TIME

The psychology of influence

ONE OF EVOLUTION’S CLEVEREST tricks was giving us a sense of shame. It’s a miserable feeling—low, humbling, publicly discomfiting—but it’s supposed to be: if you do something lousy you ought to feel something lousy, so you don’t do it again.

In theory, when so many of the strategies for beating the COVID-19 pandemic depend on abiding by social distancing and other rules, shaming people who don’t ought to be a powerful way to

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from TIME

TIME7 min read
Catalysts
It’s been a long time since there was good news about Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition that affects more than 8 million people worldwide. But that changed this year, thanks in part to Michael J. Fox’s perseverance in raising awarene
TIME2 min read
A Man In Full, Adapted And Redacted
Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publicatio
TIME5 min read
The Golden Age Of Ryan Gosling Is Upon Us
In Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 love-on-the-rocks heartbreaker Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling plays a husband and father, Dean, who appears to be nothing but an annoyance to his wife, Michelle Williams’ Cindy, a harried nurse. She hustles to get their young

Related