In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the excessive mental stress and discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time. This stress and discomfort may also arise within an individual who holds a belief and performs a contradictory action or reaction. For example, an individual is likely to experience dissonance if he or she is addicted to smoking cigarettes and continues to smoke despite believing it is unhealthy.
Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. ...
The quality of the Q&A on Stack Overflow continues to outshine any other on the Internet – thanks to the awesome community. Like any community, unspoken rules eventually become expectations. In the previous post in this series, Joel talks about how the community developed its own set of rules and norms that new recruits simply don’t know about. When a new comer walks into the group and puts her hand up for a high-five and gets chastised by the group because they don’t give high-fives, she walks away embarrassed with head hanging low. That’s unfortunate. …
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"The customer is always right" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that they should not feel cheated or deceived. This attitude was novel and influential when misrepresentation was rife and caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) was a common legal maxim. Variations include "le client n'a jamais tort" (the customer is neve...
The Thinker (') is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin, usually placed on a stone pedestal. The work shows a nude male figure of over life-size sitting on a rock with his chin resting on one hand as though deep in thought, and is often used as an image to represent philosophy. There are about 28 full size castings, in which the figure is about high, though not all were made during Rodin's lifetime and under his supervision, as well as various other versions, several in plaster, studies, and posthumous castings, in a range of sizes. Rodin first conceived the figure as part of another wor...
