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Maria Konnikova

Writer, The New Yorker

Maria Konnikova is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Confidence Game , winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes , an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. Her new book, The Biggest Bluff , will be out from Penguin Press on June 23, 2020. While researching The Biggest Bluff , Konnikova became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings—and inadvertently turned into a professional poker player. She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker , and her writing has been featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing and has been translated into over twenty languages. Maria also hosts the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media, a show that explores con artists and the lives they ruin, and is currently a visiting fellow at NYU's School of Journalism. She graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in psychology from Columbia University.

Memory, Preferences, and Choices: How Our Noses Impact Our Decisions

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, […]

Sit Up Straighter, Decide Better

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, […]

The Power of Negative Gossip: Coloring How We See the World, One Rumor at a Time

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 […]

The Female Investor: What Every Successful Investor, Regardless of Sex, Should Know

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 […]

Monkey See, Monkey Do? Risk-taking, Aggression, and Media Exposure

The perennial question: how does media affect action? Or, to put it in more specific terms, does watching violent things on TV, reading about risk-taking on the internet, or playing […]

When a Pipe Is Not a Pipe: How Shifting Perspective Creates Insight, Creativity, and Mindfulness

A change in scale forces us to take note. Objects that we would never notice acquire significance, become worthy of examination and attention. In other words, they force mindfulness.

Colin Firth a Neuroscientist? Yes, and Researching Political Attitudes in the Brain to Boot

Whenever making claims about the brain and political attitudes, tread with care. It’s easy to open yourself up to intense criticism from the scientific community, on anything from methodology to […]

Is It Really How You Play the Game? No, Say Our Brains. Winning and Losing Matter – At Least If You’re the Loser

I can’t count the number of times I heard, “It’s not if you win or lose. It’s how you play the game” when I was growing up. And how often […]

The Wisdom of Crowds, Revisited: When The Crowd Goes From Wise to Wrong

While groups may have been wise at the start of the experiment, as soon as individuals within the group became aware of others’ estimates and choices, the diversity of opinions plummeted.

Reducing Empathy Through Choice: How Too Much Choice Can Backfire

Choice is good. It’s always nice to have options. It makes us feel more in control; it supports our vision of ourselves as “deciders” in our own lives. But choice can also come with negative consequences.

Disgust, Prejudice, and Stereotypes: Pathogen Protection Gone Awry

I think it’s time to add the behavioral immune system to the long list of subconscious influences on our choices.

Pursuing Isn’t Being: Why The Pursuit of Happiness Might Undermine Being Happy

Actively pursuing happiness may not lead to an actual increase in happiness. In fact, it can do the opposite and make you less happy at the end of the day.

Do You Believe In Free Will? Maybe You Should, Even If You Don’t

Is free will real, or is just one of our happy illusions? As it turns out, the answer might not matter as much as our belief in the answer does. […]

Power and The Ease of Amorality: The Illustrative Example of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Power changes how we make decisions. That’s what I thought when I first read about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s debacle – and the escapades that have apparently preceded it. Actually, the first […]

IQ, Motivation, and Success in Life: It’s Less About The Intelligence and More About The Incentives

Motivation matters. It matters a lot. It matters more than we thought, and might make more of a difference on both performance and life outcomes that we thought possible.

Is Multitasking Everything It’s Cut Out To Be? The Brain Says, No

Question: How do you remain mindful when juggling two, three, four, however many things at once? Answer: You probably don’t. For a long time, cognitive scientists have observed that processing […]

The Choices That Mean Life or Death: Osama’s Crucial Decisions

What is it about power that changes people – or if not changes, brings out those aspects of them that had heretofore lain dormant? As the old adage goes, power […]

Less Than Artful Choices: Narcissistic Personality Disorder According to Donald Trump

Debate on personality disorders, classifications, diagnoses, and treatments is well worthwhile, and a colorful spokesperson never hurts.

Take Too Much Risk? Must Be The Testosterone…Or Not: Testosterone, Financial Decisions, and Risk

Both too much and too little testosterone increase risk-taking and ambiguity tolerance.

The Guantánamo Files and Future Violence Assessment

In Guantánamo Files, the New York Times coverage of Guantánamo from WikiLeaks documents, one piece in particular caught my attention: a discussion of the difficulty of judging detainees’ risk of […]

Is the world really what it appears?

Regarding optical illusions, framing, and choice.

Happy Birthday Hitler! Or, Avoiding the “Just Following Orders” Trap

Yesterday, we passed the birthday of Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889). So let’s take a moment to reflect, something that becomes increasingly important as the memory of his infamous reign […]

A Post-Script on Teamwork: Can Groups Hurt Memory?

Today, I was planning to write about memory in decision making, but when I came across this new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, I felt like I had […]

Building a Future from Memory

With the recent publication of Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, it’s hard to avoid someone, somewhere (the New York Times is a safe bet) writing on the ins and outs […]

Teamwork? Good, until it’s not: When working alone works best

Teamwork. Support. Group (there’s that word) synergy. These are all hallmarks of positive business-speak and, one would assume, business practice. They’ve become the modern calling cards of businessmen who want […]

The Mindful Decision Maker: An Introduction

Our decisions matter. You don’t need me to tell you that. Of course they matter. It almost seems a tautology, a restatement of the obvious, of the very definition of “decision.” And yet, even though we make decisions at every point in our lives . . .

Politics & Current Affairs

Setting Goals for an A and a Whole Lot More

How to improve a struggling student’s academic performance has bedeviled educators and parents alike. Is poor performance the fault of the curriculum, the teachers, the student, conditions at home or […]