When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…The contrast between the previous apprehension and the pre...
We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what...
Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.
To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.
To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten ye...
To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.
Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.
There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. [...] The second lesson is that in g...
The culture of honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-gr...
That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking—It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead!—is useless, Harris concludes. This is adult propaganda; these are adult...
Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people senders.