Simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behavior.... Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic... the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure is demonstrably false... Talent and ... “grit” depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowmen…

approximately half of the psychological pressure that we feel to own or not to own a dog is influenced by our DNA with the other half influenced by environmental factors

Focusmate — a free virtual co-working service that pairs you with a complete stranger for 50 minutes of silent, mutual labor over a webcam... harnesses pillars of psychology proven to boost productivity 200-300 percent... just telling someone I was going to do something made me get it done... because it layers various productivity hacks like soci…

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

The systems in the brain that light up when we access our beliefs are the same systems that help us understand stories... the same brain systems involved when people think about who they are and about the beliefs that are most important to them... the default mode network, a set of interconnected areas of the brain associated with identity and sel…

a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with ... our propensity to feel physical disgust.... The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures... different brain networks were stimulated... the subjects’ neural responses... could predict with …

this ability to stand outside of one’s immediate context and take a longer historical view, like other forms of genius, may have physical correlates in the brain... they excel at “recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way... much stronger activations (compared to a control group) in the …

Instead of asking, “What rewards should we give away?” ask “How should we give away a reward?” ... how the reward is framed, and the steps customers must take ... the endowed progress effect: We’re more committed to completing a goal when we have made some progress... LinkedIn, where I can gauge my “profile strength,” is similar. My profile is n…

intellectual humility, the crucial characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness... crucial for learning... difficult to foster... a virtue worth striving for... entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning ...actively curious about your blind spots... It’s about asking: What am I missing here? our reali…

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand... seen at all levels of a company... if you already know the answer... tend to underestimate the difficulty of the question or the problem... become so immersed in t…

naive realism, the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong because they are misinformed, that if they knew what you knew, they would change their minds to match yours... maybe WE are the ones who are wrong. We never go into the debate hoping to be enlightened, only to crush our opponents... When confronted with people who disagree, you te…

the Oxford Circus panic ... was amplified by social media.... Fear can be transmitted digitally as easily as it can physically—and that’s a problem because digital technologies reach everyone.... the English-speaking world is in the middle of a fear pandemic... Cognitive biases leave us ill-equipped ... Amygdala hijacks and warped media business m…

the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later... fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals.... no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals. Until we did.... Imagining being completely safe…

about 80 percent of people, the brain overestimates the likelihood of future good events and underestimates the odds of future bad events... our built-in optimism bias.

How do you persuade the people on the other side to see things your way?... the answer is in learning how to cross ... the empathy gap. When we produce arguments, we do so from within our own moral framework and in the language of our moral values. Those values rest on top of a set of psychological tendencies influenced by our genetic predispositi…

One of the most effective ways to change people’s minds is to put your argument into ... a story — but not just any story. The most persuasive narratives are those that transport us. Once departed from normal reality into the imagined world of a story, we become highly susceptible to belief and attitude change.... learn from psychologist Melanie C…

the psychology of warnings - why some warnings get heard, why many are ignored and the pitfalls of being a prophet.... a vicious cycle ... As the planet warms, the permafrost thaws... dead animals and plants and fungi start to decompose. More decomposition means more carbon released ... means warmer temperatures... even more melting of the permafr…

talk-show hosts like journalists ... know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger.... We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations... I met psychologists, med…

these technologies ... kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking... wears down certain capacities, like willpower... repeated distractions lower people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points... over twice ... that ... from long-term marijuana usage....…

uses the social network to promote her business... set up various safeguards to avoid becoming too emotionally invested ... a web browser plug-in ... replaces the social network’s endless stream ... with a single inspiring quote.... hired a social media manager ... because she could no longer stand the addictive feedback loop ... She had been a …

The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

A library, organised by topic

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.... insidious. It affects every choice you make. Every. Single. Day. ... without you noticing. Confirmation bias affects you in 3 ways... Why? You seek evidence that confirms your beliefs because being wrong ... means you’re not …

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

the backfire effect can be hard to replicate in rigorous research... a large-scale, peer-reviewed study ... couldn't reproduce the high-profile 2010 study . ... The trouble is that even when we learn that something is false, we may be able to acknowledge those facts without changing our political position accordingly

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

a lot of psychology and other social science studies... participants are overwhelming Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries... not only are they WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit.... from countries that represent only about 12 percent …

my team and I studied how people use different information when it comes to voting... presented voters with ... “Public information” was seen by everyone and referred to as “expert”. “Private information” was given to individuals and referred to “personal opinion”... with a probability of it being correct,... They followed their personal informa…

The scientists asked the volunteers to perform a creative thinking task as they lay inside a brain scanner... strong connectivity between three networks of the brain... default mode network, is linked to spontaneous thinking and mind wandering... executive control network, is engaged when people focus in on their thoughts... salience network, help…

we evolved to solve complex problems not independently but dependently in a group setting.... the knowledge illusion... much of our “knowledge” is not knowledge in the sense of understanding how things work but ... faith... in other people  -... smart people with PhDs... whatever  -  who I trust to know these things that I do not know.... for tho…