Category: psychology
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Typography, Pronunciation and Cognitive Fluency
How easy something is to read and understand significantly affects how we perceive it in terms of its risk, beauty, difficulty, credibility and truthfulness. Factors that influence this cognitive fluency include typography (typeface choice, contrast, etc.), ease of pronunciation, familiarity and how much the words rhyme. The cover story of this month’s The Psychologist is…
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Derren Brown’s Bertram Effect Experiment Text
I love the Bertram effect. It’s likely the cognitive bias / psychological experiment that I think of the most. While the text from the original experiment is good, it’s from 1948. In the brilliant Tricks of the Mind and his 2000s TV show of the same name, Derren Brown updated the experiment, using his own text (reproduced…
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Perceived Complexity and Will Power
While willpower and dedication matter considerably in sustaining a resolution and reaching a desired goal, the perceived complexity of the process can have a big influence on whether we are likely to achieve that goal or not. This conclusion comes from a study showing how the subjective “cognitive complexity” of a diet was a major factor…
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The Relationship Between Boasting and Arrogance
In certain situations boasting about one’s achievements is a necessary evil (I’m British, OK?). It’s a delicate thing to do correctly and there are strategies to successfully avoid the situation completely[1]. When you must brag, however, research has shown in what circumstances a person’s boasting comes across as self-absorbed arrogance and when it comes across as…
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Reasons for Compassion and Charity
Tackling the idea that human empathy is self-serving, Dacher Keltner, for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, reviews a number of studies looking at why we are compassionate. In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others…
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The Transformative Power of a Narrative
Can a narrative attached to an everyday object increase its objective value? That was the question posed by Rob Walker (author of The New York Times‘ Consumed column) and Joshua Glenn (author of Taking Things Seriously) when they started the Significant Objects Project—an experiment designed to test whether a series of stories created about an object…
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Credit Card Customer Profiling and the Luhn Algorithm
From a Q&A with a VISA fraud prevention agent on reddit: Some years ago, someone wrote a paper claiming he could get the age, gender and race only from the credit card purchase history. It worked very well. Today, with your full purchase information, we can even “guess” your income range, number of dependants and…
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The Irrational Use of Credit Cards
Our irrationality toward money and inability to fully visualise the impact of distant events is how credit card companies thrive and many bank balances suffer. That’s the conclusion one draws after reading this article from Time that looks at a number of studies showing that we fail miserably in making logical decisions about money when…
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Psychological Pricing and Other Shopping Persuasion Techniques
The endowment effect, sex in advertising and pricing anchors: all bits of ‘shopping psychology’ we’ve heard before. Ryan Sager looks at these shopping persuasion techniques we should be aware of, adding a few small pieces of information that may be novel: Endowment effect: We place a higher value on items we own, and just by…
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Barriers, Not Calories, Influence Eating Habits
Informing consumers of the calorific value of their food options doesn’t change their ordering/eating habits (previously), but removing barriers and making the healthier options easy to order does. That’s the conclusion from Kevin Volpp’s lecture, ‘Using Behavioral Economics to Improve Health Behaviors’. Recent studies […] have indicated that providing nutritional information at restaurants and recommending…