Hunger Games If you want a favorable decision from a judge pray that you get a hearing early in the day or straight after lunch.  In similar fashion you shouldn’t be making investment decisions on an empty stomach.  In the parlance, such arbiters of justice and seekers after profit are suffering from ego depletion; although we might perhaps just say that they’re hungry. Anyway, ego depletion seems to have a real effect on our ability to make important decisions: we’re more likely to be decoyed, to procrastinate and to compromise over our decisions when we’re low in energy.  So...

Nuance-onomics We’ve previously looked at some of the evidence that suggests Studying Economics Makes You Mean.  The general idea is that learning about the market economy and the benefits of natural selection tends to make us less generous and less empathetic towards the travails of others. However, like so much research quoted here this only offers up part of the story. It’s possible that we’re looking at a false correlation – it may be that it’s not studying economics that makes you a nasty grasping son-of-a-bitch but that you study economics because you already are one.  And, as...

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two strangers just the same" IF ... Rudyard Kipling Problematic Pronouns We all probably know someone who believes that their successes are entirely down to their own levels of skill and whose failures are someone else’s fault.  To some extent most of us will meet them in the mirror each morning.  This is self-serving bias in action.  As Donelson Forsyth explains it: “Those told they failed attribute performance to such external factors as bad luck, task difficulty, or the interference of others, and those told they...