We are not necessarily quite as irrational as is sometimes argued, but that does not make us as rational as we might like to think we are. — Many years ago, when we were on holiday in the South of France, one day we made an 80-mile round trip by car so I could enjoy a particular sorbet in a village where we had stayed four years earlier. A rational decisionmaker might have calculated the cost of that…

Making someone else better off without making any other person worse off, that can only be a good thing, right? Well, not quite, it seems. — Was Robin Hood, the English folk hero, the noble bandit who “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor” a good guy? Being generous to the less well-off would certainly appear to be a good thing. But stealing someone’s possessions, even if you question their legitimate ownership and if…

The dispute about nurses’ salaries in the UK highlights the peculiar way in which we make judgements, and how one ignores market dynamics at one’s peril, even in the labour market — This week’s nurses’ strike in the UK was suspended, but the dispute between the government, as the employer of the National Health Service (NHS) staff, and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), the nurses’ trade union has not been settled yet. Its centrepiece is pay: the RCN considers the government’s…

When it comes to leadership and persuasion, cognitive phenomena may not be as maladaptive as they are sometimes portrayed — This past week saw two important speeches by two of the most powerful political leaders of the planet. Both were made against the background of the first anniversary of the start of the Ukraine war, and the geopolitical situation was largely also their subject. Nonetheless, someone unaware of this might…

Decision making is, more than we imagine, guided by our sense of right and wrong — and that can lead to difficult dilemmas — Mathematics and language have several things in common. One of them is that, just like in mathematics, in many languages, a double negative makes a positive. Someone who is “not unattractive” is good-looking, and an experience that is “not unpleasant” is usually quite enjoyable. That doesn’t mean we can extrapolate…

We punish wrongdoing, but do we do so consistently? Exactly what we punish and why is not so straightforward — When British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took office late in 2022, he pledged, “ This government will have integrity, professionalism, and accountability at every level”. Not really an extraordinary expectation of the country’s leaders, but at the end of last month, things went rather bad for Mr Sunak. The chairman…

ChatGPT is all the rage, but does it live up to our expectations? And are our expectations realistic? — I remember my first trip to Japan in the 1990s. I had worked all over Europe, and being fortunate enough to speak a few languages, most of the time I had been able to get at least some sense from notices, menus and other various written material. My British colleagues…

We can handle disruption better than we might imagine — in fact disruption can be beneficial to us — About two weeks ago, my life got seriously disrupted. I have been a frequent (some might say continuous) Twitter user for well over a decade. Not really for debating or sharing my opinion *, but to find and share information, mostly about my professional interests. For almost as long, I…

Do we always have to have an opinion on everything? It’s a tendency that is hard to resist, but it may be worth practising being comfortable with an absence of opinion — Many moons ago, my younger daughter got me a present on Father’s Day: a mug depicting Homer Simpson with the inscription, “No Opinion”. The Simpsons connection was to be expected, as I was a known Simpsons fan at the time — my modest but significant collection of T-shirts depicting members…