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Book Reviews

Wholeness for Wellness: No Bad Parts review

Remember how often you have done something that felt like going against yourself. Visualize a situation where you have been taken hostage by emotions, led by a blind force that drove your mind through future regrets -it could be a life-changing decision or a daily choice. It has happened to everyone to feel like they […]

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Technology and Algorithms

Filter bubbles: a delicate interaction between algorithms and human bias

If you use any social media, you have probably noticed how different and unique your feed is from the one of your friends. The same is true for your Amazon recommendations, Netflix suggestions, Google News homepage, and so on. In the last years, almost every online company has adopted increasingly sophisticated algorithms that analyze users’ […]

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Everyday Life Our Work

Why do people procrastinate?

Etymologically, “procrastination” is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare — to put off until tomorrow. But it is more than just voluntarily delaying. Procrastination also comes from the ancient Greek word akrasia, which means doing something against our better judgment.  To understand what causes procrastination (outside of conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, where executive functioning […]

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Everyday Life Politics and Public Policy

Misperception of Social Norms given out by the market-based logic

One of the most pivotal changes that unfolded during the past three decades was the reach of markets and market values into spheres of life traditionally held sway over by nonmarket norms. Healthcare, education, public safety, and environmental protection are some examples of the sectors where the use of market logic was for the most […]

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Everyday Life

Music and the brain: a biased symphony

Music is a fundamental part of our every-day life. We either listen to it actively while walking, studying, relaxing, attending concerts and operas, or passively, being exposed to background music in bars, restaurants, waiting rooms and many other places. There exists a large amount of literature investigating music and its effects on our emotions and […]

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Everyday Life

A Guide to Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings and view a situation from their standpoint.   Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional or affective empathy, and compassionate empathy. The first relates to understanding how a person feels and why they feel this way. The second refers to the ability to feel someone else’s emotions. […]

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Everyday Life

The secret attraction of cults 

The world “cult” comes from the Latin “cultus”, meaning “to till or cultivate”. In antiquity it was used to describe the sacrifices, offerings, and monuments built to cultivate favor with the gods, whereas in time, it came to mean any unorthodox religion.  It is a known fact how dangerous a cult could be: they may […]

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Environment Politics and Public Policy

Cooling down environmental panic: Are we biased in the way we approach climate change? 

Thousands of years ago, human beings transcended the overwhelming wrath of nature, proceeded to overcome tribal wars amongst each other (kind of), and now live in a state of chaotic harmony across the planet. However, by our own hands, the conflict with nature has once again ensued—this time on a world stage. Climate change is […]

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Philosophy and Literature

A behavioral lesson from the Iliad and the Odyssey

In 1951 Eric Dodds, an Irish philologist and anthropologist, published “The Greeks and the Irrational”, a famous book in which he presented two antithetical concepts applied to the study of the Ancient Greece: the “shame culture” and the “guilt culture”.  Dodds focused his inquiry on the earliest stages of the Greek culture, analyzing the Homeric world, […]

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Our Work

Scaring the fish away: behavioral insights into talent recruitment

The job recruitment process is a game. Precisely, a signaling game with asymmetric information. Hoping for a perfect match, both the job seekers and the companies looking for new talent signal their attractiveness to each other. Neglecting the in between the lines signals that are conveyed in job advertisements can deter top candidates from applying and reduce the diversity of the company’s biggest asset – […]