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?

The Intolerance of Understanding

Let’s say that at some point in the next week, we discovered how to travel back in time. Let’s say we bring our smartphones with us to show the old world.

How would we explain them?

Lost in the Trend

Take a look at this latest ad for Continental...

Protecting Ourselves from Sense

Asheley Landrum recently wrote an article about the bullshit of bullshit. In it, she critiques studies about bullshit as being bullshit themselves, because of the authors’ predisposition toward information that supports said bullshit effect.

Just Chill Out, Man

There is an idea in digital strategy that those who are prepared to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ brands on social media are just as enthusiastic to talk to them; to have a two-way conversation – as it is commonly described – wherein consumers are ready and willing to listen and respond to what brands are saying.

Comforting as this idea is for businesses that build themselves around social media marketing, it’s a huge stretch.

12 Reasons Why You Share Too Much

It’s 7:30am.

You’re sitting down at your table with a cup of instant and half a pomegranate thumbing your way down your Facebook feed trying to coax yourself into a semi-wakened state. You glimpse an article with the words ‘Trump’, ‘evolution’ and ‘Mexicans’ in the headline and before your brain has caught up you find yourself in a comments-war with racists and climate change-deniers.