psychology

Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.

Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price of a car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another. In the wake of a many-thousand-dollar deal, a couple hundred extra dollars for a nicety such as an upgraded sound system seems almost trivial in comparison. The same will be true of the added expense of

You don’t need status or expertise to start writing. In fact, beginners often create the most helpful content:

• While learning Ruby on Rails programming, I couldn’t get it installed despite following expert tutorials. The solution came from a fellow beginner’s blog who explained a “basic” configuration step the experts had skipped.

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

After the war, John Maynard Keynes predicted countries wrecked by war would go on to have a “craving for social and personal security.” Which is what happened.

But now declassified tapes and documents from the time provide an entirely different account. Kennedy’s “win” was due not to his inflexible bargaining stance but, rather, to his willingness to remove US Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy in return for Khrushchev’s removal of missiles from Cuba. For reasons involving his political popularity,

It is the ability to recognize your emotions, feel them, and move forward unobstructed—the difference between being caught in the storm and becoming the sky that holds it. Surveys show that this kind of emotional intelligence is already the number-one criteria for managers when considering a team member for a promotion or salary increase.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.