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The effects of social and cognitive factors on economic decisions
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
Let’s say you try to disagree with somebody. I think there are three ways to do it and two of them are not great. So the first way is just to be negative: "Hey, you’re wrong, you’re an idiot, it’s a bad idea”. Even if you don’t actually call somebody an idiot that is the message they will ...
There are certain traits that we don’t pay much attention to, but which actually do explain success. So, for example, one of them you would call mind sight, which is the ability to look into other people’s eyes and sort of download the information they have there. Babies come with this skill, so ...
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...
A few years ago, at mile 20 of my second marathon, I promised myself I would never again run a 26.2 mile race. I had trained impeccably, ran my first mile a little slower than goal pace, as everyone advises, and was primed to shave seven minutes off my previous time and traverse the five boroughs ...
Irony lurks in the surge of interest in cognitive psychologists’ research on human reasoning: we seem to be desperately interested in reading about how poorly we think. If Descartes could behold the popularity of books by Daniel Kahneman and Leonard Mlodinow and the hundreds of articles and blog ...
I will never know if my vocation as a psychologist was a result of my early exposure to interesting gossip, or whether my interest in gossip was an indication of a budding vocation. Like many other Jews, I suppose, I grew up in a world that consisted exclusively of people and words, and most of the ...