If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. “The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.
The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems.
Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.
To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.
When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?
We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.
All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn’t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.
There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.
Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking – It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead! – is useless,” Harris concludes. “This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don’t approve of smoking – because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it – that teenagers want to do it.
Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play – and by “we” I mean society – in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.
There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.
But let’s not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you’ve probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading.
There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it’s the back jacket of books.
We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.
They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.
But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do – or don’t do – to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.
If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.
Farkas’s Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.
What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.