I recently started reading David McCullough’s latest book, The Pioneers, about the settling of the Northwest Territory: what would become Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The directive for this settlement, the Northwest Ordinance, included three extraordinary conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and the...
Do you drive to work? Alone? What would it take to get you to take public transportation, or bike, or walk? The city of Durham, North Carolina, found out. City officials have good reasons to encourage people to move to alternative transportation: Traffic. Pollution. Carbon emissions. Valuable downtown...
Stuff might last longer than experiences; but experiences make us happier. Partly because the stuff sticks around for so long—we adapt to it, the “new stuff!” becomes normal, and it fades into the background. And partly because stuff is always separate from our identities, even when...
Hara hachi bu for the holidays. Are you the eat-now-think-about-the-calories-in-January type? Happy holidays! If not, read on for what’s happening in the behavioral science of eating. Not all of it good news. “The French have their modest portions and taboo against seconds. The people of Okinawa, one...
And other counterintuitive research discoveries There are limits to the conscious mind’s capacity for processing. Truly. Our minds switch back and forth between focused attention and daydreaming. Focused, undistracted attention enables us to get things done. Like building the pyramids. So at work we probably should never, ever...
Face it. You are tribal. It's true. “Humans aren’t just a little tribal. We’re very tribal,” writes Yale professor Amy Chua in her recent book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. “We crave bonds and attachments, which is why we love clubs, teams,...
Good Ethics is Good Business: Jonathan Haidt at BSPA Every year behavioral psychology’s best and brightest (and those who aspire to be) gather at the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA) conference to drop knowledge, meet people, and learn new things. This year’s conference was in...
Nir Eyal can show you how to design habit-forming apps. Not habit in the classical sense, of a quality that develops the powers of the body or mind. No. Habit as in drug habit. The supercomputer in our pockets, with its dings, buzzes, haptics, likes, and so on,...
The rhythm of writing. And disturbances in the Force. ...
Most of us wonder, to varying degrees, what others are thinking about us and what kind of impression we’re making. People make lousy mind readers, but there’s a scientific way to make better guesses at practice mental telepathy (or Legilimency . . . ). Researchers Tal...