As the novice becomes more skilled there is a dramatic improvement in performance. For example, when learning to parallel turn in skiing, attention may be initially directed towards several aspects of technique, such as the positioning of the skis and ski poles, the forward lean of the trunk, the distribution of body weight on uphill and downhill skis, the angle of the knees and the rotation of the trunk. It is likely that novice skiers will have to consider each of these individual parts as they perform the skill. Consequently, performance will be rather awkward and not as smooth and efficient as that of skilled skiers. As novices become more proficient, they are likely to stop thinking about the individual parts of the turn. Rather these components will be grouped together as larger parts so that the entire action becomes much more coordinated and efficient. At this stage, attention may be focused only on the placement of the downhill ski pole or the imminent terrain of the slope. The rest of the action is carried out effortlessly without consciously thinking about any particular aspect of the technique. These changes equate to a reduction in the a mount of attention which has to be devoted to the technique. This progression enables attentional resources to be allocated to other concurrent activities and to the development of more refined performance strategies. Moreover, if skilled skiers think too much about what they are doing as they ski down a difficult black run, they may find that there is a deterioration in performance. From a cognitive perspective, directing conscious attention to the various parts of the skill may disrupt the established motor programme controlling the action. This results in an over-reliance on conscious feedback mechanisms or a shift towards a different mode of control during the task, leading to what is referred to as 'paralysis by analysis.'

In a classic experiment, shoppers in Draeger's Market, a gourmet grocery in Menlo Park, California, dropped by a "tasting booth" where fancy jams were displayed. Some times 24 different kinds of jam were available; other times, only 6 were offered. Shoppers were 50% more likely to drop in for a taste when the full variety of 24 jams was displayed. Then choice started to show its dark side. Among the people who were offered 24 choices, only 3% actually decided to buy one jar of jam. Among those who had only 6 choices, however, 30% ended up buying at least one. When a similar test was done with some chocolates, the people who had selected one piece of chocolate from a display of 6 were much happier with their choice than those who picked one out of an array of 30 different chocolates. The more choices they left on the table, the more they worried that the one they picked was not the best. Too much of a good thing creates "choice overload," releasing a swarm of potential regrets. The experiments above show that when we have numerous options to choose from, our chances of making a satisfactory decision tend to be lowered.

Psychologists Robert J. Contreras and Marion Frank did an experiment investigating a reason why the preference for salt increases when animals are salt deprived. These researchers first deprived rats of salt for 10 days, so that the rats' preferences for salt increased. They then measured the responses of various neuronal fibers in the chorda tympani nerve to different concentrations of salt. They found that, although the lowest concentration of salt that would induce a response in the nerve did not change, a higher concentration of salt was necessary to make the nerve respond as vigorously as before deprivation. Similarly, neurons in the brain that respond to the presence of salt respond much less after salt deprivation. Both of these findings suggest that, after deprivation, the rat would perceive a particular concentration of salt as equivalent to a lower concentration prior to deprivation and would therefore prefer foods with a relatively higher concentration of salt. These mechanisms for increasing the preference for salt seem to be based entirely on automatic physiological processes that are independent of an animal's experiences.

The social impact of emotional events is particularly spectacular in the case of a collective emotional episode. This is what happens when a community is directly affected by an event such as a victory or defeat, a loss, a disaster or a common threat. Under such conditions, the direct experience of individuals is generally taken into relay by mass media. In case of media exposure, the number of individuals and communities who are concerned about the event can be extended considerably. Thus, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 or Japan in 2011 first affected large communities directly. But the media coverage generated empathy across the entire planet. Similarly, the death of Princess Diana or of singer John Lennon affected individuals far beyond the communities directly affected due to the combined effect of the media coverage of the event and the prestige these personalities had in the world. In all cases that meet these examples, abundant collective sharing of emotion develops.

An aspect of bilingualism often overlooked by educators is the potential benefits of bilingualism on some specific aspects of cognition, including metalinguistic awareness, attentional control, and executive function. Bilingual children show advantages on a variety of tests of psychological functioning in these areas over comparable monolingual children. In addition, there is emerging evidence from hospital records for the substantial delay of onset of dementia for bilinguals. Thus, in addition to the direct linguistic and educational benefits of bilingual education, there is emerging evidence of the long-term health benefits of bilingualism. Although the research is still far from pointing to specific educational interventions that might result in biligualism, it suggests that the field of bilingual education has prospets that extend well beyond a compensatory framework of bilingualism to a far-reaching vision embracing people's longevity and mental acuity.

As Hamlet said, we would "rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of." Once you make a mistake, your gut tells you that another sin of commission is sure to hurt more than a sin of omission. Almost everyone believes that even when you think your answer on a test might be wrong, you still should "stick with your first instinct" rather than change your answer. But test-takers who switch an answer are twice as likely to go from wrong to right as from right to wrong! On average, you can significantly raise your test score by changing the answers you have second thoughts about. But any difference from the status quo sticks out in your memory, so you will tend to overestimate how many times you changed your original right answers to wrong ones—and to underestimate how often you should have switched from your first answers to ones that actually would have been right. So you expect to feel foolish if you change an answer, even though that anticipated regret is based on a mistaken view of mistakes.

Negotiation courses usually focus their primary attention on the interactions among the parties involved in the actual negotiation. Such courses also tend either to isolate the negotiation process from the social context within which it is embedded, or to assume that negotiators need only know about one small piece of the social context (e.g., the legal system or the business world). Negotiators should be encouraged to step back from the negotiation process and think more broadly about the social context within which they are operating. To this end, it is useful to consider how the structure of the larger social conflict or social problem affects the negotiation process. Some students of negotiation will protest that they are not dealing with conflicts; they are helping people address problems or differences. We would counter that the difference between a conflict and a dispute or "mere problem" can be quite small. It is often a matter of the perceptions of the parties; therefore, it is useful for all students of negotiation to understand the way the nature of the conflict ― including its relative intensity ― affects a negotiation process.

Anthony Tjan recommends ‘embracing one's ignorance', since entrepreneurs who are ‘unaware of their constraints and external realities' are likely to ‘generate ideas freely'. Later and more cautiously, he explained that ‘The key is recognizing the critical moments in a company's trajectory when a clean-sheet approach is a net positive. The phrase ‘creative ignorance' implies a recognition that too much knowledge may inhibit innovation, not only in business but in other domains as well. The phrase ‘creative ignorance' was coined by a writer in the New Yorker to refer to what prevented Beardsley Ruml, director of a major research foundation, ‘from seeing the No Thoroughfare, Keep Off the Grass, and Dead End Street signs in the world of ideas', warnings that acted as obstacles to the interdisciplinarity that he favoured. At a more practical level, Henry Ford is said to have remarked that ‘I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done'.

Among the many discoveries that humans have made about the world we live in, one of the most profound, as well as the most useful, is what it is made from. Every substance we can see and feel is composed of atoms ― too small to see even with conventional light microscopes ― of which there are just 90 or so varieties. What's more, many of those varieties are extremely rare; the familiar world encompasses perhaps just twenty to thirty of them. These varieties are called the chemical elements, and they help massively in the task of simplifying our understanding of the world around us. There was no guarantee, before we knew of these elements, that all matter could be dissected and categorized into such a relatively small number of fundamental constituents ― compare this, for example, to the profusion of species we find in the living world, where there are more than 300,000 known varieties (and probably more than that still unknown) of beetles alone. So the manageably limited list of chemical elements is something to be thankful for.

Long before the first Soviet and American spaceflights, American science fiction heroes were rocketing off to new locations, leading mixed bands of adventurers to explore new frontiers, and encountering new aliens. Conceptions of spaceflight often reflected their national contexts. For instance, the Soviet space program fit well with the distinctively Russian intellectual movement called cosmism, which assumed that through technology, humanity would transcend death and earthly difficulties by moving away from the planet. Recent studies of "astroculture" have explored how European spaceflight visions developed in ways that reflected their particular cultural context. Likewise, traditional Confucian culture shaped Korean science fiction. Whether in North Korean science fiction adventures taking place on other worlds or South Korean science fiction set in alternative Koreas, the characters rarely engage other races or aliens as equals. The basic form of American science fiction was just as historically grounded and culturally based.

In a world dominated by empirical science and quantitative measurements of almost everything, we're constantly called upon to be evidence-based thinkers. We hardly question the role of evidence-based reasoning in science, engineering, or major business decision-making. The critical importance of careful analysis in these areas is clear and undisputed. But we have trouble taking a similarly rigorous approach in the interpersonal space, where we have a powerful tendency to form snap judgments and take actions based on presumptions and deep misunderstandings about other people. It's remarkable how we tend to disregard evidence-based analysis when we enter into conversations that somehow, and quite misleadingly, strike us as informal, ordinary, or even beside the point. We almost never seek data about another person's inner life with the kind of rigor a scientist employs when seeking the more familiar type of quantitative data. But a lack of rigor with interpersonal engagement can be just as dangerous as we know it to be in our technical work.

It is truly extraordinary that billions of people today live in an environment of ongoing caloric plenty (while, of course, billions of others do not), and hundreds of millions of them are apparently suffering for it. There is a mismatch between the human body and the present-day food environment, and that mismatch is mediated by the mind. Two things are certain: first, barring a collapse of the global food economy, almost everyone in developed and newly developing countries will continue to have access to abundant cheap calories; and second, human bodies are not going to evolve quickly enough to be able to physiologically handle these excess calories in a healthy way. That leaves the mind, shaped by natural selection to be flexible and adaptable, as the best target if we want to address the obesity epidemic. Dieting involves changing not just what is eaten but also how food is thought of and mentally processed. The better we understand the cognition of food and eating, the easier it will be to effect these changes in diet that so many public health officials say are desperately needed.

There is an important reason to "pass the role" whenever we can. Mistakes arise from mindlessness. If our interactions with others are not individual in nature, they risk unfolding in a mindless manner. Role-to-role behavior is rule-bound and normative; that is, a typical pattern of behavior is likely to be repeated. There are times when the rules should not be followed, but to notice these instances requires that we pay attention to the way this situation is different. This can be hard for medical staff, because they always see so many patients and tend not to distinguish among them, although it would be to their advantage. But it should not be hard for patients, because we typically are not always patients and we have fewer people to keep track of. And as with the staff, it is clearly in our best interest to do so. It is easier for us to stay mindful if we are who we are and not what our patient role may "demand."

Normalcy bias is defined by psychologists as "the refusal to plan for, or react quickly to, a disaster which has never happened before." It's a state of denial that most people enter, by default, when confronted by evidence of novel or growing risks. Normalcy bias is so widespread and hard to resist, in fact, that it's responsible for roughly a quarter of CEO firings: according to a four-year study of 286 companies that forced out their CEOs, 23 percent were fired primarily for "denying reality" and refusing to recognize the need to change. Normalcy bias is a result of the brain's preference for stable patterns. It's easier to plan, strategize, and act when you can safely assume that the future will be similar to the past. The brain wants to believe that what's normal now will still be normal for the foreseeable future. And, conversely, it wants to believe that if something has never happened before, it probably won't happen anytime soon.

A conceptual model resides in people's minds, which is why it is also called a mental model. Conceptual models help us transform complex physical reality into workable, understandable mental concepts. Conceptual models are extremely important tools for organizing and understanding otherwise complex things. They enable us to understand things, learn how they work, and figure out what to do when failures occur. But just as we can watch sports games without a deep understanding of the rules, we can operate many devices without understanding them, that is, without good conceptual models. We do so by following simple instructions, mimicking the actions of others, or by memorizing a standard set of actions. When some novel situation occurs, either because of the desire to do something new or because something has gone wrong, then we are in trouble: without a relevant conceptual model, we lack guidance. And when that happens we complain: Why does this have to be so complicated?