Psychology

Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.

In our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.

Money allows you to deal with anonymous other people, not just your kin. There are things we do in families that we would find objectionable if they were transactions.

They tend to have quite a power of persuasion and dominance in person. That gets diminished when they are reduced to words on a page.

One interesting way to break the sunk cost is to think about the cost of staying to other people. You might be willing to absorb the abuse yourself — but are you willing to put your family through the effects of your staying?

It’s more like a you problem than a them problem. You have a problem with their behaviour, but they don’t have the same level of empathy or concern for others. So why would they care about it?

They are not held back by care, compassion, concern, or remorse. They are very willing to lie to get what they want.

That stress doesn’t just stay in the office. We get in our car, we get on the subway, we bring it home with us. If you have a high-psychopathy boss, research shows you actually have more conflict at home too.

If the sixty hours of capacity was always there in those rats — what are we writing off as fixed limits in human beings that are actually just locked potential waiting for the right belief?

The phrase 'seeing is believing' has it exactly backwards. The research shows that believing is seeing.

Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.