and chaos. To somehow save their world a group of scientists launched a nuclear warhead all over their planet to release a gas that would...
So basically, a guy (criminal, fraud, con artist and generally very untrustworhy person) is involved in an accident and suffers total memory loss. He remembers absolutely nothing about his previous...
My current ongoing science fiction project has FTL travel that is instantaneous for the ships and their crews, but still, usually, takes years of real-time in the rest of the universe. This is goin...
I am creating a world in which a society exists that is heavily inspired that ancient Sparta, specifically with a focus on Spartiates and their military education, the agoge. A character in the sto...
Here's one to ponder: what would an immortal eight-year-old be like after one thousand years? In most stories involving immortality, the immortals are fully formed adults. When those stories do in...
Say we are able to mass produce clones for our clone army and give them memories. Then we decide to give them the same template/personality/identity/etc. What psychological effects would this have...
So assuming their existed an Oracle, what effects would it have on society. Assume that everyone has access to it similar to using a library where the books can't leave. Properties of the Oracle ...
