rekordowe-miejsca: The Saga of Recluce

Evidence: 51 • authority: 88

Selfish and prosocial individuals both distort their actions’ impact, but selfish distortions can be more contagious. People often act without fully knowing how their actions impact others. Do people take advantage of this ambiguity to make themselves look good? And how do these distortions influence others? In a series of experiments (N=8,769), selfish individuals inflated how much their choice benefitted others and downplayed the social benefits of the alternative. Generous individuals, by contrast, portrayed their choice as having greater social benefit and inflated their relative sacrifice. We observed distortions even before people made a choice and when choices were forced. Although p…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Comments on the Grays' Four Hundred Year Cycle in Human Ability. In the Journal of Cycle Research (7:43–48, April, 1958) S.W. and N.E. Gray published “Evidence for a 400-Year Cycle in Human Ability”, which might have been more accurately called “Human Achievement” since ability refers to potential, but the 25,000 lives they reviewed were finished and realized. They took the names of historic personages listed in the 1935 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia and classified them, without rating or ranking, each as an equivalent unit, according to their occurrence in time; or, more exactly, counting how many individuals, eminent enough to have won inclusion in this encyclopedia, were alive in…

Evidence: — • authority: 65