Where do you think is the best place to live?

Perhaps you’d select Hawaii or some jewel in South America like Argentina or maybe amidst the glorious food and climate of southern France.

But if you are looking for places with the highest reported levels of happiness, then you would choose Denmark, Sweden, or Switzerland.  That’s right – citizens in those three countries are among the most satisfied people in the world.

What if you were looking to avoid the parts of the world that have the highest rates of suicide.  Where might you steer clear?  Perhaps certain parts of the Middle East or locales with awful climates? Continue reading →

Consider this experiment.  Students are asked to solve a word-find puzzle – a kind of puzzle where letters are arranged in a large grid and one must find certain words “hidden” within the sea of letters.  Students are paid for each puzzle they complete.

The payments work like this: after completing the first puzzle, $0.55 is awarded; $0.50 for the second puzzle, $0.45 for the third, and so on.  The student may complete as many puzzles as they’d like or choose to quit the experiment at any time and take the money they’ve accrued.

The experiment is broken into three groups of students.  In one group, known as acknowledged, when the student completes each puzzle and hands it in, the experimenter looks the puzzle over, gives an approving nod to the student, and puts the completed puzzle on to a stack of papers. Continue reading →

Three women and five men showed up at a hospital complaining that they were hearing strange voices.  Actually, each person went to a different hospital.  All eight of them were evaluated by highly trained personnel, subsequently diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, and each admitted into the hospital.

After admission, each patient told the staff they no longer heard the voices and acted perfectly normal.

They acted perfectly normal because they were perfectly normal.  One was a pediatrician, one a housewife, one a painter, three were psychologists, one a psychiatrist, and one was a student.  This was a clandestine experiment conducted by the psychologist David Rosenhan to test the nature of labeling and pattern fitting. Continue reading →

I studied three semesters of French in high school and, embarrassingly, can’t speak a word of the lovely language.  But all these years later, I’ve never forgotten the phrase: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.  Its meaning is quite profound, but I hardly knew it then.

Voltaire published the satire Candide in the mid-1700s in which the hero (Candide) lives an ideal, sheltered existence only to have it shattered into a life of great hardships and disappointments.  Through extraordinary adventures in which Candide and his friends narrowly escape death on several occasions, Candide cultivates a belief system counter to his mentor, the philosopher Pangloss.

Pangloss believes that everything that occurs in life is perfect, and that the universe is the best possible one that God could have created.  Borrowing heavily (and satirically deriding) the philosophy of Leibniz, Voltaire makes it clear that spiritual growth is not possible following a path of blind optimism.  Continue reading →

Why is it that we often have such a difficult time with self-control?  Perhaps we want to lose weight but we keep eating more than we should.  Or we say we want to exercise more or practice a new skill, but we get so easily waylaid onto something more “desirable” including doing nothing.

We all know that self-control is essential for achieving goals, yet we succumb to the impulses of temporary thrills, lethargy, or distraction.  Is there any hope for lasting success?  Legends from Greek mythology applied to current behavioral patterns suggest the answer is yes.

But first, a brief detour into the nature of impulse control – with the help of Lindt chocolates. Continue reading →