Articles (page 5)
- Why Sad Posts Go Viral Less Often
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…
- Social Eating and the Cue to Stop
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.
- The Thing You Cannot Judge
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.
- Teaching People to Doubt Everything
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.
- Why the Best Song Does Not Win
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.
- You Do Not Know Why You Bought It
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…
- Why You Love the Thing You Assembled
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…
- Going Green Where Someone Can See You
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…
- The Price Rise Everyone Saw
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.