Tag: guthrie
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Episode 16: How To Induce Compliance
Let’s assume I’m evil. What I want to do is INDUCE COMPLIANCE. I want people to do what I want. Well that might be hard to do. But what if I could get people to comply with a request? That may be simple and effective. Dr. Susan Weinschenk wrote a whole book on how to…
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Episode 15: How to Make Users Ignore Privacy Warnings
Let’s pretend I’m an evil version of Google that cares nothing about privacy (is this an allegory about the real Alphabet… you be the judge). Anti-Google. And my slogan is “Always Be Evil”. What I want to do is get customers to disclose all of their private information to me. I want to have access…
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Episode 14: The Big Reason People Are Only Open To Their Own “Group-Think” Ideas: Self-Regulatory Fit and Persuasion
I want to walk you through a rather complicated paper that I think is pretty important; it’s called “Bringing the Frame Into Focus: The Influence of Regulatory Fit on Processing Fluency and Persuasion”. It’s by Lee and Aaker from 2004. The focus of the paper was the importance of what they call “regulatory fit”. Now…
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Episode 13: Satisficing
I want to give credit to an old paper that was quite ahead of its time. In 1956 Herbert Simon in his paper “Rational choice and the structure of the environment” had some of the ideas of behavioral economics before the field had really developed. His take on some of the interesting human behaviors was…
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Episode 12: Individualist Societies vs. Collectivist Societies
Okay this one is a tough one. It’s kind of complicated, but it’s worth it, trust me. We mostly talk about how humans work biologically and in which ways that influences our decisions. That is somewhat the field of the behavioral science. But beyond biology that is consistent across all humans there are also cultural…
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Episode 10: How Sunk Costs Work
One of, if not the most, important motivator in behavioral economics is the fear of loss. We’ve talked about this extensively and it takes many different shapes. One of my personal favorites is what’s known as a “sunk cost”. Compared to a lot of behavioral economics terms this is pretty popular and well known, but…
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Episode 9: What Are Heuristics?
I have a confession to make. It took me years to understand the concept of heuristics. I don’t know why. I mean, I’m a smart guy, who obviously understands this economic mumbo-jumbo far better than the ordinary person. And heuristics is/are one of the foundational ideas of behavioral economics. Maybe it’s the name. Too Greek?…
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Episode 3: Why something being FREE is so compelling
Everyone loves free. There’s something truly magical about getting something that you value for free and the feeling seems universal. In another post I’ll talk about why we feel indebted when we get something for free, but for now, I want to focus on the feeling of free. If we want it; we take it.…
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Episode 1: What Is Behavioral Economics? Part 1
Hello friends, I am planning on embarking on an epic quest, and I want you to come with me on my journey. Have you heard of behavioral economics? It’s a very fun, interesting field of research that combines decision making, social behavior, and brain science with our everyday human actions. I’ve been exploring the topic…
