Quotes from Maria Konnikova

As our understanding of fraud evolves, we might one day be able to develop predictive algorithms that could identify would-be con artists based on patterns of behavior.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can't quite accept that he's gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don't put pen to paper, I reinforce his life's work with my reluctance.

Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.

The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.

There will be great books. There will be great films. Sometimes, if we are lucky, the two will intersect.

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.

Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

To a child, 'The Little Prince' is the story of a boy who falls from the sky, meets lots of funny people on his travels, and then returns to his star. But take a closer look and you find as clear a commentary on everything that's wrong with modern life - and what can be done to fix it - as you would in the most biting social satire.

At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party.

Before I found out what poker really was I had this picture in my mind of men smoking cigars and having all these chips and like going all macho and crazy. I don't think there's been that much done in the mainstream community to change that perspective.

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.

I really had to go back and remind myself that trusting makes society function on an individual level related to health and on a social level related to economic growth and development.

Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

I hate casinos. I have zero interest in gambling.

Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.

The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information - and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

We don't remember everything that happens to us on a given day: sometimes, we remember something simply because it's emotional, while, at other times, we work our way through mundane details to figure out why something matters.