The Planning Fallacy
David Books, author of The Social Animal, with an excellent column on the planning fallacy: In his forthcoming book (now released), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy....
View ArticleTwo Questions Everyone Asks Themselves When They Meet You
People everywhere differentiate each other by liking (warmth, trustworthiness) and by respecting (competence, efficiency). Essentially they ask themselves: (1) Is this person warm? and (2) Is this...
View ArticleAn Incredible Offer — But Wait…There’s More
You’ll never look at infomercials the same after reading this post. Robert Cialdini calls But Wait…There’s More “A wholly fascinating account of a wholly fascinating industry.” If you’re interested in...
View ArticleHow Infomercials Persuade
In response to But Wait … There’s More, a kind reader passed along a link to a wonderful interview between Andrew Warner and Tim Hawthorne (a producer of infomercials). On how to orchestrate an...
View ArticleWhy First Impressions Don’t Matter Much For Experiences
A recent article in the WSJ, “Hidden Ways Hotels Court Guests Faster”, focused on how hotels are trying to dazzle guests with first impressions. Jeremy McCarthy, a hotel executive, argues this is why...
View ArticleThe Noise Bottleneck: When More Information is Harmful
When consuming information, we strive for more signal and less noise. The problem is a cognitive illusion: we feel like the more information we consume the more signal we receive. While this is...
View ArticleThe evolutionary roots of human behaviour
Anthony Gottlieb writing in the New Yorker: Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from...
View ArticleHow you can instantly improve your marriage
Most of us see what we want to see. If we’re arguing with a spouse, we’re going to start seeing all of their faults. After all, it’s not my fault it’s your fault. Once we’ve labeled someone as, say,...
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The Art of Thinking Clearly
Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, is a compendium of systematic errors in decision making. While the list of fallacies is not complete, it’s a great launching pad into the best of what...
View ArticlePredicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem
In a recent podcast, we talked with professional poker player Annie Duke about thinking in probabilities, something good poker players do all the time. At the poker table or in life, it’s useful to...
View ArticleStop Preparing For The Last Disaster
When something goes wrong, we often strive to be better prepared if the same thing happens again. But the same disasters tend not to happen twice in a row. A more effective approach is simply to...
View ArticleThe Availability Bias: How to Overcome a Common Cognitive Distortion
“The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character, and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal,...
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