The power of the first decision

Without precommitments, we keep on falling for temptation. Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.

The struggle for control is all around us: bo...

Money is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper but often more effective as well.

If corporations started thinking in terms of social norms they would realize that these norms build loyalty and—more important—make people wan...

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information offered to make subsequent judgments during decision making.

Anchoring influences all kinds of purchases. Research found that people who move to a new city generall...

A stereotype is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has seen before. For that reason, stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent.

They provide short...

Expectations are more than the mere anticipation: they enable us to make sense of a conversation in a noisy room, despite the loss of a word here and there, and likewise, to be able to read text messages on our cell phones, despite the fact that some of the words are scrambled.

We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. We always compare jobs with jobs, vacations with vacations, lovers with lovers, and wines with wines.

We not only tend to compare things with one another but also tend to focus on compari...

The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: although initial prices are "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only present prices but also future prices.

It is a cognitive bias: we tend to have a specific change in preferences between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated.

This is the secret agent in more decisions than we could imagine. It even helps us decide whom to date...

We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth; we mostly focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another and estimate value accordingly.

For example, we don't know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we c...

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.

Emotions grab hold of us and make us view the world from a different perspective. Procrastination is rooted in the same kind of problem. When we promise to save our money, we ...

Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE ! we forget the downside, FREE ! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is.

And that is because humans are intrin...

... and we usually don't make best decisions when it comes to it. Why? Because of three irrational quirks in our human nature:

• We fall in love with what we already have.
• We focus on what we may lose, rather than what we may gain.