Perhaps worse than attempting to get the bad news out of the way is attempting to soften it or simply not address it at all.↵
This Mum Effect ― a term coined by psychologists Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser in the early 1970s ― happens because people want to avoid becoming the target of others' negative emotions.↵
We all have the opportunity to lead change, yet it often requires of us the courage to deliver bad news to our superiors.↵
We don't want to be the innocent messenger who falls before a firing line.↵
When our survival instincts kick in, they can override our courage until the truth of a situation gets watered down.↵
The Mum Effect and the resulting filtering can have devastating effects in a steep hierarchy, writes Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist.↵
What starts out as bad news becomes happier and happier as it travels up the ranks ― because after each boss hears the news from his or her subordinates, he or she makes it sound a bit less bad before passing it up the chain.

It is not the peasant's goal to produce the highest possible time‐averaged crop yield, averaged over many years.↵
If your time‐averaged yield is marvelously high as a result of the combination of nine great years and one year of crop failure, you will still starve to death in that one year of crop failure before you can look back to congratulate yourself on your great time-averaged yield.↵
Instead, the peasant's aim is to make sure to produce a yield above the starvation level in every single year, even though the time-averaged yield may not be highest.↵
That's why field scattering may make sense.↵
If you have just one big field, no matter how good it is on the average, you will starve when the inevitable occasional year arrives in which your one field has a low yield.↵
But if you have many different fields, varying independently of each other, then in any given year some of your fields will produce well even when your other fields are producing poorly.

There are several reasons why support may not be effective.↵
One possible reason is that receiving help could be a blow to self‐esteem.↵
A recent study by Christopher Burke and Jessica Goren at Lehigh University examined this possibility.↵
According to the threat to self-esteem model, help can be perceived as supportive and loving, or it can be seen as threatening if that help is interpreted as implying incompetence.↵
According to Burke and Goren, support is especially likely to be seen as threatening if it is in an area that is self‐relevant or self-defining ― that is, in an area where your own success and achievement are especially important.↵
Receiving help with a self-relevant task can make you feel bad about yourself, and this can undermine the potential positive effects of the help.↵
For example, if your self‐concept rests, in part, on your great cooking ability, it may be a blow to your ego when a friend helps you prepare a meal for guests because it suggests that you're not the master chef you thought you were.

Taking a stand is important because you become a beacon for those individuals who are your people, your tribe, and your audience.↵
When you raise your viewpoint up like a flag, people know where to find you; it becomes a rallying point.↵
Displaying your perspective lets prospective (and current) customers know that you don't just sell your products or services.↵
The best marketing is never just about selling a product or service, but about taking a stand ― showing an audience why they should believe in what you're marketing enough to want it at any cost, simply because they agree with what you're doing.↵
Products can be changed or adjusted if they aren't functioning, but rallying points align with the values and meaning behind what you do.

One benefit of reasons and arguments is that they can foster humility.↵
If two people disagree without arguing, all they do is yell at each other.↵
No progress is made.↵
Both still think that they are right.↵
In contrast, if both sides give arguments that articulate reasons for their positions, then new possibilities open up.↵
One of the arguments gets refuted ― that is, it is shown to fail.↵
In that case, the person who depended on the refuted argument learns that he needs to change his view.↵
That is one way to achieve humility ― on one side at least.↵
Another possibility is that neither argument is refuted.↵
Both have a degree of reason on their side.↵
Even if neither person involved is convinced by the other's argument, both can still come to appreciate the opposing view.↵
They also realize that, even if they have some truth, they do not have the whole truth.↵
They can gain humility when they recognize and appreciate the reasons against their own view.

Greenwashing involves misleading a consumer into thinking a good or service is more environmentally friendly than it really is.↵
Greenwashing ranges from making environmental claims required by law, and therefore irrelevant (CFC-free for example), to puffery (exaggerating environmental claims) to fraud.↵
Researchers have shown that claims on products are often too vague or misleading.↵
Some products are labeled chemical-free, when the fact is everything contains chemicals, including plants and animals.↵
Products with the highest number of misleading or unverifiable claims were laundry detergents, household cleaners, and paints.↵
Environmental advocates agree there is still a long way to go to ensure shoppers are adequately informed about the environmental impact of the products they buy.↵
The most common reason for greenwashing is to attract environmentally conscious consumers.↵
Many consumers do not find out about the false claims until after the purchase.↵
Therefore, greenwashing may increase sales in the short term.↵
However, this strategy can seriously backfire when consumers find out they are being deceived.↵
-> While greenwashing might bring a company profits temporarily by deceiving environmentally conscious consumers, the company will face serious trouble when the consumers figure out they were misinformed.

Any new or threatening situation may require us to make decisions and this requires information.↵
So important is communication during a disaster that normal social barriers are often lowered.↵
We will talk to strangers in a way we would never consider normally.↵
Even relatively low grade disruption of our life such as a fire drill or a very late train seems to give us the permission to break normal etiquette and talk to strangers.↵
The more important an event to a particular public, the more detailed and urgent the requirement for news becomes.↵
Without an authoritative source of facts, whether that is a newspaper or trusted broadcast station, rumours often run riot.↵
Rumours start because people believe their group to be in danger and so, although the rumour is unproven, feel they should pass it on.↵
For example, if a worker heard that their employer's business was doing badly and people were going to be made redundant, they would pass that information on to colleagues.

Mental development consists of individuals increasingly mastering social codes and signals themselves, which they can master only in social situations with the support of more competent individuals, typically adults.↵
In this sense, mental development consists of internalizing social patterns and gradually becoming a responsible actor among other responsible actors.↵
In Denmark, the age of criminal responsibility is 15 years, which means that we then say that people have developed sufficient mental maturity to be accountable for their actions at this point.↵
And at the age of 18 people are given the right to vote and are thereby formally included in the basic democratic process.↵
I do not know whether these age boundaries are optimal, but it is clear that mental development takes place at different rates for different individuals, and depends especially on the social and family environment they have been given.↵
Therefore, having formal limits for responsibility from a specific age that apply to everyone is a somewhat questionable practice.↵
But the question, of course, is whether it can be done any differently.

The well-known American ethnologist Alfred Louis Kroeber made a rich and in-depth study of women's evening dress in the West, stretching back about three centuries and using reproductions of engravings.↵
Having adjusted the dimensions of these plates due to their diverse origins, he was able to analyse the constant elements in fashion features and to come up with a study that was neither intuitive nor approximate, but precise, mathematical and statistical.↵
He reduced women's clothing to a certain number of features: length and size of the skirt, size and depth of the neckline, height of the waistline.↵
He demonstrated unambiguously that fashion is a profoundly regular phenomenon which is not located at the level of annual variations but on the scale of history.↵
For practically 300 years, women's dress was subject to a very precise periodic cycle: forms reach the furthest point in their variations every fifty years.↵
If, at any one moment, skirts are at their longest, fifty years later they will be at their shortest; thus skirts become long again fifty years after being short and a hundred years after being long.

It's often said that those who can't do, teach.↵
It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can't teach the basics.↵
A great deal of expert knowledge is implicit, not explicit.↵
The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals.↵
Experiments show that skilled golfers and wine aficionados have a hard time describing their putting and tasting techniques ― even asking them to explain their approaches is enough to interfere with their performance, so they often stay on autopilot.↵
When I first saw an elite diver do four and a half somersaults, I asked how he managed to spin so fast.↵
His answer: Just go up in a ball.↵
Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to clearly express all the steps to take.↵
Their brain dump is partially filled with garbage.

It would seem obvious that the more competent someone is, the more we will like that person.↵
By competence, I mean a cluster of qualities: smartness, the ability to get things done, wise decisions, etc.↵
We stand a better chance of doing well at our life tasks if we surround ourselves with people who know what they're doing and have a lot to teach us.↵
But the research evidence is paradoxical:↵
In problem-solving groups, the participants who are considered the most competent and have the best ideas tend not to be the ones who are best liked.↵
Why?↵
One possibility is that, although we like to be around competent people, those who are too competent make us uncomfortable.↵
They may seem unapproachable, distant, superhuman ― and make us look bad (and feel worse) by comparison.↵
If this were true, we might like people more if they reveal some evidence of fallibility.↵
For example, if your friend is a brilliant mathematician, superb athlete, and gourmet cook, you might like him or her better if, every once in a while, they screwed up.

The concern about how we appear to others can be seen in children, though work by the psychologist Ervin Staub suggests that the effect may vary with age.↵
In a study where children heard another child in distress, young children (kindergarten through second grade) were more likely to help the child in distress when with another child than when alone.↵
But for older children ― in fourth and sixth grade ― the effect reversed: they were less likely to help a child in distress when they were with a peer than when they were alone.↵
Staub suggested that younger children might feel more comfortable acting when they have the company of a peer, whereas older children might feel more concern about being judged by their peers and fear feeling embarrassed by overreacting.↵
Staub noted that older children seemed to discuss the distress sounds less and to react to them less openly than younger children.↵
In other words, the older children were deliberately putting on a poker face in front of their peers.↵
─> The study suggests that, contrary to younger children, older children are less likely to help those in distress in the presence of others because they care more about how they are evaluated.