psychology

we showed that when asked to focus on creating more of a behavior, people almost exclusively generated interventions aimed at increasing promoting pressures, like rewards. When focused on creating less of a behavior, they disproportionately generated interventions ramping up inhibiting pressures, like punishments.

Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

The lesson from cases of people both keeping and losing their jobs is that as long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really does not matter that much and, by contrast, if you upset them, performance won’t save you.

A more interesting finding was that the relationship between liking and compliance was completely wiped out in the condition under which subjects had been given a Coke by Joe. For those who owed him a favor, it made no difference whether they liked him or not; they felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did. The subjects who indicated

Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

In fact, Iyengar argues that the regret experienced over these lost options is often greater than the joy we feel from the choices that we ultimately make.

In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.

There’s an even bigger challenge needed to build a lasting business: scaling your taste, not just into a single object, but into an organization that can build and distribute many products that reflect that taste

Early humans spent the vast majority of their existence in small tribes where everyone knew everyone, they all worked together, and most people were blood relatives. The work/personal distinction is new, alien, and arbitrary to our mammalian brains. This is why “networking” sounds sleazy but “family” sounds good.