Letters Remain

Tag: 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…

  • 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…

  • Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Prediction

    In reviewing Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment upon its release in 2005, The New Yorker of course discussed the main finding that expert judgements are not much better than those of lay forecasters. Another key focus of the review was Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, a metaphor drawn from Archilochus sometime in the…

  • ‘Locked’ Value, and Paying for Everything Twice

    How to account for the true cost and value of our possessions? In the same vein as Thoreau, who wrote in Walden: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run”, David Cain suggests that everything…

  • 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…

  • The Licensing Effect and the Unhealthy Habit of Vitamin Supplements

    The licensing effect is the phenomenon whereby positive actions or decisions taken now increase negative or unethical decisions taken later. I’ve written about this previously, before I was aware of a general effect: Just considering ordering a salad at a restaurant increases unhealthy orders. Purchasing ‘green’ products increases unethical behaviour such as cheating and stealing.…