Understanding convictions, your own included

Many conversations fail on one confusion: the listener thinks they are committing themselves, the speaker thinks they are being contradicted. These are two separable operations.

Every couple runs on a contract nobody wrote or reread. Its clauses are discovered the day one of the two breaches them.

The French scheme was born inside private firms before being generalised by law. That origin explains part of its present shape, including what is still argued about.

The employment rate of older workers has risen sharply in France over twenty years. It coexists with a difficulty in returning to work that has not moved.

School sociometry produces precise maps of relationships between pupils. They contradict several received ideas about popularity.

Much of what we attribute to our character, to the person facing us or to the situation in fact belongs to an earlier state with nothing to do with any of them.

An argument does not stop when the arguments are exhausted. It stops when a gesture is accepted, and that gesture obeys precise rules.

That contributions should be recognised is the object of broad agreement. What counts as a contribution, and what recognition authorises, is the object of none.

Time use surveys have existed since the 1960s and produce a counter-intuitive result: reported parental time has risen, in almost every rich country.

A 1963 theory holds that pay is only judged relative to that of others. Sixty years of work have specified which others.

The workplace is the leading supplier of relationships in adulthood. It is also the context whose relationships survive departure least well.

Three brains stacked by evolution, the archaic, the emotional and the rational: the model is taught everywhere and was abandoned by neuroscience long ago.

No woman has ever changed her name by marrying, in French law. What she acquires is something else, and the distinction has very concrete consequences.

A simple test, in use since 1983, seemed to place around age four the ability to attribute a mistaken belief to someone else. Non-verbal versions have blurred that timetable.

France wrote it into the labour code in 2016. The text creates an obligation to negotiate rather than a directly applicable rule.