How to Make Better Decisions

We are bad at making decisions. According to science, our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice.
And that’s assuming that we haven’t already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious!
Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation and even manipulated by the future, Horizon presents a guide to better decision making, and introduces you to Mathematician Garth Sundem, who is convinced that conclusions can best be reached using simple maths and a pencil!

Part 1

Part 2

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

About this talk
Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.
About Alain de Botton
Through his witty and literate books -- and his new School of Life -- Alain de Botton helps others find fulfillment in the everyday.

Aliens on Earth ? - Life - Drake Equation - Universe - Astronomer Mario Di Maggio

Join Mario Di Maggio, the Thinktank astronomer, to hear about the facts and the fantasies about Aliens on Earth. Determine the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence and learn how to track it down.

Minute 1 OFOs
Minute 23 Life
Minute 33 Life out side Earth
Minute 37 Milky Way photo size scale
Minute 39 Elements of Life
Minute 40 Drake Equation estimation

Interactive Periodic Table

Nancy Etcoff on the surprising science of happiness

About this talk
Cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff looks at happiness -- the ways we try to achieve and increase it, the way it's untethered to our real circumstances, and its surprising effect on our bodies.
About Nancy Etcoff
Nancy Etcoff is part of a new vanguard of cognitive researchers asking: What makes us happy? Why do we like beautiful things? And how on earth did we evolve that way?

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

About this talk
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

About Dan Ariely
It's become increasingly obvious that the dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In "Predictably Irrational," Dan Ariely tells us why.

Dacher Keltner: Born to Be Good

Summary
Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and director of the Greater Good Science Center, demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are "nasty, brutish, and short" - we are in fact born to be good.
He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action are the fabric of cooperative societies?
Born to Be Good is a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life and how the path to happiness goes through human emotions that connect people to one another.
Michael Lewis is without peer in his understanding of market forces and human foibles. He is now our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history: the crash of '87, the Russian default (and the subsequent collapse of Long-Term Capital Management), the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble, and the current sub-prime mortgage (and more) disaster.
With his trademark humor, Lewis paints the moods and market factors and, with the luxury of hindsight, analyzes what actually happened and what we should have learned from experience

The Decisive Moment

Jonah Lehrer is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine and a contributing editor at NPR`S Radio Lab.
Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the minds black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, theyre discovering this is not how the mind works.
Jonah Lehrer, author and editor-at-large for Seed Magazine, suggests that our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.
Join Jonah as he looks to answer two key questions: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

The Power of the Situation - Philip Zimbardo

Discovering Psychology: The Power Of The Situation with Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D.
This powerful documentary takes us on a journey of self-discovery. We learn just what humans are capable of through the study of our responses to commands and leadership. How is it that dictators are so easily able to manipulate the masses? Are humans pre-programmed to carry out any actions necessary to our group acceptance?




Specifically, this documentary takes a close look at the Milgram Experiment that were carried out in the early '60s. Wiki quotes Dr. Milgram and the results of his experiment...

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Find out what humans are capable of...you'll be suprised!

Dacher Keltner - Positive Emotions

Summary
Why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe and compassion?
Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, offers a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life.

Why Are People Different? - YALE / PSYCHOLOGY

LECTURE DESCRIPTION
Why are people different from one another? This lecture addresses this question by reviewing the latest theories and research in psychology on two traits in particular: personality and intelligence. Students will hear about how these traits are measured, why they may differ across individuals and groups, and whether they are influenced at all by one's genes, parents or environment.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.

Helen Fisher - "Why Him? Why Her?: Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type."

Helen Fisher visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss her book "Why Him? Why Her?: Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type." This event took place on February 20, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series.
In Why Him? Why Her?, Fisher unlocks the hidden code of desire and attachment. Each of us, it turns out, primarily express one of four broad personality types—Explorer, Builder, Director, or Negotiator—and each of these types is governed by different chemical systems in the brain. Driven by this biology, we are attracted to partners who both mirror and complement our own personality type. Based on entirely new research—including a detailed questionnaire completed by five million people in thirty-five countries—Why Him? Why Her? will change your understanding of why you love him or her and help you use nature's chemistry to find and keep your life partner.
Fisher is one of the world's leading experts on the nature of romantic love and attachment. She is the chief scientific adviser to Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com. She is the author of four previous books, two of which—The First Sex and Anatomy of Love—were New York Times Notable Books. Fisher is a research professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. She lives in New York City.

Stupidity, a documentary

Stupidity by Albert Nerenberg Features Bill Maher, Noam Chomsky, George W. Bush, Mark Crispin Miller and many others. A humorous examination of stupidity in contemporary American culture, covering: the effects of television and mass media on the American intellect; the "dumbing down" of American culture; the popularity of Steve-O and Jackass; role of religion in willful stupidity; the identifaction of many Americans with George W. Bush; the evolution of such concepts as "idiot" and "moron."

The DVD edition contains extra interviews commentaries and readings. The film is not connected to Matthijs van Boxsel's book called Encyclopaedia of Stupidity -- also 2003- but recommended.

A New View of Human Capacity - Sir Ken Robinson

Summary
Ken Robinson, innovation expert and author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, overcame polio to become one of the world's leaders in the development of creativity in business, education and human resources.
Hear him hold forth on the potential and capacity of truly "human" resources.

BIO
Sir Ken Robinson - Sir Ken Robinson was born in Liverpool 4 March 1950, the son of James and Ethel Robinson. He is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, national and state education systems, non-profit corporations and some of the world's leading cultural organizations. They include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the Royal Ballet, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the J Paul Getty Trust and the Education Commission of the States. From 1989 - 2001, he was Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick.

"Just How Stupid Are We?" Historian Rick Shenkman Interview

"Just How Stupid Are We?" Historian Rick Shenkman Interview

Shenkman is the author of the new book “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter”.
In this conversation, Shenkman discusses our need to focus on the electorate’s general lack of informed understanding of civics and what is important in our political process.
Shenkman is also the founder and editor of George Mason University’s History News Network, as well as an associate professor of History there.
(Recorded in early summer 2008)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions." - Authors@Google: Dan Ariely

Professor Dan Ariely visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions." This event took place on July 1, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series. In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational. Dan Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, where he holds a joint appointment between MIT's Media Laboratory and the Sloan School of Management. He is also a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and a visiting professor at Duke University. Ariely wrote this book while he was a fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton.



YouTube - Authors@Google: Dan Ariely

Philip Zimbardo: The Time Paradox

The Commonwealth Club of California
San Francisco, CA
Nov 12th, 2008

What if your attitudes toward time could explain why you are chronically late, why you're likely to fight for rainforest preservation, or why you might be predisposed to addictions?
Philip Zimbardo, renowned for his notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiments, will discuss how internal time perspectives determine every single one of our thoughts, feelings and actions.
He even makes the case that attitudes toward time can influence national destinies - The Commonwealth Club of California



FORA.tv - Philip Zimbardo: The Time Paradox

How Much Do We Differ From Others and When Do We Know it?

About the Lecture

Envy Shane Frederick’s Consumer Behavior students. They get to assign prices to such real but quirky products as jalapeno- and popcorn-flavored jelly beans, as well as to hypothetical products, like a pill that enables one to speak French instantly. More to the point, Frederick asks his student-confederates whether they would pay more or less than others for these goods. From classroom experiments and his own research in cognitive and social psychology and decision theory, Frederick has discovered a “false consensus” around our “willingness to pay for goods” (WPG). Individuals assume that whatever they would be willing to pay for an item, others would pay more. This applies to imaginary and actual products, as well as to such experiences as “spending time in a discomfort room.” And while Frederick’s research shows how firmly individuals differentiate themselves from others, at least around “WPG,” he remarks on an apparent paradox: people find common preferences when confronted with stimuli as disparate as Chinese ideograms, sachets, and even lines arrayed on a page. Frederick concludes that “a shared evolutionary and cultural history induces some degree of agreement about nearly everything,” so that our own beliefs are often “the best signal (we) have about others’ preferences.” Yet, don’t assume too much, because “humans have a widespread, mistaken belief that they value things less than others.” Frederick sees some relevance in these findings for marketing strategy

Deciphering the Language of Sex

Even from a purely biological perspective, gender is a complex subject. Dr. David Page reviews the biological basis for sex, emphasizing the role of the sex chromosomes—the X and the Y—in mammals. He addresses the age-old question of why sex exists, and shows how sexual reproduction can have advantages over reproduction by cloning.

BBC - Human Instinct - Deepest Desires

A Documentary from the BBC: Human Instinct
2002© As Seen On Television (UK)
Host/Narrator: Professor Robert Winston
SUMMARY: Human Instinct is the story of how instincts have made us humans into the uniquely successful species that we are, despite us not always being aware of them. Professor Robert Winston provides a unique insight into what it is that makes us human. And it is the story of our extraordinary instincts and why we behave the way we do and what other animals reveal about our most basic drives.
The instinct to have sex is one of the most potent we possess. Its vital if we are to produce the next generation. In this episode we find out what it is about the way we look, the way we smell and what we possess, that can attract the ideal mate.



YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

BBC - Human Instinct - Born to Survive

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.