Articles (page 33)

People value what they built above what somebody else built. The boundary condition nobody quotes is that it only works when the building works, which makes this a finding about completion and not…

Status motives push people towards the green product over the luxurious one. The only field test of whether the green signal actually pays found that it does not, and Veblen predicted the dependency…

Two identical price rises, one announced and one emailed, produce different reactions. The difference is not what customers believe about the price. It is what they believe about each other.

A field experiment said the logo brought social benefits. A double-blind replication found nothing across five experiments, and a cost in poorer neighbourhoods. Veblen, read properly, predicted the…

Processing fluency is the one idea in Drunk Tank Pink that survived the decade, and it is the author's own. Here is the strongest case for it, and the three parts we cannot stand behind.

People move less far from a precise number than from a round one. Five studies show it, the mechanism is about scale rather than confidence, and it matters four or five times in a life.

Interesting products get talked about immediately and then stop. What sustains word of mouth is being cued by the environment, which is duller, harder to buy and the half nobody measures.

Musical pleasure has something almost nothing else in psychology has: a proper causal test. It also has an objection the causal test cannot answer, and a group of people who feel none of it.

The dress photograph was not an illusion and nobody was seeing it wrong. It exposed a calculation your visual system performs constantly, gets no feedback on, and does differently from the person…