We over value the things we have, overreact when we can't have something anymore, and resist change. In other words, we hate loss. But because loss is frequent and inevitable, our hatred of it guarantees that we suffer. Let's take a look at the psychological mechanisms that make us act this way. The Endowment Effect Suppose that Nathan and Mae are two students at the same school. It is randomly...

Suppose that mega-corp, a large corporation, has hundreds of employees, hundreds of thousands of customers, tens of millions of dollars of cash, a recognized brand, and an experienced CEO. Tiny-upstart, on the other hand, is just two twenty-five year olds with an idea, no funding, no users and no business experience. If mega-corp and tiny-upstart are in the same line of business, then by any r...

Have you considered creating a plan to improve your life? If not, how about doing it right now? Or if you don't want to make one for yourself, you can use this one. A friend asked me to help him make a plan to become happier. He is already pretty happy, but thought he could be more so. What you see below is the general life improvement plan we came up with, which should apply to most people (pl...

Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can form a vicious feedback loop, sending you into a downward emotional spiral. You get a bad review from your boss, and start to feel upset. This negative emotion brings on thoughts about when you've made mistakes at your job, and you feel even worse. You now start imagining your boss firing you, and your mood sinks into despair. Let's dissect what's goin...

What are you unable to stop after you start? Do you: Tell yourself you'll eat just a few chips, then eat the whole bag? Watch funny YouTube videos "for a few minutes", and then notice that an hour has passed? Choose to have "one drink", and end up having five? Decide to play video games "for an hour" and then later discover you've been at it the entire night? Tell yourself you'll check...

There was a time as a kid when I believed I was pretty much flawless. Unsurprisingly, it turned out I had even more flaws as a kid than I do now. I just had very poor self-awareness. In an environment with little criticism, it’s easy to forget about your flaws. But the more aware of them you are, the better position you will be in to correct them. So when you get really serious about self-impro...

No matter how intelligent, rational, or knowledgeable you may be, you are going to be wrong pretty regularly. And you'll be wrong far more often than pretty regularly when dealing with complex topics like politics, people or philosophy. Even if you've freed yourself from thinking in terms of true and false dichotomies, and made the effort to convert your beliefs to probabilities or degrees of be...

So often when we make resolutions to change our lives we fail to carry through on them. Setting a goal and telling ourselves we'll achieve it requires no sacrifice and feels good. It's the actual effort to achieve that requires willpower and sacrifice, so it shouldn't be a surprise that we set goals more often than we actually take significant steps towards achieving them. But another, importan...

Journalism provides us with important information about what's going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading t...

When we reflect on the many things that we could have, some will produce feelings of desire. But when we take an extra moment to reflect on these desires themselves, we find some to be undesirable. The desire to fit in with the crowd may be accompanied by a contrary desire to be unconcerned by what other people think. Or we might long to be reunited with an ex, but feel averse to having those feel...