psychology

That is the meaning of the statement that “people are not adequately sensitive to sample size.”

Flow follows focus, and we pay the most attention to the task at hand, when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. We want to stretch, but not snap. When we are pushing on our talents and advancing our abilities, we are walking the path to mastery—and the brain notices. It rewards this effort with dopamine. And because dopamine

n a less tragic setting, this dynamic is also why marketers often use advertisements featuring (mostly fake) interviews with “regular people on the street” who endorse a product. “Ordinary people” comprise the largest potential market for any product, and they value an endorsement by a person who seems similar to themselves.

To avoid falling for thi

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.”

We obey authorities without question, and mere symbols of authority can already win our compliance.

From birth, we’re taught to always obey figures of authority, be they teachers, doctors or police officers. Unfortunately, this tendency to comply with authority is so ingrained and powerful that we don’t bother to think or challenge perceived authori

You have to stand in the future to create a different future. Our friend, Mike Maples Jr., calls this “backcasting.” Legendary builders must stand in the future and pull the present from the current reality to the future of their design. So an important additional job of the builder is to persuade early like-minded people to join a new movement.

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

An experiment that I mentioned earlier found that the decision weight for a 90% chance was 71.2 and the decision weight for a 10% chance was 18.6. The ratio of the probabilities was 9.0, but the ratio of the decision weights was only 3.83,

This is why people are often so afraid of success—for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: it threatens who they believe themselves to be.

Further, because we also understand time, information, and relationships in spatial terms, our ideas about how status interacts with space bleed into those domains as well. We accord higher-status people more time, more control over their information, and more social distance than we accord people of lower status.