Two Minds Blog

Psychologist Robert Cialdini recently revised his classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion , originally published in 1984. This is one of those interesting cases from the history of psychology where the method of finding things out was just as interesting as the findings. To learn how people influence one another, Cialdini took on an assumed name and signed up for some new jobs. He took training programs designed for used-car dealers, real estate agents, waiters, door-to-door salesmen, and high-end clothing retailers. In each of them, he quizzed his instructors on how to sell things more effectively and took notes on their best tricks for manipulating people's minds and their pocketbooks. From those lessons he distilled six basic principles for changing people's behavior (with a seventh added in the new edition), all of which fundamentally rely on the Intuitive mind. In other words, Cialdini was most interested in the things that people do to guide someone into a p...

In the words of a Danish proverb (often attributed to Yogi Berra), "it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." I felt that way about a blog post that I wrote last year where I argued that COVID-19 infections were coming in waves that corresponded to people's loosening and tightening of public health precautions. By the end of the year my assessment seemed tragically short-sighted, as COVID-19 infections in Colorado surged to a pinnacle that made all previous peaks and valleys look like nothing more than chance variations.  OK, I thought, I was probably wrong: the behavioral battle against SARS-CoV-2 was lost, and only vaccines would be able to bring us back from the precipice. By March or April of this year that's still how things looked, and numbers were finally on the decline. But in May another surge showed up, and by August the Delta variant had fueled another. Here is Colorado's graph: The new cycle, after vaccinations blunted the very...

What makes some people successful in life and others not? The classical answer to this question is that those who succeed must be the "right sort of person," possessing the quality of excellence (Greek arete ). Aristotle suggested that this excellence could be developed through deliberate practice, while  Plato  proposed that it was inborn. In modern behavioral science, people often propose that excellence is tied to certain behavioral tendencies like self-control or executive functioning, which are in turn supposed to be tied to one's genetic characteristics. This is not too different from Plato: Some people are just born to be more excellent than others. The ancient philosophers had a blind spot when it came to the role of life circumstances or opportunities in producing excellence -- the word  arete , in fact, comes from the same root as the word  aristocrat , with the implication that the rulers of society also had excellent character. The idea that excellence ...