Articles (page 17)

Writing, the printing press, comics and the smartphone each drew the same alarm. Sociology has a name for the pattern and five tests for it. The evidence explains why the reaction recurs and why the…

A green calorie label made a candy bar look healthier than a red one with the same calories. Studies of whole packs are less tidy: vivid colour cuts both ways, and green can also read as…

Fast-food signage is often explained with a sentence about yellow and appetite. The experiments that come closest used red, blue and tinted food pictures, and they gave mixed results. Where a colour…

Dark triad scores went with higher pay in one German sample and with worse job performance across 245 samples. Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy do not move together at work, and pay…

Thaler and Sunstein tell readers they have no stake in the company they recommend, which is conflict disclosure at its best. In the experiments, disclosure often raised compliance with biased…

The most repeated anecdote in consumer marketing survives in its original document, which is what makes it traceable. The magazine article sources the angry father to one unnamed employee who was…

Galton's crowd guessed an ox to within 0.8 per cent, and the result has been read as proof that groups are smarter than people ever since. The later record is narrower: averaging works while guesses…

Success stories are chosen because the outcome was good, so whatever the winners share looks like a cause. Abraham Wald's returning bombers, a database of 2,071 US equity funds and a fighter pilot's…

The two trillion dollar prize on the jacket of the seed book traces to one unpublished consultancy index, which scores a firm partly on having already grown. The field experiments tell a smaller and…