Understanding convictions, your own included

Symbolic recognition schemes are cheap and widely deployed. Available experiments find real and short-lived effects.

The difficulty is real and measurable. It stems not from a personal disposition but from the disappearance of one precise kind of situation.

Some people receive confidences without having asked for them. The role is useful, it is rarely reciprocal, and it is never counted.

Marrying the person you love looks like the natural order of things. It is a young idea, a minority one on the scale of history, and long held to be unreasonable.

Almost everyone wants less poverty, more safety and breathable air. Political disagreement rarely begins with the destination: it begins with the route, and learning to spot that changes the nature of the discussion.

French health records changed charts in 2018. The debate turns on a technical distinction with very concrete consequences.

Holding several posts may broaden skills or multiply constraints. Surveys make it possible to distinguish the two configurations.

Confiding is the criterion defining the narrowest circle in most measurement instruments. What it produces has been studied mainly in the laboratory.

We spontaneously look for what confirms what we already think, and we examine more closely what contradicts us. This is not bad faith: it is a default way of working, observable even where one has nothing to defend.

Not at all, rather not, neither, rather, entirely: this format has dominated measurement since 1932. It carries three well-identified biases.

Cohabitation has been defined by French law since 1999, and creates almost no rights between the parties. That freedom has precise consequences, generally discovered at the worst possible moment.

Everyone claims liberty, which should put us on alert. Behind the same word stand three rival definitions, which do not recommend the same rules and do not identify the same threats.

The idea of a window closing for good comes from animal ethology. In humans, the data support a far more flexible version.

Three separate bodies were merged into one. The debate turns less on the principle than on the number of representatives and their specialisation.

The result is old, robust, and it still surprises. It stems less from a misunderstanding than from what the word covers.