Posts Tagged ‘choice’
outliers
Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, there’s so much I like, that seems sound, that seems to redress inbalances in our understanding of success and intelligence. For instance the popular perception that high performers are born not made, ideas about giftedness, genius, and so on. 1. Gladwell makes the point that it takes hard work to achieve. […]
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Tags: choice, economics, intelligence, Malcolm Gladwell, paradox, psychology, success
negativity bias
See Nancy Etcoff on “the surprising science of happiness”. One small thing that exemplify the negativity bias that she talks about is that we can detect sweetness at 1 part per 200. We can detect bitterness at 1 part per 2 million! This could stand for all the ways we are more sensitive to the […]
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Tags: bias, brain, choice, emotion, Etcoff, happiness, mind, psychology
Marshmallows revisited…
Pink and White Marshmallows, originally uploaded by Craig Jewell. “TED has reached 100,000 Facebook fans today! Thank you, TEDsters — Here is the premiere of Joachim de Posada’s talk “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow” exclusively for you. Please enjoy the high-definition talk from TED U 2009.” Update: Now it’s on the TED site:
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Tags: choice, gratification, happiness, marshmallow, psychology
predictably irrational
While we’re talking about behavioural economics we should mention Dan Ariely. Ariely, whose revised and enlarged Pridictably Irrational has just been published (see his blog, predictablyirrational.com, see excerpts), has just been on TED again. A fantastic talk, about irrationality, Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our decisions? So the apparent difference in preferences […]
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Tags: Ariely, brain, choice, economics, irrationality, morals, psychology
honesty
So when people play a game like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, what do they actually do? According to Peter Lunn in Basic Instincts, about half “co-operate” He mentions how honesty boxes work on a similar principle (see BBC article). Is this a kind of “superationality” at work? – that we know that we’ll get more out […]
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Tags: anthropology, choice, dilemma, honesty, logic, Lunn, mind, morals, paradox, prisoner, psychology, zemblanity
actual behaviour
Yes, it doesn’t correlate with human beings’ actual behaviour. Behavioral economics, the branch of economics that looks at people’s actual economic behaviour, has a well-known example that has basically the same structure as the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s called a public goods game. Both players get €10. They can keep it, or put it into a […]
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Tags: anthropology, choice, dilemma, logic, Lunn, morals, psychology, zemblanity
pigeon brain
Just read the chapter called “The Hound of Silence” in Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. This book is, of course, not a self-help book. It’s a look at the experiments that have paved the way to understanding how some of our illusions about what leads to happiness are created.In its overview it comes up with […]
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Tags: Bacon, brain, choice, Cicero, Gilbert, mind, paradox, perception, pigeon, psychology
zemblanity 