One of the primary reasons to get teams together has to do with the hardwiring of the human brain... Building trust is a multisensory experience... Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult t…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

... no one has direct access to reality. The real world is nearly impossible to see in this maelstrom ... because human minds need to “construct” their own version of reality — and each of us does this within a community of shared experiences and beliefs... there are many social worlds and each is built on its own version of what is real and true.…

A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.

the science on how to best communicate science across different issues, social settings and audiences has not led to easy-to-follow, concrete recommendations... becoming increasingly clear that the “deficit model” ... if we just “fill people up” with science knowledge and understanding, they’ll become increasingly rational decision-makers – simpl…

When someone tries to correct you... it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions ... the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper... exerting effort dealing with the cognitive dissonance produced by conflicting evidence, we actually end up buildin…

the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs... People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others... Pascal frames persuas…

Echo chambers aren’t just a product of the internet and social media, however, but of how those things interact with fundamental features of human nature... Understand these features of human nature and maybe we can think creatively about ways to escape them... our tendency to associate with people like us. Sociologists call this homophily.... t…

The brain ... is an “inference generating organ.” ... predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world... When “the sensory information ... does not match your prediction... you either change your prediction—or you change the sensory information that you receive.” We form our bel…

fake news wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t fall for it and share it. Unless we understand the psychology of online news consumption, we won’t be able to find a cure... online news readers don’t ... care about the importance of journalistic sourcing ... “professional gatekeeping.”... I mocked up a news site and showed four groups of partici…

a post for my Facebook friends about my personal experience with narcissistic personality disorder and how I view the president elect... who almost certainly suffers from it or a similar disorder.

Confirmation bias is usually described as a tendency to notice or search out information that confirms what one already believes, or would like to believe, and to avoid or discount information that’s contrary to one’s beliefs or preferences. This presidential election was undoubtedly the most contentious of any in the memory of most voters... Th…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

Man differs from other animals... he has some desires which are... infinite, can never be fully gratified... Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power... However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you... eclipsed by an…

Power gets into our heads... give us confidence to indulge in our base urges. It can make us less empathetic, more likely to see our own success in a positive light and harshly condemn failures in others...power is only likely to magnify the negative characteristics in a man like Trump... “power simply brings our true nature out into the open”... …

“Capgras delusions,” ... the belief that loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters... the brain has separate modules for analyzing the cognitive aspects of recognition, and for feeling the emotional aspects of familiarity... these functional fault lines in the social brain... have given rise to the contemporary Facebook generation... …

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life... how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership... He asks only, how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?

Even if we do feel an emotion, there are parts associated with it that we aren’t usually aware of.

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality. Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason... those with a high I.Q. were, if anything, more prone to the conjunction fallacy... rationality, unlike intelligence, can be improved through traini…

when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

repeating a lie, which is generally part of the debunking process, can reinforce it. ... confirmation bias leads people who want to believe something to believe it even more after they’ve been shown they’re wrong.

In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge... being in “search mode” on the Internet helps people feel smarter, despite their searches resulting in nothing due to filters blo…

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

Barb's job is to convince us that this simple system of thought can account for the messiness of many of our personal and interpersonal relationships, regardless of gender, race, class, age, language, education... Type is intensely democratizing in its vision of the world, weird and wonderful in its commitment to flattening the material diffe…

Cognitive ease is the concept of which when you hear something repeatedly, your brain starts to form connections around it, thus making it easier for you to process later. And since we prefer things to be simple and easy, things that are easy to think about generally makes us feel happier... for newspapers it’s part of the problem that we all face…

what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it.... The “most empowering” menu is different than the menu that has the most choices... When we wake up in the morning and turn our phone over to see a…

Instead of trying to bludgeon online companies to conform to some opaque standard of objectivity, we need to shift towards more fruitful endeavors... none of the outlets mentioned by name... are particularly well known news institutions... the underlying bias might not be based on institutional outlook, but an internal pressure to cite sources wit…

Great explainer video - accompanying article here.

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? ... his support seems to cross demographic lines ... does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast o…