Category: decision-making
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How Trust Affects Creative Collaboration
Control freaks and psychological safety — We brought Eric Olive on the podcast as a guest to talk about the science of decisions and we ended up talking about control and safety. How do you create an environment of psychological safety? And how does that encourage creative collaboration? Eric has also offered a list of…
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iPhone X? Yes or No? It Might Come Down To Which Part Of Your Brain Is Active.
This week Apple announced the iPhone X. Some of you have decided you are definitely NOT going to buy it, others have decided you definitely are, and others are on the fence. Whether you go for it or not at least partially depends on whether you are making a habit-based decision or a value based…
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The Buying Brain
Is there anything specific that triggers the “buy” decision? Can you predict whether and when someone will buy? In this HumanTech podcast episode we talk about the research on the “buy” decision in the brain. HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk…
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The Science Of Decisions
How we really make our decisions may surprise you. In this HumanTech podcast we explore the newest research on decision-making. HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #102 — The Best Way To Process Big Data Is Unconsciously
Jason is 20 years old and he’s deaf. He puts on a special vest that’s wired so that when it receives data, it sends pulses to his back. The vest is connected to a tablet. When I say the word “book” into a microphone that feeds into the tablet, the tablet turns the word into…
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5 Reasons We Make Poor Decisions
I just read a great report from Eric Olive on how and why we make decisions, especially bad ones. Here’s a summary of the report and the trouble we can get ourselves into: Most of our decision-making happens unconsciously, so it’s difficult to prevent these errors. Eric says your best strategy is to put some procedures…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #13–Talk to the unconscious
“We want them to type in their email and click on the “Join” button”, was the response from my client as I asked him what was the one action he wanted people to take on his landing page. Good. That was clear. But now the question was what else should be on the landing page…
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365 Ways To Persuade & Motivate: #2 Use The Word “Because”
In the first blog post of this new “365” series I cited new research on eye contact. But sometimes I think it’s important to go back to “foundational” (i.e. old!) research. So #2 in the series comes from research conducted in 1978. Ellen Langer (Professor of Psychology at Harvard) published a research study about the…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff #6: Hot drinks, soft pillows & heavy objects
Do you think you’d make different decisions if you were holding something heavy in your hand than holding nothing? Or if you were holding a cup of hot coffee instead of a cold drink? Sounds unlikely, but it’s true: Here’s a video about “haptic sensations.” Or, if you prefer, you can read the summary text…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff: #3 — A Hard-To-Read Font Will Activate Logical Thinking
I am taking a chance here, because I know that the subject of fonts is always controversial, and if I say that you should use fonts that are hard to read I’ll be blasted by many of my readers! But I have to share this fascinating research on how mental processing changes in some surprising…
