A recent Harvard Business Review article co-authored by psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman gives a checklist approach to decision making at an institutional level to avoid biases.

Abraham Lincoln was careful about what he wrote. But it was his duel of 1842 with James Shields that really brought that cautious change. Dueling was a normal practice to challenge and sort out differences. Lincoln apologized and managed to avoid a potential disaster. America could have lost its president to a duel.

Warren Buffet calls it calculated, Ivan Boesky (1987 Wall Street Arbitrageur) said it’s good, Catholicism considers it one among the top seven sins and environmentalists may call it a disease.

Ziar Financiar, July 20, 2006

Human psychology is fascinatingly cyclical. Bank failures and manias mar the history of markets on a cyclical basis. Whatever the regulators may do to control frauds they invariably happen with the cyclical accuracy. The reason being that human behavior is patterned and mass psychology moves from confidence to optimism to greed and to fear to…