Author posts
Poker: The high-stakes way to unlock your potential
Join Maria Konnikova live at 11am EDT tomorrow on Big Think!
Poker skills: Playing against the odds is a rational way to win
Success isn't about finding one great way to achieve something and sticking with it. It's about looking at all the possible options and computing success through analysis.
How con artists manipulate your emotions in genius (and evil) ways
Psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova on how to out-smart a con artist.
Why Our Hearts and Minds Are Easy Targets for Con Artists, Holy Men and Cult Leaders
Psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova looks at the mechanisms of human nature that have allowed con artists, religious authorities, and cult leaders to prevail for thousands of years.
A con artist sold the Eiffel Tower, twice — by listening
We tend to think con artists are smooth talkers and persuasive sellers, but listening is their most important quality, says Maria Konnikova, who has written a new book on con artistry.
What Psychological Traits Does the Con Artist Look for in Victims?
The con artist is more of a psychologist than a thief, explains Maria Konnikova. If fact, con artists will never actually steal anything from you; they'll convince you to hand it over freely.
The value of unplugging and doing one thing at a time
We all need to give ourselves mental breaks, but we also need to focus and not let email notifications, Twitter notifications, suck our attention.
Attention Training: Learning Single-Minded Focus
We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle.
You Can Train Your Attention Like a Muscle
We need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle.
You May Not Have Noticed But Habituation Just Happens
Your brain learns to block out the noises that it hears all the time.
What we know — and don't know — about creativity
Maria Konnikova: the good news is that you can become more creative and I think that everyone has a certain degree of creativity in them.
Don't Use Up All Your Energy Multitasking
Heavy multitaskers become worse at the very thing that they should be very good at.
How to Have a Good Argument with Yourself
You can learn to argue with yourself. That’s actually how I get a lot of my thinking done.
I Went to the Woods to Become a Creative Problem Solver...
For whatever reason being in nature helps people become better at problem solving.
When It's OK to Trust Common Sense
Experts should trust all of their instincts and their common sense in their areas of expertise. The problem comes when non-experts have "common sense opinion" that really is just coming out of nowhere.
Voting for a Face, Not a Candidate
From an evolutionary perspective, our quickness to judge faces certainly makes sense. We need to know if someone is friend or foe, if he is strong or weak, if we can trust him or not. And we need to know quickly, before something bad happens. But is that quickness still as good when it determines national political outcomes?
Re-examining Significant Research: The Problem of False-Positives
It is remarkably easy to report false-positive findings, or results that support an effect that, in reality, does not (or may not) exist.
Thinking makes it so: How we think about mistakes affects how we learn from them
The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think, from something as concrete to learning, the subject of the current study, to something as theoretical as free will.
The narcissistic leader: Not as good as he (or you) may think
In most circumstances, narcissism doesn’t go over well. But there’s one big exception to the rule: leadership.
Luck and The Researcher: Kahneman's Path to Prospect Theory
Today, I don’t want to write about Kahneman’s work or his invaluable contribution to the study of decision making and the workings of the human mind, but rather, about something much more general: his approach to research.
Thinking Can Enhance Self-Control—in Eating and Elsewhere
When we habituate to something, our physical and psychological response becomes so used to it that whatever the “it” is stops being arousing.
Procrastination As The Secret to Achievement: Honoring This Year’s Ig-Nobel Winner John Perry
We become high achievers by working on something important—all the while procrastinating doing something even more important.
The Chameleon Outcast: When Social Mimicry Goes Awry
Being a chameleon is good only if your colors are changing in the right direction.
A Little Touch Goes a Long Way: How Touch Influences Perception and Choice
Touch has always played an important role in our development and in our tendency to make certain judgments and take certain risks.
The Perils of a Wandering Mind
Does a wandering mind make you less happy than a present mind? This question formed the basis of an important study by psychologists from Harvard University. The answer, I wasn’t surprised to find, is yes. Absolutely.
How to improve your athletic (and other) performance through self-talk
When researchers asked runners to repeat a specific phrase in their heads, like "push," the runners performed substantially better than they had prior to the intervention.
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes Pt.I: Paying Attention to What Isn't There
Pay attention to what isn’t there, not just what is. Absence is just as important and just as telling as presence.
Don't just see; observe: What Sherlock Holmes can teach us about mindful decisions
What it means to go beyond seeing and to actually observe.
The Pervasive Threat of Conformity: Peer Pressure Is Here to Stay
The Asch effect has been replicated successfully numerous times, in a variety of contexts, and each time, peer pressure glows strong.
Gender, Education, and the Gender Gap: Blame It On the Kids?
A recent study shows that the decision to have children, and especially to have them early, is a factor that contributes to women's educational attainment.
How to Improve Self-Control: Freedom from Your Hot Triggers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is the world really what it appears?
Regarding optical illusions, framing, and choice.
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 . . .
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.
