Four extremely bad ideas that have been popular

Here are four incredibly bad ideas (that are still commonly believed): 1) That people should be judged for, blamed for, or feel shame about the behavior of their ancestors. Of course, if your ancestors did bad things, you should condemn those acts. And if you directly benefit from something bad your family member did, you should consider if you can make amends. But, logically, people cannot be morally responsible for events that they were unable to affect. This bad idea (th...
More

Anonymized Responses to Taboo Questions – A Social Experiment

If you run a meeting group or like to host events, you may want to try out my event format, "Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions," which allows attendees to see each other's (anonymous) answers to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable and rarely asked questions, and then discuss them as a group to discover what they can learn. I've included the details of the event format below, including materials you can use to throw your own version of it. Important Note: this event fo...
More

What People Want Most

What do people want more than anything else in the world? I explored this question by running two little studies across two different populations: mechanical turk (“mturk,” n=49, all U.S.) vs. my Facebook friends (“FB,” n=111, who tend to be in the U.S.) with different approaches, me hand categorizing written responses vs. participants selecting the category that best matches what they wrote using 24 categories in random order developed from the first study, including an “other” option. A...
More