psychology

Perhaps Reverend Jones’s mistake was in teaching the Scriptures too well to Ms. Louie, especially Exodus 23:8—“And thou shalt take no gift; for a gift blindeth them that have sight and perverteth the words of the righteous.”

the increasing extravagance of noble consumption.

you could change the behavior of college students who smoked by putting a sticker on their lighter reminding them that “Smoking Kills”—just like MacDonald’s AIDS stamp.3 Students were asked to use the lighter when they wanted to smoke, but some of them had an additional task of counting backward by tens.

A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what is important: The content, the argument and the ideas.

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.

Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

As a result, low cost signals that are easy to fake are often unreliable cues of trustworthiness.

judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation.

language. Linguistic barriers are not surmounted so easily.