Akkiblogpost

You decide to renovate your house. The contractor says the work will be completed in two months. You calculate the expenses, arrange the money, and start imagining how your home will look after the renovation. Everything seems manageable. Two months pass. The flooring is still incomplete. The electrician needs another week. The kitchen fittings have not arrived, and the contractor has discovered a few additional expenses. Suddenly, your two-month renovation has become a six-month project. The same thing happens with wedding budgets, office projects, college assignments, business launches, and personal goals. We confidently estimate how much time and money something will require, only to discover that reality has a different plan. Why does this happen so frequently? Are we simply bad at planning, or is there something deeper happening inside the human mind? Psychologists have a name for this behaviour: the Planning Fallacy . It describes our tendency to underestimate how long a ...

I magine a child who loves drawing. Nobody asks him to draw, nobody promises him a gift, and nobody checks whether his work deserves a prize. He simply picks up his colours and starts creating something. Now imagine that his parents begin offering money for every drawing, a toy for every completed picture, and a bigger reward for winning a competition. Initially, he may draw more often. But what happens when the rewards stop? Will he still draw because he enjoys it, or will drawing begin to feel like something worth doing only when there is a prize at the end? This question lies at the heart of a psychological concept called the overjustification effect . It explains how an external reward can sometimes weaken the internal interest that made a person enjoy an activity in the first place. The idea has important implications for Indian parenting, education, competitive exams, and workplace incentives. But the lesson is not that rewards are always harmful. It is that rewards can c...

A message appears in your family WhatsApp group. It claims that a particular food cures a serious disease, a bank is about to shut down, or the government has quietly introduced a rule nobody is talking about. You are not entirely convinced, so you ignore it. The next morning, another relative forwards the same claim. Later, you see it in a reel. A friend mentions it during a conversation. By the end of the week, the claim no longer feels unfamiliar. And somewhere in your mind, a small thought appears: "There must be some truth to this. Itna sab log bol rahe hain." That little shift is more important than it sounds. You may not have seen convincing evidence. You may not remember who first made the claim. You may not even consciously believe it. Yet, because you have encountered it repeatedly, the statement can begin to feel more familiar, more believable, and sometimes more likely to be true. Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect . It helps explain why misi...

Imagine sitting in an office meeting where your manager suggests an idea that you genuinely believe will not work. You look around the room. Three colleagues are nodding. Someone says it sounds promising, and another person adds that the team should move forward quickly. You have doubts, but suddenly those doubts feel uncomfortable. You tell yourself that perhaps everyone else understands something you do not. When your turn comes, you nod too. Later, over tea, one colleague quietly admits that the idea seemed impractical from the beginning. Another says they agreed only because nobody else appeared to object. You realise that the room was full of people who privately disagreed but publicly appeared to agree. This happens more often than we notice. We sometimes hide our real opinions not because we have changed our minds, but because standing apart from a group feels socially risky. The need to belong can become so powerful that silence begins to look like agreement, and agreement...