Mindframe

Imagine going to a corporate team-building event where everyone in your office was sorted and evaluated based on the results of taking one of those time-wasting Buzzfeed quizzes, like “Which Disney Character Would You Be Friends With?” or “ Which Muppet Are You? ” It might make for an interesting afternoon, or at least a weird story to tell the next time you’re at a party, but it probably wouldn’t leave you feeling like you had gained some crucial self-insight to help you function better at work or in your home life. Clicking through an online quiz might be a decent way to procrastinate, but in the back of our minds, we all know that Buzzfeed doesn’t employ a lab of white-coated psychologists to study, for instance, the deep-seated implications of preferring Cartoon Network to Nickelodeon. It may be fun, but we wouldn’t call it science . This brings us to the Myers-Briggs. You’ve probably heard of Myers-Briggs, or as it’s more formally known, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sur...

Just how much is your performance shaped by the way your boss talks to you? To what extent are our behaviors, attitudes, and identities simply a reflection of somebody else’s expectations? This been the subject of controversy since at least 1968, when Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jackson published their book Pygmalion in the Classroom . In it, Rosenthal and Jackson described studies in which first and second grade teachers seemed to treat students differently based on how smart they believed each child to be, which in turn had a direct impact on that child’s actual performance. This held true even when researchers lied to the teachers about the children’s intelligence—children who were labeled as gifted were treated as such and still performed as such, independently from their actual IQs. The following year, J. Sterling Livingston wrote his now-legendary article for the Harvard Business Review , “Pygmalion in Management.” Citing several studies, Livingston asserted that the...

Making iffy predictions about our future: it’s been a hallmark of human behavior for at least as long as we’ve been recording our present. Perhaps the most famous early example of forecasting took place in Mount Parnassus in Delphi, Greece. From roughly the 8th century BCE to the 4th century BCE, for nine days each year, travelers could pay to pose their burning questions to the Pythia, a priestess said to channel the wisdom of Apollo. To a modern reader, perhaps a bit skeptical about the whole Greek gods thing, it may be unsurprising to learn that the Pythia phrased her answers as riddles, arguably granting her some convenient wiggle room. For instance, as the story goes, King Croesus once asked a Pythia if he should attack the neighboring Persian Empire. "Cross the border and a great empire will fall,” she told him. Encouraged, Croesus brought his troops over the border—and suffered a crushing defeat. Her reaction was to coolly point out that he had failed to make her s...

"What is the most resilient parasite?” asks Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2011 movie Inception . “Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm?”   Before anyone can ask what exactly he’s getting at—or volunteer some gruesome facts about, say,  toxoplasmosis  —DiCaprio answers his own question. “An idea,” he declares, with a meaningful squint. “Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.” Metaphors aside, Leo’s got a point. We all know someone clinging steadfast to a belief that is provably false. How can an otherwise intelligent person end up with such blatant blind spots, seemingly immune to logic or fact? One culprit is confirmation bias.   Confirmation bias occurs when you selectively choose what information to value, and what information to discard, based on the picture you want to paint for yourself. Imagine a detective who needs to believe his client is innocent so badly, he keeps insisting tha...