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by Mihar Dias October 2026
After more than five decades studying, teaching, managing and advising people, I have reached a conclusion that is both illuminating and inconvenient: human beings are considerably more complicated than we think, and considerably less rational than we would like to believe.
I have met intelligent people who make spectacularly foolish decisions, successful executives who cannot manage their own egos, and individuals who insist on honesty while becoming positively inventive when the truth threatens their interests.
I have also met people of modest means and little formal education whose judgment, decency and common sense put more celebrated individuals to shame.
Human behaviour is a wonderful subject. It is also an exhausting one.
As a social scientist and management consultant, I have spent much of my working life trying to understand why people do what they do, why organisations behave in ways that defy their own stated objectives, and why sensible advice sometimes disappears the moment it encounters a powerful person's ego.
The answers are rarely as simple as we would like.
We blame incompetence when incentives are wrong. We blame bad character when fear is doing the driving. We admire confidence when we should be asking for evidence. We follow the crowd because disagreeing is uncomfortable, then congratulate ourselves for having an independent mind.
And when things go wrong, we are remarkably skilled at finding someone else to blame.
This book which will be out soon, is not a manual for manipulating people. There are already enough people trying to do that. Nor is it a collection of tricks for becoming the most impressive person at a dinner party or the most feared person in an office.
It is an attempt to help you see people more clearly, make better judgments, handle difficult situations and recognise the part you may be playing in your own problems.
The observations are informed by behavioural science and by a lifetime of experience in classrooms, consulting rooms, boardrooms and everyday encounters. Some lessons are serious. Others are amusing. A few may be uncomfortable.
That is intentional.
My preferred approach is to take human pretensions seriously enough to examine them, but not so seriously that we lose our sense of humour.
At eighty, I have accumulated a considerable number of observations about people. I have not accumulated a licence to be right about everything.
That, perhaps, is the first lesson in understanding human behaviour: the person who most needs to be studied is not always the person sitting opposite you.
Sometimes, he is the fellow in the mirror.
Do get a copy when it's released.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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