Articles (page 25)

The trade sells psychographic targeting on one famous Facebook experiment, and the first meta-analysis of the field is harsher than the pitch. We read both, along with the two published critiques…

Walter Lippmann wrote in 1922 that we define first and then see, and he never said when that stops being true. The condition arrived sixty-four years later in a laboratory, and it is far more severe…

The book that calls individual focus advice a cruelty also admits, in its own introduction, that nobody ever measured the decline it describes. We went to see what the tested record says, and it…

Groups have a reputation for deciding badly, and it was earned on tasks that have a right answer. A purchase has not got one, so the strongest evidence we have about deciding together has never been…

Every coffee app now spins a wheel, on the strength of a pigeon experiment from 1957 and a business book that was never a research claim. The one paper that tested repetition found the effect, and…

The trade sells a simple rule: make the customer work for the choice and the customer will defend the purchase. The design that produced the evidence for it turned out to be unable to measure the…

Everyone knowing that everyone knows is the favourite explanation for why a Super Bowl slot costs what it does. The evidence underneath it is one unpublished regression, two field studies that…

In 1927 a book diagnosed the problem correctly: the buyer's competence had been outrun by what was being sold, and the cure was impartial published test results. We got the cure, and it turned out…

Good-looking things are judged easier to use, and the judgement is worth less than it looks. The effect is real, small, conditional, and it thins out as soon as time or money enters the room.