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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
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Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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A mindful life, one decision at a time
The markets are a mess. That doesn’t mean you or your investment reactions should be. When everything is going well, it doesn’t take all that much for good investors to keep being good investors. It’s during the dives that even the best ones can get swept away – and it’s at those moments when it is ...
In 1997, two researchers decided to try their hand at training elite sprinters in a 100m race. They developed a three-stage race plan and assigned a cue to each stage: in other words, at every point, the runners were told to repeat a specific phrase in their heads. For the first phase, acceleration ...
Thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s request for thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes series that has taken up the blog for the last few weeks. I was surprised to receive so much positive feedback (and some wonderful suggestions for future directions) and am happy to see that love for the old ...
Today, we say goodbye to Sherlock Holmes (for the rest of the series, on the importance of true observation, seeing what isn’t there and not just what is, and preventing your mind from growing cluttered, please see the links). It’s not that there’s a shortage of valuable psychological lessons to be ...
Today’s lesson from Sherlock Holmes deals with learning to cull and to cultivate knowledge in such a way that your decision process will be optimized for the question at hand, and not get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae – a lesson that is all too relevant in the age of the internet, when we have ...
Today, we begin with the first in a brief series of lessons from Sherlock Holmes on the importance of true observation, of using our senses to their fullest potential to be fully mindful as we make our decisions. The first lesson is, perhaps, the most difficult to apply on a regular basis: pay ...
Sherlock Holmes isn’t what you’d call a traditional psychologist. In fact, he isn’t even real (despite the letters that to this day arrive at 221B Baker Street). But we’d be well advised, as decision makers who want to gain better insight into our minds and the processes that lie behind our choices ...
Today, I’d like to revisit one of the most well-known experiments in social psychology: Solomon Asch’s lines study. Let’s look once more at his striking findings on the power of group conformity and consider what they mean now, more than 50 years later, in a world that is much changed from Asch’s ...
Talk about gender equality—or a lack thereof—in education, in the workplace, in higher levels of whatever occupation you choose to discuss (fewer female managers, fewer female CEOs, fewer female board members, and the list goes on) is certainly not new. Over and over, studies, analyses, and ...
How does someone decide whether or not to offer a bribe? While there is a general consensus that bribery is not exactly the most moral act in the world, the practice remains rampant. As it turns out, one factor in its enduring presence is collectivism: the more collectivist a culture, the more ...
Self-control: we could all use more of it. Even those of us who are best at exercising self-control on a daily basis have so-called hot triggers, the special circumstances that would make us, too, lose our cool and start to behave less than rationally. One of the examples Walter Mischel (the ...
Our memories affect our choices. It makes a whole lot of sense: we decide based on what we know. And if we don’t have any experience with a particular decision, we generalize. Was there something similar in the past? Something that I can relate this to, something that will help me choose? Memory ...
Friday’s New York Times touts the health benefits of good posture: it helps avoid the pain (both physical and financial) of back and neck problems, improves muscle tone and breathing, and helps with such important long-term issues like balance (something that deteriorates with age and is related to ...
Gossip: you can’t avoid it. And maybe, you shouldn’t want to. Scientists have argued that gossip is an important tool for social cohesion and information transmission, allowing us to function more effectively in an ever-larger society. Moreover, it’s an important tool for affective learning: it can ...
Yesterday, we celebrated Father’s Day. Today, let’s celebrate the wisdom of the female investor – or more specifically, what it is that generally makes her more financially successful over the long-term in her market investments. In a recent op-ed, inspired by the wave of male-tinged scandals, ...