Our minds often play tricks on us. It’s human nature. Believe it or not, people are Predictably Irrational (thanks, Dan Ariely). Marketers and salespeople use these tricks to their advantage; corporations have spent billions in research learning how to exploit consumers using these tricks. Everyone should know about them. I’ve [Keep reading]
It seems crazy, but housing prices have actually hit record highs in many places, and the housing market is sweltering. If you thought you might find a bargain during the pandemic, you are out of luck. How can this be? I wrote about this for CNBC’s Grow website recently. [Keep reading]
Once upon a time, Americans waited until dinnertime to find out what happened in the world that day. Then, Ted Turner had a crazy itch to scratch and everything changed. Not for the better, I’d argue. For starters, people now tune to TV news — and to the Internet — [Keep reading]
I recently published a story about scarcity, and its powerful impact as a marketing tool. Order today! Only 3 remaining! Today’s I’m sharing a piece I wrote for PeopleScience.com that describes the underlying principle/mental shortcut that empowers scarcity — loss aversion. Losses loom larger than gains. The pain of losing [Keep reading]
An app that tells you if you were exposed to someone with Covid? Sounds great. But, as usual, tech-as-silver-bullet ideas come full of booby-traps. There’s been a lot of scattershot discussion around smartphone contact tracing during the past several months, with privacy advocates saying the harms far outweigh the benefits, [Keep reading]
I wrote a story for CNBC’s Grow site yesterday about the stock market’s remarkable turnaround. Down more 30% in March, but now up almost 50% since then…a run that has put S&P 500 investors right back where they were on New Year’s Eve. What happens next? I sure don’t [Keep reading]
It’s foundational to almost every scam you’ve ever read about. Act fast! Last chance! It’s also the force behind much unsavory human behavior. Fighting over distribution of scarce resources brings out the worst in us. It’s part of what makes racism so powerful (“They’re taking YOUR jobs!”). That’s why it’s [Keep reading]
FICO admitted this week that its credit scores don’t do such a good job of predicting which consumers might not pay their bills someday soon. The credit-scoring firm rolled out a new product called the FICO Resilience Index, which theoretically will tell banks which consumers will be able to weather [Keep reading]
The United States and many venerated European democracies are well on their way to becoming “a fact-free version of Democracy Lite,” warns today’s podcast guest, Nina Jankowicz. She’s the ‘disinformation fellow’ at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., and she has a new book out called How to Lose the [Keep reading]
The developer of a popular yoga iPhone app says Apple is forcing him to “steal” from users by requiring implementation of gotcha-style automated payments at the end of their free trial. The developer currently lets fans of the Down Dog app opt-in to monthly payments at the end of the [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan