When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll...
When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, ad...
What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to...
We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much b...
We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much informat...
We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enoug...
We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.
We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over 50 times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categorie...
We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.
They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? Mary got a quarter, Friedman says. There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter,...
There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.
There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a c...
There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.
There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.
The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour, Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow, Elizabeth Bishop’s The...
The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reachi...
The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call diminishing...
The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.