Sublime

“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and

The “above-average” effect is pervasive.

Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions. What the Chinese have discovered is that the man himself uses this same evidence to decide what he is like. His behavior tells him about himself; it is a primary source

in the few non-WEIRD societies where it has been studied, having high self-esteem and a positive view of oneself are not strongly linked to either life satisfaction or subjective well-being. In many societies, it’s other-esteem (“face”) that matters, not self-esteem rooted in the successful cultivation of a set of unique personal attributes that ca

Internals outperform Externals in academic achievement situations: they tend to get superior grades, score higher on academic tests, and solve problems with greater efficiency. Internals achieve more than Externals in business as well. They make more money, are better leaders, and find ways to feel better about themselves and what they do.

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his c

Tajfel découvrit que ses sujets affichaient une nette préférence pour les membres de leur propre groupe, refusant d’adopter une stratégie de distribution égalitaire, et récompensant de manière disproportionnée ceux à qui ils s’identifiaient désormais. D’autres chercheurs ont réparti des individus dans différents groupes selon des stratégies encore

“fundamental attribution error.”