You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that th...
You are always looking for risks and rewards, but when you want to believe something is good you will unconsciously turn down the volume on the bad qualities, and vice versa.
Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unluc...
Visiting friends just to shoot the shit is the human equivalent of picking ticks off of one another’s backs.
The next time you get a pimple on your forehead, or buy a new pair of shoes, or Tweet about how boring your day is, don’t expect anyone to notice. You are not so smart or special.
THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions of people and events are based on objective evaluation. THE TRUTH: You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.
THE MISCONCEPTION: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera. THE TRUTH: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in...
THE MISCONCEPTION: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. THE TRUTH: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.
THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are lying to yourself. THE TRUTH: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history witho...
THE MISCONCEPTION: You calculate what is risky or rewarding and always choose to maximize gains while minimizing losses. THE TRUTH: You depend on emotions to tell you if something is good or bad, grea...
Mathematically speaking, though, there is a miracle happening every time you turn a page of this book.
It isn't you don't want to help; you just don't want to help a cheater or do more than a slacker - even if your not helping leads to ruining the game for you and everyone else
Indeed, later research backed up their claims, showing that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. Peo...
If you suppose it could have happened, you are far less likely to question yourself as to whether it did.
Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can't out-consume one another becau...
Even as the brain is dying, it refuses to stop generating a narrative, the scaffolding upon which it weaves cause and effect, memory and experience, feeling and cognition. Narrative is so important to...
Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things . . . well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to...
As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book The Tipping Point, if a company grows beyond 150 people, productivity sharply declines until the company divides its outlying entities into smaller groups....
A lot of what you presume to be evidence of your intelligence is just part of a vast cultural inheritance.
Narrative bias—a bias in that when given the option, you prefer to give and receive information in narrative format.