CEO Learns What Happens When You Run out of People to Blame

A CEO has taken on a new job, and the outgoing CEO says to him, "Sometimes you'll make wrong choices. You will. You'll mess up. When that ...

Author Michael Crichton on the Power of False Information

In 1998, Michael Crichton, author of the best-seller Jurassic Park, wrote a book entitled State of Fear, a fictional look at a global disaster caused ...

Outthinking Burglars or Playing into Their Hands?

If we knew the most likely place a thief might strike would we react differently? The front door and first-floor window are the most common places burglars ...

Boy's Hoax Teaches Valuable Lesson

Ever hear about the dihydrogen monoxide hoax? It's been around for a while, but it got a lot of media attention in 1997 when a 14-year-old student ...

Being Afraid of the Light

If there is a terror about darkness because we cannot see, there is also a terror about light because we can see. There is a terror about light because ...

Research on Honesty and Deceit

In 2008, New York Magazine ran a comprehensive article about research concerning kids and lying. In one study researchers gathered a group of children ...

Hollywood Director on Detecting Fraud

It's gotten to the point that our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it.

—Andrew Niccol, U. S. screenwriter, producer, ...

French Investor Caught for $7 Billion Fraud

Have you ever gotten yourself in big trouble—really, really big trouble? So big you can't even conceive of how much trouble you're in? That's ...

Why We Lie

Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in studying forms of human deception, asked college ...

Changed Tax Rule Forces Honesty

In their book Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explain how a simple change to U. S. tax rules in 1987 exposed the depth of the public's ...