In last week’s post, I referred to the challenges in setting policies for vaccinating people against COVID-19. If the aim is to protect the people who are the most at risk of the disease, then it makes sense to give priority to the elderly and those with underlying conditions, and to work your way down from there to the young and healthy, the people who are unlikely to develop serious symptoms, let alone require hospital admission.

There are clear instrumental motives for such an approach: the risk is not just to the individuals, but also to society as a whole…

In a recent blogpost, economist Brank Milanovic riffs on a theme from the end of his book, Capitalism, Alone. Capitalism facilitates (and arguably even requires) the progressive commercialization of activities and relationships that, before, happened as part of general social interaction, e.g., within or between families, and between friends.

In this post, he focuses specifically on the arts. The advantage of capitalism, Branko says, is that you can only make a profit if you satisfy someone else’s need: this aligns, as if by an invisible hand, the profit goal of a producer with the personal needs of their customer. This…

In music, two or more tones played together can sound pleasant, or unpleasant. The former is referred to as consonance , the latter as dissonance. Like other concepts from music such as harmony, tempo, and striking a chord, this term too is being used more generally as a metaphor in human behaviour and interaction. A specific case is that of cognitive dissonance, which describes the situation of holding beliefs and values that are in conflict with each other, that are contradicted by facts, or by the way we behave.

The theory around cognitive dissonance was developed by social psychologist Leon…

For many years, the product evaluations of consumer magazines like Which? in the UK, and countless equivalents in other countries, have been identifying “Best Buys”: the products that performed best in the tests. But such a binary distinction (a product either is, or is not, a Best Buy) is not necessarily very helpful.

One issue with it is that it doesn’t tell us whether a product that failed to receive the coveted badge only just failed to make the grade, or whether it was mediocre across the board. Another concern is that the boundary between Best and Not-Best is arbitrary…

(featured image: Paul Sableman/Flickr CC BY)

We tend to be ambivalent towards preferential treatment — kind of OK when we benefit (or we grant it to others), but dislike it when it’s others who gain. Or is it not that simple?

We care more for ourselves than for others. This may sound a tad controversial, but it is in fact not surprising: perhaps our oldest and most profound imperative is to pass on our genes — and not those of strangers. So, when it comes to the crunch, we come first.

Of course, in our sophisticated societies, we don’t act this out blindly and in an extreme fashion. Paying a round in the pub (remember those?) to our mates, doing a colleague a favour, or making a donation to a good cause are not likely…

I once had the misfortune of experiencing two fire alarms in the same day. The first one was in the middle of the afternoon, at the office of my then employer in West London. As so often when this happens, the rain was pouring down, and many of us got soaked hurrying from the emergency exit to the assembly point in the car park across the road. Later, I made my way to the Isle of Wight for a client meeting the next day. …

How come we are here? A good few billion years ago, a bunch of chemicals in the primordial soup that sloshed around a young Earth combined to form what we would, much later, call ‘life’ — organisms that somehow possessed two key capacities. They were able to reproduce, and they could distinguish what was beneficial to them from what was detrimental. …

Decision-making is effortful. Even if we have only two options to choose from, they often both have numerous pluses and minuses that need to be weighed up. Thankfully, we can often rely on rules that act as shortcuts and take much of that hard work away.

Many such rules we develop and adopt ourselves. After using the toilet, we don’t every time consider the upsides and downsides of washing our hands — it is a habit we mindlessly carry out. Neither do we spend a lot of time, every week, working out whether we will do the shopping on Friday…