General

What’s happening around you can be just as important as what’s going on in your head. Open floor plans might promote collaboration, but they are clearly hotbeds of distraction. So there’s a trade-off: More collaboration, less productivity. It turns out, for example, that bad weather is good for productivity. It all comes down to distractions, according to a Harvard Business School study. The more distracted people…

Humans are subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about. Status-Quo Bias We humans tend to be apprehensive of change, which often leads us to make choices that guarantee that things remain the same, or change as…

The holiday shopping season is almost upon us. Gift giving: What do you get someone? Will they like it? What will they give you? Will you like it? Quite frankly, the whole process can be fun but exhausting. Gifts can be tokens of social relationships, ways that we transmit impressions and feelings to one another. If you boil down the above questions, you are really…

The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when…

For decades, psychologists have repeatedly documented the basic human tendency to display unwarranted overconfidence. People attempting to lose weight believe that on this next attempt they will succeed despite numerous failed attempts in the past. Gamblers remain optimistic that this time they will beat the house, despite a history of evidence to the contrary. All of us experience the “planning fallacy,” or the tendency to…

A little snap judgment goes a long way toward making friends: Marc Salem, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist says , all it takes is 20 seconds to decide whether or not a stranger is trustworthy. 1. Inconsistent behavior If normally someone is very still, and suddenly they become very animated, or vice versa, that change-up is a red flag. The same goes if a person is speaking…