Understanding convictions, your own included

A 1973 article argued that distant acquaintances are more useful than close friends for finding a job. A 2022 experiment tested it on twenty million people.

The idea that six emotions can be read on every face in the world dominated for fifty years. A review published in 2019 showed that the correspondence is far looser.

A joint account, a loan taken together, an unequal contribution: each of these decisions produces legal effects that couples almost never measure at the moment they take them.

Charts stating how many hours a six-month-old sleeps do exist. What they hide is how widely children scatter around the average.

His name has served as an insult for a century. The content of his texts is more precise, and stranger, than the word now covers.

One hundred and fifty stable relationships: the figure has circulated everywhere since the 1990s. Its origin is a regression line drawn on primates.

Knowing that something is wrong without being able to say what is neither rare nor a sign of a problem. It is a way of functioning, documented since the 1970s.

French uses a single term where other languages had four. This economy of vocabulary produces part of the misunderstandings attributed to people.

The centre denotes at least three different things depending on context. That is what explains how it can be declared both a majority and nowhere to be found.

A famous experiment showed that a majority manifestly in error could change an otherwise obvious answer. The result is not anecdotal for public debate.

The question is not whether you love your country. It is at what level a decision should be taken, and what makes that level legitimate.

A well-built test measures something real. It does not measure what is often attributed to it, and it is more useful to say so than to let people believe otherwise.

A constitution is not a neutral text organising debate from outside. Each mechanism it installs decides between values that conflict.

We readily tell ourselves as coherent people applying principles. Work on introspection suggests the order is often the reverse.

Agreement on the objective says nothing about the instrument. Yet it is on the instrument that almost all disagreements are played out, and each instrument has its serious supporters.