relationships

Mathematician Hannah Fry's TED talk on patterns in dating and mate-seeking, including optimal stopping and three math-backed tips for finding a partner.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

Clayton Christensen's TEDx talk applying business theory to personal life. He argues that career success is not the right measure of a life and urges attention to relationships and values.

Audio of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment, laying out a framework of cognitive biases and mental models for decision making. It covers factors like incentives, social proof and denial.

Hans Rosling and his son Ola run an audience quiz with global population, health and income data to show how wrong most people are about the world. Ola then gives four ways to get less ignorant.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

Adam Conover's talk at a millennial marketing conference argues that generations are an unscientific, condescending idea and that millennials do not exist as a real category. The description notes that researcher Jean Twenge later said he misrepresented some of her work.

Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

A four-minute TED talk in which Derek Sivers argues that announcing your goals can make you less likely to achieve them. He cites psychology research going back to the 1920s.

Black musician Daryl Davis tells how a chance encounter led him to befriend Ku Klux Klan members and seek the source of racial hate. He argues that sitting down and talking with people can change them.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

An excerpt of the 2005 Harvard debate in which Steven Pinker gives his prepared case on biological sex differences and the under-representation of women in science. It covers cross-cultural patterns in preferences and abilities and the overlap between male and female distributions.

Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.

Civilization creator Sid Meier's GDC 2010 talk on applying psychology to game design. He discusses player perception, randomness, and win states, and why designers must account for how players experience events.

Johann Hari's TED talk arguing that addiction is driven largely by disconnection and environment rather than chemical hooks alone. He draws on his personal experience with addicted relatives and on research and policy examples from around the world.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in this TED talk that abundant choice makes people more paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier.

Hans Rosling's TEDxSummit talk asks whether some religions have higher birth rates and how that affects population growth. He charts data across time and religions and reaches a surprising conclusion about fertility.

Eduardo Briceno gives a TEDx talk on mindset, contrasting fixed and growth views of ability. He argues that believing abilities can be developed encourages challenge, deliberate practice and grit.

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen explains in a TEDx talk why Germany has lower crime and far fewer prisoners than the US, and what American criminal justice could learn from German prisons.

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on race, justice and history in America. Baldwin argues that the American dream came at the expense of Black Americans.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

Documentary filmmaker Cassie Jaye explains how making The Red Pill led her, a feminist, to reevaluate her assumptions about the Men's Rights movement. She argues for listening to people you think of as the enemy.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Moral philosopher James Flynn explains the Flynn effect, the steady rise of IQ scores across the 20th century. He argues the shift reflects a move toward abstract, hypothetical thinking as cognitively demanding professions grew.

Julia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Simon Sinek's 99U talk on why leaders earn trust by putting their team's safety ahead of their own, drawing on biology and anthropology. It distills the ideas of his book Leaders Eat Last into about 46 minutes.

Clinical psychologist Dr Michael Yapko draws on forty years of practice and research to explain skills that help people recover from, and even prevent, depression. He emphasizes cognitive and social factors beyond medication.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

Dan Pink's TED talk argues that traditional carrot-and-stick rewards often fail for creative work, drawing on the candle problem and social science research. He points to autonomy, mastery and purpose as better motivators.

A Google Tech Talk by Sebastian Deterding on gamification. It looks at what points and badges get wrong and what lessons game design offers for non-game applications.

BJ Fogg of Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab argues that lasting change comes from tiny habits, such as flossing one tooth or doing one pushup, anchored to things you already do.

Kathy Sierra's Fluent 2015 keynote on the one metaskill for developers: the ability to come up to speed quickly and stay there. She covers how people learn, cognitive resources versus willpower, and building skill.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

Stephen Duneier describes a decision-making approach that took him from struggling with simple tasks to achieving ambitious goals. The talk centers on breaking goals into small marginal adjustments.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents his moral foundations research in a TED talk. He argues that liberals and conservatives weigh a different set of moral values, which helps explain political divides.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert argues in this TED talk that our psychological immune system lets us become happy even when things do not go as planned. He challenges the idea that we will be miserable if we do not get what we want.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.