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The Science of Irrational Decisions
The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
I think Im 50 / 50 on this one
Will it help me to understand why I read Slashdot instead of doing something productive with my time?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
define "big words". do you mean closer to "potato" or closer to "superstructure"
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
Maybe they were flying a plane.
In other words, a company that installs Windows on its first PC will probably install it on thousands of additions, instead of installing Linux on hundreds.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The wife's number ends in 99, which explains everything.
threadeds blog
I do. And when they start to explain why it costs $30,000 more then my offer I go "Well why didn't you say it costs $30,001 in the first place?"