Food for Thought

There are 143 posts filed in Food for Thought (this is page 1 of 5).

Consistently mistaking confidence for competence

There’s research on what’s called the Babble Effect, which is the idea that the more you talk in a meeting, the more likely you are to get selected as the leader of a team. So we reward people who dominate the conversation, even though they are not actually better at leadership. Often they’re worse, because they fail to include and learn from the voices around them in the room. They’re so obsessed with being the smartest person in the room that they fail to make the room smarter. And I think what happens there is we’re consistently mistaking their confidence for competence.

Adam Grant

The view that humans are morally more important than animals appears later and may be socially acquired.

Is the tendency to morally prioritize humans over animals weaker in children than adults? In two preregistered studies (total N = 622), 5- to 9-year-old children and adults were presented with moral dilemmas pitting varying numbers of humans against varying numbers of either dogs or pigs and were asked who should be saved. In both […]

Self is a Victim

A new personality construct has been defined that describes people who persistently see themselves as victims within interpersonal conflicts. The research was published in Personality and Individual Differences. Study authors Rahav Gabay and team describe how the social world is satiated with interpersonal transgressions that are often unpleasant and seemingly unwarranted, such as being interrupted […]