Interesting article by Richard Thaler on encouraging good citizenship by making the desired behavior more fun: Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued. Of course you can simply pay people for doing the right thing, but if the [...] Read more – ‘Making Good Citizenship Fun — Richard Thaler’.
Idealistic approaches, however well motivated, rely on top down determination of what is right. In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not [...] Read more – ‘Naturalistic v. Idealistic Approaches to Organizational Planning’.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, an official named Gresham observed that where different metals were in circulation as coinage and some were better than others of the same nominal value, the coins made of the inferior metal tended to drive the better out of circulation. The better coins were either hoarded or melted down [...] Read more – ‘The Law of Competing Standards’.
William James famously wrote “Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic. All of our life is nothing but a mass of habits.” James, according to Jonah Lehrer writing in the WSJ, “was pointing out that, though we give habits little thought, they define our lives: how much we eat, save or spend, how often [...] Read more – ‘Habits’.
Matt Ridley with an excellent column in the weekend Wall Street Journal on why we feel uncomfortable about using honesty when face to face with other people but seem to have no problem being brutally honest over the net. In many monkeys and apes, face-to-face contact is essentially antagonistic. Staring is a threat. A baboon [...] Read more – ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect: Why We Tell All Over The Internet’.
Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization. Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas. — My Life and Work Read more – ‘The Balance Wheel of Civilization’.
…Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading [...] Read more – ‘Scientifically Proven Ways to Study Better’.
The prisoners’ dilemma is the best known strategy game in social science. The game shows why two entities might not cooperate even when it appears in their best (rational) interest to do so. What is rational for the individual in certain circumstances is not rational for the group — that is, pursuing a strategy that [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Prisoners’ Dilemma’.
Justin Landis with an an interesting blog post he wrote in response to a Freakonomics podcast “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?” The highlight: [T]hose of us who live in the business world are certainly incentivized to focus on what we know over what we don’t know. And whether we’re talking about [...] Read more – ‘The Most Dangerous Place’.
Free The Animal: Lose Weight & Fat With The Paleo Diet (5 stars) A charming primer on the paleo idea, with an illustration through the authors own life. I read it in one sitting. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (5 stars) This is a great synthesis of the modularity [...] Read more – ‘Book Recommendations from Nassim Taleb’.
“To do nothing is within the power of all men.” — Samuel Johnson A fundamental assumption in rational decision making is that only relevant information from the alternatives available will influence an individual’s decision. Thus, the order in which alternatives are presented should not affect an individual’s choice. However, decision problems are rarely presented without [...] Read more – ‘Status Quo Bias in Decision Making’.
There are 563 toasters for sale on Amazon.ca. Most of the listings offer detailed technical specifications and reviews from customers and consumer magazines. In the quest for the best, “it’s so easy to be seduced, so easy to search some more,” says Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of [...] Read more – ‘Where does willpower come from?’.
Psychologist Robert Cialdini wrote two of the the most important books on influence Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Now he recommends five books for you: Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It [...] Read more – ‘Master of Influence Robert Cialdini Recommends Five Books’.
From the “I have a dream” speech to Steve Jobs’ iPhone launch, all great presentations have a common architecture. At TEDxEast, Nancy Duarte draws lessons on how to make a powerful call-to-action. If you want to improve your presentations try Duarte’s books: slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations and Resonate: Present Visual [...] Read more – ‘The Art of Storytelling Through Presentations’.
Great video of psychologist Robert Cialdini introducing the universal principles of influence: reciprocation, scarcity, authority, commitment, liking, and consensus. Still curious? Read Robert Cialdini’s books Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Read more – ‘The Principles of Influence (video)’.
Drawing on attribution theory in psychology, a new research paper investigates how individuals learn from both failure and success. The authors contend that when individuals fail, they ascribe the performance deficit as the result of situational factors beyond their control. As a result, individuals are likely to fail to learn as much from their own [...] Read more – ‘How Individuals Learn From Both Failure And Success’.
A new paper by Dan Ariely found offering customers the choice to downsize portions proved effective (and cost-effective for the company): Policies that mandate calorie labeling in fast-food and chain restaurants have had little or no observable impact on calorie consumption to date. In three field experiments, we tested an alternative approach: activating consumers’ self-control [...] Read more – ‘An Alternative to Calorie Labels’.
Increasing evidence suggests that the mindsets associated with the concepts of time and money can differentially affect the happiness we derive from a given activity. Conclusion: In three separate experiments we have demonstrated that bringing individuals’ effective hourly wage to their attention impairs the ability to derive happiness from pleasurable experiences. This effect was observed [...] Read more – ‘How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses?’.
How do you remember where you parked your car? How do you know if you’re moving in the right direction? Neuroscientist Neil Burgess studies the neural mechanisms that map the space around us, and how they link to memory and imagination. RSS and Email readers click here. Read more – ‘TED Talk — How Your Brain Tells You Where You Are’.
An eloquent explanation on the difference between mysteries and secrets by Gregory Treverton: There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right [...] Read more – ‘What’s The Difference Between a Puzzle and a Mystery?’.
Two Harvard researchers looked at the factors that actually improve student achievement and those that don’t. In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Will Dobbie and Roland Freyer analyzed 35 charter schools, which generally have greater flexibility in terms of school structure and strategy. They found that traditionally emphasized factors such [...] Read more – ‘Class size doesn’t matter’.
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer On Being Certain by Robert Burton Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely Mentioned by many others. Outstanding experimentally-driven analysis of human irrationality. Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Great book that explains the disproportionate impact that initial conditions (priming, anchoring, etc.) have on our decision making. Stumbling Toward Happiness, [...] Read more – ‘What are the best books on the psychology behind human decision making and irrationality?’.
danah boyd with a fascinating talk on the realities of information consumption and the flow of information through social media: The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally [...] Read more – ‘The Flow of Information Through Social Media’.
In three experiments, we tested the prediction that individuals’ experience of power influences their perceptions of their own height. High power, relative to low power, was associated with smaller estimates of a pole’s height relative to the self (Experiment 1), with larger estimates of one’s own height (Experiment 2), and with choice of a taller [...] Read more – ‘Powerful People Overestimate’.
What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly. The other thing we did was to show in mathematical terms how when making predictions, a [...] Read more – ‘Collective Accuracy = Average Accuracy + Diversity’.
Forensic scientists are not immune to cognitive biases: Dr Dror’s and Dr Hampikian’s experiment presented data from a real case to 17 DNA examiners working in an accredited government laboratory in North America. The case involved a gang rape in the state of Georgia, in which one of the rapists testified against three other suspects [...] Read more – ‘Ignorance is bliss’.
Interesting video: Still curious? Check out Clay Johnson’s intelligent manifesto for optimizing our consumption The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. Read more – ‘The Truth About Information Overload’.
Thrity Umrigar, a 2000 Nieman Fellow, and the author of the bestselling The Space Between Us, and the forthcoming World We Found explores how the worlds of journalism and fiction writing are not as unimaginably different as one might think. First of all, journalism imposed a certain discipline, a work ethic, a workmanlike attitude toward [...] Read more – ‘The Exploration of How Power Corrupts Human Relationships’.
In a 1904 letter to a friend, Franz Kafka asked a provocative rhetorical—and metaphorical—question: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” And then he answered the question this way: A book should serve as an ice-axe to break [...] Read more – ‘If the book we are reading does not wake us … why then do we read it?’.
To change an organization you must first change minds. A. Regard every belief as a hypothesis. The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management’s unexamined beliefs. Music can only be sold on shiny discs? Don’t bet on it. The news has to be delivered on a big piece of flimsy paper? Not [...] Read more – ‘Intellectual Flexibility’.
In this rare clip from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl delivers a powerful message about the human search for meaning — and the most important gift we can give others. If we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take him as he should be, we make him [...] Read more – ‘Viktor Frankl — Why to believe in others’.
Joseph Schumpeter applied the term “creative destruction” to the dynamic of the market economy. Not only does the new technology displace the old: the new company displaces the old. Innovation mostly comes from entrepreneurs outside established businesses, engaged in an endless succession of experiments. Most fail, but not all. …The established firm more often responds [...] Read more – ‘Creative Destruction’.
When your environment is cluttered, the chaos restricts your ability to focus. The clutter also limits your brain’s ability to process information. Clutter makes you distracted and unable to process information as well as you do in an uncluttered, organized, and serene environment. The clutter competes for your attention in the same way a toddler [...] Read more – ‘Physical Clutter Negatively Affects Your Ability To Focus & Process Information’.
An excerpt from an interesting article highlighting some of the recent findings of brain science on making better decisions: Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions-but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice. …Roy F. Baumeister, a social [...] Read more – ‘How Can We Make Better Decisions? Brain science helps redefine decision-making’.
Knowing what to expect colors so much of our life’s experiences. The key is understanding what you control. There are two sides of expectations — what we expect from others and what we expect from ourselves. And how we manage those expectations is critical to how we view our experiences and pursue our goals. … [...] Read more – ‘Expectations Make A Difference’.
Many of us have constant access to information. We are so used to looking up the answer to any question immediately that it can feel like withdrawal when we have to wait. Of course, storing information outside of our brains is nothing new. I came across this interesting study: “We investigate whether the Internet has [...] Read more – ‘The Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’.
Jonah Lehrer with an interesting article in WSJ on our belief that risks can be overcome with technology: Though antilock brakes should make cars safer to drive, studies have demonstrated that drivers with such systems drive faster and brake later. The same goes for cyclists and skiers who wear helmets; they tend to move more [...] Read more – ‘The Risk-Compensation Effect’.
Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian Association) is one of the most basic forms of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov and his dogs in 1927. This Scientific America piece takes a closer look: Classical Conditioning, Explained The most important thing to remember is that classical conditioning involves automatic or reflexive responses, [...] Read more – ‘Classical Conditioning And Why It Matters’.
Interesting Nudge: Sugary drinks like soda are a big cause of obesity, but public health types haven’t had much luck convincing the public of that. But what if you knew that it would take 50 minutes of jogging to burn off one soda? When researchers taped signs saying just that on the drink coolers in [...] Read more – ‘Exercise Info — Not Calorie Counts’.
Email has influenced the kinds of people we interact with. A new study by Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University claims that we exchange the highest volume of email with the people we know the least. “These are folks you almost certainly wouldn’t talk to on the phone,” Mr. Uzzi says. “You also [...] Read more – ‘How To Use Email To Determine If Someone Likes You’.
Working alone is out. Organizations, schools, and culture are in the thrall of what Susan Cain calls “the New Groupthink,” which holds that creativity derives from our gregariousness. “Most of us,” she writes, “now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is [...] Read more – ‘Open-plan Offices Suck — Privacy Makes Us Productive’.
Surgical care is often linked to adverse events with a wide variation in mortality rates across hospitals. Given that lives are at risk a lot of efforts go into improving care. Most of those efforts focus on technological advancement. Only a few focus on the impact of human factors, such as the surgeon’s performance. “Professional [...] Read more – ‘Are More Experienced Surgeons Better? The Association Between Surgeons’ Experience and Performance’.
An edited excerpt from David Weinberger’s new book, Too Big to Know, explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain’s ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on. In 1963, Bernard K. Forscher of the Mayo Clinic complained in a now famous letter printed in the [...] Read more – ‘To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data’.
An interesting article in the Boston Globe on the future of prediction. Philip Tetlock’s findings, which he collected in a 2005 book called “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”, were disturbing because they seemed to imply that prediction was impossible. But Tetlock’s study did not cause him to give up [...] Read more – ‘The Future of Prediction’.
An interesting TED talk by Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth studies non-IQ competencies that predict success both academically and professionally. Duckworth defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” “Grit,” she continues, “entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite [...] Read more – ‘True Grit: Can Perseverance be Taught?’.
In this RSA Keynote (video below), Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, discusses his ideas on fragility and their relevance to the current economic crisis, national policy making and other topics. Listen to an audio copy and see the slides here. Nassim Taleb is the author of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, and most recently, [...] Read more – ‘Nassim Taleb — The Predictability of Unpredictability’.
Odysseus had himself tied to the mast, and that still works against modern sirens. To keep your New Year’s promises to yourself, first recognize that human will is a depleatable physical resource. But, there’s hope: “the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.” One of their newest [...] Read more – ‘Willpower & New Year’s Resolutions’.
George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novella, Animal Farm, almost never saw the light of day. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book, partly for political reasons. Eventually Animal Farm came out in print in [...] Read more – ‘George Orwell’s Animal Farm — The Movie’.
An interesting paper by Max Bazerman on the malleability of morality and behavioral ethics. Bazerman defines behavioral ethics as “the study of systematic and predictable ways in which individuals make ethical decisions and judge the ethical decisions of others that are at odds with intuition and the benefits of the broader society.” By focusing on [...] Read more – ‘Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty’.
How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. … No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. … Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new [...] Read more – ‘Joshua Foer — How We Perceive The World’.
“But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens?” Interviewer: If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the other way, and they slam together. Now, what is it, the feeling between [...] Read more – ‘Richard Feynman on Why Questions’.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think will change the way you think about your next meal. According to eating behavior expert Brian Wansink the mind makes food-related decisions, more than 200 a day, and many of them without pause for actual thought. In Mindless Eating, Wansink argues that we don’t have to [...] Read more – ‘Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think’.
An insightful piece by Ivan Eland on the uses and limitations of economic sanctions against nations. Sanctions — an economic means to achieve a political end — don’t work. Frequent practitioners of economic warfare—especially the United States, which is the most aggressive user of such methods in the world—often confuse the economic effects of sanctions [...] Read more – ‘Economic Sanctions Are Overrated’.
In his 1986 book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum laid out the foundation for life. Some of his advice: - Share everything. - Play fair. - Don’t hit people. - Put things back where you found them. - Clean up your own mess. - Say you’re sorry when [...] Read more – ‘What You Were Supposed to Learn in Kindergarten’.
A lecture by Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis on face-to-face social networks, what they mean to our lives, and how they effect us. Our social networks have the power to spread obesity — or happiness — like contagion. If you’re friends are obese you have about a 45% higher likelihood of being obese yourself. If your [...] Read more – ‘The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives’.
Interesting article in the economist on the science of pedestrian behaviour. “At low densities, behaviour is cognitive and strategic. At high density, it’s about mass movement and physical pressures”. … Another self-organising behaviour comes when opposing flows of people meet at a single intersection: think of parents trying to shepherd their children into school as [...] Read more – ‘The strange but extremely valuable science of how pedestrians behave’.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion Tyler Cowen with an excellent TEDtalk on the dangers of storytelling: So if I’m thinking about this talk, I’m wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? One story you might [...] Read more – ‘The danger of storytelling’.
Do people desire creative ideas? If yes, why do we resist them? Similarly, research documents that teachers dislike students who exhibit curiosity and creative thinking even though teachers acknowledge creativity as an important educational goal. Three researchers took a stab at the answer: We offer a new perspective to explain this puzzle. Just as people [...] Read more – ‘The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas’.
[A] species of crow and a species of woodpecker can continue to diverge evolutionarily, when while sharing the same forest. They do it by responding differently to different aspects of the environment—that is by adapting themselves to different ecological niches. An excerpt from The Song of the Dodo Read more – ‘Evolution and Divergence’.
“I do not believe I have ever written a children’s book.” An awesome 5 minute video of children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Sendak is the creative genius behind books such as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. When asked why he never did a sequel to Where the Wild [...] Read more – ‘Maurice Sendak, Creative Genius’.
An insightful piece by Jonah Lehrer on the challenge of causation. Despite all of our fancy tools and computers, we’re still trying to figure out how X relates to Y. This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to [...] Read more – ‘The Challenge Of Causation’.
How did our species develop a mind that is hardwired for culture-and why? “…at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators.” In a recent video (below) posted on edge.org Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, offers a hypothesis on the downside of interconnectedness — A [...] Read more – ‘Wired for Culture: Mark Pagel Explains our Social Culture’.
If you read the seven habits of highly ineffective people, you might want to read seven things highly productive people do: 1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down [...] Read more – ‘7 Things Highly Productive People Do’.
Some widely held holiday- and winter- themed medical beliefs are re-examined by a pair of scientists. “Examining common medical myths reminds us to be aware of when evidence supports our advice, and when we operate based on unexamined beliefs.” Sugar causes hyperactivity in children …Regardless of what parents might believe, however, sugar is not to [...] Read more – ‘Can You Cure a Hangover? A Closer Look At Some Holiday Medical Myths’.
Leading neuropsychiatrist Peter Whybrow is the author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, a neurobiological look at the instinctual and social behaviors that balance a market economy. He explains how America’s reward-driven culture is pushing the physiological limits of our evolutionary inheritance. Peter Whybrow – PopTech 2008 from PopTech on Vimeo. Read more – ‘Neuroscience, Happiness, and Balancing Self v. Social Interest’.
How did Christmas, a holiday started back in Pagen Rome, become the centrepiece of the Christian Year? Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas originally appeared on the history channel back in 1997. Narrated by Harry Smith, this documentary traces the roots of Christmas back to its early beginnings as a pagan Roman holiday of feasting [...] Read more – ‘Origins of Christmas’.
We all enjoy stockings but those extra little gifts can diminish the value of other presents you bought. It’s Christmas morning, and you open a box to find a cashmere sweater. The sweater feels plush and expensive, and you feel grateful. But then, underneath the sweater, you find a packet of Hershey’s kisses. Technically, you [...] Read more – ‘Should You Buy Stocking Stuffers?’.
Where did the iconic Santa Claus imagery we have all come to know – red suit, pleasantly plump, flowing white beard, rosy cheeks – come from? Turns out, Coca-Cola’s advertising program was more than a little helper in the modern interpretation of Saint Nick. Eatocracy talked with Phil Mooney, the Coca-Cola Company’s Vice President for [...] Read more – ‘How Coca-Cola helped shape the modern-day Santa’.
While talking with friends, you learn that your former boss has been sentenced for fraud. One of your friends thinks your boss received a jail term of “one year” and another friend reports that it is “366 days”. Who seems more knowledgeable about the details of the case? Similarly, suppose you want to order a [...] Read more – ‘How does one year differ from 365 days?’.
…When we’re threatened we defend ourselves—and our systems. Before 9/11, for instance, President George W. Bush was sinking in the polls. But as soon as the planes hit the World Trade Center, the president’s approval ratings soared. So did support for Congress and the police. During Hurricane Katrina, America witnessed FEMA’s spectacular failure to rescue [...] Read more – ‘Why do people defend unjust, inept, and corrupt systems?’.
As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost: “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and [...] Read more – ‘Smoke Screening’.
The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions [...] Read more – ‘On Being the Right Size’.
Our mental machinery is designed to make sense of the world. Our mental machinery is designed to tell us stories, and those are stories we believe, and the stories tend to be simple. They tend to be causal, and yet, internally coherent. And the quality of those stories plays a very significant role in our [...] Read more – ‘Our mental machinery’.
‘Email’s variable interval reinforcement schedule is basically a slot machine for your brain’ 1. Responding Like a Trained Monkey. Every productivity expert in the world will tell you to check email at periodic intervals — say, every 90 minutes — rather than clicking “refresh” like a Pavlovian mutt. Of course, almost no one listens, because [...] Read more – ‘Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012’.
Holidays make us nostalgic, which increases our feelings of fellowship. This leads to more giving: Compared with control groups, those encouraged to wax nostalgic planned to donate and volunteer more and scored higher on tests of empathy. In a final experiment, a nostalgic pitch (“Restoring the Past for the Children of Wenchuan”) led to greater [...] Read more – ‘Feeling Nostalgic Leads to Increased Giving’.
Ronald Reagan once remarked that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” “…our interviews revealed an interesting and creative reasoning style that we call inferred justification: recursively inventing the causal links necessary to justify a favored politician’s action. Inferred justification operates [...] Read more – ‘Inferred Justification’.
As someone who recently purchased a copy of The Story of Art, I found Jonah Lehrer’s wired article on how the brain perceives art fascinating: We want to believe that pleasure is simple, that our delight in a fine painting or bottle of wine is due entirely to the thing itself. But that’s not the [...] Read more – ‘How Does the Brain Perceive Art?’.
Those who solicit tips know why they do it, but can the same be said of those who tip? The obvious answer is, a tip is a small thank you for services rendered. Thank you to the doorman for getting you a cab, to the cabdriver for not killing us, and to the waitress for … [...] Read more – ‘Tyranny of Gratuity’.
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” —Leon Festinger In that quote, Festinger was describing a famous case study in psychology. Festinger and [...] Read more – ‘The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science’.
Behavioral economics is more appreciative of gift giving than traditional economics: Behavioral economics better understands why people (rightly, in my view) don’t want to give up the mystery, excitement and joy of gift giving. In this view, gifts aren’t irrational. It’s just that rational economists have failed to account for their genuine social utility. So [...] Read more – ‘Is It Irrational To Give Gifts?’.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects [...] Read more – ‘The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence’.
Even though sales of vitamins have risen steadily, there has been no corresponding improvement in public health. Indeed, the opposite is true, with obesity and diabetes climbing perilously. What’s going on here? A team of psychological scientists in Taiwan, led by Wen-Bin Chiou of National Sun Yat-Sen University, has been exploring this paradox from the [...] Read more – ‘Behavioral Licensing’.
Interesting post on limits of our perception and awareness. Late one January night in 1995, Boston police officer Kenny Conley ran right past the site of a brutal beating without doing a thing about it. The case received extensive media coverage because the victim was an undercover police officer and the aggressors were other cops. [...] Read more – ‘If You Can’t Notice a Gorilla in Plain Sight, How Can You Testify as a Witness?’.
It’s a fact: 80% of people tend to think they are above average. Until now, few people have ever questioned why? What happens is that we evaluate others based on their average performance and ourselves based on our best performance. * * * Abstract We examine whether people call to mind different manifestations of various [...] Read more – ‘Are You Above Average?’.
“We live in a competitive world in which people frequently act on the basis of their own self-interest. This means they will embrace you when you provide value and forget you the minute you don’t. This tough lesson is being played out in work organizations every day. Prepare and act accordingly.” To benefit from the [...] Read more – ‘Why Your Company Won’t Repay Your Favors’.
This explains why humans are naturally hardwired to make bad investment decisions. “When we enjoy a gain of a dollar and the loss of a dollar which are, of course, symmetrical, we tend to suffer two to two and a half times more from the loss then we enjoy the gain,” says Michael Mauboussin, Chief [...] Read more – ‘Why Emotional People Make Bad Investors’.
In one of the more in-depth and wide-ranging Q&A sessions on the freakonomics blog has run, Daniel Kahneman, whose new book is called Thinking, Fast and Slow, answered 22 questions posted by readers. Three of the questions that caught my attention: Q. As you found, humans will take huge, irrational risks to avoid taking a [...] Read more – ‘Daniel Kahneman Answers’.
“When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make [...] Read more – ‘Breaking Out of Our Righteous Minds’.
“Sustainability by stealth, if you will. So many strategies for addressing the sustainability challenge hinge on a simple, appealing premise: Explain the facts about our unsustainable lifestyles and assume that if people understand those facts, they’ll alter their behavior accordingly. It’s an approach based on two assumptions: that individuals listen to reason, and that individuals [...] Read more – ‘Four Ways to Make Sustainability More Attractive’.
In honor of the publication of his first book later this month (Situations Matter), Sam Sommers presents his Top 7 List of Lessons about Human Nature offered by Seinfeld: 7. The Ubiquity of Social Norms. Seinfeld was a show about norms, not nothing. At its minutiae-focused best, the series was a 22-minute weekly discourse on [...] Read more – ‘Top 7 List of Lessons about Human Nature offered by Seinfeld’.
Leaders, in other words, are necessary, but not because they are the source of social change. Rather their real function is to occupy the role that allows the rest of us to make sense of what is happening — just as Tolstoy suspected. Typically, the way we think of social change is some variant of [...] Read more – ‘What Are Leaders Really For?’.
I’m a huge Feynman fan. Here is the complete BBC video of “No Ordinary Genius” If you want to learn more, check out these Feynman books: Six Easy Pieces, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, The Feynman Lectures On Physics. Read more – ‘Richard Feynman – No Ordinary Genius’.
Thomas Friedman was responsible for the Iraq invasion of 2003, and not only he paid no penalties for it but he is still continuing to have the Op-Ed page of the New York Times confusing innocent people. He got —and kept —the upside, others get the downside. A journalist with arguments can harm more people [...] Read more – ‘Nassim Taleb: “If you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud”’.
The world is a complicated place. Reality is dense with patterns, but these patterns are often subtle and inconsistent. We think we understand how things work – X always causes Y – but then Z happens. It’s very confusing. Needless to say, such complexity poses a big problem for biology. How should animals learn from [...] Read more – ‘Is there such a thing as too much feedback?’.
We sweat the small stuff. “We suggest that metacognitive inference contributes to a process we name “decision quicksand,” whereby people get sucked into spending more time on unimportant decisions. Our central premise is that people use the subjective difficulty experienced while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to [...] Read more – ‘Why do people sometimes get stuck in seemingly minor choices?’.
This study examined the role of gratuity guidelines on tipping behavior in restaurants. When diners were finished with their meals, they were given checks that either did or did not include calculated examples informing them what various percentages of their bill would amount to. Results indicated that parties who received the gratuity examples left significantly [...] Read more – ‘Does Including Gratuity Guidelines on Customers’ Checks Affect Restaurant Tipping Behavior?’.
An excerpt from an Interview with Malcolm Gladwell: It’s an interesting question. I have been reading a lot about the Vietnam War. What’s amazing [about it] is that a set of lessons were painfully learned there, which were completely ignored 30 years later in the Iraq War and Afghanistan. It’s like Vietnam never happened. One [...] Read more – ‘Malcolm Gladwell On The Role of Academics’.
Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447′s flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion between the pilots that led to the crash. We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with [...] Read more – ‘What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447’.
Social scientists have only begun to seriously examine the act of donating money: …the emerging research on charitable giving has yielded a difficult truth: Thinking harder about how to give makes us less likely to give at all. …Why anyone is ever selfless is a mystery that has fascinated, not to mention frustrated, scientists since [...] Read more – ‘Why we give to charity’.
Frequent multitaskers are worse at multitasking than infrequent multitaskers. Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking [...] Read more – ‘Do you get better at multitasking with experience?’.
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what [...] Read more – ‘Learning How To Think’.
Power—defined as the ability to influence others—makes people think differently. For North Americans, a feeling of power leads to thinking in a focused and analytical way, which may be beneficial when pursuing personal goals. “What’s most interesting about this study is the idea that thinking is flexible, not rigid or innately pre-programmed. We are able [...] Read more – ‘Does Power Goto Our Heads?’.
“Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts—mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that’s generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor—entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.” — Peter Thiel While [...] Read more – ‘Mimetic Theory’.
If you’re still looking for the perfect gift for the book-lover on your list, start here: Five Must-Reads for Tackling Complex Problems Farnam Street’s Behavioral Economics Reading List Foreign Policy’s Favorite Reads of 2011 The 10 Best Books of 2011 from the NYT What books influenced Steve Jobs What is Bill Gates Reading Five Book [...] Read more – ‘The Ultimate Book Lover’s Resource’.
In this podcast, renowned academic and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses his groundbreaking ideas and their relevance to the current economic crisis, national policy making and other topics with Rohan Silva, senior policy advisor to the Prime Minister. Cameron Conservatives quote Taleb in making the case against central state control and planning and in favour [...] Read more – ‘The Predictability of Unpredictability’.
I thoroughly enjoyed Douglas Allen’s new book, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World. Here is a summary excerpt: Having consistent weights and measures, like knowing the precise time, allowed for — almost by definition — more accurate and less costly monitoring. The lowered transaction costs of measurement meant that [...] Read more – ‘The Institutional Revolution’.
Freeman Dyson reviews Thinking, Fast and Slow Cognitive illusions are the main theme of his book. A cognitive illusion is a false belief that we intuitively accept as true. The illusion of validity is a false belief in the reliability of our own judgment. The interviewers sincerely believed that they could predict the performance of [...] Read more – ‘Freeman Dyson on Daniel Kahneman: How to Dispel Your Illusions’.
Just how tech-savvy are young people? A group of researchers led by business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps [...] Read more – ‘“Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less”’.
An observer of policy based on behavioral economics might well conclude that an assumption of irrationality may be valid, but irrational behavior is hard to predict. Why, for example, do people (even experts and managers who should know better) act in their own worst interests or those of their firms? Can such behaviors be predicted [...] Read more – ‘Is Thinking Slow An Argument for Bureaucracy?’.
Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s top commanders and chief of the German Luftwaffe, speaks on the ease with which people can be induced to enter into war. Interviewed in his cell during the Nuremburg trials by Gustave Gilbert, an intelligence officer and psychologist, Goering was quite candid. Gilbert kept a journal of his observations of [...] Read more – ‘How to persuade a nation to enter a war?’.
Thanks again for sharing and tweeting. 1. But Wait … There’s More: A look at how infomercials persuade. 2. If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: How you spend your time makes a big difference. 3. Google Talks Presents: Daniel Kahneman. 4. Three ways organizations demotivate their employees(Video.) 5. An Interview With Daniel Kahneman. 6. [...] Read more – ‘The Best of Farnam Street November 2011’.
“Things without all remedy. Should be without regard. What’s done is done.” —Lady Macbeth Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, delivers an excellent TED talk on embracing our regrets. “The point isn’t to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. … Regret [...] Read more – ‘Don’t Regret Regret’.
As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things. [...] Read more – ‘How We Lose Our Mental Flexibility’.
“Economists essentially have a sophisticated lack of understanding of economics, especially macroeconomics.” There is a beauty to the models in and of themselves. You assume, for example, that people are rational. I don’t think any really good economist thinks that people are perfectly rational, but, on the other hand, if you want to model people [...] Read more – ‘All Of The Models Are Going To Be Flawed’.
The New York Times picks the 10 best books of 2011 (fiction first, nonfiction at the bottom) THE ART OF FIELDING At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach’s expansive, allusive [...] Read more – ‘The 10 Best Books of 2011 from the NYT’.
Christian Jarrett created a list of the best psychology books in 2011 for the the BPS Research Digest: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. The Sunday Times describes Foer’s story of how he became American Memory Champion as “the most entertaining science book of the year”. The Indy [...] Read more – ‘Best Psychology Books Of The Year – 2011’.
Situations Matter is an excellent book that should give you a leg up in life. One of the lessons of modern psychological research is that ‘the situation’ we find ourselves in influences us. If you’ve ever wondered about why you are not as independent-minded as you think or about the difference between men and women [...] Read more – ‘Situations Matter’.
High performers learn from both success and failure making small adjustments. Conversely, low performers, learned more from success. Learning effectively from experience is a daunting task for any organism. For every good or bad outcome, there are an immense number of potential causes and associations to be considered. For many decisions, it can be nearly [...] Read more – ‘Learning Effectively From Experience: Distinguishing High from Low Performers’.
What’s the best way to beg for money? Psychologist Dan Ariely put a student on the street to find out. …And it turned out that both his position and his eye contact did, in fact, make a difference. He made more money when he was standing and when he looked people in the eyes. It [...] Read more – ‘What’s The Best Way to Beg for Money?’.
Scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a video recorder-storing perfect memory in a way that can be pulled out, rewound, and replayed over and over while remaining intact. Even the simple act of telling a story can modify memory. This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than [...] Read more – ‘The Certainty of Memory’.
In standard models with asymmetric information, the parties involved are assumed to have private information about their own characteristics. That means, I should know more about me than you know about me. This plays out in many different ways. “In the health insurance market, for example, customers are typically assumed to know more about their [...] Read more – ‘Asymmetric Information’.
Why is it so hard to get doctors, nurses and others in patient care to adequately disinfect their hands? At least part of the problem is psychological. People in general—but health care professionals in particular—suffer from cognitive biases that skew their judgment about risk. Research has shown, for example, that hospital workers maintain an “illusion [...] Read more – ‘Can altruism be a better motivator than self-interest?’.
An insightful paper by Sendhil Mullainathan on how behaviorial influence like the status quo bias affect the poor and rich alike. The main difference being the narrow margins for error in poverty: …According to this behavioral view, people who live in poverty are susceptible to many of the same impulses and idiosyncrasies as those who [...] Read more – ‘Savings Policy and Decisionmaking in Low-Income Households’.
Bob Sutton commenting on a very old study called “The Effects of Changes in Roles on the Attitudes of Role Occupants”: The study was fascinating in that Lieberman was able to gather data during a “naturally occurring experiment” where people who worked in a manufacturing company switched roles — in some cases moving from a [...] Read more – ‘The Power of Roles’.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” —Tacitus In Plato’s Revenge, William Ophuls spells out what’s implied by this syllogism: * In a healthy state, laws are few, simple, and general because the people are moral, law-abiding, and public spirited, which makes them easy to govern. * In a sick state, the [...] Read more – ‘Tacitus’ syllogism’.
If you’re planning on cruising Amazon.com today for deals, you can use this link to help support Farnam Street in the process. It won’t cost you any extra and you’ll help support my caffeine addiction. If you live outside the United States and you want to contribute, please consider a modest donation. Read more – ‘Cyber Monday’.
Joel Podolny, currently the vice pesident of HR at Apple, sat down with James March for an interview published in Academy of Management Learning and Eduction. As always, March offers counter-intuitive thinking and fascinating insight. On the importance of leadership: I think, however, that the importance (or unimportance) of leadership for the unfolding of history [...] Read more – ‘An Interview on Leadership with James March’.
For anyone who has been compelled to give a long-term vision or read a marketing forecast for the next decade, Mr. Taleb’s chapter excoriating “The Scandal of Prediction” will ring painfully true.” What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors,” observes Mr. Taleb, “but our absence of awareness of it.” We tend [...] Read more – ‘The Scandal of Prediction’.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz talks with Lars Mensel about the downside of choice, and the silver lining to the economic downturn. On choice and aspiration When choice was limited, I think people’s aspirations and expectations were limited. And so you could live a decent life and feel good about it. But living a decent life just [...] Read more – ‘The Paradox of Choice’.
In all versions of the game, roughly 60% of players started out co-operating. However, in the first two, this decreased over time as the pernicious influence of the freeloaders spread. The larger the fraction of a subject’s partners who defected in a given round, the less likely that person was to co-operate in the next—classical [...] Read more – ‘The evolution of co-operation: Social networking tames cheats’.
In response to But Wait … There’s More, a kind reader passed along a link to a wonderful interview between Andrew Warner and Tim Hawthorne (a producer of infomercials). On how to orchestrate an immediate response: ..In order to do that, I think there are definitely certain products that fall into a category of generating [...] Read more – ‘How Infomercials Persuade’.
From an excellent career couch column in the New York Times: People often lose their concentration when they are bored, of course, but also when they are engaged in challenging tasks, says Peter Bregman, author of “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done” and chief executive of a management [...] Read more – ‘Why do we lose focus so easily?’.
Meet Colonel Robin Stephens, a master interrogator, who was tasked with breaking down the most hardened of German Spies during WWII. He was so successful, the British “actively ran and controlled the German espionage system.” Stephens didn’t believe in violence, instead, he applied many forms of psychological pressure. “Figuratively, a spy in war should be [...] Read more – ‘The Commandant: A Master Interrogator Reveals His Secrets’.
Since discovering Lapham’s Quarterly earlier this year, I’ve been a reader. In the wake of the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we asked Lewis Lapham, the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly and the former editor of Harper’s, what books he would recommend in order to better understand the current political climate. Here is his [...] Read more – ‘Lewis Lapham’s revolutionary reading list’.
…marketers also understand that, by using the illusion of scarcity, they can accelerate demand. This false scarcity encourages us to buy sooner and perhaps to buy more than normal. We saw two excellent examples of this effect this summer with the launches of the iPhone and the seventh Harry Potter book. In both cases, the [...] Read more – ‘How to Profit from Scarcity’.
Daniel Balliet, Norman Li, Shane Macfarlan and Mark Van Vugt did a meta-analysis of 272 research findings over the past 50 years exploring men and women in cooperative settings. This paper was published in the November, 2011 issue of Psychological Bulletin. In a meta-analysis, researchers analyze the data from many studies conducted over a long [...] Read more – ‘Do Men And Women Cooperate Differently?’.
“The principles of good management are simple, even trivial. They are not widely practices for the same reason that Christianity is not widely practiced. It is not enough to know what the principles are; you must acquire deeply ingrained habits of carrying them out, in the face of all sorts of strong urges to stray [...] Read more – ‘The Principles Of Good Management’.
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of [...] Read more – ‘Google Talks Presents: Daniel Kahneman’.
There’s a lot of psychology at play here. Lauren Rivera, examined hiring processes in three types of elite professional service firms: investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms. “These types of firms share important similarities, allowing for a robust comparison.” Her results are fascinating. You have 10 seconds to make an impression – most [...] Read more – ‘How Elite Firms Hire’.
You’ll never look at infomercials the same after reading this post. Robert Cialdini calls But Wait…There’s More “A wholly fascinating account of a wholly fascinating industry.” If you’re interested in how late night TV informercials use every psychology trick in the book, you need to read this. Infomercials are powerful. A thirty-second commercial for Tide [...] Read more – ‘An Incredible Offer — But Wait…There’s More’.
…There once was a clever engineer who noticed that the carousels for luggage are spaced at different distances from different gates – some farther and some closer to where the passengers were deplaning. And this engineer redesigned the allocation of carousels such that they minimized the distance to their gate, and therefore minimized the amount [...] Read more – ‘Idleness, Luggage Carousels, and The Inefficiency of Airports’.
Lance Workman interviews Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, co-creator of behavioural economics, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow: You’ve demonstrated that people are rather poor at making decisions that involve some degree of uncertainty – and yet you don’t see people as irrational? Well, I think the whole issue of whether people are rational or [...] Read more – ‘An Interview With Daniel Kahneman’.
Interesting, this paper suggests that television access is associated with higher debt levels for durable household goods, but not with the total amount of non-mortgage debt. …The empirical results suggest that the greater access to television is associated with a greater tendency to maintain household debt and debt for household products. Results also suggest that [...] Read more – ‘Does access to a television increase debt?’.
…They also reveal a problem at the very heart of Nudge theory: it assumes that our wise leaders will use their powers to nudge us for our own good. But why should we think they are any less self-deceived and irrational than the rest of us? (In his book, The Folly of Fools: The Logic [...] Read more – ‘Who is nudging the nudgers?’.
The size of dinnerware influences how much people serve and consume. When plates and bowls are large enough that capacity is not a constraint, we consistently serve more onto relatively larger than relatively smaller dinnerware. But why? Two researches (Van Ittersum & Wansink) set out to investigate. This is more important than you might think, [...] Read more – ‘Why you eat too much: The Delboeuf Illusion’.
Energy issues can be extremely complex and controversial. Bill Gates offers up 4 books that bring clarity and point to solutions: Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate I recommend this book to everyone who spends time working on energy issues – not to cheer them up but to help them [...] Read more – ‘Bill Gates Picks 4 Reads That Bring Clarity and Solutions to Energy Issues’.
Penny Sarchet discusses research on the ‘nocebo’ effect in her winning essay for the Wellcome Trust science writing prize Can just telling a man he has cancer kill him? In 1992 the Southern Medical Journal reported the case of a man who in 1973 had been diagnosed with cancer and given just months to live. [...] Read more – ‘The nocebo effect’.
With the adoption of environmental programs by hotels, more and more travelers are finding themselves urged to reuse their towels to help conserve environmental resources by saving energy and reducing the amount of detergent-related pollutants released into the environment. In most cases, the appeal comes in the form of a strategically placed card in the [...] Read more – ‘Using Social Norms to Motivate’.
John Kay with some insight: …When political leaders imagined they derived authority by divine right, they were tempted to believe that they had all the necessary talents – that they added the wisdom of Socrates and the military prowess of Alexander to the rhetorical skills of Cicero. The principal basis for this belief was the [...] Read more – ‘We need a fox to see the snares and a lion to scare the wolves’.
“Leadership is a gift. It’s given by those who follow. You have to be worthy of it.” —General Mark Welsh The video is 50 minutes long, but it might be the finest piece of public speaking you’ll see all year. Do your Christmas shopping at Amazon.com and support Farnam Street. Read more – ‘Leadership Is a Gift Given by Those Who Follow’.
Clayton Christensen asks, “What is it that kills successful companies?” His answer might surprise you. According to Christensen, “It’s the principles of good management that we teach at the harvard business school that sow the seeds of every company’s ultimate failure.” Christensen wrote a book on this called The Innovators Dilemma, who’s central message was [...] Read more – ‘Disruptive Innovation’.
Why are we so optimistic in our estimation of a projects cost and schedule? Why are we so surprised when something inevitably goes wrong? Because of the human tendency to underestimate disjunctive events. According to Daniel Kahneman and his long-time co-author Amos Tversky (1974): “A complex system, such as a nuclear reactor or the human [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Conjunctive and Disjunctive-Events Bias’.
Amazon.com’s editors choice for 2011 1. Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II “A riveting story of deliverance under the most unlikely circumstances, Lost in Shangri-La deserves its place among the great survival stories of World War II.” …“A truly incredible adventure.” (New [...] Read more – ‘Amazon’s 10 Best Books of 2011’.
“Landing gear malfunctions tend to be splendidly telegenic, but rarely are they going to end in disaster”: Touching down without landing gear isn’t a whole lot different from touching down with landing gear. For this reason — and contrary to what was reported on page one of last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal – pilots do [...] Read more – ‘How Difficult Was That Landing in Poland Without Landing Gear?’.
From an interesting article in Time magazine: The grand jury investigation that resulted in 40 counts of child abuse against Penn State’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, has raised profoundly unsettling psychological and moral questions about the actions — or lack thereof — of others involved in the case. Head football coach Joe Paterno was [...] Read more – ‘The Bystander Effect at Penn State: Why Some Witnesses to Crime Do Nothing’.
I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars [...] Read more – ‘“The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education”’.
Why are elite violinists better than the average players? The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long, Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life. The data tells a different [...] Read more – ‘If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong’.
Somehow a belief in the power of group brainstorming sessions persists, despite evidence that it doesn’t work. Evidence has long shown that getting a group of people to think individually about solutions, and then combining their ideas, can be more productive than getting them to think as a group. Some people are afraid of introducing [...] Read more – ‘Why brainstorming doesn’t work’.
Crowds, we are often told, are dumb. They obliterate reason, sentience and accountability, turning individuals into helpless copycats. Commentators on the riots offered different explanations but most agreed that crowd psychology was part of the problem. “The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona,” wrote the [...] Read more – ‘Crowd Behaviour’.
If you’re not following me on twitter, here is a sample of the great stuff you might have missed: —New Michael Lewis Article in Vanity Fair on Daniel Kahneman: The King of Human Error —Cognitive Biases in Times of Uncertainty —Chart: One Year of Prison Costs More Than One Year at Princeton —Why IQ fluctuates [...] Read more – ‘Not following @farnamstreet on Twitter? See what you missed’.
In his 20 years as a researcher, first at Stanford University, now at the University of Toronto, Dr. Redelmeier, 50, has applied scientific rigor to topics that in lesser hands might have been dismissed as quirky and iconoclastic. In doing so, his work has shattered myths and revealed some deep truths about the predictors of [...] Read more – ‘Think the Answer’s Clear? Look Again’.
When you wander into the work of Kahneman and Tversky far enough, you come to find their fingerprints in places you never imagined even existed. It’s alive in the work of the psychologist Philip Tetlock, who famously studied the predictions of putative political experts and found they were less accurate than predictions made by simple [...] Read more – ‘The King of Human Error’.
Two researchers set out to investigate what drives loss aversion. They found that the usual model of loss aversion does not fully explain how people make decisions—and that, rather than tallying everything up as a gain or a loss right away, people are constantly comparing options and seeking out information that supports their inclinations. That [...] Read more – ‘What drives loss aversion’.
Why do we so often fail to act in our own best interest? Why do we promise to skip the chocolate cake, only to find ourselves drooling our way into temptation when the dessert tray rolls around? What are the forces that influence our behavior? Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral [...] Read more – ‘Dan Ariely – Money Changes Everything (Video)’.
Nassim Taleb proposes addressing the principle-agent problem in banking by removing banker’s bonuses: Bonuses are particularly dangerous because they invite bankers to game the system by hiding the risks of rare and hard-to-predict but consequential blow-ups, which I have called “black swan” events. The meltdown in the United States subprime mortgage market, which set off [...] Read more – ‘The Best Risk-Management Rule Ever’.
Picture this in your mind: On a cool evening in late October, a man driving a crew-cab pickup with roll bars in the bed pulls into the parking lot of an upscale grocery store in Santa Barbara. The man exits his pickup and locks it, then walks quickly toward the sliding glass doorway of the [...] Read more – ‘Alleged ‘Excessive Force’ Incident a Case Study in Cognitive Bias’.
Here is a wonderful excerpt on the pitfalls of hiring star performers from Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition: What is the quickest way to improve your organization’s results? Many companies, sports teams, and entertainment businesses opt for the same solution: they hire a star. At first glace, signing a star seems like a [...] Read more – ‘Why you should never poach “stars” from competitors’.
Fibs and self-deception are central to our evolutionary strategy. The following excerpt is from an interview with Robert Trivers, author of The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life: You do have some really fascinating information about the power of the placebo effect in medicine. What does the placebo effect [...] Read more – ‘The evolution of deceit’.
…the system was not set up for educated people who thought for themselves, it wasn’t to help customers make informed decisions. The system was designed to catch people off guard, to score a quick sale, to exploit people who were weak or uninformed. And of course, they use a lot of subtle psychological hacks to [...] Read more – ‘Confessions of a Car Salesman’.
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy — and our own self-awareness. You should read Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow Read more – ‘Video: Daniel Kahneman – The riddle of experience vs. memory’.
On average people are too pessimistic, we actually enjoy our workouts more than we think. According to the researchers below this is “forecasting myopia.” The trick is to focus on the whole, not the beginning. People underestimate how much they enjoy exercise because of a myopic focus on the unpleasant beginning of exercise, but this [...] Read more – ‘Why you suck at starting your workout’.
This is why the ambience of a restaurant matters. In a 2001 experiment, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But [...] Read more – ‘Does Music Change The Taste Of Wine?’.
The last two looked pretty interesting. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires This one really stuck with me–a top level analysis of how changes in media change the culture and change the structure of industry. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined I heard Steve Pinker present on [...] Read more – ‘Seth Godin’s Fall 2011 Reading List’.
Heather Brooke, author of Your Right To Know: A Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, offers five picks on Holding power to account. Animal Farm …it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues [...] Read more – ‘Five books on Holding Power to Account’.
Insightful: “If you’ve never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you’re not really an intellectual.” The issue—and this is actually much more a problem in the United States but even in Canada it’s true—is we’re selecting a [...] Read more – ‘What’s wrong with the way we teach’.
People who feel like they’re stuck with a rule or restriction are more likely to be content with it than people who think that the rule isn’t definite. Psychological studies have found two contradictory results about how people respond to rules. Some research has found that, when there are new restrictions, you rationalize them; your [...] Read more – ‘People Rationalize Situations They’re Stuck With, But Rebel When They Think There’s An Out’.
Robert Siegel’s interview with Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow author Daniel Kahneman: “When you’re depleted, you tend to fall back on default actions, and the default action in that case is apparently to deny parole. So yes, people are strongly influenced by the level of glucose in the brain.” The implications of such a study are [...] Read more – ‘Implications of Kahneman’s Findings’.
In 1969, the psychologist Robert Zajonc published an article about a curious study. He’d posted a silly-sounding word—either kardirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, or iktitaf—on the front page of some student newspapers in Michigan every day for several weeks. Then he sent questionnaires to the papers’ readers, asking them to guess whether each word referred to [...] Read more – ‘What is the exposure effect?’.
Hans Rosling explains the growth of 200 countries over 200 years and then explains the world of 7 billion using IKEA props. Via TED: The world’s population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years — and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth. This is [...] Read more – ‘Video: Hans Rosling explains world population’.
… Greed is a human motivation, but not a dominant one – and the institutions that most exemplified the philosophy of greed were those that imploded in 2007-08. The goods made by workers whose motivation was purely instrumental were driven out of the marketplace by those of people who took pride in their work and [...] Read more – ‘Capitalism need not be about greed and gambling’.
How many of these does your organization do? Jim Collins, the author of the infamous Good to Great and co-author of the new and equally compelling Great by Choice, offers a very insightful 3-minute video describing three ways organizations demotivate their employees. Via Dan Pink Read more – ‘Video: Three ways organizations demotivate their employees’.
The psychologist David Nussbaum has shown that whether we tend to learn from mistakes or brush them aside, the response is rooted in repairing our self-esteem. Failure is never fun, but success requires that we learn to fight through our frustration and find the upside of error. People with a fixed mindset tend to see [...] Read more – ‘The Art of Failing Successfully’.
Selection by Consequences, B.F. Skinner In summary, then, human behaviour is the joint product of (i) the contingencies of survival responsible for the natural selection of the species and (ii) the contingencies of reinforcement responsible for the repertoires acquired by its members, including (iii) the special contingencies maintained by an evolved social environment. Ultimately, of [...] Read more – ‘Selection by Consequences’.
Thanks again for sharing and tweeting. 1. Video: Nassim Taleb on Wall Street Protest, Banking 2. The Science of Irrationality 3. Mental Models 4. What did Steve Jobs Read? 5. What does Bill Gates Read for Fun? 6. The Psychological Bias Against Creativity 7. Video: TEDxEast Guest Curator Dan Ariely on Self-control 8. Video: Michael [...] Read more – ‘The Best of Farnam Street October 2011’.
“Pleasure now is worth more to us than pleasure later,” says economist William Dickens of Northeastern University. “We much prefer current consumption to future consumption. It may even be wired into us.” …In fact, neuroscientists are mapping the brain’s saving and spending circuits so precisely that they have been able to rev up the saving [...] Read more – ‘Moneybrain’.
An excerpt from Think Twice on unintended consequences: When you are dealing with a system that has lots of interconnected parts, tweaking one part can have unforeseen consequences for the whole. Take the example of Yellowstone National Park. In retrospect, it looks like the park’s woes started when explorers in the mid-1800’s couldn’t find enough [...] Read more – ‘Unintended Consequences’.
Feedback loops are created when reactions affect themselves and can be positive or negative. Consider a thermostat regulating room temperature. This is an example of a negative feedback loop. As the temperature rises, the thermostat turns off the furnace allowing the room to rest at a predetermined temperature. When the temperature falls below that predetermined [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Feedback Loops’.
According to author and researcher Joshua Foer, it’s the dedication and willpower to doggedly push beyond the “OK Plateau.” When most of us learn a new skill, we work to get just “good enough” and then we go on autopilot. Foer identified four principles that he saw the experts using to remain alert and to [...] Read more – ‘What separates those who accomplish outstanding feats from those who don’t?’.
Bill Gates reviews Vaclav Smil’s Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines: … Smil says, today’s prime movers have reduced the cost of shipping so much that “distance to the market has been largely eliminated” as a factor in siting manufacturing facilities, sourcing imported materials, or pursing new [...] Read more – ‘Prime Movers of Globalization’.
While Daniel Kahneman’s new book, “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow” flies off the shelf, he’s quietly written a few articles that might catch your interest. Optimistic Bias: In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant cognitive bias. Because optimistic bias is both a blessing and a risk, you [...] Read more – ‘Thinking about Thinking’.
Bad emotions, bad parents and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Source Read more – ‘Bad Is Stronger Than Good’.
Albert Speer did very bad things. Although you’ve probably never heard of Speer, at one time he was Hitler’s chief architect and second most powerful man in the Reich. But that’s not why he’s interesting. Speer is one of the few Nazi elite not to be hanged after the Nuremberg trials. In fact, Speer was [...] Read more – ‘Ignoring the Obvious’.
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Kahneman and Tversky. Like Darwin, they helped to dismantle a longstanding myth of human exceptionalism. Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply [...] Read more – ‘Is Self-Knowledge Overrated?’.
In this video, master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell tells the tale of the Norden bombsight, a groundbreaking piece of World War II technology with a deeply unexpected result. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink, Outliers and most [...] Read more – ‘Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsight’.
Marketing researchers Rajesh Bagchi and Derick Davis conducted a series of three studies looking at the influence that order, size and calculation effects have on decision making. The resulting analysis showed that when an offer was easy to calculate people rated that offer as better value and were more likely to trial it when it [...] Read more – ‘Anchoring And The Influence of Order’.
They can do it because Apple hasn’t optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority. When you do this, the fear of cannibalization or disruption of one’s self just melts away. In fact, when your mission is based around creating customer value, around creating great [...] Read more – ‘How Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma’.
From an essay by George Soros: The typical sequence of boom and bust has an asymmetric shape. The boom develops slowly and accelerates gradually. The bust, when it occurs, tends to be short and sharp. The asymmetry is due to the role that credit plays. As prices rise, the same collateral can support a greater [...] Read more – ‘Boom, Bust, and Asymmetric payoffs’.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs provides an unprecedented look at the texts which influenced Jobs. There is only one business book on the list, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and it “deeply influenced” Jobs. Of his teen years, Jobs recalled “I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside [...] Read more – ‘What did Steve Jobs Read?’.
“A revolution aims at bringing about fundamental changes in institutions by employing illegal tactics. What is legal and what a society will tolerate are distinct. When there is sympathy for ends, illegal means may become acceptable and the laws against them unenforceable.” From the remarkable autobiography of the Nobel Prize winning social scientist and father [...] Read more – ‘Revolutions’.
This may turn some heads. A new study shows that the “hot hand” really does exist. Mind Hacks explains: A famous 1985 study by psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues looked at the ‘hot hand’ belief in basketball, finding that there was no evidence of any ‘scoring streak’ in thousands of basketball games beyond what [...] Read more – ‘Is the hot hand real?’.
In this video, Michael Mauboussin, Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason, shares three mistakes about how your brain leads you astray with cognitive biases. One tip, Mauboussin offers to counter hindsight bias, is to keep a decision-making journal. Michael Mauboussin is the author of More More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places [...] Read more – ‘Michael Mauboussin Explains Three Mistakes You Make’.
As a guest curator for TEDxEast, Dan Ariely shares more of his research and thoughts on self-control and irrationality in this video. Dan Ariely is the best-selling author of The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home and Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That [...] Read more – ‘Video: TEDxEast Guest Curator Dan Ariely on Self-control’.
“Fitness is the central concept in modern Darwinian genetics. It is measured simply by the rate at which an organism reproduces itself. If two organisms compete for occupancy of the same ecological niche, relative fitness determines which will survive. Even small differences in fitness can lead to enormous differences in reproductive success over only a [...] Read more – ‘Models of My Life’.
Gary Klein’s book Streetlights and Shadows takes commonly held maxims for decision making and overturns them, revealing cases where these practices break down Klein’s book does an impressive job showing us where these problems occur and he prescribes how we can be more resilient decision makers in these scenarios. He begins by outlining ten of [...] Read more – ‘Streetlights and Shadows’.
From Daniel Kahneman’s Edge master class on the flaws of intuitive thinking: One way a thought can come to mind involves orderly computation, and doing things in stages, and remembering rules, and applying rules. Then there is another way that thoughts come to mind. You see this lady, and she’s angry, and you know that [...] Read more – ‘Understanding Intuition’.
Let’s return to evolution. Are humans the only species with the capacity for self-deception? No, I do not think so. Lying is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, both between species and also within species. One example is mimics, species that are harmless and tasty but gain protection by resembling a poisonous or distasteful one. Psychologists [...] Read more – ‘Is self-deception correlated with intelligence?’.
If you or your organization develop software this is a worthy read: Any organization that designs a system … will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communications structure. In other words, if the people writing a program are divided into four teams, the program they create will have four major [...] Read more – ‘Empirical Software Engineering’.
In an essay in the NYT, Daniel Kahneman adapts part of his new book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow: The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated new candidates and very little effect on the confidence we had in our judgments and predictions. I thought that what [...] Read more – ‘Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence’.
In a recent New Yorker, Evan Hughes explores how personal friendship, rivalry, and jealousies among a group of writers that included Jeffery Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Carr, and David Foster Wallace pushed each of them to become better. Eudenides’ new book, The Marriage Plot, sparked the story. It was another novel-in-manuscript that had propelled Franzen [...] Read more – ‘What fuels great fiction?’.
Is addiction about the reward of dopamine or the anticipation of that reward? Neurologist Robert Sapolsky explains that it’s the uncertainty of the reward that drives behaviour. “Dopamine” Sapolsky argues, “is about the pursuit of happiness not the happiness itself.” Interestingly, we are able to keep our dopamine levels up for decades and decades waiting [...] Read more – ‘Is addiction about the reward or the anticipation of that reward?’.
People have a difficult time comprehending the meaning of small probabilities. Many individuals exhibit behavior that implies they are either unconcerned or extremely risk averse when deciding whether to purchase insurance against events that have a small probability of occurring. Unconcerned individuals are not willing to pay a penny, even if premiums are subsidized, whereas [...] Read more – ‘Insurance and the role of worry’.
From the Economist: Satire and idealism have been the yin and yang of management wisdom for nearly a century. Emerging humor by pioneers such as Randall Munroe of xkcd, High Macleod of Gaping Void and the creative team behind “The Office” reveal many things about the landscape of human potential that earnest and idealistic management [...] Read more – ‘The Gervais Principle’.
From the Boston Globe: Researchers asked people to write about situations when they felt envy and then to read fictitious interviews of other people. An envious mindset increased the time spent reading the interviews and improved subsequent recall for details from the interviews. In another experiment, researchers asked people to read fictitious interviews of wealthy [...] Read more – ‘Can Jealousy Improve Your Memory?’.
If leaders were chosen randomly, would our productivity increase? A paper by S. Alexander Haslam, called “Inspecting the emperor’s clothes: evidence that random selection of leaders can enhance group performance” argues that random leaders are more effective. Interestingly, in some follow up work, the authors also found that groups rated random leaders as less effective [...] Read more – ‘What happens if you select leaders at random?’.
This is the best risk management rule ever: If you have the upside, you have to keep the downside. Taleb posted this on his facebook wall, which is relevant to the video above: Hammurabi’s code, ~3800 years ago, removed the agency problem as a condition for transaction: “If a builder builds a house and the [...] Read more – ‘Video: Nassim Taleb on Wall Street Protest, Banking’.
Some thoughts from occupywriters.com: People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices. …Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending. Continue [...] Read more – ‘Occupy Farnam Street’.
In the latest Wired, Dan Ariely talks about persuasion in the medical field. This is something we’ve covered before. One tactic was to hire doctors to lecture other practitioners about a drug. The reps weren’t interested in what the audience took from the talk, but in the effects on the speaker himself. They found that [...] Read more – ‘Are Dr.’s blind to being influenced?’.
Focused attention can make you oblivious to sights and sounds that would otherwise be glaringly obvious. This has been confirmed, with a great example being the “Invisible Gorilla” experiment, by psychologists Dan Simons of the University of Illinois and Chris Chabris of Union College, New York. Guardian columnist Mocosandi writes: Simons and Chabris investigated inattentional [...] Read more – ‘The illusion of attention’.
“These findings do not mean that people enjoy painful experiences, such as filling out their income-tax forms, or that people enjoy things because they are associated with pain. What they do show is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that [...] Read more – ‘How a little pain makes something more attractive’.
There is a ton of psychology at work in Apple’s new virtual assistant Siri and if they succeed, it will be much harder to change phones. This : The Siri group, one of the largest software teams at Apple, fine-tuned Siri’s responses in an attempt to forge an emotional tie with its customers. To that [...] Read more – ‘Brand Attachment Through Emotion’.
On any given day we’re lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle and counter-intuitive. Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, shows the manners and “hotspots” used by those trained to recognize deception — and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving. You can purchase Pamela’s [...] Read more – ‘(Video) How to spot a liar’.
Remember the episode of Seinfeld called “The Caddy?” It’s the one where George ends up getting promoted for locking his car keys in his car. George: Assistant to the General Manager!! You know what that means?!? He’d could be askin’ my advice on trades! Trades, Jerry, I’m a heartbeat away! Jerry: That’s a hell of [...] Read more – ‘The illusion of hard work’.
There are actually few organizations that can support passionate employees—even if they say they want them. That’s because the original industrial revolution was designed to support productivity … Managers want passionate employees, but don’t always know how to manage them. Passionate employees question things, probe and push. Who’s got the time to deal with that? [...] Read more – ‘Passion vs. Productive’.
The Web offers choice and competition that is only one click away. But in practice, the power of defaults often matters most. This article in the NYT flags some interesting points on technological defaults and privacy. THE default values built into product designs can be particularly potent in the infinitely malleable medium of software, and [...] Read more – ‘The Default Choice, So Hard to Resist’.
Jonah Lehrer reviews Daniel Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow in the WSJ: In Mr. Kahneman’s important new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” his first work for a popular audience, he outlines the implications of this new model of cognition. What are the most important mental errors that we all make? And can they [...] Read more – ‘The Science of Irrationality’.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard Feynman Cargo cult science follows all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but misses something essential. But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the [...] Read more – ‘Cargo Cult Science’.
This isn’t very definitive, but if you’re “old” you’ll appreciate it: It appears that 20-somethings are more efficient at identifying the most rewarding choices, but slower to form hypotheses about the dynamic relationships between past and future choices. The latter form of problem solving, the scientists emphasize, is much closer to the dilemmas faced in [...] Read more – ‘Youth vs Age: Who Makes the Better Decisions?’.
The trap for the helper is to move too rapidly to solutions, to provide advice or guidance on the hypothetical problem and, thereby, cut off the opportunity to learn what the real problem might be. Working the hypothetical problem does little to equilibrate the relationship. Source: Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help Read more – ‘Are you too quick to help?’.
There is a growing movement to change the way organizations make decisions – from a reliance on a leader’s “gut instinct” to increasing data-based analytics. Interesting things happen in organizations when you argue more over data and less on subjective thoughts. The authors below point out that organizations employing data driven decisions tend to perform [...] Read more – ‘How do firms make a better decision?’.
I finally got around to reading Susanna Braund’s translation of Seneca’s De Clementia, which is well worth the read. Seneca addresses De Clementia to the young roman emperor Nero with the aim of depicting the ideal ruler. Braund goes to great lengths to establish the literary, philosophical, and political traditions that influenced the work but [...] Read more – ‘Why is the power of tyrants short-lived?’.
Ted Cadsby writes “the following five books are a small sample from a longer list of must-reads, but they have two things in common. First, they forced me to confront how superficial and inadequate my thinking was in assessing different kinds of complex problems. Second, they took the important next step of introducing more sophisticated [...] Read more – ‘Five Must-Reads for Tackling Complex Problems’.
If you’re not following me on twitter, here is a sample of what you missed over the last week: Photo Essay on the Construction of the Hover Dam http://goo.gl/SoOVG More money? More problems : materialistic couples have more money and more problems http://goo.gl/hY3it Are Workers Too Productive? http://goo.gl/seVHD David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey [...] Read more – ‘Not following @farnamstreet on Twitter? Here is what you’re missing’.
The paper below finds a link between having a sense of power and having a disregard for advice. According to the paper’s authors, power increases confidence, which can lead to an excessive belief in one’s own judgment. In a sense, powerful people think they are right because of their place in the organization, not because [...] Read more – ‘The Decision-Making Flaw in Powerful People’.
Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, reveals an interesting email he received from a reformed psychopath: Well, lets look at what (bright) psychopaths are naturally quite exceptional at… We are good at identifying, very rapidly, extreme traits of those around us which allows us to discern vulnerabilities, frailties, and mental conditions. It also makes [...] Read more – ‘The Psychopath Test’.
We think narcissists rise to the top because their qualities – confidence, dominance, authority, and self-esteem make them good leaders. But is this true? “Our research shows that the opposite seems to be true,” says Barbora Nevicka, a PhD candidate in organizational psychology, describing a new study. It turns out that the narcissists’ preoccupation with [...] Read more – ‘Reality at Odds With Perceptions: Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance’.
In a recent column for Foriegn Policy, Vaclav Smil argues Americas real problems are wasteful private energy use and the near-total absence of effective, down-to-earth, long-term policies. The parallels with America’s great public-health epidemic of obesity are inescapable. Even after throwing away some 40 percent of its abundant food supply, the United States still has [...] Read more – ‘Americans use more energy per capita than any other country, and have nothing to show for it.’.
A preview of Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at the New Yorker Conference discussing deterrence. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink, Outliers and most recently, What the Dog Saw. Read more – ‘Malcolm Gladwell: The Virtues of Obnoxiousness (video)’.
A wonderful essay by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker on whether we need a personal coach. …I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique? …Élite [...] Read more – ‘Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?’.
Jonah Lehrer on Steve Jobs’ emphasis of consilience over convenience. Perhaps the clearest demonstration can be seen in the design of the Pixar campus. In November, 2000, Jobs purchased an abandoned Del Monte canning factory on sixteen acres in Emeryille, just north of Oakland. The original architectural plan called for three buildings, with separate offices [...] Read more – ‘Consilience Over Convenience’.
In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Taleb defined a black swan as “an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact…. Third, [...] Read more – ‘What is a black swan?’.
Most of us believe we are rational decision makers. But medical decisions are especially complex, thanks to the numerous unknowns and the uniqueness of each person’s body. Groopman and Hartzband (in Your Medical Mind) explore two sets of biases that affect patient decisions. We can be minimalists, preferring to do as little as possible, or [...] Read more – ‘How Patients Think, and How They Should’.
Jonah Lehrer comments on a new study forthcoming in Psychological Science led by Jason Moser at Michigan State that helps explain why some people are more effective at learning from their mistakes than others. …the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between [...] Read more – ‘Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes?’.
“What we’re trying to do is be the modern-day Pavlovs and ring your bell with these images.” “I make my living basically taking food and painting a reality with it,” says Mr. Somoroff, leaning back in a chair in his office as the team preps another set-up. “And if I succeed in a given moment, [...] Read more – ‘Why does food look so good on television?’.
“People align themselves with a brand that reflects what they see when they look in the mirror…” Happiness Tactic No. 1: Make Us Feel Like a Kid Again “Certain companies know that they have something—a classic label, a certain smell or taste or feel—that make people remember their childhoods, a time people relate to being [...] Read more – ‘The Happiest Brands In the World’.
Peter Thiel: The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific [...] Read more – ‘The End of the Future’.
“…death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new … Your time is limited, so don’t waste it [...] Read more – ‘Death is the destination we all share.’.
On that note, leading clevers require some non-traditional leadership skills. Please describe a couple of them. We have a full list of ‘do’s and don’ts’ in the book. We say things like: Do explain and persuade rather than tell people what to do; do use your expertise rather than rely on the hierarchy; do encourage [...] Read more – ‘How To Lead Clever People’.
People everywhere differentiate each other by liking (warmth, trustworthiness) and by respecting (competence, efficiency). Essentially they ask themselves: (1) Is this person warm? and (2) Is this person competent? The “warmth dimension captures traits that are related to perceived intent, including friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness and morality, whereas the competence dimension reflects traits that are [...] Read more – ‘Two Questions Everyone Asks Themselves When They Meet You’.
We discount the pain of people we don’t like. Pain “of disliked patients expressing high intensity pain was estimated as less intense than pain of liked patients expressing high intensity pain.” If a patient is not likeable, will he or she be taken less seriously when exhibiting or complaining about pain? Reporting in the October [...] Read more – ‘We discount the pain of people we don’t like’.
Vaclav Smil pens an excellent article comparing Thomas Edison’s and Steve Job’s accomplishments: Some 130 years after Edison’s remarkable creation of the electricity system, there still remains no doubt about the fundamental and truly epochal nature of his contributions: the world without electricity has become unimaginable. I bet that 130 years from now our successors [...] Read more – ‘Why Jobs Is No Edison’.
Neal Stephenson with some interesting thoughts: The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision-making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, [...] Read more – ‘Innovation Starvation’.
Awesome video of Richard Feynman talking about beauty: Read what you’ve been missing. Subscribe to Farnam Street via Email, RSS, or Twitter. (via @matthiasrascher) Read more – ‘Richard Feynman on Beauty’.
Earlier this year, Martin Lindstrom (author of Brandwashed) carried out an fMRI experiment to find out weather iPhones were as addictive as alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. As with most additions, the chemical driver of this process is the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of [...] Read more – ‘You Love Your iPhone. Literally.’.
Daniel Kahneman answers: When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, found that imagining eating M&Ms makes you eat fewer of them. It’s [...] Read more – ‘Why Do Sandwiches Taste Better When Someone Else Makes Them?’.
Not according to this insightful piece by Chad Ford who argues that professional basketball teams are actually getting worse at picking players, despite all of their new data-points, statistical tools and models. The NBA draft is both an art and a science. Over the years, the balance between the two has gotten out of whack. [...] Read more – ‘Are we getting better at evaluating NBA talent?’.
Our resistance to uncertainty makes the “old ways” far sticker than warranted in light of the benefits of new creative ideas. Our preference to avoid uncertainty causes us to eschew the novel in favor of the tried-and-tested. Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty [...] Read more – ‘The Psychological Bias Against Creativity’.
NPR reports on Gene Heyman’s book Addiction: A Disorder of Choice Here is a remarkable yet rarely remarked fact about addiction. Only a very small portion of drug users are drug addicts. About 15 percent of people who drink develop alcoholism; about 10 percent of those who experiment with drugs become drug addicts. (See Heyman’s [...] Read more – ‘Do spouses raise the cost of addiction?’.
“Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.” —Warren Buffett Read more – ‘Warren Buffett on Temperament’.
One of the most interesting studies I’ve come across is the case of Dr. Myron L. Fox. Dr. Fox, an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior, presented a lecture on “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education” to a group of highly trained educators. These educators were then asked to rate [...] Read more – ‘Rating Teachers is Educational Seduction’.
This mental model refers to the pursuit of perfect fairness which causes a lot of terrible problems in system function. Charlie Munger, twice referenced this mental model. First in a UCCB talk: “It is not always recognized that, to function best, morality should sometimes appear unfair, like most worldly outcomes. The craving for perfect fairness [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Kantian Fairness Tendency’.
“Moderate levels of embarrassment are signs of virtue” If tripping in public or mistaking an overweight woman for a mother-to-be leaves you red-faced, don’t feel bad. A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous. In short, embarrassment can be a [...] Read more – ‘Easily embarrassed? Study finds people will trust you more’.
“The innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve in its present state.” —Newton Interesting. “A policy’s attractiveness increases when it is labeled status quo.” Three types of tendencies confer advantage to status quo: 1. Tendencies to refrain from action altogether. In [...] Read more – ‘Advantage: Status quo’.
David Wilson offers a thumbnail sketch of the current state of scientific knowledge about cultural evolution in an interesting response to Jerry Coyne’s tepid review of his latest book: The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. 1. Darwin’s theory of evolution originally said nothing about genetics. It was [...] Read more – ‘A thumbnail sketch of scientific knowledge about cultural evolution’.
Retro but still relevant. How to Create Advertising That Sells By David Ogilvy Ogilvy & Mather has created over $1,480,000,000 worth of advertising, and spent $4,900,000 tracking the results. Here, with all the dogmatism of brevity, are 38 of the things we have learned. 1. The most important decision. We have learned that the effect [...] Read more – ‘Create Advertising That Sells’.
An interesting new paper in the Journal of Marketing Research explores the effect of relaxation on consumer behavior. People who feel relaxed spend far more easily than those who feel less at ease. It turns out that relaxation increases the monetary valuation of products “rather than a deflation of value by less-relaxed individuals.” Jonah Lehrer [...] Read more – ‘Feeling relaxed? Don’t shop’.
Scary stuff. …the ethical and legal implications of the new technology already go far beyond the relatively circumscribed issue of targeted killing. Military robots are on their way to developing considerable autonomy. As noted earlier, UAVs can already take off, land, and fly themselves without human intervention. Targeting is still the exclusive preserve of the [...] Read more – ‘Predators and Robots at War’.
Some amazing insights on Steve Jobs (and marketing) from an interview with John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple: We did some research and we discovered that when people were going to serve soft drinks to a friend in their home, if they had Coca Cola in the fridge, they would go out to the [...] Read more – ‘John Sculley On Steve Jobs’.
The cost of spin: …There are so many costs to a culture of spin. It’s kind of a situation of mutually assured destruction, where you have this arms race of good news, and the price you pay for being candid about your missteps or problems on the horizon is that everyone will turn to your [...] Read more – ‘The cost of spin’.
The safest cities in America were all incorporated before 1930, when streets were grids. “What intuitively made sense to us a hundred years ago can be justified and measured in foreclosure rates, vehicle miles traveled, and traffic fatalities.” Cul-de-sacs, it turns out, are inefficient and dangerous. The FHA never put it quite this way, but [...] Read more – ‘Debunking the Cul-de-Sac’.
Advertisers come at you in two ways. There is the just-the-facts type of ad, called “logical persuasion,” or LP (“This car gets 42 miles to the gallon”), and then there is the ad that circumvents conscious awareness, called “non-rational influence,” or NI (a pretty woman, say, draped over a car). Despite research surrounding the notion [...] Read more – ‘Logical Persuasion or Non-rational Influence’.
Fascinating: We like to think that others agree with us. It’s called “social projection,” and it helps us validate our beliefs and ourselves. Psychologists have found that we tend to think people who are similar to us in one explicit way—say, religion or lifestyle—will act and believe as we do, and vote as we do. [...] Read more – ‘Do the silent agree with us?’.
Great thoughts on instilling a challenging mindset in children: We trust experts because there is no way that we can learn everything that we need to know to understand every issue that affects us. We put our trust in those who offer good work. But how do we decide who those experts are? Without the [...] Read more – ‘Kids need fewer facts, more crap detection’.
“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.” Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade while other nations struggle. Why? The article below argues that its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. The transformation of [...] Read more – ‘Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?’.
Although absolute power is supposed to corrupt absolutely, a recent experiment suggests that power without status is the most corrupting. In the experiment, students were told they would be interacting with a fellow student in a business exercise and were randomly assigned to either a high-status “Idea Producer” role or low-status “Worker” role. They were [...] Read more – ‘When power makes us cruel’.
Sewage water, it seems, is thought of as contaminated even once every last contaminant has been removed. As the psychologist Carol Nemeroff told NPR: “It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone.” In his highly readable book On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s [...] Read more – ‘The Cooties Heuristic’.
An insightful piece by Martin Lindstrom on priming. As Lindstrom points out in his new book Brandwashed, retailers are becoming masters at the art of seduction. Consider Whole Foods’s store at Columbus Circle in New York City: As you descend the escalator you enter the realm of a freshly cut flowers. These are what advertisers [...] Read more – ‘How Whole Foods “Primes” You To Shop’.
Believing you’re better than you are may help you succeed or fail. The results, published today in the journal Nature, showed that overconfidence pays off only when there is uncertainty about opponents’ real strengths, and when the benefits of the prize at stake is sufficiently larger than the costs. “So let’s say you and I [...] Read more – ‘Evolution of Narcissism: Why We’re Overconfident, and Why It Works’.
The Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have a Great Wall, the British have immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers.* An insightful study on why Americans love chain stores and the lure of familiarity: “Our main thesis is that residential mobility, the [...] Read more – ‘Why Americans Love Chain Stores’.
Nassim Taleb at UPenn talking about anti-fragility: There’s something called action bias. People think that doing something is necessary. Like in medicine and a lot of places. Like every time I have an MBA—except those from Wharton, because they know what’s going on!—they tell me, “Give me something actionable.” And when I was telling them, [...] Read more – ‘Taleb: People Kept Telling Me I Was an Idiot’.
Priming represents a powerful idea—that very subtle cues can shape people’s unconscious minds to think and act in certain ways. On Second Thought author Wray Herbert explaines how we can minimize priming effects: New York University psychological scientist Peter Gollwitzer believes that we do have such power, and he set out to demonstrate it in [...] Read more – ‘Are we powerless to priming?’.
Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults. …Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them—angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling—then how did those traits survive selection? They [...] Read more – ‘Beautiful Minds: Why teenagers act they way they do?’.
NPR on Gene M. Heyman’s 2009 book Addiction: A Disorder of Choice: ..the distinctive hallmark of addiction is the fact that in addiction the normal interplay we’ve just been contemplating between choice, value and preference breaks down. And this is because addictive substances are, in Heyman’s phrase, behaviorially toxic. They neutralize the value of everything [...] Read more – ‘Addiction: A Disorder Of Choice?’.
Shelley Adler, author of Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection, comes to a stunning conclusion: People can be killed for their beliefs in the sprit world. “If you were born under a bad sign, you died five years younger from the same diseases as people born under good signs. But only if you [...] Read more – ‘The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills’.
If you were browsing a book in a store and the jacket blurb said, “This is one of the best books of the year!” – amazon.com …would you be inclined to buy it? Before you say no, here’s something to think about. We have a deep-seated sense of duty to authority. If we’re uncertain about [...] Read more – ‘Amazon Reviewer Objectivity’.
George Soros with some shrewd insight: It takes a crisis to make the politically impossible possible. Under the pressure of a financial crisis the authorities take whatever steps are necessary to hold the system together, but they only do the minimum and that is soon perceived by the financial markets as inadequate. That is how [...] Read more – ‘How to make the politically impossible possible’.
We all love a good story. Knowing how the story unfolds doesn’t change that: Stories are a universal element of human culture, the backbone of the billion-dollar entertainment industry, and the medium through which religion and societal values are transmitted. The enjoyment of fiction through books, television, and movies may depend, in part, on the [...] Read more – ‘Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories’.
David Books, author of The Social Animal, with an excellent column on the planning fallacy: In his forthcoming book (now released), “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (I’ll write more about it in a couple of weeks), Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future. [...] Read more – ‘The Planning Fallacy’.
Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, offers the following management advice. Dalio says “Taken together, these principles are meant to paint a picture of a process for the systematic pursuit of truth and excellence and for the rewards that accompany this pursuit. I put them in writing for [...] Read more – ‘Management Lessons from Ray Dalio’.
Putting people and things into categories is something we all do. It’s a useful shortcut but reveals biases. And it plays a role in everything from ethnic violence to childhood development. The Browser’s excellent five-books interview with Susan Gelman: People have all kinds of cognitive biases, ways that we look at the world that are [...] Read more – ‘Putting people and things into categories’.
A great read in the NYT: “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have [...] Read more – ‘What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?’.
Steve Martin, co-author of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion, writes “…asking people what persuades them to make decisions is not that helpful — primarily because they won’t know.” Behavioural scientist Wesley Schultz has some compelling evidence of why asking people what they think influences their decisions is largely ineffective. In one set [...] Read more – ‘The difference between what people say and what they think’.
The admirable goal of increasing diversity in organizations has led, inevitably, to an increase in interactions between members of majority groups and members of historically underrepresented or stigmatized groups. Problematically, interactions between members of such groups are fraught with opportunities for things to go awry: stigmatized individuals must worry that non-stigmatized individuals hold prejudiced attitudes [...] Read more – ‘The persuasive power of stigma?’.
The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Here are some simple and easy to carry out ideas (backed by science) that will help you improve your ability to absorb, retain, and apply knowledge: “Spaced repetition” is one [...] Read more – ‘The Trouble With Homework: Using Science to Learn Better’.
If you’re looking to gain a scientific advantage over that two-year-old that controls your life, this might be the book for you. The books authors, Aamodt and Wang, offer some insights from neuroscience on how you can get your child to sleep (use a routine); improve their vision (lots of time outdoors); and promote the [...] Read more – ‘Parenting tips from neuroscience’.
If you’re reading this at work don’t feel guilty. According to a new study, web surfing may actually help improve your performance. But don’t check email. “Web browsing can actually refresh tired workers and enhance their productivity, compared to other activities such as making personal calls, texts or emails, let alone working straight through with [...] Read more – ‘Web surfing at work increases performance’.
Aristotle claimed that poetry—at the time he meant the epics of Homer and other tragedies, which we now call fiction—was better than history. He argued that fiction tells us what is possible, whereas history tells us only what has happened. Fiction stretches our imaginations and, in doing so, opens a window into ourselves and others. [...] Read more – ‘Is reading fiction good for you?’.
Something to ponder. A sobering excerpt from Vaclav Smil’s Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years: “The first is that even the most assiduous deployment of the best available preventive measures (smart policing, clever informants, globe-spanning, electronic intelligence, willingness to undertake necessary military action) will not be able to thwart all planned attacks. The [...] Read more – ‘Several uncomfortable realities’.
How will we feed 9 billion or more people by 2050? “Where,” Gareth Cook asks in his op-ed in the Boston Globe, “on this ever more crowded planet, will we grow all of it?” …Where will the food come from? Today, we use about a third of the planet’s land surface for agriculture, according to [...] Read more – ‘The limits of farming’.
The part on Alfred Marshall looks really interesting. Roger Lowenstein gives Sylvia Nasar’s new book, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, five stars in his review column. Grand Pursuit retraces much of the same ground as Robert L. Heilbroner’s 1953 classic The Worldly Philosophers—which is to say, Nasar gives us Karl and Jenny Marx [...] Read more – ‘The Story of Economic Genius’.
The status-update era is changing the annual performance review. But the question reamains: Do performance reviews work? For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the [...] Read more – ‘Do performance reviews work?’.
Hans Magnus calls the people who wish to end their life in a grand bloddy finale “radical losers.” Hundreds of years ago, the ability for these people to inflict massive damage was limited to stone throwing. Recently, however, their ability to inflict evil or harm onto others has grown exponentially. Hans Magnus’ excellent essay, The [...] Read more – ‘The radical loser’.
In the Globe and Mail, Michael Ignatieff has an excellent column on the age of sovereign failure: It is always good to be skeptical about what governments tell us. But we are beyond skepticism now, into a deep and enduring cynicism. There will come a day when they are not crying wolf and we will [...] Read more – ‘The age of sovereign failure’.
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? In this video, Paul Bloom argues that our beliefs about the history of an object profoundly changes how we experience it. Bloom argues that we value an expensive bottle of wine from a friend of ours more than an identical one from our employer, [...] Read more – ‘How our perceptions change our experiences’.
In this TED talk, chemist Lee Cronin asks what is the minimum unit of matter that can under go Darwinian evolution? The answer is, in fact, a single cell. Before life existed on Earth, there was just matter, inorganic dead “stuff.” How improbable is it that life arose? And — could it use a different [...] Read more – ‘Making matter come alive’.
What trick can you learn from the most successful sales person ever? How many choices are too many? How can you persuade people to keep appointments? How Apple is brilliantly using a 100-year-old persuasion strategy. Storytelling in Psychology and Marketing. The most brilliant marketing in the history of wine. Why Performance Won’t Get You Promoted. [...] Read more – ‘How you can naturally influence others’.
An excerpt from an awesome article by Herbert Simon: We have seen that a major component of expertise is the ability to recognize a very large number of specific relevant cues when they are present in any situation, and then to retrieve from memory information about what to do when those particular cues are noticed. [...] Read more – ‘On expertness and intuition’.
Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic is a shocking book. This book explores some hard questions. Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled recently? Are the long-term health outcomes of this medication better than no medication? Once we start taking drugs for our mental illnesses, do we end up [...] Read more – ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’.
The progress of science is commonly perceived of as a continuous, incremental advance, with new discoveries added to the existing body of scientific knowledge. However, Thomas Kuhn argues that the history of science tells a different story, in which discontinuities are crucial. He argues that science proceeds with a serious of revolutions. “A prevailing theory [...] Read more – ‘How Scientific Advancement Happens’.
Johnah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, with a column in the WSJ on our ability to focus. The key is strengthening what psychologists call “executive function,” a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to exert control over our thoughts and impulses. When we resist the allure of a sweet treat, or do homework [...] Read more – ‘Learning How to Focus on Focus’.
A new study explains why people take stupid chances in a group of friends that they would never take by themselves. It seems, the human brain places more value on winning in a social setting than it does on winning when you’re alone. The researchers found that the striatum, a part of the brain associated [...] Read more – ‘Is succumbing to peer pressure hard-wired into our brains?’.
Faced with too many choices (see Do You Make Too Many Decisions?), people find it difficult to stay focused long enough to handle even routine tasks and decisions. We have a limited amount of cognitive energy and using it ensures that subsequent tasks are increasingly difficult. In addition, cognitive depletion makes it easier for others [...] Read more – ‘The role of cognitive depletion in how we believe’.
From London to the Middle East riots have shaken political stability. Why? Is it human nature? “Imagine you’re on a bus,” explains Vaughan Bell, clinical research psychologist at King’s College London. “It’s full of people and you have to jam into an uncomfortable seat at the back.” Very little connects you with any of the [...] Read more – ‘Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence’.
A column in the Boston Globe asks how we insulate ourselves from conflicts of interest? The most popular solution—disclosing them—turns out not to help. …transparency, the rationale goes, encourages those in authority to behave more ethically, and lets those relying on their guidance take the bias into consideration. But recent research by experimental psychologists is [...] Read more – ‘Deeply conflicted’.
It seems the only thing western society is good at delaying is delayed gratification. The study below points out that the capacity to resist temptation was relatively stable over a 40 year span. Put differently, children who were able to resist temptation grow into adults who are able to resist temptation. Whereas children who had [...] Read more – ‘Is the capacity to resist temptation stable from toddlers to adults?’.
Ryan Avent argues that when it comes to economic growth and the creation of jobs, the denser the city the better. An essay, adapted from Avent’s book The Gated City, appeared in the New York Times: …In 2009, the average Silicon Valley household earned about $85,000. Despite this, over 500,000 residents of the Bay Area [...] Read more – ‘Does increasing the density of cities lead to better jobs?’.
It’s impossible not to. Sam McNerney writes: For example, back in the early 1980s psychologists John Darley and Paget Gross showed a video of a girl, ‘Hannah’ to two different groups, one who saw her in an affluent neighborhood and the other who saw her in a poor neighborhood. Then, Darley and Gross asked both [...] Read more – ‘Do we judge a book by its cover?’.
A follow up to Do You Make Too Many Decisions? Steven Pinker reviews Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength in the Sunday NYT Book review: What is this mysterious thing called self-control? When we fight an urge, it feels like a strenuous effort, as if there were a homunculus in the head that physically impinged [...] Read more – ‘The Sugary Secret of Self-Control’.
In most workplaces a failure to consider sound evidence inflicts unnecessary damage on “employee well-being and group performance.” But Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton argue, in the New York Times, that it doesn’t have to be that way: Consider the issue of incentive pay. Many people believe that paying for performance will work in virtually [...] Read more – ‘Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts’.
Deborah Blum with an excellent article on the history of food poisoning: … Since that time, really dangerous food—the term food poisoning, even—has tended to refer to bacterial contamination issues rather than toxic-chemical contamination. Still, the public continues to worry about pesticide residues, preservatives, and food dyes—the FDA recently investigated concerns that food dyes might [...] Read more – ‘The history of food poisoning’.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the many things we haven’t done as the things we [...] Read more – ‘Steve Jobs: The Focus to Say No’.
Is the velocity of making the impossible possible increasing? I’ve had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I’ve encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts [...] Read more – ‘Why the Impossible Happens More Often’.
It’s comforting to believe that the world is simple and can easily be guided by simple heuristics and models. Our reality, however, is vastly more complex. Dan Airely argues that we need to spend more time helping people understand and deal with complexity and less time concocting dumbing-down mechanisms. A perfect example of what happens [...] Read more – ‘Asking the right and wrong questions’.
Reinsurers make their living thinking about the things that almost never happen and are devastating when they do. “The psychology piece dominates, even in boardrooms,” says David Bresch. “People measure against the perceived reality around them and not against possible futures.” Bresch is in charge of sustainability and risk management for Swiss Re, founded in [...] Read more – ‘The God Clause’.
Jason Zweig with an excellent column on how the halo effect can lead investors astray: But halos also can lead investors astray. As management professor Phil Rosenzweig points out in his book “The Halo Effect,” a soaring stock price can lead investors to regard the company’s managers as focused, disciplined and passionate—while, in the negative [...] Read more – ‘The Halo Effect: How it leads investors astray’.
David Books, author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, with an excellent column on the diminishing returns of luxury living. Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability. I once visited a university that had a large, lavishly [...] Read more – ‘The Diminishing Returns of Luxury Living’.
Sixty-six years ago, we dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Now, some historians say that’s not what ended the war. In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa – a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara – has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet [...] Read more – ‘Why did Japan surrender?’.
‘Nudging’ on its own is unlikely to be successful in changing the population’s behaviour. That is the main conclusion of the House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee’s report, Behaviour Change, published today. The report – the culmination of a year-long investigation into the way the Government tries to influence people’s behaviour using behaviour change [...] Read more – ‘Nudging Alone Not Enough’.
“It would be wrong [to conclude from the new study] that nature doesn’t play a role. [But] nurture plays a substantial role, large enough that we can even see a gender difference wiped out.” Indeed, culture is not limited simply to encouragement of young girls in grade-school math. Studies that have looked at gender gaps [...] Read more – ‘The Math Gender Gap: Nurture Trumps Nature’.
Jonah Lehrer reports: Amid all this punctiliousness, however, the rulebook contains one glaring omission: There are no rules about the surface of the court. While the boundaries of the space are carefully specified — it must be a rectangle, 78 feet by 27 feet, with a one-inch-wide center service line — there are zero references [...] Read more – ‘The Physics of Grass, Clay, and Cement’.
I always like to see what other people are highlighting on the kindle. Here are some recent popular ones. Boundaries: When To Say Yes, How to Say No What we can do is set limits on our own exposure to people who are behaving poorly; we can’t change them or make them behave right. The [...] Read more – ‘What people highlight on their kindle’.
We’ve all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And others learn best when lessons involve movement. In fact, an entire industry has sprouted up on learning styles. This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style [...] Read more – ‘Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely’.
Dan Ariely offers: 1) Procrastination. Joys untold attend this particular bad habit. And it’s one people indulge in all the time, exercise, projects at work, calling the family, doing paperwork, and so on. Each time we face a decision between completing a slightly annoying task now and putting it off for later, battle for self-control [...] Read more – ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People’.
…After 1850, things changed. American agriculture fell into the grip of scientific farming. Agricultural scientists, followed by farmers, began to conceptualize farming as a strictly quantifiable venture. Beginning with plants, and then moving to animals, they became less concerned with individual idiosyncrasies and more concerned with collective evaluations of productivity. The chain of production expanded, [...] Read more – ‘The Dangerous Psychology of Factory Farming’.
In this short talk, psychologist Dan Ariely tells two personal stories that explore scientific conflict of interest: How the pursuit of knowledge and insight can be affected, consciously or not, by shortsighted personal goals. When we’re thinking about the big questions, he reminds us, let’s be aware of our all-too-human brains. Dan Ariely is the [...] Read more – ‘Video: Beware conflicts of interest’.
A few months ago, Adam Lashinsky wrote a fascinating article in Fortune describing life inside Apple. The article begins with the following scene: In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide [...] Read more – ‘The surprising benefits of negative moods’.
The American Library Association (ALA) released its list of books which were most often challenged by the public to be banned from libraries in America. 1. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson Reasons: Homosexuality, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group 2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman [...] Read more – ‘What are the top 10 books the public wants banned from the library?’.
Are people starting to value ebooks less? Nathan Bransford asked people what they thought an ebook should cost if the hardcover retailed at $25? While the results are likely not up to a scientific standard, they are nonetheless interesting. On June 14, 2010 people responded: And the same survey ran again on February 2, 2011: [...] Read more – ‘What should an e-book cost for a $25 hardcover?’.
Give people a head start. Not only does this improve the odds of loyalty but it also increases the speed of purchases. Why? Two reasons: (1) People are generally more willing to commit to tasks that have already started but that are incomplete than to begin a new task and (2) The closer that an [...] Read more – ‘How to double customer loyalty using the science of persuasion’.
From the Sunday Book Review Toward the end of his penetrating new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us,” Pennebaker crunches the numbers on presidential press conferences since Truman and finds that “Obama has distinguished himself as the lowest I-word user of any of the modern presidents.” If anything, Obama [...] Read more – ‘The Power of Pronouns’.
We’re pathetically obedient. We queue and walk where we’re told to, and all because it’s printed on a sign. There is a massive body of research about the psychological effects of signs, perhaps because they’re an easy way to rope members of the public into an experiment without asking permission: erect a sign, stand somewhere [...] Read more – ‘Signs’.
Can you tell the difference in container size between a Haagen Dazs (14oz) and Ben and Jerry’s (16oz)? Two researchers, Chandon and Ordabayeva, conducted experiments on customer perceptions of package size and changes, concluding “that changes in size appear smaller when products change in all three dimensions (height, width, and length) than when they change [...] Read more – ‘Container Size and Visual Bias’.
An excerpt from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Americans spend more time shopping than the members of any other society. Americans go to shopping centers about once a week, more often than they go to houses of worship, and Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools. In a recent survey, 93 [...] Read more – ‘What Too Much Of A Good Thing Means For Consumers’.
One President. Five Books. 1. Isabel Wilkerson’s National Book Critics Circle Award winner, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” which chronicles the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South. 2. “Cutting For Stone” by Abraham Verghese: an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles–and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined. [...] Read more – ‘Obama’s Summer Reading List’.
The first thing you do in the morning is make a decision. Decisions pile up fast. Should I hit snooze? What clothes should I wear? What should I have for breakfast? What combination of choices from Starbucks will make my morning go smoother? You’ve already made more decisions than most of our ancestors would make [...] Read more – ‘Do you make too many decisions?’.
Maria Popova comments: In a lot of ways, we do that with information. If we somehow stumble upon an incredible archive of, say, digitized “rare” vinyl LP’s or unpublished manuscripts by a famous author, and it tickles our fancy, perhaps we bookmark it, perhaps we save it to Delicious or Instapaper, perhaps we take a [...] Read more – ‘How the rhetoric of rare is changing in the age of information abundance’.
Some interesting NPR reporting by Dave Pell The only time I really experience any self-reflection these days is when my computer sleeps and my screen goes dark. And I’m not alone. According to Pew, 42 percent of cell owners used their phone for entertainment when they were bored. If those 42 percent of people are [...] Read more – ‘Does the Internet Make You More — Or Less — Connected?’.
The case shows we see what we expect to see. That can mean innocent people go to jail while criminals remain free. Last week, the “West Memphis Three” were released from prison, having spent half their lives — 18 years — behind bars for crimes they almost certainly didn’t commit. So what made prosecutors and [...] Read more – ‘The ‘West Memphis Three’ and combating cognitive biases’.
James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, says: We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be the sole owner of a Jackson Pollock or a Blue Mauritius but not of a piece of information — not for long, anyway. Nor [...] Read more – ‘We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity’.
“Big populations don’t go extinct. Small populations do. It’s not a surprising finding but it is a significant one.” But why is rarity perilous? Why do small populations go extinct? While the answer is simple to outline the scientific details are complicated. For now, lets stick to the outline version. “Small populations go extinct because [...] Read more – ‘Why do big populations survive while small ones go extinct?’.
Daniel Lieberman, author of The Evolution of the Human Head, sat down with the NYT for an interesting conversation. Some years ago, I was doing an experiment where I put pigs on treadmills. The goal was to learn how running stressed the bones in the head. One day, a colleague, Dennis Bramble, walked into the [...] Read more – ‘Born, and Evolved, to Run’.
An interesting study on the prevalence of mistaken intuitions about memory. Do people think that memory works like a video camera? Do they believe that memories are immutable once they are formed? Answers to questions like these have important ramifications for psychologists… People often dismiss behavioral science research as merely recapitulating common sense, but many [...] Read more – ‘What People Believe about How Memory Works’.
Malcolm Gladwell explains why owning a basketball franchise has always been a bad business — and ought to stay that way. The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment — the same way they would view buying [...] Read more – ‘‘Psychic Benefits’ and the NBA Lockout’.
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction: Quammen explores how studying the distribution of species on islands applies to modern ecosystem decay and extinction. (This was mentioned in our post on What is the best book that no one knows about? where a reader offered “If there’s been a better [...] Read more – ‘What I’m Reading’.
“It’s a perverse time. The time when people should enter into investments and make commitments is when times are extremely tough. But human nature is such that most people can’t. They only want to go into something when it’s on a winning streak. That’s just the way it works.” —Bruce Berkowitz. Read more – ‘It’s a perverse time’.
I thought Warren Buffett said a lot of interesting things in his recent interview with Charlie Rose. Here are some of the bits that stood out for me. Fairness: BUFFETT: …I also think fairness is important and I think getting rid of promises that you can’t keep is important. I don’t think we should cut [...] Read more – ‘This is a world of incentives’.
Beliefs come first; reasons second. That’s the insightful message of “The Believing Brain,” by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. A extract from a WSJ book review makes me think some readers might be interested: In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that [...] Read more – ‘Beliefs come first; reasons second’.
Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, gave an excellent talk at TED this past year. There is a moment in her talk when she summarizes what we do when someone disagrees with us that is worth pondering. …The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is [...] Read more – ‘What We Do When Someone Disagrees With Us’.
Nassim Taleb, author of many books—The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, and The Bed of Procrustes—is in the process of writing a new book. He’s taken the sample chapter down from his website but I thought his thoughts were well worth pondering. We humans have a natural, seemingly innate, bias to think that systems do not improve on [...] Read more – ‘Intervention Bias’.
The confirmation bias is the tendency to seek information that confirms prior conclusions and to ignore evidence to the contrary. The importance of understanding this source of Psychological Misjudgment is enormous. Once you become aware of the confirmation trap you realize that it permeates your decision making process. Several biases emerge from the confirmation heuristic: [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Confirmation Bias’.
Habits allow us to do all sorts of things. We can make breakfast while talking on the phone without having to focus (consciously) on every step. The dark side of habits rears its ugly head when you try to change them. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Here are six things you can do [...] Read more – ‘Changing Bad Habits’.
Al Pittampalli has just published a book, Read This Before Our Next Meeting, about how to make meetings better. In his post, Pittampalli argues that meetings are a tragedy of the commons: Our traditional system of meetings is a true tragedy of the commons. In a culture where anyone can call a meeting for any reason at [...] Read more – ‘Are Meetings a Tragedy of the Commons?’.
What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others. —Aristotle The rules pay you to do the wrong thing. —Garrett Hardin The Tragedy of the Commons is a parable that illustrates why commons resources [...] Read more – ‘The Tragedy Of The Commons’.
Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, wrote in a op-ed for the NYT that “when our bathroom scale delivers bad news, we hop off and then on again, just to make sure we didn’t misread the display or put too much pressure on one foot. When our scale delivers good news, we smile and [...] Read more – ‘Accepting evidence when it pleases us’.
In their 1978 paper Performance Sampling in Social Matches, researchers March and March discussed the implications of performance sampling for understanding careers in organizations. If you hire/fire or promote people you’ll probably want to read this post. Considerable evidence exists documenting that individuals confronted with problems requiring the estimation of proportions act as though sample [...] Read more – ‘Promoting People In Organizations’.
I wonder if the eighth circle of hell is the most crowded. In Dante’s Divine Comedy that’s where fortune-tellers existed. The soothsayers “had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead … and since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks [...] Read more – ‘What’s Wrong With Expert Predictions’.
The Cockroach Papers by Richard Schwied is an interesting book if you are looking to learn more about biology or evolution. Cockroaches are built for survival no matter what the world throws at them. Their ability to adapt is just amazing. Here are some of my notes from the book. Food and Water German cockroaches, [...] Read more – ‘Why is it so hard to kill a cockroach with your shoe?’.
Michael Lewis investigates German attitudes toward money, excrement, and the country’s Nazi past, all of which help explain its peculiar new status. …The curious thing about the eruption of cheap and indiscriminate lending of money during the past decade was the different effects it had from country to country. Every developed country was subjected to [...] Read more – ‘It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!’.
Are you good at buying the perfect gift for others? Now what if I asked you to rate the gift giving ability of others? You would probably remember some awful gifts. The fact is we’re just not that good at buying gifts for others. Thankfully, some researchers have discovered a way to improve your ability [...] Read more – ‘Improve Your Ability To Give Gifts People Appreciate’.
Not according to this recent interview with Ed Thorp: I think that one of the big issues today is that the playing field in the financial world is not level. If big institutions behave in a risky way and threaten to bring down the hole financial community and throw the entire country into a depression, [...] Read more – ‘Is The Financial World A Level Playing Field?’.
Would you explain some of the principles of influence you have uncovered? RC: The first is reciprocation. People will be ready and eager to help you when you have first done something for them. This principle suggests that to be successful one must be proactive in their approach instead of reactive. Give first, and then [...] Read more – ‘Learn The Principles Behind The Art Of Persuasion’.
“The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character; and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best.”—William James. There are two biases eliminating from the availability heuristic: Ease of recall and retrievability. Because [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Availability Bias’.
“A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.” –Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky We tend to bet more aggressively when the odds aren’t in our favor. The right response, however, is to change direction, as Tim Harford’s writes in Adapt: Why Success [...] Read more – ‘Why Do We Hold Fast To Losing Strategies?’.
Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, explores some of the recent scientific literature on what impact our workplace has on the length of our lives in a recent Wired article. A new study led by Arie Shirom at Tel Aviv University reveals the powerful impact of the workplace on [...] Read more – ‘Are your co-workers killing you?’.
In this essay, Vaclav Smil (author of Why America is not a New Rome; see the FS review) takes a closer look at the rapid decline of American manufacturing in comparison to other wealthy nations. Smil challenges the reasons given for why Americans need not worry and argues that the US manufacturing sector needs to [...] Read more – ‘The Manufacturing of Decline’.
Interesting approach to rewards and behaivor at Pret A Manger: How does any company encourage teamwork? At Pret A Manger, executives say, the answer is to hire, pay and promote based on — believe it or not — qualities like cheerfulness. There is a certain “Survivor” element to all of this. New hires are sent [...] Read more – ‘Rewards and behavior’.
I heard about this before but completely forgot. Getting honest answers about behaviour that is illegal or frowned-upon – such as taking drugs or visiting prostitutes – is notoriously difficult. But survey researchers have devised a neat way to get people comfortable with revealing their indiscretions. Each time the researcher asks the respondent a question, [...] Read more – ‘How to get honest answers to illegal behavior’.
You may think that as you juggle emails, my-book, twitter, google, work, life, the phone and casual web surfing that you’re really doing all of that stuff at once, but you’re really doing is quickly switching constantly between tasks. And switching carries a cognitive cost. Steven Yantis, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at [...] Read more – ‘Screen Media and Deep Thinking’.
Most people thought the Internet represented a liberation from conformity where ideas, freedom of information, creativity ruled. But what role does our need to belong play? What role does the simple “like” button play in social approval? The WSJ article below argues that “As a result,” of the like button, “we can now search not [...] Read more – ‘The Insidious Evils of ‘Like’ Culture’.
Daniel Kahneman, noted for his amazing work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making & behavioral economics, has a new book coming out this fall entitled Thinking, Fast and Slow. Steven Levitt—the lucky guy—got to read an advance copy*. Among the hundreds of interesting ideas in the book, there is one that I simply can’t get [...] Read more – ‘Blind to our blindness’.
I heard about this before but completely forgot. Getting honest answers about behaviour that is illegal or frowned-upon – such as taking drugs or visiting prostitutes – is notoriously difficult. But survey researchers have devised a neat way to get people comfortable with revealing their indiscretions. Each time the researcher asks the respondent a question, [...] Read more – ‘How to get Honest Answers on Illegal behaviour?’.
You may think that as you juggle emails, my-book, twitter, google, work, life, the phone and casual web surfing that you’re really doing all of that stuff at once, but you’re really doing is quickly switching constantly between tasks. And switching carries a cognitive cost. Steven Yantis, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at [...] Read more – ‘Multitasking’.
Animal species reside on a scale with “generalist” on one end and “specialist” on the other. Specialists can live only in a narrow range of conditions: diet, climate, camouflage, etc. Generalists are able to survive a wide variety of conditions and changes in the environment: food, climate, predators, etc. Specialists thrive when conditions are just [...] Read more – ‘Generalists vs. Specialists (And the Specialist’s Dilemma)’.
David MacKay—the bloke in the excellent video below—is the author of Sustainable Energy. Bill Gates called MacKay’s book “one of the best books on energy that has been written“*. The book is available for free online or in hard copy via Amazon. Farnam Street: Mastering the best of what other people have figured out. Subscribe via twitter, email, [...] Read more – ‘How Many Light Bulbs?’.
Humans exhibit many psychological biases, but one of the most consistent, powerful, and widespread is overconfidence. Most people show a bias towards: (1) exaggerated personal qualities and capabilities; (2) an illusion of control over events; and (3) invulnerability to risk (three phenomena collectively known as “positive illusions”). Overconfidence amounts to an “error” of judgment or [...] Read more – ‘The Evolution of Overconfidence’.
Bill Gates tells us what he has read on topics such as education, energy, finance, and development. A few of these looked really interesting, so I ordered them (yes, amazon.com, I’m in the top 1% of your customers). Education Work Hard, Be Nice ”Jay did a great job writing this book. The book gives a great [...] Read more – ‘What does Bill Gates Read for Fun?’.
In a new study, researchers report that bumblebees were able to figure out the most efficient routes among several computer-controlled “flowers,” quickly solving a complex problem that even stumps supercomputers. We already know bees are pretty good at facial recognition, and researchers have shown they can also be effective air-quality monitors. Bumblebees can solve the [...] Read more – ‘Evolution 1, Supercomputers 0’.
Why are we so bad at knowing — in this case remembering — what passes through our own minds? An interesting article in the NYT Sunday Book Review: The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, in “Perplexities of Consciousness,” contends that our minds, rather than being open-access, are largely hidden territory. Despite what we believe about our powers [...] Read more – ‘Know Thyself: Easier Said Than Done’.
…While Mr. Berger initially assumed that people would share articles with practical implications—he imagined lots of pieces on diets and gadgets—he discovered instead that the most popular stories were those that triggered the most arousing emotions, such as awe and anger. We don’t want to share facts—we want to share feelings. Why does this desire [...] Read more – ‘We want to share feelings, not facts’.
The model suggests why competitors always seem to locate so close to each other and compete on real estate. Think about big burger chains, supermarkets, and video stores. You will almost always see them clustered even though it would be nicer if they spread out. The model also has been applied to political candidates. Imagine [...] Read more – ‘Why are rival gas stations always across the street from one another?’.
A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters—and regrets. “It’s been about a decade of learning,” says the Microsoft co-founder whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the nation’s richest charity. Its $34 billion in assets is more than the next three largest foundations (Ford, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson) [...] Read more – ‘Bill Gates and billion dollar lessons’.
Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavorial economics, says we can all be more aware of our surroundings and our decision-making process. He suggests the following five books: The Invisible GorillaWe think we see with our eyes, but the reality is that we largely see with our brains. Our brain is a master at giving [...] Read more – ‘Five Book recommendations from Dan Ariely on Behavioural Economics’.
This study shows that conventional wisdom isn’t the best approach. What you eat makes a difference. Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking [...] Read more – ‘Still Counting Calories? Your Weight-Loss Plan May Be Outdated’.
Reading Duncan Watts new book Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer will make you uncomfortable. Common sense is particularly well adapted to handling the complexity of everyday situations. We get intro trouble when we project our common sense to situations outside the realm of everyday life. Applying common sense in these areas, Watts argues, “turns out to suffer from a [...] Read more – ‘Is Everything Obvious Once You Know The Answer?’.
Interesting… the study authors were able to determine—before the snap— if the next would be a short pass, medium pass, long pass, run, or scamble 40% of the time. This study investigated the ability of discriminant analysis to predict the offensive play calling of the 2005 Atlanta Falcons. Data was collected on each of the [...] Read more – ‘Can you predict what play will be run in the NFL before the snap?’.
On television modern histories of Rome lead one to think that Romans were rather well off, enjoyed a lot of free time, and commanded the largest and most powerful Empire in the history of the world. That is, until the Americans came along. America’s post WWII strategic and military dominance combined with affluence inspired comparisons [...] Read more – ‘Is America A New Rome’.
“We put a lot of effort into thinking through how to organize some of the things that we try to do as groups,” said Gordon. “Ants don’t put in any effort at all. They’re pretty messy about it, and it works really well.” …Of course, ants don’t just create farms; they make assembly lines, highways [...] Read more – ‘What Ants Can Teach Us’.
David Foster Wallace in Consider the Lobster: Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere — fastest, strongest — and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best [...] Read more – ‘Why do top athletes fascinate us?’.
…Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men. Stormannsgalskap is particularly common among media barons, not least because they frequently blur the line between reporting reality and shaping it. William Randolph Hearst is widely suspected of stirring up the Spanish-American war to give his papers something to report. Lord Beaverbrook regarded himself as a kingmaker, [...] Read more – ‘Stormannsgalskap’.
If you’d like to read more about economics issues try these 18 books recommended by Greg Mankiw, author of Principles of Economics. The Cartoon Introduction to Economics Basic economic principles, with humor. Spin-Free Economics A straightforward guide to major economic policy debates. Lives of the Laureates Twenty-three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics offer autobiographical [...] Read more – ‘Greg Mankiw Recommends Reading These 18 Economics Books’.
This is interesting but not surprising—We tend to find aversive situations less stressful when we believe we have some degree of control. In a reaction time (RT) task 40 subjects were told to react to the onset of a 6-second shock. Following l0 trials, half of the subjects were told that by decreasing their RT [...] Read more – ‘The illusion of control and stress’.
Access to computers fosters lower rates of recall of what we’re trying to recall and enhanced recall about where to find it. The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things [...] Read more – ‘Is human memory migrating to the cloud?’.
For those who don’t know, today would have been Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. McLuhan rocketed from an unknown academic to rockstar with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. Understanding Media contained the simple prophecy that electronic media of the twentieth century—at the time consisted of telephone, radio, movies, television but also [...] Read more – ‘Marshall McLuhan — The Man, The Mystery, The Life’.
David Foster Wallace in Consider the Lobster A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in SWE—Standard Written English—(he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you’ve seen them — these are the sorts of six-to-twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to [...] Read more – ‘Does being precociously fluent in English but teased on the playground indicate a dialectal problem?’.
Future Babble has come out to mixed reviews. I think the book would interest anyone seeking wisdom. Here are some of my notes: First a little background: Predictions fail because the world is too complicated to be predicted with accuracy and we’re wired to avoid uncertainty. However, we shouldn’t blindly believe experts. The world is [...] Read more – ‘Future Babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway’.
The challenges of climbing the corporate ladder are both fascinating and fluid. Whether you’re looking to improve your ability to influence or avoid some common pitfalls these books are a great place to start: 1. Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know—and What to Do About Them “Your number one job is [...] Read more – ‘6 Must-Read Books To Help Navigate the Workplace’.
Dan Ariely, below, on how taking something as broad as education and reducing it to a simple measurement has a lot of consequences. Ariely belives that The mission of teaching, and its evaluation, is incredibly intricate and complex. In addition to being able to read, write, and do some math and science, we want students [...] Read more – ‘Teachers cheating and Incentives’.
Ben Franklin discovered that a person who has done someone a favor is more likely to do that person another favor than they would be had they received a favor. Or, as Franklin put it: “He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you [...] Read more – ‘The Ben Franklin Effect’.
A lot of these books explore sex and drugs. Anything by Charles Bukowski Anything by William S. Burroughs On the Road by Jack Kerouac The New York Trilogy by Paul Auste Anything by Martin Amis Honourable mentions: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, anything by Don DeLillo, The Virgin Suicides by [...] Read more – ‘What are the most stolen books from bookstores?’.
People function through their use of two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of and knowledge how. …Knowledge how [is] what psychologists call procedural knowledge. …Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice. Even the best teachers cannot usually describe what [...] Read more – ‘Two kinds of knowledge’.
Reciprocity is a social norm that maintains that people should return favors and other acts of kindness. For example, most of us have no problem picking up the tab for a co-worker or friend who picked did the same last time. However, this bias can also be exploited. Many studies show that manipulating reciprocation can increase [...] Read more – ‘Returning favors even when no one finds out’.
The word narcissism comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, an attractive young man who set out looking for someone to love. The beautiful nymph Echo falls in love with him and repeats everything Narcissus says, but he rejects her and she fades away. Narcissus keeps looking for the perfect mate until one day he [...] Read more – ‘Where does the word narcissism come from?’.
Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn’t involve explicit knowledge. It doesn’t involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can’t explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have [...] Read more – ‘Insight & Intuition’.
Some of the most famous—and most discussed—studies ever conducted are Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies. Briefly, under the guise of a learning study, an experimenter instructed participants to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to a learner when a mistake was made on a memory task. In reality, no shocks were delivered and the learner was really [...] Read more – ‘Explaining Obedience to Authority’.
If you look in the Guinness Book of World Records you’ll discover that a car salesman named Joe Girard is one of the most successful salespeople ever. In fact, he has sold more retail “big ticket” items “one-at-a-time” than any other sales-person in any retail industry. We can learn a lot from studying success. So [...] Read more – ‘What trick can you learn from the most successful sales person ever?’.
Research suggests that flattery will get you everywhere. I’m sure you knew that already — you are, after all, the smartest readers on the planet. Psychologies have long known that the more likeable you are the more likely you are to influence others. A study published recently in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social [...] Read more – ‘The art of flattery’.
The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; [...] Read more – ‘Overvaluing hard work’.
This introduction to redundancy includes wisdom from Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Confucius, Norman Fuqua and others. “The reliability that matters is not the simple reliability of one component of a system, but the final reliability of the total control system”—Garrett Hardin We learn from Engineering that critical systems often require back up systems to guarantee a [...] Read more – ‘Mental Model: Redundancy’.
A great post from John Kay on what the $10 minibar beer has to do with the financial crisis. …have you struggled to understand your mobile phone bill? Bought a cartridge of ink that costs almost as much as the printer? Do you fill in your personal details on an insurance comparison website every year, [...] Read more – ‘Is Caveat Emptor the Dominant Business Principle Of Our Time?’.
Everyone loves to be associated with success. Imperial messengers in old Persia had a precarious time. Assigned the task of updating their rulers on the progress of battles, they had special cause to hope things were going well. Upon arrival at the palace with news of an imminent victory, a messenger would be showered with [...] Read more – ‘How to make people happy’.
What makes a good liar? The authors of this study found 18 attributes: (1) manipulativeness. “for manipulators, people high in Machiavellianism or social adroitness, lying is a normal and acceptable way of achieving their goals. Manipulators frequently tell lies, tend to persist in lying when challenged to tell the truth, don’t feel uncomfortable when lying, [...] Read more – ‘18 Attributes of Highly Effective Liars’.
Rather than invest the time and effort necessary to ponder the pluses and minuses of most decisions, we tend to rely on quick heuristics to make most decisions. These rules of thumb help us save cognitive processing and navigate a world full of choices. Our tendency to make near-automatic decisions exposes us to exploitation by [...] Read more – ‘Just for you: How Scarcity Factors Into Decisions’.
If you want to influence the decisions of clients or colleagues, the number of choices you offer them is crucial. Too many and you risk overloading the cognitive process. Not enough and people don’t feel like they have a choice. In a series of studies recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research, persuasion researchers [...] Read more – ‘How many choices are too many?’.
Chicago restaurateur Gordon Sinclair found he could reduce the number of no-shows in his restaurants by asking staff to make one small change when taking phone reservations. Rather than saying, “Please call us if you need to change or cancel your booking,” staff are instructed to say, “Would you be willing to call us if [...] Read more – ‘How can you persuade people to keep appointments?’.
New research about to be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests that even though people claim to be pretty good at predicting the likes and dislikes of others, they are, in fact, anything but that. And, surprisingly, the longer we know someone, the worse our predictions may get. …It turned out that everyone [...] Read more – ‘Does knowing someone longer mean you know them better?’.
An interesting paper for the nerds among you. Regret is a negative experience that most of us would rather avoid. In decision making, regret can stem from comparing actual outcomes to outcomes that might have happened had we made different choices. Interestingly, some research has shown that ‘experienced’ regret affects subsequent decisions. After experiencing regret, [...] Read more – ‘Does our desire to avoid regret affect how we make decisions?’.
Great quote from Edward Tufte that was too long for twitter: Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things – people do things. People’s names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride. source Read more – ‘Who does things?’.
Research has shown we typically prefer foods, medicine, and other goods described as natural over their artificial counterparts. Little research, however, has examined whether natural preferences extend towards aversive events or hazards. If, as some contend, risk assessment is predominately based on feelings elicited by potential costs and benefits, independent of probabilities, a preference for [...] Read more – ‘Would you rather be injured by lightning or a downed power line?’.
You simply must read this. I don’t normally post ‘finance’ related stuff on this site—I post that stuff here. This is a worthy exception. Like Herb Simon, the world would benefit from a little more Charlie Munger. Munger provided a copy of the document below yesterday at an event. munger Read more – ‘Required Reading: Munger’s Parody’.
Here are some of the notes I took while reading Tim Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure Biologists have a word for the way in which solutions emerge from failure: evolution. … Disconcertingly, given our instinctive belief that complex problems require expertly designed solutions, it is completely unplanned. Astounding complexity emerges in response [...] Read more – ‘Notes from Tim Harford’s book Adapt.’.
Human intuition suggests that being ahead in a competition increases the odds of winning. New research from Jonah Berger challenges that thinking by suggesting that being slightly behind can actually increase success because it increases motivation. Berger analyzed more than 18,000 professional basketball games and found that being slightly behind at halftime lead to a [...] Read more – ‘Can Losing Lead to Winning? (Behaviorial Economics to the rescue!)’.
From Thomas Goetz in Wired: …So feedback loops work. Why? Why does putting our own data in front of us somehow compel us to act? In part, it’s that feedback taps into something core to the human experience, even to our biological origins. Like any organism, humans are self-regulating creatures, with a multitude of systems [...] Read more – ‘Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops’.
Great Big Think interview with Malcolm Gladwell on seeing the world as others do. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink, Outliers and most recently, What the Dog Saw. Read more – ‘Malcolm Gladwell: Seeing the word as others do (video)’.
I didn’t put much effort into choosing books. I was promiscuous like that. As a result, I have a room full of overstuffed bookshelves. In an effort to find a few books to donate to the local public school book drive, I’ve been pulling them off my shelves. At first, I decided to get rid [...] Read more – ‘The Great Books’.
If bubbles are so obvious, why do they keep happening? The real problem, according to Duncan Watts, author of Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, in his recent Slate article is how we learn from history. By analogy, when you’re reading a mystery novel, you don’t necessarily know what to make of events because you [...] Read more – ‘The real reason it’s so hard to predict bubbles’.
We owe thanks to the publishing industry. Their ability to take a concept and fill an entire category with a shotgun approach is the reason that more people are talking about biases. Unfortunately, talk alone will not eliminate them but it is possible to take steps to counteract them. Reducing biases can make a huge difference [...] Read more – ‘Before You Make That Big Decision…’.
We’re all familiar with the classic adage “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Not only does this statement reflect popular sentiment but it is also supported by scientific research. How does corruption affect a person’s power position? Idealists among us would hope that people with power who break the rules quickly and [...] Read more – ‘Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others’.
An excerpt from Buyology: The Truth and Lies About What We Buy: … the team leader, Dr. Calvert, presented me with the results. I was, to put it mildly, startled. Even Dr. Calvert was taken aback by the findings: warning labels on the sides, fronts, and backs of cigarette packs had no effect on suppressing [...] Read more – ‘Will new tobacco labelling with gross images decrease consumption?’.
A great (and negative) book review of How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One: After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, [...] Read more – ‘Heavy sentences’.
A new book, Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, lays out a cognitive and evolutionary perspective on the answer. A reviewer from Science Magazine explains: The key to the authors’ success is that they locate humor within recent cognitive science and evolutionary theory. To aid survival, our brains constantly and covertly use heuristics to [...] Read more – ‘Why do we laugh?’.
After reading The Ambiguities of Experience, I set out to read another book by James March: On Leadership. The genius of March takes a while to appreciate. I assure you, however, this thought-provoking book is packed full of wisdom you won’t find in the business best seller section. On Leadership offers a stunning demonstration of [...] Read more – ‘On Leadership’.
In 1637 René Descartes changed the course of science forever with the publication of Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. That work lays the foundation to modern science by putting forth two enduring ideas: reductionism as a way of knowing (“divide each of the difficulties [...] Read more – ‘The Humpty-Dumpty Problem’.
I recommend reading Nassim Taleb’s recent article in Foreign Affairs. If you don’t have time here are my notes: Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting not visible risks. Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to [...] Read more – ‘How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous’.
I must admit that I have Derek Parfit’s long-awaited book On What Matters sitting on my night-stand at the moment. Its daunting length—over 1400 pages in two volumes—helps me procrastinate. Most of us might come to the same conclusion as Parfit on the question of what matters—”we rich people give up some of our luxuries, [...] Read more – ‘Does anything Matter?’.
One thing that has always baffled me is how we get fat. Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes unearths the biological truth around why we’re getting fat. In the process Taubes dispels many accepted ideas on weight-loss and nutrition. While it’s easy to believe that we remain lean because we’re virtuous and we get [...] Read more – ‘Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It’.
What would you do if you were stranded at sea in a small inflatable raft with little hope of survival? What differentiates the person who gives up immediatley from the one who fights to the end? In 1957 an experiment was done at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine by renowned psychobiology researcher, Curt Richter in [...] Read more – ‘Would you choose to live or die?’.
One researcher suggests that there are two main forms of regret. The first is a “hot emotion” that carries a blow. For example, it’s what you feel when you suffer a loss because you didn’t follow instructions or seek guidance. It’s the punch to the diaphragm as you think about the things you could have [...] Read more – ‘Does the experience of regret serve a purpose? Is it a necessary element of sociality?’.
There are a number of ways you can automatically get this blog daily for free. Email is easy-peasy. Click here to sign up (you will receive an email asking for you to confirm). Your info is never rented or sold. Twitter makes it easy, just follow @farnamstreet. As an added bonus, I post a lot of [...] Read more – ‘Subscribing’.
At some point it happens to all of us. Someone asks a pointed question that we don't want to answer. Politicians have mastered this but what can the rest of us do? The study below indicates that people are frequently unable to remember an initial question if a speaker answers a similar question. According to [...] Read more – ‘How you can avoid answering uncomfortable questions’.
…Classic examples of cognitive biases are escalating commitments, such as those countries that want to hold the Olympic Games and World Games – the projected losses keep rising but they will keep persisting with it. “Another example is rigidity in the face of crisis, so when something is going wrong we tend to withdraw, to [...] Read more – ‘Cognitive traps’.
The next time somebody tells you about a wisdom-of-crowds effect, make sure you ask them whether they're talking about a real crowd or a statistically enhanced crowd.: Even in its most basic expression, the wisdom-of-crowds effect seems to be exaggerated. In many cases, including the ones covered by the Swiss researchers, it's only by using [...] Read more – ‘The wisdom of statistically manipulated crowds’.
This is a great way to kick off your summer reading:Clinical Professor Robert Bordone ’97 has already started on Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom,” a book that is “wonderful for conflict resolution types.” And he is looking forward to the all-new 3rd edition of Professor Emeritus Roger Fisher ’48 and William Ury’
