Articles (page 32)

The heaviest fifth of buyers supply far less than 80 per cent of sales, and many of them are not heavy buyers a year later. Plan for the drift.

Write a sure discount in cash and a spin-the-wheel offer can lose its advantage, because uncertain discounts win mainly when the certain alternative looks small.

Public charity comes with an audience. A widely read book and the experiments it relies on suggest the audience changes what people do, though less certainly than either would like.

A famous experiment said that getting people's bodies going makes them share. It failed in 2024. The newspaper pattern behind sad posts going viral less often still stands, though its explanation is…

Why the same person eats differently at a long dinner, a client lunch and a meal with a light eater, and what a 2003 review says decides the moment you stop.

Some things you cannot assess before buying or after using. An experiment with 936 participants tested the four remedies for that, and only one of them worked.

The misinformation games governments adopted were scored on whether people rated fake headlines lower. A reanalysis separating scepticism from accuracy found they moved the first and not the second.

An experiment ran the same songs against the same field in parallel worlds. Quality set the floor and the ceiling. Social influence decided almost everything in between.

People asked why they chose something construct a plausible reason rather than retrieving the real one. The 1977 paper that showed this also says exactly when the answer can be trusted, and that…