Silence Isn’t Golden: Everyone Thinks You Should Speak

You’re sitting in the weekly management meeting and the senior person at the table is running through the agenda at a fevered pace. Decisions are being made, left, right, and center, and you can barely keep up with what’s going on. Wondering if you’re alone, you look around the table and it seems that most …

Is “A” Really the Best Option or is it Just that It’s Better Than “B”: List of Biases in Judgment and Decision-Making, Part 18

The other day, someone was talking to me about my series on biases in judgment and decision-making and it made me realize that I was missing a rather important bias — the contrast effect! I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks, but I’m glad to be able to write about it for you today. It’s been almost …

My Answers to the 13 Weirdest Interview Questions You’ll Hear in 2014, Part 3

Over the last two days, I’ve been going through Mashable’s list of the 13 weirdest interview questions you’ll hear in 2014. On the first day, the guesstimate question took a little of time to answer because I had to type it out as I was talking through it out loud. In yesterday’s post, I was …

Can You Succeed in Politics if You Aren’t Selfish?

From time to time, I like to highlight what I think are important passages in books (Stockdale Paradox, The Art of War, etc.). As I begin my journey through some of the classics, there’ll probably be more and more posts where I’m sharing passages from books. While the passage I’m going to share in this …

Perception vs. Reality: Revisiting Wealth Inequality in America

This past summer, I wrote a post that shared some information about wealth inequality in the US. I was actually sharing information that had been published the summer before (in 2011). There was a telling graphic that followed as a result of the study (I’ve included it below):  Keeping in mind that this study was …

Ethics: A Jagged Line

Earlier this calendar year, I had an ethics class. It was only a half-semester course, but I rather liked it. That’s probably because I really enjoy morality and ethics. In fact, some of the research I worked on during my undergraduate degree required me to read one of George Lakoff’s books, Moral Politics. Even now, …

Why We Lie, Cheat, and Steal: The Truth About Dishonesty

I’ve just finished the 5th week of my 4th year of graduate school. For folks that have been in graduate school this long, there’s usually a development of research interests. Because of the nature of my time in graduate school (1 year in a PhD program, 1 year completing my first Master’s, and now into …