Behavior

November 2026

• Nov 2, 2026ConceptsParkinson's Law: Work Expands to Fill the Time AvailableC. Northcote Parkinson published the line as Civil Service satire in The Economist in November 1955, backed by arithmetic: between 1914 and 1928 Royal Navy capital ships fell by roughly two thirds while Admiralty officials rose by nearly 80 percent. His mechanism was that officials multiply subordinates and then make work for each other. The article is candid that controlled experiments isolating the law are scarce, the support being convergent.14 MIN216

April 2026

• Apr 15, 2026ConceptsWhy Procrastination Affects Capable IndividualsWhy procrastination resists productivity systems. Steel defined it in 2007 as voluntary delay despite expecting to be worse off, which makes it an emotion regulation problem rather than a time management failure. Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett found in 2010 that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on one exam procrastinated less on the next, while self-criticism predicted the opposite.15 MIN4.7k

February 2026

• Feb 27, 2026ConceptsCommon Psychology Terms Explained Without JargonFestinger and Carlsmith paid participants $1 or $20 to call a dull task interesting. The $1 group rated it significantly more enjoyable, because they had no outside excuse for the lie and changed their belief instead. That is cognitive dissonance, properly defined. This sorts out introvert against shy, empathy against sympathy against compassion, the major defense mechanisms, and which clinical words get misused.24 MIN29.0k

January 2026

• Jan 27, 2026ConceptsThe Gap Between Thinking and BehaviorMeta-analyses put intention-behavior correlations in health behavior around r = 0.4 to 0.5, so stated intention accounts for roughly a fifth to a quarter of what people actually do. The page traces the mechanisms, System 1 outrunning System 2 at the moment of action, present bias, social desirability, dissonance resolving through belief change, then the fixes: implementation intentions, which Gollwitzer and Sheeran found roughly doubled follow-through.14 MIN71.6k
• Jan 26, 2026ConceptsSocial Influence on BehaviorThe mechanisms behind crowd-following behavior, from Asch's line judgments to Milgram's finding that 65% of participants went to the maximum shock when the authority stood nearby, falling to 21% when instructions came by phone. The page also covers the escape route popular accounts skip: a single dissenter cut conformity from about 33% to roughly 5.5%. Later sections add the Bond and Smith meta-analysis of 133 studies.20 MIN3.7k

June 2025

• Jun 24, 2025ExplainersHow Metrics Influence BehaviorWells Fargo tracked products sold per household as a proxy for engagement and attached bonuses and firings to an eight-product target. Employees hit the number by opening roughly 2 million accounts customers never requested, drawing a $185 million penalty in 2016. The healthcare version is stranger: Dranove and colleagues found in the Journal of Political Economy that publishing New York surgeons' cardiac mortality rates raised overall cardiac mortality.27 MIN3.0k

December 2024

• Dec 24, 2024ConceptsThe Psychology of Motivation Explained: How It Drives BehaviorHe called it the overjustification effect, and it means the reward did not simply stop working when withdrawn, it pushed engagement below where it started. The effect is strongest when a reward reads as controlling rather than as feedback about competence, which is the distinction anyone designing incentives needs. Self-Determination Theory grew from this, naming autonomy, competence and relatedness as the needs an environment either supports or frustrates.20 MIN23.3k

July 2024

• Jul 9, 2024ExplainersThe Neuroscience of Decision Making and EmotionsDamasio's patient Elliot retained vocabulary, memory and measured IQ after frontal surgery, yet could not decide how to file papers. On the Iowa Gambling Task, healthy players' palms started sweating at the losing decks before they could say which decks were bad; vmPFC patients never produced that signal. Covers dopamine prediction error and the orbitofrontal common currency.15 MIN2.2k

March 2024

• Mar 26, 2024CultureWhy Good People Commit Bad Acts: Moral PsychologyMilgram's single most powerful finding was not the 65% who delivered the maximum shock. It was that compliance collapsed to 10% when two confederate peers refused first, making visible dissent a stronger protection than any appeal to character. The article traces the same pattern through Reserve Police Battalion 101, where fewer than 12 of 500 men took a genuine offer to step aside, and through Bandura's eight mechanisms of moral disengagement.21 MIN4.3k

February 2024

• Feb 24, 2024ConceptsUnderstanding Humans' Tendency to LieRobert Feldman had volunteers watch video of their own conversation with a stranger and identify inaccuracies. Most were astonished to find statements they had not intended to make and did not remember making. A 2002 follow-up quantified it: 60% lied at least once in ten minutes, averaging 2.92 lies. DePaulo's diary studies put lying at roughly 20% of social interactions, and people estimate their own rate at a fraction of that.19 MIN11.4k
• Feb 21, 2024ConceptsNeuroscience Insights on Why We Get AngryPhysiologically it looks closer to enthusiasm than to distress, which explains why outrage content is sought out and why anger can become habitual, and why it feels like clarity even when the reading is wrong. The page also closes the case against venting, which reliably increases rather than reduces later anger, and identifies hostile attribution bias as one of the strongest predictors of chronic anger.13 MIN6.0k
• Feb 1, 2024ConceptsWhat Is Personality? Science of Individual DifferencesWhat trait science establishes and what it does not. Goldberg, Digman, and Costa and McCrae independently found that personality-descriptive language resolves into five dimensions, and Goldberg coined Big Five in 1981. The routinely missed point is that this is a map of where stable variation lies, not an account of why those dimensions exist or what mechanisms generate any individual's position on them.19 MIN13.9k

January 2024

• Jan 9, 2024ConceptsHow Willpower Works: The Science of Self-ControlMartin Hagger's 2016 pre-registered multi-lab study tested ego depletion across 23 labs in 36 countries using the same paradigm, and the effect was not found. Tyler Watts' 2018 replication of Mischel's marshmallow test, with a larger and more socioeconomically diverse sample, found the link between early delay of gratification and later outcomes substantially reduced once socioeconomic status, family stability and cognitive ability were controlled.14 MIN7.6k

August 2022

• Aug 28, 2022ConceptsWhat Is the Herd Mentality: Why People Follow the CrowdAsch found that roughly 75 percent of participants went along with an obviously wrong group answer at least once, but his more useful result came next: one confederate answering correctly dropped conformity from about 32 percent of trials to 5 to 10 percent, while enlarging the majority past three people barely mattered. What people bend to is the appearance of unanimity. The article links that to information cascades, GameStop, and groupthink at NASA.18 MIN7.7k