Adam Grant to Explore the Psychology of Unconventional Workplaces as Host of Upcoming New TED Original Podcast “WorkLife” Organizational psychologist, professor, bestselling author and TED speaker Adam Grant is set to host a new TED original podcast series titled WorkLife with Adam Grant, which will explore unorthodox work cultures in search of surprising and actionable […]
Brian Little is one of those professors everyone adores. Students sit starry-eyed in his class, hanging on his every word, and they line up at his door during office hours. But on the TED stage, he shares a secret: “I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine.” After interacting with students, he […]
Most human beings can tell the difference between a smirk and a smile. Our computers and devices, however? Not so much. Fifteen years ago, Rana el Kaliouby left her home in Egypt to study computer science at Cambridge. With her husband at home, she found herself homesick. “I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than any other human,” she […]
Dan Gilbert gave his first TED Talk in February 2004; The surprising science of happiness was one of the first we ever published, in September 2006. Here, the Harvard psychologist reminisces about the impact of TED, shares some suggestions of useful further reading — and owns up to some mistakes. When I gave this talk in 2004, the […]
How does being rich affect the way we behave? In today’s talk, social psychologist Paul Piff provides a convincing case for the answer: not well. “As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases,” he says in […]
“We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories,” declares psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in today’s talk. She’s spent the past forty years studying the memory, and has reached some mind-blowing conclusions about what we know, and what we think we know. Here, she shares more detail about her work, and suggests further reading for anyone […]
Elizabeth Loftus studies false memories. As she describes in her TED Talk, The fiction of memory, she has implanted erroneous memories of childhood trauma into adult study subjects as part of her work. She has pinpointed failures in eyewitness testimonies. She’s found that misinformation can reshape taste preferences. And, she’s found that people in stressful […]
Aerialist Nik Wallenda looks down and sees the 1,500-foot drop to the bottom of the Grand Canyon below him. All that stands between him and a lethal landing is the 2-inch tightrope that he has decided to traverse on camera, the moment being broadcast around the world on live television. If most people were to […]
You have a choice: You can read this blog post, or not. Simple. Or you can read one of 80 other blog posts from this conference. Which to choose? At TED we’re no strangers to the paradox of choice, but today Slovene philosopher Renata Salecl takes a different look at choice, chance and how they […]
Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal is here to talk about stress. In particular, she’s here to make the case that stress might not, in fact, be the enemy we tend to think it is. To do this, she asks those assembled in the conference hall in Edinburgh to indicate how much stress they’ve felt in the past year. […]
In the wilds of planet Earth, there exists a species so creative that it not only uses tools but is constantly rewriting the rules of what a tool can be, so cooperative that they build wildly complex systems to support each other and so consternating that its inconsistent behavior would make even the most seasoned […]
“For the past five years we’ve been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world,” says Alex Laskey in today’s TED Talk, given at this year’s 2013 conference in Long Beach. “And, it’s working.” Laskey’s company Opower partners with utility companies to deliver personalized home energy reports, all based off the insight that people are […]
At TED2012, Jon Ronson wove a mind-bending tale that asks: How can we truly tell who is a psychopath? What’s the line between crazy and sane? And is it something we can truly delineate, or are we trying to discern black and white in a color-soaked world? Today’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post picks up […]
Philip Zimbardo knows evil inside and out. He led the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 and was an expert witness at Abu Ghraib, privy to graphic unseen images. At TED2008, Zimbardo explains how easy it is for the good to turn evil, and on the flip side, for inspiration to lead people to heroism. […]
Watch James Flynn’s TED Talk: “Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’ Jim Flynn is an expert in intelligence famous for his research on the Flynn effect, the phenomenon that humanity’s IQ has been dramatically increasing since the 1930s. He opens Session 11 today on the last day of TED2013 to help answer […]
Turn up the radio! TED Radio Hour’s second season begins today. Hosted by NPR’s Guy Raz, the first episode is “The Unquiet Mind,” a beautifully soundscaped hour of inspiration that will make you think differently about, well, thinking. We’ve all had that moment when you see or hear something and wonder: am I going crazy? […]