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 wavy line, a curve. The task is to complete the drawings.
5 min readRead
Blog: page 6
Projective Tests
What Your Animal Drawing Says, According to Levy's Method (Tested Against Real Data)
A blank sheet of paper and a single instruction: draw an animal, whichever one you want. That's how a technique published in 1958 begins, o…
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, the canopy and, if you like, the roots. In 1949 that instruction gave rise to one of the most widely used drawing t…
5 min readRead
Love Languages
Quality Time: Being Truly Present
Quality time: truly being present For people whose main language is quality time, affection is measured in attention, not total time spent…
5 min readRead
16 Personalities
What's the Most Common Personality Type?
The MyersBriggs Type Indicator (MBTI) sorts personality into 16 distinct types based on four basic dichotomies. No profile is better than a…
4 min readRead
16 Personalities
What's the Rarest Personality Type?
The MyersBriggs Type Indicator (MBTI) sorts personality into 16 types that combine four preferences. Of all the combinations, the INFJ (Int…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Dissociative Fugue: The Preacher Who Lived Two Months as Another Man
On January 17, 1887, a Rhode Island preacher withdrew 551 dollars from the bank, boarded a horsecar and vanished. Two months later he woke…
6 min readRead
Projective Tests
Direct Stroke: What It Means to Draw Fast Within a Small Space
If the Expressive Style quiz gave you direct stroke as a result, your drawing combined high stroke speed with limited use of the canvas: yo…
5 min readRead
Projective Tests
Spontaneous Stroke: What It Means to Draw Fast Across the Whole Canvas
If the Expressive Style quiz gave you spontaneous stroke as your result, your drawing combined a high stroke speed with broad use of the ca…
4 min readRead
Projective Tests
Exploratory Stroke: What It Means to Draw Slowly Across the Whole Canvas
If the Expressive Style quiz gave you exploratory stroke as your result, your drawing combined a low stroke speed with broad use of the can…
4 min readRead
Projective Tests
Meticulous Stroke: what it means to draw slowly and small
If the expressive style test gave you meticulous stroke as your result, your drawing combined two things: a low stroke speed (you moved slo…
6 min readRead
Work and Productivity
Three real stories behind 'The Leader Who Had No Title,' Robin Sharma's leadership fable
Behind Robin Sharma's mostcited leadership fable are three stories that actually happened, and they teach more about leadership than most o…
6 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Your Brain Responds to a Click Before You Know What It Is
An electrode on the crown of the head and a click repeated hundreds of times, every few seconds, for several minutes. The person doesn't ha…
6 min readRead
Character Strengths
The Virtue of Humanity: Love, Kindness, and Social Intelligence
The Virtue of Humanity: Caring for Others' WellBeing Caring for the people close to you, not just the community at large, is the thread tha…
6 min readRead
Character Strengths
The Virtue of Justice: Fairness and a Sense of Community
The Virtue of Justice: Building Community Some strengths only make sense in the company of others: of the six virtues Christopher Peterson…
5 min readRead
Character Strengths
The Virtue of Wisdom: Curiosity, Judgment, and Creativity
The Virtue of Wisdom: The Pleasure of Understanding Piling up facts is not the same as enjoying truly understanding something. That second…
5 min readRead
Character Strengths
The Virtue of Temperance: Restraint and Self-Regulation
The Virtue of Temperance: Restraint in the Face of Excess Acting with restraint when impulse pushes toward excess, without that being repre…
5 min readRead
Character Strengths
The Virtue of Transcendence: Gratitude, Hope, and Meaning
The Virtue of Transcendence: Connecting to Something Bigger Connecting with something beyond the immediate is, according to Christopher Pet…
5 min readRead
Character Strengths
The Virtue of Courage: Acting on Your Convictions
The virtue of courage: holding to what's right when it's hard Acting on your own convictions despite the risk, without that meaning an abse…
6 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Visionary Connector: Linking Ideas That Didn't Seem Related
The visionary connector style thinks in terms of longterm impact and is good at connecting ideas or people that didn't seem related at firs…
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
Relationships and Social Life
The FOMO That Won't Let You Enjoy the Plan Has a Way Out
In May 2004, a Harvard Business School student named Patrick McGinnis published a column in his school's newspaper with a decidedly unacade…
14 min readRead
Chronotype
Lack of Willpower or a Night Owl's Clock? What Science Separates Between Chronotype and Procrastination
In 2014, three management researchers published an uncomfortable experiment. Supervisors were asked to rate fictitious employees whose file…
12 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
Why We All Follow the Rules of a Snowball Fight When Nobody Ever Wrote Them Down
In December 2018, a 9yearold boy stood before the town board of Severance, Colorado, with a serious problem: in his town, throwing snowball…
17 min readRead
Self-Awareness
The Mandela Effect: Why Thousands of People Confidently Remember Something That Never Existed
Close your eyes and picture Pikachu. You probably see a lightningbolt tail with a black tip.
8 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
The Twenty-Minute Exercise Erich Fromm Recommended Before Trying to Love Better
Erich Fromm didn't believe love was a talent you're born with or without. He considered it an art, and like any art, he argued it demands p…
4 min readRead
Self-Awareness
The Third Man Factor: The Invisible Presence That Walks With Climbers and Castaways in Extreme Situations
In May 1916, three exhausted men crossed the frozen mountains of a South Atlantic island on foot to save their companions. Years later, one…
8 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
Music Chills: Why Some People Get Goosebumps From a Song and Others Never Do
A song you know comes on, that particular moment arrives, and a cold current runs up the back of your neck and makes the hair on your arms…
8 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Jamais Vu: Why a Word You Have Always Known Suddenly Looks Strange
You write a simple word, "door", say, and somewhere around the twentieth time something goes wrong. The letters are all in place and you kn…
7 min readRead
Big Five
Synesthesia: The People Who See Colors in Letters, and What It Reveals About Personality
For Vladimir Nabokov, the long a of the English alphabet "has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. " It…
9 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
Catharsis: why venting can fuel anger instead of putting it out
Hitting a punching bag while thinking about whoever drove you up the wall seems like the healthiest way to let rage out. In 2002, an Americ…
8 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
Active listening: why most of us hear the lyrics and miss the music
Two men are arguing at a table beside Lake Ohrid, in Macedonia. They have been talking over each other for a while, louder and louder.
8 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Bluffing: where strategy ends and lying begins in a negotiation
You never need to lie in a negotiation. That is the claim of Steve Gates, the founder of a consultancy that has spent years training negoti…
8 min readRead
Business and Decisions
Eye for an eye: why return only nine out of ten blows
About 3,750 years ago, a king of Babylon had a rule carved into a black stone more than two meters tall that we still repeat today: if a ma…
8 min readRead
Relationships and Social Life
Ostracism: why being left out really hurts (and what it can end up costing)
A man is in a park. Two strangers playing with a frisbee throw it to him and, for a while, the three of them play together.
7 min readRead
Learning Style
Aphantasia: The People Who Close Their Eyes and See Absolutely Nothing
If you close your eyes and think of the table where you ate breakfast this morning, can you see the mug, the color of the tablecloth, the l…
7 min readRead
Self-Awareness
What Is Déjà Vu? What Your Brain Is Really Doing When a Moment Feels Like a Rerun
You walk into a coffee shop for the first time and suddenly everything feels familiar: the light, the sentence someone just said, the clink…
7 min readRead
Work and Productivity
How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit? Why the 21-Day Rule Is a Myth
Twentyone days is the number that apps, books and motivational mugs all repeat, and it's wrong. The first study that actually measured how…
6 min readRead
Emotional Intelligence
The 1890 Self-Esteem Formula That Explains Why Silver Hurts More Than Bronze
In 1890, a Harvard professor wrote selfesteem down as if it were a gradeschool division problem. A century later, television cameras at the…
6 min readRead
Self-Awareness
How Does a Ouija Board Work? The Ideomotor Effect Behind the Moving Planchette
A few fingertips on a small wooden pointer, letters arranged in an arc, the lights turned down. The planchette starts to glide and nobody a…
6 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Pareidolia: Why Your Brain Sees Faces in Outlets, Clouds and Toast
A wall outlet stares at you in surprise. A cloud has a nose.
7 min readRead
Self-Awareness
Why Does Time Go Faster as You Get Older? What Time Perception Research Says
A childhood summer lasted forever. A year in your forties is gone in a blink.
6 min readRead