Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.
More than 70 percent of the men in his generation have sex before they marry, compared with just 33 percent in the earlier generation.
Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get mar...
Los cinturones de seguridad reducen el peligro de muerte hasta en un 70 por ciento;
It's easy to let your biases—political, intellectual, or otherwise—color your view of the world. A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confir...
It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase conventional wisdom. He did not consider it a compliment. We associate truth with convenience, he wrote, with what...
If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be right.
If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying I don’t know is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least f...
I hope when my kids have kids, there are still books around, and I don’t really care if mine are around, but I hope there are books around because I love the idea of that. I love doing this. I love do...
Here is the broader point: whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your t...
He upended the conventional wisdom on altruism by introducing new elements to a clever lab experiment to make it look a bit more like the real world. If your only option in the lab is to give away som...
From 2002 to 2008, the United States was fighting bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; among active military personnel, there were an average 1,643 fatalities per year. But over the same stretch of ti...
El enfoque económico no pretende describir el mundo como cualquiera de nosotros quisiera que fuera, o teme que sea, o reza por que llegue a ser, sino más bien explicar lo que hay en la realidad. La ma...
Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.
David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-hun...
Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?
Correlation does not equal causality.
Consider the kind of questions that kids ask. Sure, they may be silly or simplistic or out of bounds. But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased. Because they know so little, they...
Come up with a terrible idea? No problem—just don’t act on it.
But this is not to say that parents don’t matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that...