Articles (page 23)
- Growth Mindset After the Tests
The claim that one belief permeates every part of a life was printed before any evidence arrived, and it has never been tested. The claim that was tested is small, conditional and cheap, and this is…
- How Much Advice People Actually Take
People do not reject the advice they asked for, and whether they asked for it changes almost nothing. They take about two-fifths of it where half would be defensible, and the shortfall reverses in…
- What Showing the Work Actually Does
The popular reading of the labour illusion, that making people wait longer makes a service feel more valuable, is not what the paper found: wait time had its own negative effect throughout. What the…
- The Decision You Think Is Yours
A card in a hotel bathroom and a door hanger in California are both instruments of social influence, and the people they move rank them last among the things that moved them. That gap has been…
- The Veblen Effect Is Mostly Folklore
The rising demand curve for Veblen goods is not Veblen's, is not in his book, and was drawn in 1950 by an economist who said only a segment of it could slope upward. The one shop experiment where…
- What a Story Adds to a Price
The case the marketing trade cites as proof that stories raise prices is not a study, and its curators never said it was. The controlled literature is large, consistent and almost entirely about…
- What Scent Does in a Shop
Ambient scent reliably changes how a shop is judged and how it is remembered. What it does at the till is unsettled: the pooled effect on spending does not reach significance, the three per cent…
- Why Brands Reach for Blue
Banking, technology and healthcare all converged on the same colour, and the research says that is a convention rather than a persuasive choice. The one blue-specific performance claim failed a…
- What Television Does to Your Beliefs
Walter Lippmann said in 1922 that we act on a picture of the world rather than the world, and cultivation research spent fifty years trying to measure that picture. The correlation is real, small…