Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Locksmiths, Benevolent Deceptions, and the Benefit of Fake Effort

    In my last post, I discussed ‘the labour illusion‘—the idea that transparency about the effort involved in a process can enhance our perception of its value. I think of it as the ‘cousin’ of the IKEA effect. More intriguingly, this principle holds true even when the effort and delay is entirely unnecessary and fabricated. We…

  • The Labour Illusion, or Why Visible Effort Matters

    The accuracy of loading bars has long been a joke: reaching 66% takes mere moments, but 99% to 100% feels endless. Yet, progress bars—designed to offer “operational transparency”—play a key psychological role in building trust and satisfaction. A lot of business and marketing research has gone into identifying ways to improve idle wait times to…

  • The Cashless Effect: Financial Abstraction Increases Spending

    I previously wrote about the denomination effect, where people spend the coins faster than banknotes because coins are perceived as ‘smaller’, creating fewer psychological barriers. This raised the question of whether increased “financial abstraction” leads to higher spending, too. Indeed, research confirms that the lower the payment transparency, the greater the spend. This is the cashless…

  • Cake Mixes, the IKEA Effect, and the Psychology of Effort

    In the index of cognitive biases (previously), I came across the IKEA effect: why do we place disproportionately high value on things we helped to create? Similar to the endowment effect (our tendency to overvalue our own belongings), the IKEA effect explains why we’re willing to pay a significant premium (over 60%!) for products that…

  • An Index of Cognitive Biases (Understanding (and Overcoming) Mental Shortcuts)

    I’ve shared lists of cognitive biases before, and books and blog posts on the topic are everywhere. To me, this stuff is like catnip. While doing further research into cognitive-debiasing training (inspired by Philip Tetlock’s research on forecasting), I stumbled across an extensive index of over 100 cognitive biases from The Decision Lab. The biases…

  • Studying and Learning: What Works, What Doesn’t

    Self-testing and spaced repetition are the “two clear winners” in how to study and learn better. That’s from an informal meta study conducted by six professors (from fields such as psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience) when they reviewed over 700 scientific articles to identify the ten most common learning techniques and which are the most…

  • The Three Important Response Time Limits

    There are three important response time limits in user interface design, and this has remained constant since 1968, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Those three time limits? Chess, anyone? It’s worth also looking at Nielsen’s Powers of 10, detailing further time scales of user interaction. My summary:

  • Perceptions of Probability and Numbers

    Back in 2011 I wrote about “words of estimative probability“; the quantitative ranges we apply to ambiguous words and phrases, based on Sherman Kent’s research for the CIA in the 1960s. In 2015, Reddit user zonination duplicated the study using /r/samplesize. His resulting post in /r/dataisbeautiful made the longlist for the 2015 Kantar Information is…

  • Congestion Tolling at the Supermarket

    To help explain why toll lanes might not be the great solution to traffic congestion many believe them to be, Timothy Lee goes to an unexpected place to draw parallels: your local supermarket. Supermarkets are a good analogy, suggests Lee, because they operate in a free market, are ruthlessly efficient, intensely competitive, and employ ‘lanes’ (checkout…

  • Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion and the Importance of Recognising “Enforced Compliance”

    Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is Robert Cialdini’s 1984 book discussing what he calls the six fundamental psychological principles of compliance: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity. The conclusion to Cialdini’s book points out why, in this increasingly complex world, resisting attempts at “enforced compliance” (deception) through these key principles is as important…