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Decision Making

Psychology76 insights0 followers

@psychology
The Challenger launched at a record-low 36°F, exploded 73 seconds later, and killed all seven crew members.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Your future depends heavily on maintaining chosen standards instead of repeatedly accepting less than your worth.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Cold weather made the Challenger’s O-ring rubber hard and inflexible, raising the risk of catastrophic seal failure.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
An engineer warned against launching, but NASA leadership’s delay pressure pushed Thiokol to approve the Challenger launch.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Schedule rest days, cheat meals, and relaxation days deliberately, so breaks provide relief without quietly lowering your standards.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Systemic drift makes repeated small exceptions reset what feels acceptable until a catastrophic outcome occurs.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Normalization of deviance turns unacceptable practices into accepted ones when repetition brings no immediate consequences.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Ignored repairs, avoided conversations, lies, and missed workouts feel harmless until each tolerated slip lowers your next standard.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomHow to Avoid Catastrophe: The Normalization of Deviance
@psychology
Egas Moniz repeatedly sought Nobel nominations for an angiography method that was dangerous, often unnecessary, and derivative.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Before 1926, Egas Moniz had a successful political career, a successful private practice, and only a middling academic career.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Psychiatrists often viewed further deterioration in severely institutionalized schizophrenic patients as nearly inevitable, making lobotomy seem preferable to lifelong confinement.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Freeman may have cared about patients while professional ambition blinded him to the harm of lobotomy.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Psychosurgery declined mainly because psychoactive drugs were cheaper, safer, and easier to administer, not because morality suddenly won.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Theranos, the opioid epidemic, and Alzheimer’s amyloid-plaque fraud show recurring forces driving modern medical failure.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Destroying frontal lobes or connecting fibers could erase appetite suppression, triggering voracious eating and substantial weight gain after lobotomy.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize for work built on claims that later harmed tens of thousands of patients.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
About 70% of psychiatrists consider electroconvulsive treatment effective for otherwise intractable depression, despite no agreed modern mechanism.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Surgical trials are harder than drug trials: sham operations raise ethical problems, techniques vary, and powerful studies are difficult.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Psychiatrists embraced somatic treatments partly to prove psychiatry was medicine, not psychology, talk therapy, or metaphysics.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Somatic treatments pushed psychiatrists toward an organic view of mental illness because physical interventions appeared biological.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
ECT is safer and beneficial for some treatment-resistant conditions, yet remains risky with an incompletely justified mechanism.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Extensive frontal-lobe damage can impair decision-making and executive control, producing disinhibition, gambling, and difficulty maintaining employment.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Freeman’s blunt, self-assured, combative personality alienated colleagues and steadily weakened his professional standing.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Some lobotomy patients regained meaningful functioning, but celebrated recoveries did not represent typical outcomes.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Lobotomy was mainstream American medicine, practiced by prestigious medical schools and celebrated in contemporary journals as scientific psychiatry’s breakthrough.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Medical institutions and journals normalized lobotomy while acknowledging it mutilated patients, caused defects, and lacked sufficient evidence.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Acute demand, weak evidence, and inadequate safeguards let physicians pursue dramatic interventions on hunches, ambition, or no clear rationale.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Lobotomy spread through desperate families, fame-seeking physicians, uncritical clinicians and media, psychiatric rivalry, and overcrowded hospitals.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
Psychosurgery was normalized by decorated, capable physicians following then-current brain theories, not merely by rogue doctors.
Scott AlexanderYour Book Review: Great And Desperate Cures
@psychology
At a Native American reservation school, growth-mindset lessons moved kindergarteners and first graders from the state’s bottom to district’s top in 1–1.5 years.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
A growth mindset treats ability as developable through effort, not a fixed verdict on intelligence.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
Students taught neural growth sharply increased their grades. Students without the lesson declined across thousands of students.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
Growth-mindset classrooms challenge the idea that group performance gaps are inevitable and can produce major gains for struggling students.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
A Harlem kindergarten teacher moved students struggling with pencils and tantrums to the 95th percentile on the National Achievement Test.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
Rewarding effort, strategy, and progress instead of only correct answers can sustain learning and perseverance.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
Teach students that pushing beyond comfort forms stronger neural connections, turning difficulty into a route to becoming smarter.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
A growth mindset turns difficulty from evidence of stupidity into an opportunity to get smarter.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
Praise effort, strategies, focus, and perseverance, not talent or intelligence, to help children seek challenges and build resilience.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
Add “not yet” to failure, and a dead end becomes temporary progress with a path into the future.
Stanford AlumniDeveloping a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck
@psychology
A technology can work brilliantly yet remain unused because insufficient adoption creates a social and psychological barrier.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Punctuality is not the diagnosis. Identify the emotional variable that actually drives customer dissatisfaction.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
People do not optimize utility alone. Habits, norms, and social proof strongly drive human behavior.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Facts about mask effectiveness do not automatically overcome the awkwardness people feel wearing one.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
The Boeing 787 used lighting, pressurization, humidity, and spatial cues to make flying feel less tiring and more spacious.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
A health recommendation can increase consumption by establishing trusted authority and making occasional behavior feel acceptable.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Find a business opportunity by listing industry assumptions, then identifying which one is false now or soon will be.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Use behavioral science less for definitive answers than for testing a much wider range of interventions.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Asking a mixologist for a recommendation turns an awkward request into a chance to use their expertise.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Red Bull challenged the assumption that a soft drink has to taste particularly pleasant.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
Passengers tolerate a longer delay with a known end better than a shorter delay shrouded in uncertainty.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
In a recycling study, environmental and economic messages failed, while neighbor comparisons significantly changed behavior.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
A £15 penguin nightlight drew over 360,000 entries. A year of free energy worth more than £1,000 drew 67,000.
Nudge Podcast#63: Rory Sutherland | Why counter-intuitive thinking wins
@psychology
An apocryphal cobra bounty made the problem worse: breeders raised cobras for rewards, then released them when the policy ended.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
Replacing goals with measures is an inevitable human blind spot, but awareness and adaptation can reduce its consequences.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
Surrogacy happens when a metric quietly replaces the complex goal it was meant to represent.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
Optimizing money as your sole success measure can cost you relationships, peace of mind, and family events.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
Health tracking can improve sleep, exercise, and diet while making you avoid social plans to protect your scores.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
A self-improvement routine becomes counterproductive when performing it delays the work it was meant to enable.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
Write each measure on one side of a page and the actual goal it represents on the other.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
Before chasing a metric, identify its unintended consequences and the warning signs that they are appearing.
The Curiosity Chronicle with Sahil BloomThe Cobra Effects of Life
@psychology
About 60 percent of shoppers stopped at the 24-jam display, versus about 40 percent at six.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Retirement-plan participation sat around the mid-70 percent range with two funds, then fell to about 60 percent with nearly 60.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
CEOs make half their decisions in nine minutes or less. Only about 12 percent take an hour.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Make each option’s consequences vivid and concrete so people can understand and feel the differences between choices.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
The average grocery store offers about 45,000 products, Walmart about 100,000, while Aldi offers only about 1,400.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Choice overload makes people avoid choosing, even when avoiding the decision conflicts with their best interests.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Cards encourage higher spending when electronic payment stops feeling like real money to the spender.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Harvard automatically enrolls every employee in a lifecycle fund, then offers 20 funds instead of 300 or more.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
A grocery store with 348 jam varieties attracted more samplers with 24 options, yet sharply reduced purchases.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Among jam samplers, 30 percent bought from six varieties, but only 3 percent bought from 24.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Procter & Gamble increased Head & Shoulders sales 10 percent after cutting varieties from 26 to 15.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Golden Cat Corporation increased profits 87 percent after removing its ten worst-selling cat-litter products.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
People were at least six times more likely to buy jam when choosing among six options instead of 24.
TEDSheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier
@psychology
Creating something makes people love it more, turning an object or project into something that feels personally theirs.
Business InsiderHow the 'IKEA effect' can motivate people to work harder
@psychology
Open-source contributors grow attached to code when their names stay permanently connected to what they wrote.
Business InsiderHow the 'IKEA effect' can motivate people to work harder
@psychology
To motivate people, make ownership visible through signatures, names, group identity, and explicit credit for contributions.
Business InsiderHow the 'IKEA effect' can motivate people to work harder

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