These four principles come from behavioral science. Behavioral science is the study of the causes, consequences, and influences of people’s behavior. Its triumphs are behind recent Nobel Prize winners such as Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, Obama’s Executive Order to get more Behavioural Science in government, and the rising successes of behavioral economics and data science. It is an integration of ideas from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, economics, and business.

What most of us want to know is how do you put behavioral science into practice? …

For many of us, life is hard enough even when there isn’t a global crisis. But when times get especially hard, our routine environments change. Uncertainty makes it difficult to focus. That, in turn, threatens our sense of self and stability.

Our comfort with ourselves is largely a measure of how we understand our thoughts and manage our actions.

Difficulty focusing is a natural response to uncertainty. When our ancestral environments were full of potential threats, our ancestors who kept one eye open even when they slept tended to survive and become our ancestors — survival of the one-eye-opened. The…

Knowing what not to do can save you and maybe even the world.

Brexit is turning out to be a tragic example of bad negotiation. Good negotiators follow a basic set of rules that Brexit has seemingly failed to manage. Negotiations of such complexity are fabulously complicated and we must give those attempting to create value credit where it is due. But in the case of Brexit, perhaps the best value comes in learning how not to negotiate.

1. Brexit negotiators have no idea what lies in store for Britain if there is no deal. One of the first things…

What I’m about to tell you has implications for brain washing, for advertising, and for fake news. It also has implications for the way we grow up, the way we dream, and the way we should present information to other people. And it is the difference between those who make their dreams come true and those who simply believe the stories they are told about who they are and what they can achieve.

I’m a skeptic, by nature. When I was young and my parents dutifully hauled me off to church on Sundays, I insisted on talking with the preacher.

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Meltdown Days

And sell them down the river

To a Cajun shanty resting on the swamp knees of mangroves

Where are the miracles yells

Old woman time shakes the coins in her hair

And throws bones on porch boards

Ain’t no coming back from tomorrow

This is all you got

You get one time down the river

Before the angels hoist you up

The yardarms of the gospel ship and sail you up to heaven

Where is the love yells

Grandfather Jazz old black knuckles

Moon ripples on the bayou’s cool

Lace made of cream

Poured out of Gravity’s dance

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Planes are what the wind became

After people tamed it and taught it to fly

First they walked it on tethers from hot air balloons

And showed it that there is such a thing as falling into heaven

Then they fed it wood from soft pine

And dreams of birds with hollow bones

They watched as it thrashed about kicking up the dust

Pawing at the sky, at space, at the infinite, unable to fly

Then the people thought maybe our spirits are falcons high above the desert

And the sun-baked wind is our soul

And they fixed their wings…

I’m a complete sucker for being asked to do things. I sometimes actively avoid people because I know that if they ask me to do something I will be physically unable to say no. My cats know this. My children know this. Charities seem to know this too, because they’ve forced me into hiding. I must be on some kind of global watchlist somewhere as a celebrity philanthropist. But I’m not. I’m just a regular guy. Probably not much different from you.

Actually, I know I’m no special case because entire books have been written on helping people to learn…

Richard Wrangham described the behavior of a young chimp, Kakama, who played with a small log as if it were a child. Kakam made a small nest for it, held it, and seemingly loved it. What is the best scientific explanation for this behavior? Do you risk anthromorphising the behavior by suggesting it is like what a child does? Or do you risk anthropodenial by assuming the chimp is just an automaton, more like a watch than a human, just a watch who happens to like logs?

The usual way to go about answering this is to appeal to parsimony.

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