Please Stop Neglecting Me!

That's what some of my posts are saying right now. It's nice to have a list of your most popular posts (on the right hand side, if you haven't noticed yet), but what about the ones that have been somewhat overlooked by a lot of you? Well, I thought they deserved a second chance :-) And that's why today I present to you the four most neglected posts:

It's All Up To You...Well Almost (on being great)

Why Loneliness Is Worse Than Smoking

Have You Been Brandwashed?

Of Bottles and Mugs

Why Sunshine Is (totally) Overrated

Sunshine is great. I love sunshine. I've recently moved to Spain, where I get to enjoy more of it than I normally would in my home country of Germany. And it's healthy too, providing the body with the important Vitamin D, which keeps our bones healthy (among other things). But as humans, we tend to overrate the importance of sunshine (and climate in general) in our lives when it comes to rating our own happiness.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman relates an argument he had with his wife, in which she claimed that people in California are happier than those who live on the East Coast. He tried in vain to convince her that her intuitions about the importance of climate when considering someone's happiness were wrong, citing the Scandinavian countries as an example for some of the happiest people in the world. So what does a psychologist like him do when his wife won't listen to him? Of course, he sets up an experiment so he can prove it to her.

When Memory Trumps Experience

Ok, tell me this: have you ever shared an experience with someone (a friend, a family member, etc.) and afterwards had different memories of it? It was the exact same thing, but one of you thought it was amazing while the other still liked it, but maybe not as much. Why does that happen? I'm sure there are several reasons for it, but I'm only going to talk about one of them here: The truth of the two selves.

Now before you jump up and yell: "Hey, but I'm not schizophrenic!" (of course you're not), allow me to explain what that means... or you know what? I'll let someone do it who actually knows what he's talking about. Daniel Kahneman, author of the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow talks about these two selves in the context of experiencing pain:

Would You Like A Frame With That?

I remember a time as a child (probably not more than a few months) when I used to enjoy playing marbles. What I did not realize at the time was that researchers apparently like to use marbles for their experiments as well. At least sometimes...

In one such experiment the participants were asked to draw a marble from one of two urns. If they drew a red one, they would win a prize:

Urn A contained 10 marbles, of which 1 is red.

Urn B contained 100 marbles, of which 8 are red.

Which urn would you have chosen? About 30% to 40% of the participants went with the urn that had the larger number of winning marbles (Urn B), instead of picking the one that gave them a better chance of winning (10% in Urn A, 8% in Urn B). Psychologist Paul Slovic calls this the denominator neglect. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains why some people are susceptible to choosing Urn B:

How Honest Are You?

This post is just in passing. I thought the following link was really worth sharing. Maybe just something to think about at the beginning of the new week: in what ways am I being dishonest, just because "everybody's doing it"? 

Dan Ariely on How to Stop Illegal Downloads

P.S. His book on dishonesty is on my list of books to read. So you may find some posts on the topic here sometime in the future...