Imagine we are attempting to design a stock picking model that will outperform the market over the next ten years. After a great deal of forensic research and testing we finalise our approach. Although we couldn’t know this in advance, the system we devise is optimal – there is no better way of tackling the…

Every year on my birthday (January 5), I like to conduct some interesting exercise that will push me to grow in a new way. In past years, I’ve written gratitude letters to all of my close family and friends, gone on a 10-hour silent walk, and done a lengthy self-reflection process. But this year felt…

What is greed good for? Greed is ubiquitous, suggesting that it must have some benefits, but it is also often condemned. In a representative sample of the Dutch population (N = 2,367, 51.3% female, Mage = 54.06, SD = 17.90), we examined two questions. First, inspired by Eriksson et al., we studied whether greedy people generate more personal and household…

I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However, I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating psychology to an understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and published mostly…