psychology

Conventional indifference maps and Bernoulli’s representation of outcomes as states of wealth share a mistaken assumption: that your utility for a state of affairs depends only on that state and is not affected by your history. Correcting that mistake has been one of the achievements of behavioral economics.

• Micromanagement is annoying because it's a threat to one's status, the same way getting in someone's face is a threat.

• Transparency is traditionally seen as an insult to power because it's a violation of the (assumed) prerogative of leaders to keep more information to themselves.

Insight may seem to come from nowhere, but really, it comes from somewhere quite specific: from the attic and the processing that has been taking place while you’ve been busy doing other things.

University of North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson discovered “the positivity ratio,” or the fact that it takes three positive thoughts to counter a single negative thought. “Three-to-one,” she wrote in a recent journal article, “is the ratio we’ve found to be the tipping point beyond which the full impact of positive emotions becomes unleashed.”

It is not so much the content as much as the frame around the content.

The effect goes beyond simple self-report and plays out in decisions that matter a great deal. On rainy days, students looking at potential colleges pay more attention to academics than they do on sunny days—and for every standard deviation increase in cloud cover on the day of the college visit, a student is 9 percent more likely to actually

The frontier also tends to forge tribes that are more democratic and meritocratic (and less status-conscious), have fewer laws and policies, and bias toward empiricism over theory (because theory encodes facts about older environments). All of these cultural institutions help keep tribes more flexible, so they're more able to adapt when change

the better we are, the better we’ve become, the more we’ve learned, the more powerful is the urge to just rest already. We feel like we somehow deserve it, instead of realizing that it is the greatest disservice we could possibly do ourselves. We see this pattern playing itself out not merely at the individual levels but throughout organizations

MacDonald’s paper inspired Ward and his frequent collaborator Traci Mann to posit a more generalized model of attentional myopia.2 It showed that by selectively narrowing attention, they could change a wide variety of behaviors, like eating more or less or being more or less aggressive toward others.