Behavioral Psychology

“independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds.” That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.

Humans are fundamentally conflicted. One of the foundational conflicts in psychology is between self-enhancement, or the desire to feel good about who we are, and self-accuracy, or having an honest, realistic understanding of ourselves.

According to Jung, synchronicities often arise during periods of psychological transformation—what he called individuation, the process of becoming a whole, integrated person. When unconscious material is rising toward consciousness, meaningful coincidences tend to appear in clusters, as if the psyche and the universe are in dialogue.

This is maybe the single most important core of human psychology - people want to reinforce narratives about themselves. If you’re marketing, don’t sell them a thing, sell them a self image that your thing happens to reinforce.

The essay suggests that in high-energy emotional states, such as falling in love, grief, awe, psychedelics, deep meditation, the brain becomes molten, its patterns loosened, more open to reorganisation. The person we focus on in these states becomes like a mold for the cooling metal, shaping how our thoughts settle, what habits crystallise, what... See more

The authors link this to the so-called Tocqueville paradox, which suggests that social progress can, paradoxically, lead to greater frustration.

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.

This shift has moral as well as economic consequences. When a society pushes its citizens to take only financial risks, it hollows out the virtues that once made collective life possible: trust,... See more

People who value choices over happiness never argue about it. They are proud of it. People who value happiness over having a life full of interesting opportunities get indignant over being accused that they made that choice.

Since Freud, psychologists have distinguished between theories of autoplastic and alloplastic change. With autoplastic change, the problem is the patient, and the patient must first improve himself. With alloplastic adaptation, the problem is the environment, and the subject should change his surroundings.