Perceived Value

A wise man once said that human nature doesn’t change. In fact, this was said by several wise men, all of whom probably belonged to the epistemological school of thought. Marketing isn’t exempt from this. It seems that every new developing technology only draws attention to how easily we humans are swindled by framing and design.

Consider Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a food promoter born in 1737 back before even Hotmail was at its peak. Parmentier was an army pharmacist captured in Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, and while in prison was forced to eat potatoes that the French saw as ‘hog feed’.

Snap Speconomics

Monday marked the release of Snap Inc.’s much-hyped Spectacles to the masses. Far from a traditional distribution channel, this was carried out through Snapbots: glorified vending machines that spit out up to two pairs at a time for hungry trendsetters wishing to jump on the bandwagon. Snap Inc. have taken advantage of three major principles of behavioural economics (BE) in order to ride the hype train all the way to the station.

Five Psychological Traps

This article was originally written as a guest post for Mental Reshape. 

When author David Foster Wallace made a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he talked about the dangers of operating on what he termed: “our natural default setting”.

Wallace argued that through conscious choice, people have the power to interpret and respond to the frustrating, mundane realities of everyday life in a manner that is healthy and satisfying. The title of the speech: This is Water, refers to an allegory about fish not being conscious that the water around them is, actually, water.

By ‘natural default setting’, Wallace is referring to the unconscious: evolution’s way of filtering the huge amount of sensory information we are exposed to each and every day. But the unconscious has its drawbacks. Decades of psychological research have uncovered from it a number of cognitive biases that affect the way we think and behave.

We’re going to look at five of these biases. All five occur when we operate on our natural default setting, and all can be protected against when we consciously choose how to respond to our environment. Through in-depth examination we can learn to break free from harmful behavioural patterns, taking control of our life and, ultimately, our happiness.

Anattā

What superpower best represents you? What’s your Greek God name? Which character from Game of Thrones are you? What can your star sign predict about your relationships? What are your core personality traits? Who is your ideal lover? Who are you? Who are you?

Don't Make Things Harder

Trawling through my Twitter feed today I found an environmental intervention by McDonalds aiming to nudge people into disposing of litter more thoughtfully.

At least I think that’s what it’s aiming to achieve. Honestly I have no idea. Judge for yourself: the McDonald’s Bag Tray.