If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us.
If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it—they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a beha...
Every day, we all encounter things we love and things that need to change. The former give us joy. The latter fuel our desire to make the world different—ideally better than the way we found it. But t...
Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism. That was one of the major failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against economic and social inequality tha...
Based on David Hornik’s story, you might predict that givers achieve the worst results—and you’d be right. Research demonstrates that givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder. Across a wide ran...
As Jack Handey advised in one of his Deep Thoughts on Saturday Night Live, before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and...
Across cultures, there’s a rich body of evidence showing that people continue to hold strong gender-role stereotypes, expecting men to be assertive and women to be communal. When women speak up, they...
A growing body of evidence suggests that entrepreneurs don’t like risk any more than the rest of us—and it’s the rare conclusion on which many economists, sociologists, and psychologists have actually...
So if givers are most likely to land at the bottom of the success ladder, who’s at the top—takers or matchers? Neither. When I took another look at the data, I discovered a surprising pattern: It’s th...
People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.
New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In
Indeed, Cialdini finds that people donate more money to charity when the phrase even a penny will help is added to a request.
If you’re a matcher, you’ll also punish takers for acting unfairly toward other people.
If we want people to accept our original ideas, we need to speak up about them, then rinse and repeat. To
Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your bu...
Consider the four responses to dissatisfaction: exit, voice, persistence, and neglect. Only exit and voice improve your circumstances.
At work, our sense of commitment and control depends more on our direct boss than on anyone else. When we have a supportive boss, our bond with the organization strengthens and we feel a greater span...
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
Taking is using other people solely for one’s own gain. Receiving is accepting help from others while maintaining a willingness to pay it back and forward.
Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they woul...