Why Humans Thrive on Rituals
Perhaps most importantly, rituals help solve the central challenge of getting large groups of fiercely tribal primates to cooperate.
About Max Beilby
Max Beilby is a business-psychology practitioner working in the banking industry.
Entries by Max Beilby
The Status Game Doesn’t Have to Be Zero-Sum
Do you ever get a niggling feeling that other people are doing better than you? Don’t worry, we all do. And rest assured, social comparison isn’t a frivolous activity: “To our brains,” Will Storr writes in his new book The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It, “status is a resource as real […]
A Philosopher’s Toast to Getting Drunk
As workers across the corporate world have begun scuttering back into their offices, many of us are sneaking away with our comrades for a drink. Given the substantial hazards alcohol presents, what should our stance on drinking with our colleagues be? In his new book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, […]
The Double-Edged Nature of Cooperation
The pandemic has been a stark reminder of just how much we rely on one another. Like plagues of the past, the novel coronavirus has exploited our social nature. But our sociality is also our Get Out of Jail Free card. Billions of people complying with strict lockdowns and the race to roll-out COVID-19 vaccines in […]
Can Geopolitical Decision-Making Benefit from a Little Bias?
A well-established finding from modern psychology is that mentally healthy people are generally overconfident (with men being particularly cocky). What this body of research suggests is that we individually tend to overestimate our abilities, as well as our control over life events, and we also underestimate our vulnerability to risk. We tend to think more […]
The Obscure Medieval Roots of the Modern Psyche
Imagine you are in the city, riding in a car with a close friend, and he hits a pedestrian going 35 miles per hour. The speed limit is 20 miles per hour, but there are no witnesses. Your friend’s lawyer says that, if you testify under oath that he wasn’t speeding, it may save him […]
Culture Explains Our Weak Response to the Coronavirus
The sneakiness of the novel coronavirus has wreaked havoc worldwide.
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