Understanding convictions, your own included

It is one of the rare family practices tested by controlled trials. Effects exist, and they are better established on vocabulary than on anything else.

Several countries have legislated, and a few natural situations have allowed measurement. The effects run in several directions at once.

A 1997 experiment produced a widely reused procedure. What it establishes is narrower, and more interesting, than its coverage suggests.

A questionnaire observes nothing: it records a self-description. That bounds what can be concluded from it, and it does not make it useless.

The result has been constant in the literature for fifty years, and it is regularly misreported. What it says exactly deserves spelling out.

A laboratory procedure devised in 1969 still supplies most of the data on attachment. It measures something real, and far narrower than is often claimed.

Continuous measurement of activity has spread far beyond warehouses. The law frames these systems through old principles applied to new tools.

The 1967 experiment is famous; its completion rate less so. Large-scale replications confirmed the order of magnitude without lifting the main objection.

What it is proper to show, to whom and where, is neither universal nor stable. Historians have traced its shifts since the Middle Ages.

Two people can share four evenings a week without seeing each other. What counts is not the duration but what is called joint attention.

When we are wrong, circumstances explain it. When someone else is wrong, what explains it is what they are. This asymmetry has a name and direct political effects.

Most data on young children come from questionnaires completed by an adult. That source has well identified properties, rarely recalled when the results circulate.

The indicator is a ratio between output and a volume of hours. Each of its two terms poses difficulties that commentary ignores.

The reference instrument, published in 1978 and revised since, deliberately avoids the term. That methodological choice explains part of the figures in circulation.

An absence of reply contains no information about its cause. We produce one anyway, immediately, and almost always to our own disadvantage.