The Psychology of Risk and Reward
An excerpt from The Aspirational Investor: Taming the Markets to Achieve Your Life’s Goals that I think you’d enjoy. Most of us have a healthy understanding of risk in the short term. When …
Cognitive Dissonance
Nassim Taleb: How to Not be a Sucker From the Past
The fact that new information exists about the past in general means that we have an incomplete roadmap about history. There is a necessary fallibility … if you will. In The Black Swan, Nassim …
Genevieve Bell on the Value of Humanities in an Executive Role
Genevieve Bell is one of the most powerful and influential social scientist in the tech industry. Speaking to Christian Madsbjerg in an excerpt from The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to …
Impressions Are Schematically Determined
The way a given culture thinks about dirt and cleanliness can tell us a lot about the way people think of themselves and others. Mary Douglas’s book, Purity and Danger, is an inquiry into the …
The Half-life of Facts
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades we were convinced that …
Cognitive Dissonance and Change Blindness
“Their judgment was based more on wishful thinking than on a sound calculation of probabilities; for the usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave …
Why Do People Choose Political Loyalties Over Facts?
One of the theories is cognitive dissonance—we find it difficult to hold contradictory ideas in our head at the same time. Cognitive dissonance predicts that given the choice between our emotional …
The Ben Franklin Effect
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 …
James March: The Ambiguities of Experience
How do our experiences help us learn? We’re often told that experience is the best way to learn. We might see this play out when someone gives us advice which we ignore, until experience teaches us …
Can one person successfully play different roles that require different, and often competing, perspectives?
No, according to research by Max Bazerman, author of the best book on decision making I’ve ever read: Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. Contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous …