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Are Arguments Decided by Facts or Emotions?

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Are Arguments Decided by Facts or Emotions? Arguments are influenced by both facts and emotions, but the two play different roles. Evidence helps determine what is true, while emotions and values influence which consequences matter, how people interpret evidence, and whether they are willing to reconsider a position. Arguments become confusing when these roles are mixed together. Two people may appear to disagree over evidence when they actually agree on the facts and disagree about priorities. Alternatively, they may share the same values while making different predictions about what a particular policy or decision will produce. Understanding which type of disagreement is taking place can be more useful than immediately searching for another fact. Facts Can Establish What Happened Suppose two employees disagree about whether their company should continue allowing remote work. One produces data indicating that individual productivity increased when employees worked from home, while the...
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What Can You Learn About Any Public Company?

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What Can You Learn About Any Public Company? Public companies disclose extensive information about their finances, operations, leadership, incentives, ownership, and risks. Anyone can use that information to develop a meaningful understanding of a business, provided they know where to look and how to connect the evidence. Imagine receiving a job offer from a company you know primarily by name. Before accepting, you want to understand whether the business is financially healthy, which products generate its revenue, how much debt it carries, and whether its leadership team has incentives aligned with the strategy being described. For a U.S. public company, much of the information needed to investigate those questions is freely available. The challenge is turning thousands of pages of disclosure into a manageable research process. Start With SEC Filings The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission maintains EDGAR, a database containing filings submitted by public companies and other regula...
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What’s the Economic Cost of Never Discovering What You’re Good At?

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What’s the Economic Cost of Never Discovering What You’re Good At? Never discovering what you are unusually good at can create economic losses through lower earnings, missed skill development, weaker allocation of talent, and productive opportunities that never become visible. The total cost cannot be calculated directly. Economists can compare wages, occupations, measured skills, and productivity, but they cannot observe the businesses people never started, professions they never considered, or abilities they never had the opportunity to demonstrate. Research on skills mismatch provides a partial view of the problem. It shows what can happen when people possess measurable capabilities that their work does not fully use. Having Ability and Using Ability Are Different Consider two workers with similar intelligence, education, and motivation. One discovers a strong ability to understand people, negotiate agreements, and build relationships. They enter business development and spend years...
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How Do You Maintain Lifelong Relationships?

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How Do You Maintain Lifelong Relationships? Lifelong relationships survive when people continue making room for one another while updating their understanding of who the other person has become. Shared history creates a foundation, but history alone cannot maintain a relationship after the circumstances that created it have disappeared. Many close relationships begin because two people repeatedly occupy the same space. School, work, neighborhoods, sports, clubs, and other shared activities provide opportunities to talk without requiring anyone to organize the interaction. Closeness can therefore develop partly because life keeps putting the same people together. Eventually, those circumstances change. A relationship that once maintained itself becomes something that has to be maintained deliberately. Shared Circumstances Often Create the Relationship Friendships can feel effortless when people see one another every day. Students spend hours together, colleagues share projects and probl...
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What Does Thinking in Another Language Do to Your Brain?

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What Does Thinking in Another Language Do to Your Brain? Thinking in another language can change the emotional and cognitive conditions under which a person evaluates information, sometimes influencing decisions even when the underlying facts remain unchanged. The idea is initially surprising because language seems like a delivery system for thought. If two sentences express exactly the same information, translating from one language to another should not change the conclusion a person reaches. Research suggests that the relationship between language and thought is less neutral. A foreign language can carry different emotional associations, require different levels of processing effort, and activate competition between linguistic systems that remain simultaneously available. The Same Decision Can Produce Different Choices One of the clearest demonstrations comes from research on the framing effect. The framing effect occurs when people respond differently to equivalent outcomes dependi...
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What’s the Real Danger in Compromise?

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What’s the Real Danger in Compromise? Compromise becomes dangerous when resolving the immediate disagreement causes people to stop examining what they are surrendering, who bears the cost, whether the agreement was genuinely voluntary, and what precedent the concession creates. Compromise is indispensable to cooperation. People rarely share identical priorities, resources, information, or preferences, so relationships and organizations depend on everyone's willingness to accept outcomes that are not exactly what they wanted. The difficulty is that reaching agreement and reaching a good decision are different achievements. A compromise can end an argument while making the underlying problem worse, and a concession that seems minor once can become much more consequential when repeated. Compromise Is Not Inherently Good or Bad The value of compromise depends on what it accomplishes. Suppose a manager wants a project completed Friday while the team believes Monday is realistic. Both si...
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What Do People Pay For but Rarely Use?

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What Do People Pay For but Rarely Use? People routinely continue paying for services they rarely use because the original purchase reflects an optimistic plan for the future, automatic renewal makes inaction easy, and canceling can feel like giving up on the goal the purchase represented. The gym membership is perhaps the clearest example. Someone joins in January with a plan to exercise several times each week, but attendance gradually falls. Eventually, weeks pass without a visit while the monthly payment continues exactly as scheduled. The same pattern appears with streaming subscriptions, online courses, productivity software, professional memberships, and other recurring services. The reason is not always that people simply forget. Many of these expenses survive because buying, using, and canceling involve different psychological decisions. Gym Memberships Reveal the Difference Between Intention and Behavior Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier examined membership c...
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