Articles (page 13)

The claim that good-looking people earn more is repeated without a source in a popular psychology book. Four studies, a survey, an experiment pool, a wage experiment and a CV field test, put figures…

Daniel Kahneman's acronym WYSIATI says judgment treats what is in view as the whole case. A mock-jury study, two consumer experiments and a dinnerware pricing study test pieces of that, and they…

A new car looms large while it is being chosen and recedes once it is owned. The California study, a football-fan experiment and a survey of working women show where that idea comes from and what…

A great first visit is partly the place and partly the evening. The evening does not repeat, a business book once mistook the same arithmetic for competition, and expectation adds a second cost that…

Unfinished relationships are said to linger because the mind clings to unfinished business. The study behind that claim tested lab tasks, and its memory half did not replicate.

The cocktail party effect is real, but the famous example happens to a minority of people. What the studies show, from Cherry's 1953 shadowing task to named email subject lines.

Trivers proposed that we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. Two experiments find that expecting to persuade raises confidence. What they leave open is whether evolution built the habit…

An AB test shows that a change caused a difference in one chosen outcome, among the people enrolled, over the days it ran. A Bing bug, a Facebook comparison and a Google study of ad load show how…

The rule that a fifth of customers bring four fifths of sales was named by Joseph Juran, who later wrote that Pareto's models were not meant for other fields. Three studies of customer data average…