THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how much control you have over your surroundings. THE TRUTH: You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or are too complex to predict.
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 prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when you bought them. THE TRUTH: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your...
THE MISCONCEPTION: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect. THE TRUTH: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to h...
The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.
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 can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surroun...
A lot of what you presume to be evidence of your intelligence is just part of a vast cultural inheritance.
After more than a thousand of these buzz-report-introspect-text moments, Graham looked over the data and found that couples who routinely performed difficult tasks together as partners were also more...
As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
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...
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.
If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.
In 2006, researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created fake newspaper articles about polarizing political issues. The articles were written in a way that would confirm a widespread misconception...
In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, science is fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.
In the end, Alter and Forgas concluded the happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad peopl...
It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. For a group to make good decisions, they must all...
It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated.
Mathematically speaking, though, there is a miracle happening every time you turn a page of this book.
Research by psychologist Steven Sloman and marketing expert Phil Fernbach shows that people who claim to understand complicated political topics such as cap and trade and flat taxes tend to reveal the...
Showing 161 to 180 of 239 results