Chronotype
What Chronotype Is, and What It Says About Your Personality
Some people open their eyes before any alarm goes off and are already thinking clearly by seven in the morning. Others, at that same hour,…
7 min readRead
Blog
Articles on personality, psychology, and curiosities, on the positive side, to go along with our tests.
Chronotype
The Scientist Who Went Into a Cave to Discover Chronotype
On July 16, 1962, a 23yearold French caver descended 130 meters underground, into a cave in the Alps, with no watch, no calendar, and no wa…
7 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
How to Read Wounded Pride Without Saying a Word: Talleyrand's Lesson
Talleyrand staged two fake hunts, one right after the other, to play a joke on the most powerful man in France. Napoleon never quite forgav…
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
The Psychology of Never Committing to Anyone: Kissinger's Double Game in 1968
In 1968, while the United States chose its president, a foreign policy adviser with no official position did something unusual: he promised…
6 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
The Psychological Power of Mystery: Mata Hari's Incomplete Lesson
When Margaretha Zelle arrived in Paris in 1904, she had half a franc in her pocket and no experience as a dancer. A year later, half of Eur…
6 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
The Psychological Price of Never Fully Belonging to Anyone: The Life of Alcibiades
Alcibiades managed, at some point in his life, to make Athens, Sparta, and Persia all want him close at the same time. He also managed, bef…
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Selective Honesty: The Sincere Gesture That Disarmed Al Capone
In 1926, a man who introduced himself as a count asked Al Capone for 50,000 dollars. Two months later he walked back into Capone's office a…
6 min readRead
Attachment Style
Anxious-Anxious Compatibility: When Both Alarms Go Off at Once
AnxiousAnxious Compatibility: A Lot of Involvement, Not Much Spare Calm Two people with anxious attachment tend to build bonds deeply focus…
1 min readRead
Attachment Style
Attachment Style Compatibility: The Ten Possible Combinations
Attachment Style Compatibility: Ten Different Ways of Bonding as a Couple Each attachment style (secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganize…
2 min readRead
Attachment Style
How Your Attachment Style Shows Up Inside a Relationship
Attachment in Relationships: The Pattern Doesn't Look the Same Once You're in a Stable Bond Knowing your attachment style is the first step…
3 min readRead
Attachment Style
Avoidant-Avoidant Compatibility: Calm, But Sometimes Distant
AvoidantAvoidant Compatibility: When No One Pursues, But No One Reaches Out Either Two people with avoidant attachment rarely enter the pur…
1 min readRead
Big Five
Big Five vs. 16 Personalities: Which Test Should You Take First?
Big Five and 16 Personalities start from a different decision about how to describe a person: one uses continuous scales, the other uses cl…
3 min readRead
Attachment Style
Anxious-Disorganized Compatibility: When Reassurance Is Never Quite Enough
AnxiousDisorganized Compatibility: Looking for Certainty in Someone Who Can't Offer It Steadily The pairing of anxious attachment and disor…
2 min readRead
Attachment Style
Anxious-Secure Compatibility: When the Alarm Finally Gets a Steady Answer
AnxiousSecure Compatibility: An Alarm System That Finally Gets Answered The pairing of anxious attachment and secure attachment is, accordi…
2 min readRead
Attachment Style
Disorganized-Secure Compatibility: Holding the Bond When the Signals Keep Changing
DisorganizedSecure Compatibility: A Stable Base Facing Signals That Keep Shifting The pairing of disorganized attachment and secure attachm…
2 min readRead
Attachment Style
Avoidant-Disorganized Compatibility: Predictable Distance Meets Mixed Signals
AvoidantDisorganized Compatibility: When Constant Distance Meets Shifting Signals Avoidant attachment keeps a relatively constant distance.…
1 min readRead
Attachment Style
Avoidant-Secure Compatibility: Space That Doesn't Get Read as Rejection
AvoidantSecure Compatibility: When Asking for Space Doesn't Set Off an Alarm The pairing of avoidant attachment and secure attachment tends…
2 min readRead
Attachment Style
Disorganized-Disorganized Compatibility: The Combination With the Highest Volatility
DisorganizedDisorganized Compatibility: Two BackandForths With No Stable Base Disorganized attachment combines, within a single person, two…
1 min readRead
Enneagram
Enneagram vs. 16 Personalities: Two Different Ways of Typing Yourself
The Enneagram and 16 Personalities look like cousins because both sort people into named categories, but they answer different questions: o…
3 min readRead
Attachment Style
Secure-Secure Compatibility: The Reference Combination
SecureSecure Compatibility: When Neither Partner Needs to Activate the Alarm System Of the ten possible combinations between the four attac…
1 min readRead
Business and Decisions
What the Tao Te Ching Teaches About Leadership and Negotiation (and What Current Research Confirms)
Sun Tzu has his own aisle in every business bookstore. Lao Tzu doesn't, and that's a shame: the Tao Te Ching says more about how to lead wi…
6 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Wu Wei: What the Tao Te Ching Says About Effort (and What Cognitive Science Confirms)
The harder you try to fall asleep, the more awake you stay. The harder you try not to think about something, the more it comes back.
6 min readRead
Self-Awareness
The Smarter Brain Burns Less Energy, Not More
Over half an hour, a group of people were injected with a small dose of radioactive glucose and asked to solve reasoning problems. The bett…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
The 2,000-Year-Old Advice Psychology Took a Century to Take Seriously
In the 1st century AD, a Roman teacher was already telling other teachers to watch closely for differences in talent among their students.…
5 min readRead
Self-Awareness
The Test That Predicted Road Deaths Better Than Medical History
A study of more than fortysix thousand men, tracked over years, compared 57 different variables to predict which of them would die before t…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Nearsightedness and Intelligence: The Unsolved Mystery
Children in gifted classes have three to five times more nearsightedness than their classmates in regular classes. Nobody, not even the res…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
What Your Brain Decides in a Fifth of a Second
Before you finish reading this sentence, your brain will already have completed, several times over, a process scientists have spent more t…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Chess Grandmasters Don't Have a Better Memory Than You
Give a chess grandmaster any memory test, with no piece or board in sight. They'll perform about as well as any college student.
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Why Two Strangers Raised in the Same House End Up Nothing Alike
Two identical twins, separated at birth and raised by families that never knew each other, end up about as alike in IQ as two siblings who…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
What Is Intelligence? Not Even the Experts Agree
They've been at it for more than a century. Entire university departments are devoted to it.
5 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Your Brain Responds to a Click Before You Know What It Is
An electrode on the scalp. A click, repeated hundreds of times, every few seconds, for several minutes.
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Why the End of Summer Hits Your Brain Harder Than Winter Itself
In late September, long before any real cold arrives, something starts to shift inside the brain. And according to the most recent neurosci…
6 min readRead
Projective Tests
Arno Stern, the Man Who Found the Same Drawing in Children Everywhere on Earth
Arno Stern turned 100 on June 23, 2024. He died a week later, on June 30, in France.
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
How a Freshman Senator Came to Control the US Senate in Four Years
In December 1948, a veteran senator from Texas decided to teach the newly elected Lyndon B. Johnson a lesson in humility, deliberately hand…
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
The 3,000-Year-Old Complaint That Explains How Every Generation Sees Business Failure
Around 1000 BC, someone carved this complaint into a Babylonian tablet: "The youth of today are rotten and wicked, godless and lazy. They w…
5 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Why Even Isaac Newton Lost His Fortune in the First Great Stock Market Bubble
In the summer of 1720, the most traded stock in England represented no real business at all: it represented public debt disguised as opport…
6 min readRead
Attachment Style
The Psychologist Who Described 'Phone Addiction' in 2012, Before the Term Existed
"I don't talk to people, they talk to me and I ignore them, I laugh to myself, I never look up. I'm worried, what do you think I have?" a p…
4 min readRead
Attachment Style
Why Swapping 'I Need You' for 'I Prefer You' Can Heal a Dependent Relationship
"I'm sorry, but you are not my happiness. No, you're not, and that's why I'm setting myself free.
5 min readRead
Attachment Style
Seven Things You Might Be Attached to Without Realizing It, and None of Them Is a Person
When people talk about "attachment," they almost always think of love. But psychologist Walter Riso documents, in his book Desapegarse sin…
5 min readRead
Lifestyle and Attitudes
The Englishman Who Invented the Scottish Kilt (and the Welshman Who Invented His Own Druids)
Ask any Scot which tartan belongs to their clan and they'll tell you without a second's hesitation. Few suspect that certainty, and the ver…
7 min readRead
Self-Awareness
The Doorway Threshold: Why Crossing It Is Actually a Ritual
Bowing before a doorway. Kissing it.
7 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
Why You Transform at Local Festivals
Every August, thousands of towns and cities across Spain pause for a few days to celebrate what their neighbors have been celebrating for g…
8 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
Why a Hair in Your Soup Disgusts You More Than a Hair on Your Head
It's the exact same hair. Same substance, same origin, same chemical makeup.
6 min readRead
Self-Awareness
What Happens to the Human Mind During an Eclipse
Tomorrow, August 12, 2026, the sky genuinely darkens over much of Spain. And with it, something far older than astronomy kicks into gear in…
8 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
Why Winning a World Cup Moves Us So Much, Explained by Psychology
July 19, 2026. Minute 106 of the World Cup final.
7 min readRead
Projective Tests
What Your House, Your Tree, and Your Person Say, According to Buck's H-T-P Method (and What the Real Evidence Says)
Three blank sheets of paper. A house.
5 min readRead
Projective Tests
What Your Family Drawing Says, According to Corman's Method (and What the Real Evidence Says)
Draw a family. Not yours.
6 min readRead
Projective Tests
What the Wartegg Test Measures: All 8 Fields, With the Real Evidence
Eight small boxes. Each with something already drawn inside: a dot, a line, a curve.
5 min readRead
Projective Tests
What Your Animal Drawing Says, According to Levy's Method (Tested Against Real Data)
A blank sheet of paper. A single instruction: draw an animal.
6 min readRead
Projective Tests
What Your Tree Drawing Says, According to Koch's Method (and What the Real Evidence Says)
Draw a tree. The trunk.
6 min readRead