Articles (page 18)

Studies of service encounters split on whether a staff member's mood reaches the customer. A staged encounter found that genuine feeling moved customers and extra smiling did not.

The 76 per cent behind the best-known compliance technique is one cell of five, and the evidence since has been weaker and less settled than the story told about a three-inch sign.

The implicit association test returns a difference in milliseconds, and it has long been read as a measure of hidden bias. Two meta-analyses of the same literature put its link to discriminatory…

A forcing function removes the option instead of warning against it. Seat belts, drink-driving interlocks and a false missile alert show what that buys, what it costs, and why a confirmation prompt…

The most quoted case in the argument for buying a perception instead of a capability is not in the book it is credited to. It is a 2009 conference line, the supermodels in it are explicitly a joke…

Ten in a hundred and one in ten are the same probability, yet people reach for the larger count. Bowls of beans, a paid marble task, a disease rated riskier at half the death rate and a study of…

Brain training reliably improves the game you practise. The largest trial found no carry-over to untrained tests, a flyer promising improvement was enough to produce a gain on two intelligence…

The brain spends about a fifth of the body's energy whatever it is asked to do. The default mode network is the pattern found inside that expense, and the evidence supports it as an organised…

Nobody walking past a restaurant can taste the food, so they read the room: a long queue as a recommendation, an empty room as a warning. The research supports a narrower claim than the one a shop…