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 evaluate yourself based on past successes and defeats. THE TRUTH: You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.
THE MISCONCEPTION: You choose to accept or refuse an offer based on logic. THE TRUTH: When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status.
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...
Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the de...
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...
In 1970, psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley created an experiment in which they would drop pencils or coins. Sometimes they would be in a group, sometimes with one other person. They did this s...
How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that y...
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...
Dunbar’s Number THE MISCONCEPTION: There is a Rolodex in your mind with the names and faces of everyone you’ve ever known. THE TRUTH: You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 pe...
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.
Catharsis THE MISCONCEPTION: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family. THE TRUTH: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.
Brand loyalty—that nebulous emotional connection people have with certain companies, which turns them into defenders and advocates for corporations who don’t give a shit.
Behaviors create attitudes.
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...
A lot of what you presume to be evidence of your intelligence is just part of a vast cultural inheritance.
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 and everyone else come into the world preloaded with these pesky and completely wrong ways of seeing things, and you rarely notice them.