psychology

Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we’re now realizing he was also right about some stuff. When you remove people’s emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce effort, it’s soul killing.

‘Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.’

Much of the compliance process (wherein one person is spurred to comply with another person’s request) can be understood in terms of a human tendency for automatic, shortcut responding. Most of us have developed a set of trigger features for compliance—that is, specific pieces of information that normally tell us when compliance with a request is

When we focus on novelty, we lose sight of behavioral outcomes. And while using validated pressures to inform our designs can help guard against the natural tendency to pursue interventions that feel unique, they aren’t a guarantee; just as data can be used to justify bad business decisions, pressures can be used to justify bad interventions.

choices means losing possibilities. And having so many choices increases the chance of regret.

And the way we’re interconnected changes the way we see and process information that comes our way, which changes the culture. The form of the network changes the way the network operates.

Unfairly imposing losses on people can be risky if the victims are in a position to retaliate.

In the end, Kaczynski and his followers made the same mistake as Skinner: they viewed us as mere puppets of our environment, devoid of agency and the ability to adapt. They needn’t have feared the world becoming a Skinner box, because, among all the papers written about that troublesome contraption, one fact is always overlooked: Skinner’s pigeons

Visits to Buddhist temples surged by over 300 percent last year, suggesting that more people are turning to superstitions for good luck to secure their futures. Increasingly, many Chinese seem to place more faith in temple offerings or amulets than in the party’s assurances of common prosperity.