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Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does
There is a children’s story I used to read to my daughters when they were 3 and 4 years old. It comes from Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” series and involves a big batch of
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Here’s How to Make Resolutions Stick, According to a Behavior Change Scientist
The Harry Potter audiobooks helped Katy Milkman make a foundational discovery about exercise behavior. A Harvard graduate student at the time, she was struggling to work out. Once a varsity tennis player, she no longer had
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Why We Struggle to Say No—And How to Get Better at It
As children many of us are taught that being “good” means being obedient: doing what we’re told by parents, teachers and authority figures. But that conditioning can make it incredibly difficult to speak up when
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Chimps Can Weigh Evidence and Update Their Beliefs Like Humans Do
… Most impressively, the animals even accounted for clues that undermined earlier evidence. If they heard something bouncing around inside box 1, they would assume, at first, that it was an apple—but then the experimenter
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The Great Ghosting Paradox
… Some of this was projection. “We love an avatar more than a specific being,” Pettman writes, “a gestalt abstraction, lifted from all the love stories we’ve imbibed since childhood.” I wanted this guy to
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Why We Should Thank Pigeons For Our AI Breakthroughs
… If computers can do all that with just a pigeonlike brain, some animal researchers are now wondering if actual pigeons deserve more credit than they’re commonly given. “When considered in light of the accomplishments
