I feel that my basic needs will be fulfilled soon

Was it done randomly, based on merit, or using some intricate algorithm? They care for many different reasons. An obvious one is that in some cases their grade depends on their team's performance. But they also look for subtle clues to help them better understand their place and purpose in the group. Finally, they also care about fairness. Much research suggests that people are more likely to accept an unfavorable outcome if they believe the process was fair. But what characterizes a fair process? Surprisingly, what many consider the epitome of fairness, a random process, is not typically what people like best. Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich and colleagues have studied this question in many different environments, and what they typically find is that bureaucratic or traditional procedures such as first-come first-served win the day. Much to my surprise, my students often prefer that I form the teams rather than that they create their own. Lower zones are very telling. These are where the loops in a word go down and below the letters. Think of the small letter g, or y, for instance. According to Mike Mandel, the bigger the loop is, the more friends you need. The smaller the loop, the less you need friends in your life. The person who writes a g without a loop is really not even interested in close friends. They might have one, or none, and that's about it for them. They're okay with going it all alone when they need to. The bigger loop writer will need more people, or they cannot cope. The size of your loop can reveal your sexual appetite.

Despite being disproven just a decade or so later, it is still quoted in science articles across the globe. At least this misconception wasn't life-threatening, but what about the ones that are? Henry Faulds was a Scottish physicist and scientist who in 1888 wrote an article about how every person has a unique set of fingerprints. A single fingerprint could be the cause of a wrongful criminal conviction creating cause for concern with the legal system. Simon Cole, who is a criminologist at the University of California, published a study in 2005 that presented 22 cases where people were wrongfully accused and, in some situations, even convicted BECAUSE of the assumption that fingerprints are unique. Scientific or critical thinking asks to constantly update our views, to make room for ways to improve. Long before we understood the universe, when the ancient man looked at the moon, he thought he saw a face. Now we know that we are looking at craters that are billions of years old. We can be sure that there's no man in the moon, because through telescopes, we have carefully examined the surface and disproved this hypothesis. That is the beauty of rational thinking, the ability to observe and evaluate all options and then choose the most probable one. One much-debated bureaucratic mechanism we mentioned in article 10 for composing teams is quotas. Guaranteed political seats in Indian villages and corporate board quotas in Norwegian firms have created role models. At the same time, a laboratory study that Johanna Mollerstrom conducted in Boston found that people did not perceive quotas as fair. When team membership was decided by quotas as compared to a random process, it turned out that people were less willing to cooperate with one another. Similar evidence stems from an experiment conducted in Australia where study participants in the quota treatment went as far as to sabotage each other. In addition, quotas do not always achieve their purpose. For example, though Spain passed a law in 2007 mandating that at least 40 percent of each sex be represented in national parliamentary elections, actual numbers have fallen short. And the women who were included were not always helped. One study shows that parties positioned their female candidates disadvantageously. For example, in a Senate election women were placed by their party in only 20 percent of the winnable seats whereas 53 percent of the slots that were expected to be lost were assigned to women.

Again, those with large loops have a strong and healthy sexual appetite. They have a desire for stuff, money, food, and good things in life. Some don't have a loop when they write, but instead will draw the line straight down to a defined point, and then a curved hook back to the left. According to Mike Mandel, this is called the felon's claw. This appears in the handwriting of no less than 80 percent of felons in the American penitentiary system. Mandel says the felon's claw is a sure sign of manipulation and is a dangerous sign. Graphologists do not judge people based on single letters or a pen slip. That's not enough to label them sane or psychotic. You also cannot judge them by stuff they've written on a board with chalk or a marker. They study people based on their usual handwriting, preferably written while they're sitting down, comfortable, writing on an unlined sheet of paper, and their preferred pencil or pen. With science, the possibilities are endless. How is it that while scientists are evolving their learnings and constantly readjusting their worldview, the rest of us who think we know right from wrong are stuck with a primitive understanding of the world and what is in it? Think you're different? Think again. Have you ever rolled dice in certain ways and at certain angles because you think that will influence the decision? Or have you found that when you have a certain opinion, other sources seem to corroborate the same idea? Or when you've checked your horoscope, it predicts your exact day? Often we prefer wrong information to no information, and we use it to justify our ideas and views. These are decisions made on impulse and emotion, not rationality. As humans, we look for patterns everywhere, and the greatest patterns we build are the ones we make ourselves.

Similar issues have been raised in France where an equal representation of men and women on candidate lists was mandated in 2000. Much has been written about the advantages and disadvantages of quotas. Predictions about their overall performance tend to depend on the theory of the world people have. If you think that there is a pipeline problem, that there are too few qualified women for a given job, or that such mandates undermine the functioning of a team, you will expect quotas to decrease performance. On the other hand, if you believe that stereotypes keep qualified women from being selected, you will be optimistic about the impact of quotas. Which theory wins the day often depends on context. For example, pipeline issues are real in some fields, as a survey of the research on women's underrepresentation in STEM fields suggests. Only about 20 percent of women graduate with a bachelor's degree or a doctorate from engineering schools in the United States. Arguably, there are just not enough female engineers in the pipeline to dictate a quota in some circumstances--for example, a 40 percent quota for federally financed projects. However, inferring from this that quotas do not make sense more generally would be grossly misleading. The goal is to get them to write so it mirrors, as close as possible, their usual method of writing. Weird handwriting equals weird people; You have the felon's claw, but when the lower zone is something particularly weird, maybe with several weird loops, then you're dealing with someone with weird sex drives and sexual deviation to the most extreme degrees. The signature you have is the personality you give the world, not your actual personality. It's not you. So, when you're going into a business or personal relationship with somebody, you want to know that their handwriting and their signature look similar. If they seem the same, that means this person is a straight shooter, and what you see is what you get when you deal with them. If the handwriting is legible, but the signature is just odd, and all over the place, they're holding something back about themselves and are not honest about who they are. It could be out of self-defense. Signatures can let you know if a marriage is on the rocks.

We are more swayed by a compelling story than by reality. Consider the very popular modern-day folklore of Barney and Betty Hill. Upon closer examination, doctors discovered that the scenes they described sounded a lot like the 1953 movie, Invaders of Mars. But it made great television. Much better than the rational explanation that people can experience visions, sometimes shared hallucinations occur because of fever, lack of sleep, or even changes in brain chemistry. Our need for a powerful narrative is so strong that we neglect facts. Think of the number of TED talks, even political speeches you have been swayed by. What you focus on are the stories, not the numbers and figures, because the stories are rooted in emotion. But I'm not like that, you'll argue. I listen to fact and figures, and data. In an elegant experiment that Muriel Niederle, Carmit Segal, and Lise Vesterlund conducted in the United States and which has now been replicated in other parts of the world, quotas were shown to induce more talented women to compete, those who should have competed all along but held back due to a lack of self-confidence and self-stereotyping. In their study, there were enough women in the pipeline; Concerns about adequate numbers of sufficiently skilled women and people of color in the pipeline are repeatedly raised in the context of affirmative action policies. There is reason to doubt the severity of such worries. In the United States, such policies have played an important role for federal contractors and, despite many people's fears that affirmative action would negatively impact firms' performance, a review of the evidence suggests no such effects. There were enough qualified job candidates who had been formerly discriminated against to fill the open slots, and the firms were able to find and hire them. Examining how, researchers surveyed firms in four large US cities: Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The firms reported that they had broadened their searches, looking in places that they had not looked before, and looking for candidates that were not the usual suspects. The result was a more diverse candidate pool to choose from. And it worked: comparing federal contractors with nonfederal contractors, the proportion of women employed rose substantially faster in some periods when firms were affected by the policy.