Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!

We’re so self-confident in our rationality that we think all our decisions are well-considered. When we choose a job, decide how to spend our time, or buy something, we think we’ve considered all the relevant factors and are making the optimal choice. In reality, our minds are riddled with biases leading to poor decision making. We ignore data that we don't see, and we weigh evidence inappropriately.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a masterful book on psychology and behavioral economics by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. Learn your two systems of thinking, how you make decisions, and your greatest vulnerabilities to bad decisions.

We usually think of snap judgments as lazy, superficial, and probably wrong. But are they really? In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that snap judgments can be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make when we analyze a situation carefully. Blink delves into how and why we make the gut decisions we do, when it’s unsafe to trust our guts, and what we can do to make all our snap judgments smarter, less biased, and more efficient.

In this guide, we add some structure to Gladwell’s arguments and update the research he draws on, looking at how snap judgments might work in the brain. We also give you some additional strategies for maximizing the accuracy of your snap judgments.

Your thoughts play a crucial role in shaping your experiences: They influence how you perceive, interpret, and respond to your environment. It follows then, that if you want to change something in your life—such as your mindset, habits, career, or relationship status—you first need to change your thoughts.

In NLP: The Essential Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NLP Master Practitioners Tom Hoobyar, Tom Dotz, and Susan Sanders explain what thoughts are, how they influence you, and what steps you can take to align them with what you want out of life.

In this guide, we’ll explain:

• How thoughts form and impact you—which will clarify why you tend to think, feel, and behave in certain ways
• How to intentionally change your thoughts—and, subsequently, your feelings and behaviors—to enhance all your experiences

Additionally, we’ll build on Hoobyar, Dotz, and Sanders’s ideas with research, advice, and actionable methods from psychologists and self-improvement practitioners.

We’re so self-confident in our rationality that we think all our decisions are well-considered. When we choose a job, decide how to spend our time, or buy something, we think we’ve considered all the relevant factors and are making the optimal choice. In reality, our minds are riddled with biases leading to poor decision making. We ignore data that we don't see, and we weigh evidence inappropriately.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a masterful book on psychology and behavioral economics by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. Learn your two systems of thinking, how you make decisions, and your greatest vulnerabilities to bad decisions.

Experts in the art of persuasion, whether orators, salespersons, or politicians, often focus on fine-tuning their arguments. But, according to psychologist Robert Cialdini, this approach fails to consider another key component of persuasion—what happens before we begin conveying our argument. In his 2016 book, Pre-Suasion, Cialdini argues that to make our audience receptive to our message, we must optimize the moments before persuasion.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Cialdini’s insight that people are susceptible to influence the moment before they make a decision, and we’ll examine how words, images, and environments can influence people in that moment. Next, we’ll discuss ways to “pre-suade” your audience by aligning with people’s preferences for consistency, likable communicators, authority figures, and people who share their identity. Finally, we’ll consider how to anchor the behavioral changes that result from pre-suasion by getting your audience to make a commitment. Throughout the guide, we’ll discuss pushback against Cialdini’s arguments and explore supplemental advice from other authors on how to influence people.

During the 2016 US Presidential elections, at a time when pundits had Trump at 2% likelihood of winning, Dilbert creator Scott Adams predicted that Donald Trump would win -- primarily because of his persuasive power. According to Adams, what looked to outsiders like blunders were instead examples of a Master Persuader channeling a nation’s energy to help his candidacy.

Win Bigly describes the persuasion strategies Trump used throughout the campaign, how Hillary’s campaign fell short in comparison, and how you can apply these strategies to be more persuasive yourself. Learn the ranking of the most effective persuasion methods, why visual imagery is so powerful, and how to come up with killer slogans.

If you’ve ever noticed that history seems to repeat itself over the course of centuries, you may be wondering what causes that pattern—and how it may play out in the future. In The Fourth Turning, historian William Strauss and consultant Neil Howe explain how Anglo-American history follows a pattern of four 15 to 25-year periods, called Turnings, and how the behaviors of different generations define these Turnings.

In our guide, we’ll explore the authors’ theories on the Four Turnings, as well as the generational archetypes and their respective roles in the Turnings. We’ll also discuss the authors’ descriptions of the past three Turnings and their predictions for the Fourth. Finally, we’ll examine the authors’ theories in the context of history and modern society, as well as how their predictions about the Fourth Turning have played out in the years since the book’s publication in 1997.

We usually think of snap judgments as lazy, superficial, and probably wrong. But are they really? In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that snap judgments can be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make when we analyze a situation carefully. Blink delves into how and why we make the gut decisions we do, when it’s unsafe to trust our guts, and what we can do to make all our snap judgments smarter, less biased, and more efficient.

In this guide, we add some structure to Gladwell’s arguments and update the research he draws on, looking at how snap judgments might work in the brain. We also give you some additional strategies for maximizing the accuracy of your snap judgments.

In The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli breaks down the most common logical fallacies that inhibit decision-making, including confirmation bias, social proof, and hindsight bias. Dobelli aims to help people recognize and overcome these fallacies so they can make better decisions.

In this guide, we’ll explore Dobelli’s main fallacies, including those caused by humanity’s past as hunter-gatherers and those caused by other sources such as misinterpretation of cause and effect. Along the way, we’ll compare and contrast Dobelli’s ideas with other experts on logical thinking, such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman. We’ll also provide concrete steps to overcome illogical thinking and explore why logical fallacies occur.