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Why We Overpay at Auctions
Tom Stafford discusses a lot of the psychological principles that make rational bidding hard. Auctions also hit on many psychological persuasion techniques: First, auctions use the principle of...
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Secrets from the Science of Persuasion
A great animation describing the fundamental principles of persuasion based on the research of Dr. Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Dr....
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What Lovers Tell Us About Persuasion
“The thing that is most likely to guide a person’s behavioral decisions isn’t the most potent or familiar or instructive aspect of the whole situation; rather, it’s the one that is most prominent in...
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The Destructive Influence of Imaginary Peers
Tina Rosenberg with a thoughtful op-ed in the NYT on the influence people around us have on our decisions, even, oddly, when they are imaginary. Bad behavior is usually more visible than good. It’s...
View ArticleHow to retain more of what you read
Google Reader is going away on July 1st. Sign up for my daily or weekly mailing list to make sure you don't miss a thing. One of the keys to getting smarter is to read a lot. But that’s not enough....
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The Psychology of Persuasion
“We all fool ourselves from time to time…to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.” I get a lot of emails from people asking me how they can learn to...
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Maria Konnikova on How we Get Conned
There's a scene in the classic Paul Newman film The Sting, where Johnny Hooker (played by a young Robert Redford) tries to get Henry Gondorf (played by Newman) to finally tell him when they're going to...
View ArticleMental Model: Commitment and Consistency Bias
“The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” — John Maynard Keynes *** Ben...
View ArticleMental Model: Bias from Liking/Loving
The decisions that we make are rarely impartial. Most of us already know that we prefer to take advice from people that we like. We also tend to more easily agree with opinions formed by people we...
View ArticleBias from Disliking/Hating
(This is a follow-up to our post on the Bias from Liking/Loving, which you can find here.) Think of a cat snarling and spitting, lashing with its tail and standing with its back curved. Her pulse is...
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