1. What Does It Mean to Think Like a Freak?
3. Once people are asked to donate, the social pressure is so great that they get bullied into giving, even though they wish they’d never been asked in the first place. Mullaney knew that number 3 wa...
A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.
A great deal of conventional wisdom is built on nothing more than a story that someone has been telling for so long—often out of self-interest—that it is treated like gospel.
A little girl named Mary goes to the beach with her mother and brother. They drive there in a red car. At the beach they swim, eat some ice cream, play in the sand, and have sandwiches for lunch. Now...
A pair of researchers named Kristen Schilt and Matthew Wiswall wanted to systematically examine what happens to the salaries of people who switched gender as adults. It is not quite the experiment we...
A story, meanwhile, fills out the picture. It uses data, statistical or otherwise, to portray a sense of magnitude; without data, we have no idea how a story fits into the larger scheme of things. A g...
Advertising too is a brilliant tool for creating conventional wisdom. Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled...
Among the best solutions: using disposable blood-pressure cuffs on incoming patients; infusing hospital equipment with silver ion particles to create an antimicrobial shield; and forbidding doctors to...
An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.
An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn’t likely to engage with you at all.
And then there’s the tale of an economist on holiday in Las Vegas. He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million? he asked...
And there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence - which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.
Anecdotes often represent the lowest form of persuasion.
Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don’t be afraid of the obvious.
As Albert Einstein liked to say, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Because poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.
Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3....
But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others’.
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