NOTE TO SELFWORK AND VOCATION

Don’t fall victim to the Peter Principle

A man with white hair in a suit sitting at the head of an empty boardroom table, facing forward, back toward the camera. Dozens of empty chairs line the outer edges of the room; windows at the rear of the room show trees outside.

It’s fun stumbling upon psychological concepts in unexpected places. I remember first learning about the Johari Window (an obscure framework for thinking about the limits of self-knowledge) in the Robert Galbraith novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). It happened again the other day. I was enjoying the action thriller Nobody’s Hero (2024) by M W Craven – my middle-aged version of brain rot – when the hero Ben Koenig invoked the ‘Peter Principle’ – the idea that people tend to get promoted to the point of maximum incompetence.

Koenig is already a curious character for anyone interested in psychology. He has Urbach-Wiethe disease, which has calcified his right amygdala – apparently rendering him incapable of feeling fear (a handy attribute for an action hero). By dint of his training with various special forces, he’s also a repository of fun psychological wisdom, such as the Peter Principle, which he draws on to explain why the assassins have chosen to murder a bunch of mid-ranking infrastructure experts, rather than their superiors.

I checked it out, and the Peter Principle is a genuine concept that originated with a bestselling, semi-satirical book of the same name in 1969, co-written by two Canadians, the educationalist Laurence J Peter and the playwright Raymond Hull. There’s a simple logic to their idea – you keep performing well, you keep getting promoted, until you reach a managerial role at which you struggle and so you don’t get promoted again. Various studies have confirmed there’s a truth to the logic, at least in the context of sales, the military and academia.

I’m going to add the Peter Principle to my mental dictionary of psychological concepts – and use it as a reminder not to rest on my laurels. We can’t assume that the skills and knowledge that served us well in the past will be enough for whatever challenges we face in the future.

by Christian Jarrett

FIND OUT MORE

The article ‘The Reason Why People Become Incompetent at Work’ (2020) by David Robson discusses the Peter Principle in more detail.

The Psyche Guide ‘How to Get Promoted as a Woman’ (2020) by Jan Hills offers practical advice specifically geared towards female employees.


The benefits of thinking about deep time

A mountain peak with a walking path and hikers, under a clear blue sky with scattered clouds.

Last September, I took part in a ‘Deep Time Walk’: a 4.6 km hike through the Welsh countryside, mirroring 4.6 billion years of Earth history. As the kilometres passed, our guide took us from the Precambrian to the Holocene, stopping periodically to share pivotal moments: life’s origin, cataclysmic bombardments, mass extinctions. Every metre we stepped was a million years.

In the last moments of the walk – our legs well exercised by this point – our guide pulled out a tape measure. The last 30 cm of the 4.6 km, he explained, represent Homo Sapiens. The final half-centimetre? Recorded human history. And right at the end, some of humanity’s most consequential events – the invention of the printing press, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – could all squeeze into the final millimetre. After walking for kilometres through Earth’s past, I felt a sublime smallness, but also awe.

A growing body of research suggests there are myriad psychological benefits to feeling small in the face of nature’s vastness: it dampens the ego, and can foster feelings of humility, reciprocity and generosity. Most of these studies have focused on the physical world – boundless landscapes or the enormity of the cosmos, for instance – but one recent paper, by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, showed there are also upsides to experiencing smallness in time.

Rather than go on a walk, the researchers simply showed people a video that compressed the Universe’s 14-billion-year history into one year, then asked them to reflect on how human history and their lives fit within that story. The psychologists wondered if it might prompt thoughts of mortality, but the effects were actually positive: in particular, people reported greater self-forgiveness and lower anxiety.

Our time on Earth is short – and, from the planet’s perspective, we are just flashes of sunlight on a pond – but it turns out that embracing that fact could be good for you.

by Richard Fisher

FIND OUT MORE

Watch the clip, used in the study by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, that compressed the 14-billion-year history of the Universe into a year, edited from the US TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

You can discover more about Deep Time Walks, or download the app to walk one wherever you are.

My Psyche Guide ‘How to Do Mental Time Travel’ (2024) and my book The Long View (2023) both explore how to take a longer perspective of time.


True contact is found in silence

Black and white photo of a man and woman sitting under an umbrella; the woman leans on the man’s shoulder.

When I was an adolescent, time spent with my first girlfriend – a title very quickly rescinded – was as exhilarating as it was onerous. The cause of the former was straightforward, but that of the latter was specific to that juncture in my life: I felt that a beat of dead air was a solemn mark against me, and every moment must be filled with witty and memorable words. Before our meetings, I would tabulate, sometimes physically putting to paper, all the interesting, intriguing, titillating things I could mention. I treated hanging out like a state examination. You can imagine why she lunged at the first opportunity to become an ex.

But we remained – and remain – close friends, and some time after our ill-starred relationship ended, something indelible happened: we had our first real silence. Late in a balmy summer night, conversation extinguished itself and, for some reason, nothing else was said. I’ve had a lot of beautiful silences since then, but it remains the most poignant.

I was reminded of this experience by Emil Cioran, the brooding and sardonic Romanian French philosopher, who was actually capable of stringing together witty and memorable words. ‘True contact between beings,’ he wrote, ‘is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.’

Silences between people, of course, have all sorts of meanings, and Cioran is far from the only philosopher to write about silence. But here he incomparably evokes the strange intimacy that inheres in the best kinds of silence. Perhaps the next time you are fortunate enough to inhabit this kind of silence with someone important to you, you’ll think of ‘true contact’.

by Sam Dresser

FIND OUT MORE

The delightful Psyche Video ‘Le Mots de la Carpe’ by the French animator Lucrèce Andreae shows how silence can be path to love in the cacophony of speed-dating.

For more on Cioran’s minimalist approach to life, see the Psyche Idea ‘Learning to Be a Loser: A Philosopher’s Case for Doing Nothing’ (2023) by Costica Bradatan.


To see your home city anew, try this

A traffic light showing a green transgender symbol in front of a historic city square with statues and buildings.

One of my favourite walking routes though London goes from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye, across the Thames to Big Ben, up Whitehall, and on to Soho for much-needed refreshment. But this spring, when a friend was visiting me from the United States, something happened on that familiar walk that made me see my home city with fresh eyes.

At a crossing by Trafalgar Square, she stopped in her tracks, though the lights were green. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the light flashing, not with the usual walking man, but with two female symbols, intertwined. ‘Oh that,’ I said shrugging. ‘The gay traffic lights of London.’ They’d gone up years ago, for the annual Pride Festival, and were so popular, they’d stayed – a little like my friend and I, who had a blast running back and forth between crossings so she could photograph all the LGBTQ+ symbols. Though she lives in San Francisco with her wife, these lights tickled her pink – and now they had the same effect on me.

This is an example of what the social psychologist Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkley calls the ‘vicarious construal effect’. By seeing an experience through someone else’s eyes, you can capture a feeling you’ve lost – or one you never even had. In an interview, Critcher said: ‘Simply trying to think about what someone else might see actually changes the way we see and interpret what we’re doing, changes the emotions we feel.’

This effect works whether rediscovering your hometown or more fully understanding another’s lived experience. So next time you notice yourself becoming oblivious to the place where you live, try to see it through the eyes of a visitor. Or better still, invite one over and share their perspective.

by Elena Seymenliyska

FIND OUT MORE

For looking at the world with the wide eyes of a child, check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Revive Your Sense of Wonder’ (2022) by Frank Keil.

And for more on the joys of exploring with an open mind, follow the Guide ‘How to Wander’ (2023) by Jordan Fisher Smith.


Are people less talkative these days?

Four people enjoying churros with coffee at an outdoor cafe table, engaging in conversation and laughter.

Occasionally, I have what feels like an extraordinarily talkative day, loaded with meetings, calls or friendly chatter. Maybe you can relate. It seems natural enough to wonder, then: what’s an ‘ordinary’ amount of talk?

If you look up how many words we speak per day, you’ll find varying estimates online. Often, they’re linked to gender – specifically, whether it’s true that women talk more than men. A widely cited 2007 study of university students suggested not.

However: scientists recently published an update based on a more diverse sample of talkers. Their data comes from previous studies in which people of various ages – in the United States, Australia, Serbia and Switzerland – were audio-recorded as they went about their days. On the whole, they found that women (at an estimated 13,349 words per day) did tend to speak more than men (11,950), on average. The evidence was ‘conclusive’ only for adults aged 25 to 64 (women: 21,845 words per day; men: 18,570).

It’s tempting to mention this finding to my wife and our couple friends to see what sort of debates (or nods of recognition) ensue. But another key finding is huge variation, regardless of gender: one man produced fewer than 100 words per day, some people more than 120,000; the overall average was around 13,000. This makes me wonder where I’d fall on the wide spectrum between mime and telemarketer. Short of my own personal electronically activated recorder (or EAR) study, I’ll never know for sure.

Finally, with eyes affixed to our screens, we might wonder if people do less actual talking than they used to. Well, for each year that passed between 2005 and 2018, study participants spoke about 300 fewer words per day. If that finding holds up, it could mean we’ve shed thousands of words per day in recent years.

by Matt Huston

FIND OUT MORE

Does some part of you wish you were talking to others more than you do now? Check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Come Out of Your Shell’ (2025) by Christian Jarrett.

The story ‘The Anti-Social Century’ (2025) by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic dives into the long-term decline in socialising among people in the US.

Explore more

A rugby player embracing one of his teammates.

How to be an emotional leader

In times of change and pressure, a set of skills known as ‘psychological flexibility’ can help you and your team to thrive

by Selda Koydemir

Medieval painting of a woman at a desk writing with a quill by a window with a sea view and a sailing ship.

How to find inner peace like Saint Teresa of Ávila

The 16th-century ‘spiritual rock-star’ shows how seeing your soul as a castle can be a source of strength and consolation

by Skye C Cleary

A film still of a woman, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games movie franchise, with a braid standing in a transparent elevator looking out with a thoughtful expression.
FILM

Hollywood’s fixation on the wrong stories won’t help our world

Today’s global problems are caused by broken systems, but the studios still feed us a diet of movies focused on individuals

by Namir Khaliq

A woman on a laptop in a modern café with wall art, a large cactus and pendant lights above.

What if your worry problem is really a planning problem?

Clinicians have long recognised the link between worry and planning. New research asks what this means for managing anxiety

by Paul B Sharp

Photo of an athlete in a white jacket with a gold medal, smiling with hands on face against an Olympic rings backdrop.

Here’s how to use your imagination to prepare for any task

From sport to public speaking, the link between mental imagery and actual performance is undeniable – and you can harness it

by Jonathan Rhodes

A naked young woman walking on a rippled sandy beach towards the sea, clear blue water and distant islands in view.
Psyche Exclusive

For Lucy, surviving on a remote island was hard, but returning was harder

Directed by Jesper Wachtmeister

World map illustration showing physical geography with oceans, continents and elevation.
ETHICS

What makes a map ‘good’? On the ethics of cartography

Rendering the world in a responsible way means wrestling with what gets depicted on a map, how, and for whom

by Nat Case