One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood - and one thing that affects your mood is the weather.

Nonverbal communication forms a social language that is in many ways richer and more fundamental than our words.

We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.

Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.

When we are in the grasp of illusion - or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea - instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment of our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness.

What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.

We believe that when we choose anything, judge a stranger and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false.