Maria Konnikova (2016)

Thanks so much! I think Kahneman has done some incredible work, and I've definitely been influenced by his research. I will say that I'm probably more influences by psychologists than economists, but I will also say that Kahneman is a psychologist! I think psychology can contribute a huge amount to game theory: in order to model behaviors correctly, you first need to understand them at a deep level.

Hmmm...maybe they mean this one on the Stanford Prison Experiment? http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment. Let me know if that seems right!

What a great question. I am incredibly lucky to hear from complete strangers fairly often, and each time I do, it's a wonderful thing. The story that sticks out is a young boy - I think he was nine or ten - who came to my first ever reading, at the launch of MASTERMIND. He asked me if he was too young to learn to think like Holmes, and I assured him he wasn't. I later got a note from his mom, that the interaction and the book had made a huge difference for him. I think that's the greatest thing that could possibly happen to a writer.

Great question. I think it was a piece I did on a program to fight poverty in the Arkansas Delta. It was devastating to see how endemic the problems were, and it was incredibly difficult to write the piece in a nuanced way. I was also using someone's life story as the backbone of the narrative - and that is hard to do without feeling exploitative. (If you're interested, here is the story: https://psmag.com/bringing-the-rural-poor-into-the-digital-economy-eaad0a2ff8fa#.ewsm2qw08)

Books I re-read: there are many. A lot of poetry (a lot of Auden). Alice in Wonderful. Winnie the Pooh. The Little Prince. The Master and Margarita. The Great Gatsby. I'll be here all day if I don't stop :)

Have quiet spaces where people can go - and don't penalize them for going there. There is often an implicit bias against people who want to use an office. Others see them as standoffish, or not a team player. That perception absolutely has to change. Everyone deserves quiet. Also, I'd invest in building materials that absorb noise and have policies against loud conversation in certain parts of the space - like a quiet car for coworking spaces!

Just how much damage we do to ourselves when we undersleep - how profound it is, how little time it takes to happen, and how long it takes to recover. Sometimes, you can't recover! The craziest thing is that we stop noticing sleep deprivation after a few days. We think we are functioning at our best, while all objective measures show a huge loss in cognitive function. We are too sleep deprived to realize we are sleep deprived!

Thank you! I would say: write and speak, over and over and over. And always listen to feedback. It took me a very long time to hone my writing and presentation, and I am still working at it. The only way to get better is to keep doing it, and then keep doing it some more.

Read a lot. Be curious. Study things that interest you, not things you think will be useful to you. And write, a lot. Write in your free time. Write about anything and everything, just for yourself. Make sure you truly love it. I don't think you can become a good writer because you want to write for the New Yorker. I think you end up writing for TNY because you intrinsically loved to write and worked hard at becoming a good writer.

All of the best ones! I think you need to in order to be a great fiction writer. Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Bulgakov...so many!!

Impossible to answer. Most cheese is wonderful. In my prior life I think I was a mouse. Probably a French one, because I do have a slight bias toward those.

I think it would be one thing, really, but it would amount to vastly more than five things at the end of the day: I'd want to see the difference in how people respond to me as a man rather than a woman. At work, on the streets, in my interactions. From what I know of psychology, the world will change drastically in that day, and my perspective will undergo a profound change. I want to see what insights would emerge on the other side. Interesting side note: there are fascinating new studies on VR and how it affects perception. So your thought experiment could actually end up being possible.

No idea, but I'm super happy they do. There are some supremely talented artists here!

No. This is as close as I got: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/casual-sex-everyone-is-doing-it. Perhaps ask Dr. Vrangalova!

Both: I think it's definitely a problem, but it has been misinterpreted in a lot of media coverage. This does NOT mean all of psychology is flawed, nor that all of the studies that aren't reproduced are flawed. Replications fail for any number of reasons. It does mean we have a responsibility to be extremely careful. I will also say that this is a big problem in all of science (and research), not just psych, but the coverage makes it seem like psych is having a "crisis" and everything else is just fine.

It's really difficult to interpret who someone is based on a public persona. No clinical psychologist worth her salt would ever pass judgment on someone she hasn't met in person. It's ethically irresponsible. That said, we can certianly interpret behaviors and how they appear (I've absolutely done that). We just can't form definitive psychological judgments. It's easy to veer from science to pseudoscience when you do that - one of the reasons Freudianism was so discredited. It tried to explain everyone and everything at a distance. (Freud himself didn't do that, but his followers weren't as careful.)

I think this comes down more to individuals than to genders. Let me say what I always say when asked about gender differences: differences within each gender are almost always greater than those between genders. Different types of people certainly interpret their happiness differently, but I think other dimensions of personality may be far more important here than gender.

Sorry! I've never written about teacher abuse of power, so may be a mis-reference...

The closest thing I've written about is resilience, which isn't quite the same thing. Here's a link all the same, in case it's interesting! http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-secret-formula-for-resilience

Ha! I'm not sure I've internalized it yet. I'm great about focussing, but not always as great on coöperation.

Superman.

Request duly noted :).

Thank you for the nice aside! And yes, it definitely has. I'd like to think it has made me less quick to jump to conclusions about anyone. I always think about all the different things that might be affecting how they are coming off to me, and how I am perceiving them. Even something as little as whether we all got enough sleep. So...I strive to be as nuanced and non-judgmental as I can. Of course, I don't always succeed. But I do my best.

All I will say to that is the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior!

Thank you!

Let me give you some of my favorite non-fiction writers! Writing today: Michael Lewis, Steven Pinker, Erik Larson, David Grann immediately come to mind. I love Dave Epstein's "The Sports Gene" and am thinking of it a lot now because of the Olympics. I love essays by fiction writers who also happen to be masterful non-fiction prose stylists, like WH Auden and Joseph Brodsky. On science, I love Richard Feynman - and Einstein's work for the general public is surprisingly wonderful. There are too many to continue listing them all!

I can't pick! But I think my most important article health-wise is the series I did on sleep. It is vastly undervalued in our society, and so incredibly important.

There's no good research to show that it is. My advice: if it works for you, go for it. Scientifically, there's no evidence that it does much. But I'm a huge fan of the placebo effect: our mind does phenomenal things, and if we think something works, it very well may end up working.

I think all of those dichotomies are false ones, and most present-day psychologists would agree. We know it's nature AND nurture, genetics AND environment, etc. Always an and rather than a vs. There is no contest. And behaviorism has a lot to contribute: many things really are the result of learned associations, and Skinner and Watson did a great deal for the field by their research. The danger is in taking it too far and reducing everything to behavior. That doesn't work, and a lot of psychology reacted against it because people tend to flee from extremes. Skinner was fleeing Freud. And then people in turn fled Skinner. People are nuanced, and extreme approaches, while appealing, tend to lead to simplistic and incorrect conclusions.

No, but it makes my BS radar go off quite loudly!

Feel absolutely free to quote me on this :). Not that I carry much weight with professors, but very happy to be associated with this opinion!

I'd just hypnotize everyone with my psychic abilities, naturally.

Of course! Our sleep cycle is effectively reset every time we wake up. When our alarm initially rings, especially if we set it for the same time every day, our body has been preparing us for wake-up. When you hit snooze, you re-enter sleep, but your snooze isn't long enough to go through a full cycle so you wake up at the wrong time and are even groggier than before. That's why naps can be dangerous, as well, if improperly timed. It's quite bad to be awoken out of deep sleep. It takes us far longer to get over our sleep equivalent of jet lag.