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.