In 1806, entrepreneur Frederic Tudor sailed to the island of Martinique with a precious cargo. He had harvested ice from frozen Massachusetts rivers and expected to make a tidy profit selling it to tropical customers. There was only one problem: the islanders had never seen ice…. Hypocognition, a term introduced to modern behavioral science by …

I can’t get anything done in the summer, which I’d long assumed was due to my body’s preference for the school-year calendar of September to May. Though I haven’t been in school for many years, I figured there was some lasting psychological impact which made my brain give up every June. Hooked? Read the rest …

Animals, like humans, are reluctant to give up on pursuits they’ve invested in, psychologists report. Suppose that, seeking a fun evening out, you pay $175 for a ticket to a new Broadway musical. Hooked? Read the rest on the original site…

Professor Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics. Hooked? Read the rest on the original site…

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 20 April 2018. Is the glass half full, half empty, or laced with cyanide? Last week I wrote about “statistics, fast and slow” — the gap between the world as we intuitively perceive it, and the world as described in spreadsheets. Hooked? Read the rest …

It’s that time of year again, when Mary Meeker unloads her highly anticipated internet trends report for the Code Conference crowd in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Hooked? Read the rest on the original site…

The iconic glass Heinz ketchup bottle was once a staple in family kitchens around the world. Thump, thump…and perhaps one last thump and the red sauce spurted out onto fries, burgers or whatever else was sitting on the dinner plate. Hooked? Read the rest on the original site…

I have a hunch that, if you tried something new, the most important meeting of your day could very well be one that has no clear objectives. One where people share incomplete thoughts and unformed ideas, where no problems actually get solved. That meeting probably sounds like a nightmare to you. Hooked? Read the rest …

If you type “technology indis…” into Google, you are instantly directed to a webpage discussing Arthur C Clarke’s third law: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Hooked? Read the rest on the original site…

“I disagree with myself.” This is what a third-grade boy said in front of his math class during a discussion about even and odd numbers. He believed six was both even and odd. When one classmate presented counterevidence, he considered her point. “I didn’t think of it that way,” he said. Hooked? Read the rest …