Understanding convictions, your own included

The judgement passed on an episode depends on its most intense moment and on its ending, hardly at all on its duration. That holds for holidays as much as for questionnaires.

Four labels circulate everywhere, drawn from a theory that stopped using them long ago. What the research actually says is more interesting, and far less definitive.

We picture political disagreement as a single frontier. It looks rather like several superimposed lines, which never quite coincide.

It concerns a majority of families in rich countries and has almost never been evaluated. What exists bears mainly on adult financial behaviour.

A bonus tied to a group's result dilutes the link between individual effort and gain. Theory predicts it does not work; the data are more nuanced.

Formulated in 1954, it holds that mixing between groups reduces prejudice. The conditions it sets are more demanding than its uptake suggests.

Revising a position is not only intellectual work. It is an uncomfortable operation, whose mechanism has been documented since the 1950s.

It is judged out of place almost everywhere, and yet it was long a recognised instrument of political and judicial life. What has changed is not the emotion.

The word covers at least three different experiences, which do not call for the same responses. Confusing them is a regular source of conversations that go nowhere.

The relation to authority is the dimension most badly summarised by everyday vocabulary. Being attached to order and distrusting power is in no way contradictory.

Piaget placed around eight months the understanding that a hidden object still exists. Gaze-based methods moved that age, then were contested.

Removing assigned desks allows the leased floor area to be reduced. Effects on the work itself are less studied than the property argument suggests.

Changing city does not erase relationships, it changes their nature. Longitudinal surveys show faster than average replacement.

The formula is the default answer to a question that is not one. It is neither a lie nor information, and replacing it is not always desirable.

One waits for words, the other produces few and compensates with deeds. Both are attached in the same way, and each finds the other distant.