Rethinking Work How satisfied are we with our jobs? Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their … Continue reading How to make you satisfied with your job
Should Governments Nudge Us to Make Good Choices? Our decisions are constantly shaped by subtle changes in our environment. Even choices that feel deliberate and conscious can be swayed by cues that we may not even notice, such as social … Continue reading Never mind the nanny state
What Most People Get Wrong About Generosity and Selfishness Just how generous should you be? If you think there’s a simple moral answer, you’re wrong and possibly selfish. Far more than we notice the answer depends not on morality but … Continue reading Are you more selfish than you think?
Making Sense of Common Sense The extensive report Mind, Society and Behavior (link is external), recently published by the World Bank, includes a wealth of information for behavioral science experts, practitioners and policy makers. The paper’s conceptual framework is divided … Continue reading How do you think?
What Behavioral Science Reveals About the Iran Debate Of all the findings in behavioral science, the most significant may be “loss aversion,” the idea that people dislike losses a lot more than they like equivalent gains. Loss aversion can create … Continue reading Iran’s status quo bias
The Neuroscience of Being a Selfish Jerk If we’re being honest, most of us have at least some selfish aims – to make money, to win a promotion at work, and so on. But importantly, we pursue these goals while … Continue reading How Machiavellians’ brains go into overdrive
Brain imaging research is often wrong. This researcher wants to change that. When neuroscientists stuck a dead salmon in an fMRI machine and watched its brain light up, they knew they had a problem. It wasn’t that there was a dead fish in their expensive imaging machine; they’d put it there on purpose, after all. It was that the medical device seemed to be giving these researchers impossible results. Dead fish should not have active brains.The researchers shared their findings in 2009 as a cautionary tale: If you don’t run the proper statistical tests on your neuroscience data, you can … Continue reading Is brain imaging useless?
