The Best Cognitive Biases Books: What to Read and Why
If you want to understand why smart people make predictable mistakes, the best place to start is not a list …
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Prosocial Behavior: Why People Help Others
Prosocial behavior is any action intended to benefit others — helping, sharing, comforting, cooperating, or volunteering. It is one of …
Groupthink: When Smart Groups Make Bad Decisions
Groupthink is what happens when a group’s desire for agreement overrides its desire to make a good decision. Irving Janis …
Attribution Theory: How We Explain Other People’s Behavior
Attribution theory studies how we explain behavior — our own and other people’s. When a colleague snaps at you, do …
Social Identity Theory: Us, Them, and Belonging
Social identity theory explains a puzzle: why do people favor their own group and distrust other groups, even when the …
Obedience to Authority: What Milgram’s Experiments Revealed
Obedience to authority is following orders from someone perceived as an authority figure. Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 1960s made …
Conformity: Why We Go Along With the Group
Conformity is changing your behavior or beliefs to match those of a group. Solomon Asch demonstrated its power in the …
Social Psychology: How Other People Shape Mind and Behavior
Social psychology is the study of how other people — real, imagined, or implied — shape what we think, feel, …
Emotional Intelligence: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What the Evidence Says
Emotional intelligence is two different things sharing one name, and most confusion about it comes from mixing them up. In …
Facial Expressions and Emotion: What Faces Really Show
Faces are the most studied channel of emotional communication, and the most overclaimed. The classic finding is that some facial …