If you want to best predict how you will behave, personality traits alone won’t tell you. Introverts don’t always act introverted. But how people react to particular situations is very consistent. You might be very shy around strangers but you may be very talkative around close friends.

If ...

Peer pressure isn’t good or bad – your peers are. If you moved your troubled teen to a new high school filled with well-behaved students, would you be hoping your child was immune to peer pressure — or very susceptible? We learn some of our best qualities by being open to the praise or criticism ...

Want to be healthier? “The Longevity Project”, which studied over 1000 people from youth to death, came to the conclusion that: “The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. For people who want improved health, association with other healthy people is usually the s...

Surround yourself with people you admire and striving to be liked becomes a more elegant striving to be a better you.

Internalizing the lesson of strategic peer pressure can also make you a more compassionate person.

Realizing that personal change comes from social change, that we are...

It’s now widely accepted that when trying to predict behaviour it’s usually more effective to look at someone’s surroundings than to ask what kind of person they are. Simply put context matters.

And the biggest factor in context is usually other people. For proof, look no f...

Happy friends make you 15% more likely to be happy. And, like obesity, this effect spans three degrees. Happy friends of friends increase your odds of smiling by 10% and friends of friends of friends still add 6% to your chances.

With each friend boosting the likelihood of happiness by 9%...

We’re never utterly autonomous. We’re social creatures. Why not leverage our fundamental nature rather than (often futilely) resist it? Sometimes we’re weak on our own but groups are strong. We need others to help us do the right thing, even with individual goals. The logical conclusion is to be ...

When you use strategic peer pressure and increase your time with those you want to be like, you must still make an effort to make good choices. Because you’re now part of that network. Your bad behaviour can influence others and reduce the overall good of the group — which will eventually circle ...

What if you did this on your own, for yourself, in service of your goals? What if we need more peer pressure, not less? Improving yourself is hard. So instead of asking for a new brain for Christmas, it might be smarter to change your context than to directly try and change yourself. They say you...

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Sometimes it’s quite deliberate but more often it’s unconscious. We’re just wired for it. This is what it means when we say humans are a social species. This tendency toward imitation underlies empa...