Understanding convictions, your own included

Call records and proximity sensors have produced results questionnaires could not reach. They also import biases of their own.

Anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise: the list is taught everywhere. Yet it has changed several times, including at its author's own hand.

To be understood, to be approved of, to obtain a decision: three different requests that the same conversation claims to satisfy. They are not obtained the same way.

Helping someone may belong to the voluntary gesture, to mutual insurance or to imposed duty. Three logics covered by the same word, and which do not produce the same institutions.

France changed its organisation twice in five years. The data invoked on either side often bear on different questions.

The phrase describes an invisible barrier. Translating it into statistics requires showing that the gap widens at the top of the hierarchy, which is not always verified.

Surveys find consistent gaps in network composition and in the nature of exchanges. Their interpretation is more disputed than their existence.

One person's state alters the others', often without anyone noticing. The phenomenon has been measured since the 1990s.

It is blamed for the end of most stories. Yet repetition produces attachment as much as it dulls it, and research knows which of the two, and on what conditions.

The gap between mothers and fathers is narrowing slowly, but not in the way one imagines. The composition of tasks changes faster than their volume.

The claim that a small share of employees is engaged has circulated for twenty years. It comes from a private instrument whose method is not fully public.

Counting help actually received and asking whether someone feels supported give divergent results. The paradox has an explanation.

Asserting yourself and losing your temper are two different things, and confusing them costs dearly at both ends of the scale.

Created in 1999 amid a parliamentary debate of rare violence, it is today entered into mostly by different-sex couples. Something its designers had not foreseen.

Answering forty questions requires attention, and attention falls. Wording half the items the other way round is one of the few protections that work.