Category: Jobs and professional relationships

  • Your nontransitive preferences are driving me crazy!

    One of the great frustrations of daily life, not to mention neoclassical economics, is nontransitive preferences. Huh? In English, transitive preferences would mean that if B is better than A, and if C is better than B, then C must be better than A. But in daily life—when dealing with children or coworkers, for example—we…

  • Dealing with the distrusted: To schmooze or not to schmooze?

    At some point, most of us need to work with someone we don’t particularly trust. It’s not that we distrust them; it’s just that we have no basis for trust, along with the vague heebie-jeebies. Dealing with a potentially distrustworthy person is difficult—but more negotiable if we at least try to schmooze, defined unscientifically but…

  • The hidden benefits of trust

    Managers among us, wouldn’t it be great if the people we manage were happier and more motivated in 2016? Wouldn’t that immediately make life more negotiable? Well, here’s a deceptively simple path to a better 2016: trust your employees a little more than you were planning to. “Yeah yeah,” you say. “I’ve heard that before,…