The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is...

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn’t have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn’t at all be surprised that Pepsi’s...

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are...

So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and...

PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor. People who are busy doing things ? as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops ? don’t have...

Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources...

Both Jim and I are interested in the limits of conventional decision-making. The idea that an expert will give you the best outcome — we think that’s inadequate. You need a whole palate of different...

There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often...

the single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.

…legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice–that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the...

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with...

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how...

For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.

The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or...

For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who...

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution...

What do we tell our children? … Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much...

Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad....

I hope I have encouraged people in business to expand the way they make sense of human behavior.

The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because the act of facing overwhelming odds, produces greatness and beauty.

We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It’s a strange thing isn’t it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks...

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, ‘On what basis am I making a judgment?’ … If you have no experience, then your instincts aren’t any good.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat,...

Radio stations have constructed a narrow door[way], and that’s because they don’t understand how complex and paradoxical our snap judgments are. It’s hard to measure new songs.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

That’s like being a hockey player born on January I.

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not, With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will...

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone – or even close to everyone.

Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is – is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?

It’s challenging, it’s not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they...

Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on...

… forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of...

A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts...

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice–perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and...

The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as “steroids.”