You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision...
What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a unified trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced...
Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western...
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kin...
To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a soc...
The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims...
Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.
Of the three, the third trait—the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment—is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the...
It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.
I mean, it’s ridiculous, Dhuey says. It’s outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them.
History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized...
Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 perce...
Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity...
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a ve...
Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those d...
Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in...
But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do—or don’t do—to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and sc...