Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.
Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.
Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic - the strong attacking the weak.
If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?
That's the power of the good con artist: the ability to identify your deepest need and exploit it. It's not about honesty or greed; we are all suckers for belief.
Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.
Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.
Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.
Poker isn't the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Apart from the underlying mathematics, poker depends on the nuanced reading of human intention, interactions, and deceptions.
Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.
No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn't taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive.
Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman.
Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.
I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.
Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.
The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.
Perhaps one day we'll be able to identify and block not just scams but the scammers themselves - before they even target their first victim.
Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.
The truth is that we have no idea what the long-term effects of any artificial enhancement may be. Will our brains be able to withstand running at artificially heightened capacity?
Much of the excitement about virtual reality has come from the gaming community.
