While I’m not an expert handyman, I don’t mind trying to fix things around the house (except electricity – no, thank you). My skills are such that I’ve occasionally hit my thumb which invariably elicits a yelp swear word from me. Over the years, I’ve wondered why I feel better after the outburst. Does swearing…
You likely know about reverse psychology, but have you ever heard of inversion thinking? Reverse psychology is when you get someone to do something you want them to do by suggesting they do the opposite of it. One form of reverse psychology is to forbid someone to do something that you actually want them to…
Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for or interpret information in a way that confirms preexisting beliefs or assumptions. A classic joke supporting the confirmation bias goes like this: A stranger visits a small town and notices that everyone is wearing garlic around their necks. He asks the town sheriff about the strange custom…
Almost exactly 25 years ago, a close friend gave me a book called “The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” The book contains 23 sections, representing “major categories of knowledge”, each containing hundreds of entries discussing ideas, events, and individuals that were “essential for understanding American discourse”. At first, I thought…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about an example of unintended consequences called the cobra effect in which an attempt to reduce the snake population actually increased it. A reader emailed me asking me if I had heard of a similar phenomenon called the Streisand effect. Since I hadn’t, I thought I would share the…
Whenever plans don’t work out the way someone expects them to, I’m reminded of the cobra effect. Coined in a book written by the late German economist Horst Siebert, the cobra effect is a cautionary tale of unintended consequences during British rule in India. The British government was concerned that venomous cobra snakes were common…
Years ago, I got a chance to listen to a keynote by Jonah Berger, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During his talk, Berger asked the audience the following question: Which of these three product gets the most word of mouth buzz? The audience was almost evenly split among…
I’m tired. The reason is pretty simple: I haven’t been sleeping 8 hours a night. I know better too – I wrote an article which quoted research showing that only 2.5% of people really need less than 7 hours of sleep every night. Everyone else needs 8 or more hours. Unfortunately, I haven’t been following…
Thanks to Seinfeld, we know that double-dipping is bad for us. But what about the five-second rule? Conventional wisdom suggests it’s safe to eat food dropped on the floor – as long as you pick it up in less than five seconds. Presumably that’s not long enough for the food to get contaminated. In 2003,…
What’s the luckiest number? A variety of surveys have shown that most people choose 7. Lucky number seven. Why seven? A few years ago, I wrote an article which had a few theories on what makes seven special: There are seven openings in the head: the ears, eyes, nostrils and mouth Physiologically and biblically speaking,…