One of the unexpected obligations as a lecturer in law at a major university is that I must participate in harassment prevention training. One topic caught my attention although it was barely mentioned: micro-affirmations. Digging deeper into this topic on my own, I discovered the concept of micro inequities which [Read More]
When you see an overweight person walking down the street, or perhaps sitting in a meeting with you, what is your reaction? Do you cringe or try to avoid that person? Do you have thoughts- good or bad- about that person’s physical appearance? Are you even aware of your reaction [Read More]
Have you ever asked yourself, “What if I had taken a different route? Then I would not have been involved in the auto accident?” Or, “what if I had left the house five minutes earlier, I would have made the flight, and not missed it?” What if…., then [Read More]
The Sunday Review section of the New York Times had another interesting article on cognitive biases in its May 27, 2017 edition entitled “You’re Not Going to Change Your Mind” By Ben Tappin, Leslie Van Der Leer and Ryan McKay. Using the present political climate as a beginning point, the [Read More]
In its Smarter Living section on May 22, 2017, the New York Times published an article by Kristin Wong on cognitive dissonance entitled “Why It’s So Hard to Admit You’re Wrong.”. The article actually explains the confirmation bias that we all have, but I am getting ahead of myself. First, [Read More]
Often in negotiating, a party may make a monetary demand without providing any reasoning behind it. I have often found that such a tactic does not work well because the other party will ask me “why”. She wants to know the reasoning behind the monetary demand. So- I return to [Read More]
Once again, The Economist published an interesting study on “why posh people spend less time noticing others.” In an article entitled “Your Class determines how you look [sic] your fellow creatures” in the science and technology section of the October 11, 2016 issue, the unnamed author recounts the experiments of [Read More]
I stumbled across an article in LiveScience.com which referred me to the actual article on theconversation.com entitled “Freaks, geeks, norms and mores: why people use the status quo as a moral compass” by Christina Tworek, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The article discusses a series [Read More]
