Psychology

It might feel—if you haven't yet learned the rules of these hidden markets—that the outcomes are based on luck, chance, or things beyond your control, but you actually have a lot more agency in them than you think.

Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.

We often talk about misinformation and disinformation, but the deeper issue is the speed and flow of trust, because we're responding to feeling rather than expertise and credibility.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Being able to trust is actually what makes us human. It's a very innate thing. And often, distrust and mistrust are learned behaviours that start to set in around the age of four.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

The number one thing is misread intentions. You assume someone has ill intent toward you and you don't check in on those intentions. Then a narrative forms in your head, and that's when you start spiralling.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. Trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

They were outnumbered twelve to one north of Kyiv, and completely outmatched in terms of tanks, planes, artillery—all of it. Outmatched, yet they pushed back those Russian forces that colossally outnumbered them.

We need fear, but fear has to be harnessed, and a crucial way we harness it is through training. Training helps you turn fear from something that paralyses you into something that spurs you to take the right decisions in very difficult situations.

You can have the best AI in the world and the best robots in the world, but if they aren't integrated well with the humans, then you will lose.

We have to recognise that if we ignore or downplay the human side, we could lose. That, I think, is really the key insight for why and how things should be done differently.

This tool is truly the best thing that the science has come up with for getting two people to like each other. A little bit of optimisation can be effective—you should be eating healthy and exercising and doing the basics. But I tend to think in terms of relational optimisation: how can I put two people in the best position to share things about themselves that allow them to find conversational pathways that happen to go well?

You feel like a product when you're on these things. You feel like you're selling yourself. But what's amazing is that when you get people in person, actually interacting, much of the time they don't do that same optimisation, especially if you give them just a few nudges.

What we see in the science is something very different. We often see that romantic partners basically see the best in each other. They're wearing rose-coloured glasses. And the primary thing that brings people together is what we would call attachment bonds or pair bonds: the idea that people are looking for somebody who they feel has their back, somebody who's going to celebrate their successes, and somebody who's going to be there for them.

When you tell people these things, they get a little fatalistic about it. They tend to think, 'Well, I guess there's not much I can do about that.' I would call that a bias. It is wrong just as often as it's likely to be right. We really need to interrogate and deconstruct that assumption. It's rarely true, and it can lead people to internalise some of these effects in a way that can be pretty damaging and totally unnecessary.

Data is showing that the amount of information we're sending them without hope, and the ratio of hope versus negativity, is shutting down the next generation, which is terrifying. They're like, 'Oh my gosh, what's the point? The fire is too big.'

What happened was that people saw their place going down while London was booming. They started to blame each other. We retreat into polarised blame games, and that is very common.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa