psychology

Kodak or Atari or RIM, creator of the Black-Berry.) And this tendency isn’t limited to the business world. The pattern of spectacular innovation followed by just as spectacular stagnation describes a more general trend that occurs in academia, the military, and almost any industry or profession you can name. And it’s all rooted in how our brain’s

Economist Per Bylund once noted: “The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any).” Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason. So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of.

Skinner’s goal was to make his pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred

More, in that it takes on a larger, more general significance, as an object of broad speculation and inquiry, a scientific conundrum, if you will. It has contours that inevitably were seen before in earlier problems and will certainly repeat again, broader principles that can apply to other moments that may not even seem at first glance related.

Napoleon once said, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”

For both humans and subhumans, the automatic-behavior patterns tend to be triggered by a single feature of the relevant information in the situation.

As we’ve just seen, people tend to look to others for guidance as to how to behave. And this tendency is strongest when the person observed is similar to ourselves, an effect that can be seen in how susceptible teenagers are to the opinions and fashion choices of their peers.

Our tendency to emulate others also produces a rather grim statistic: when

‘In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’

behavior change itself will be inherently imperfect. You can lose the battle—a person, a specific moment, a single unit of behavior—and still win the war. This is true because populations are, in the aggregate, largely predictable. Even if any given person might not do what we expect all the time, the overall behavior of large numbers of people