Understanding convictions, your own included

The procedure is the same for everyone, with a few extra documents and a check the law frames strictly. What the administration can do, and what it cannot.

Comparing leave duration across countries produces rankings that circulate widely. They conflate entitlements whose pay, transferability and take-up have nothing in common.

Three different figures circulate for France, and all are accurate. They measure nested gaps whose decomposition is the real subject.

The definition changes radically between four and twelve. That shift makes comparisons of surveys across ages trickier than it seems.

In some there is almost nothing; in others, an interval. That gap is not a moral quality, it is a characteristic of functioning whose two ends both serve a purpose.

Support is rarely what we think. Part of what is offered with the best intentions produces the opposite of the intended effect.

Posing the question as a choice between two camps prevents it from being dealt with. Almost nobody wants to give up either, and everybody is constantly making trade-offs.

A typology formulated in the 1960s still structures the textbooks. It was built on a narrow sample, and its reach beyond that context has been contested ever since.

Herzberg argued that satisfaction and dissatisfaction have distinct causes. The criticism concerns the method that produced that result.

A 2019 study proposed precise hourly thresholds, widely taken up. Its method invites reading those figures as an order of magnitude, not a measurement.

Emotional intelligence would explain 80% of professional success, the intelligence quotient 20%. This split comes from no study.

Almost all research on couples rests on a handful of questionnaires. Knowing what they ask changes the way the results drawn from them should be read.

A child who says nothing may understand a great deal. The gap between what is understood and what is produced is one of the best established facts about language development.

Studying medical errors, a researcher found that the best teams reported more of them. The explanation founded an entire field.

Our relationships resemble us, one of the most consistent findings in network sociology. Inferring a preference for the similar is a frequent error.