A smaller reward now, or a better one later. The marshmallow task is usually presented as a test of whether a child can resist temptation.
But the second reward is a promise. If you don’t expect the adult to deliver, taking what’s already there could make sense. That’s a possible interpretation of the choice, rather than a way to read a child’s whole background from it.
Kidd and colleagues tested a related idea by having an adult keep or break earlier promises before the waiting task. The reliable-adult group waited about 12 minutes on average, compared with about 3 in the unreliable-adult group. It was only 28 children, and a later school extension found a smaller difference with an inconclusive main planned test. So the size and consistency still need care.
IMO it’s an interesting case of how the situation changes the meaning of a choice. How should we interpret impatience when we also have uncertainty about whether the delayed reward will arrive?
I made a short video about this for The Confound. It also covers why the later achievement findings get more complicated once background and early skills are included: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Z5TNiVO4c
Public commitment turned homeowners into billboard hosts and sent neighbours to the polls. It also lets people coast. Same mechanism, opposite results, and one thing separates them.
In a famous legal experiment, experienced German judges were asked to roll a pair of dice before deciding a prison sentence for a shoplifter.
The dice were secretly loaded to only land on 3 or 9.
The judges knew the dice were completely random and irrelevant. Yet those who rolled a 9 gave an average sentence of 8 months, while those who rolled a 3 gave 5 months. Seasoned legal professionals with decades of training, visibly influenced by a toy.
When real estate appraisers were tested, their valuations tracked listing prices almost identically—even while every single agent adamantly denied being influenced.
That is what makes anchoring so dangerous: it doesn't feel like pressure, it feels like your own independent opinion.
Most advice screams: "Always make the first offer to set the anchor."
Yet in high-stakes negotiations, going first frequently backfires—it leaks information about what you know, triggers an immediate regret trap if accepted, and can instantly collapse a deal if the other side has strong alternatives.
Worse, lawmakers are already intervening (like Massachusetts banning employers from asking for salary history entirely, treating a simple question as a price move).
It turns out whether your anchor wins or loses has very little to do with the number itself, and almost everything to do with the "shape" of the ask and how you occupy the room before anyone even speaks.
Put together an animated breakdown exploring the exact papers, the precision effect, and how tandem counter-anchoring works here: https://youtu.be/-5Eiue_jRUo
When you negotiate, do you force yourself to say the first number, or do you prefer waiting to counter?
The setup, from Arkes and Blumer (1985): you've bought a $100 ski trip to Michigan. Weeks later you buy a $50 one to Wisconsin, which you think will be more fun. Then you notice they're on the same weekend, and neither ticket can be returned.
Both are already paid for. The only question left is which weekend you'd enjoy more. 33 of 61 students still picked Michigan.
The second experiment used real money. The Ohio University Theater sold season tickets at random prices: $15, $13 or $8. Over the first five plays, full-price buyers used 4.11 tickets each. The discount groups used 3.32 and 3.29. By the last five plays, the difference had gone.
I put these together with Levitt's coin-flip study (20,000+ people; the ones the coin told to make a change were happier six months later) in one page. It also has a quiz on when past costs do count: https://sheets.works/data-viz/sunk-cost-fallacy
Happy to be corrected. The theatre figures are from page 128 of the paper
I've been thinking about something interesting: why do some wealthy people keep their lifestyle private, while others feel the need to show everyone what they own?
Is it about security, social status, psychology, or simply how people are raised to think about money?
I explored this idea in my latest stick-animation video on Cognitive Canvas, looking at quiet wealth, the psychology of showing off, and why visible wealth doesn't always mean lasting wealth.
Independent project, sharing because the failed result is the interesting part, not the tool.
I ran a forced-choice elicitation: 51 either/or statements about how knowledge works (does testimony get default trust, does one counterexample kill a claim, is an unresolved question tolerable). Answers get mapped against 137 named belief systems. Free, no account, about five minutes: https://epistemia.life
Two caveats first. The 51 axes are a model I chose, not a structure I discovered, and the historical-figure cards are a language model approximating each figure's public epistemic style, not the real minds.
The part worth arguing about: I predicted a "collapsed" epistemology (low confidence the world is legible, low default trust in testimony, low tolerance for unresolved questions) would act like an attractor that systems drift toward. Under my setup it isn't. Systems drift away from collapse, toward more specific commitments. The site reports this on the methods page, labeled as a failed prediction.
Open questions:
1. Forced-choice formats make you bet on every axis, which may manufacture more structure than actually exists. Is there a clean way to separate real preference structure from format artifact?
2. Is "collapse" the right operationalization? A different definition might produce the attractor.
3. What prior prediction would be worth testing in the open before defending the model further?
Been looking at Winter Arc through the fresh-start and incentives research. IMO the big jump in the advice is going from "a new date helps me start" to "90 days makes the whole routine stick".
Dai et al. found increases in things like gym visits and goal commitments around calendar landmarks. Starting is an interesting outcome, but it isn't the same as sticking with it months later.
The exercise-payment study is interesting too. Employees picked a preferred two-hour workout window. Some could earn payments only in that window; others could earn them any time on a weekday. Flexible payments produced modestly better attendance during the incentive period, with some differences in the first four weeks afterwards. That's a workplace gym with incentives though, not a universal argument against routines.
I made a video for The Confound unpacking this alongside the habit-timing research.
What outcomes would you want to see before calling a 90-day challenge a lasting behaviour-change intervention?
I’m basically a victim of marketing 😂 💔I often end up spending way too much money when I’m sad, stressed, or just not feeling great. I’m curious if other people experience the same thing what triggers you to buy, and I think that social media make it worse😭
Remember, happiness scaling with log(income) rather than with income means that each marginal dollar of income procures less happiness than the last.
Is it weird that Pritchard's source lists becoming a full-time caretaker as only one-third as bad as having a headache? No. Because it asks about point-in-time happiness, all things that happen at a specific point in time will seem large compared to protracted state changes in lifestyle. Put another way, since rich people are rich every day, the proper comparison is having a headache every day.
Since we apparently disagree on the badness of forced caregiving, headaches, and hangovers, it might be helpful to look at Pritchard's ultimate source (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010) for some other anchors. Here are some other differences about as big as a 4x income difference:
The difference between married people and divorced people.
3x the difference between normal-weight people and obese people
The point-in-time difference between it being a weekend vs. a weekday.
Think about the last thing you bought that you were genuinely hyped about—a jacket, an upgrade, a new phone, or even a cosmetic skin in a game.
For the first few days, it feels like an upgrade to your personality. You wear it, check it, and mention it. Then, at some point, it quietly becomes "just a thing you own." Not bad, not great—just your new baseline.
That isn't having bad taste or lacking willpower. It’s hedonic adaptation.
Our brains don't measure satisfaction against zero; they measure it against whatever we already have. The second something transitions from "what you got" to "what you have," the feeling that drove the purchase quietly checks out.
Here are a couple of behavioral insights on why this happens and how consumer psychology exploits it:
The entire consumer economy bets on your joy fading
If the excitement of an upgrade lasted permanently, industries would only sell you something once. The feeling never actually came from the object itself—it came from the gap closing between wanting something and having it. And by design, that gap always reopens.
Static objects vs. Ongoing narratives
The common advice is always "just buy less stuff." But the real problem isn't buying—it’s what we buy for:
- Adaptation resets almost instantly on static objects. A watch, a car, or clothes just sit there unchanged, so your baseline catches up within days.
- Adaptation resets far slower on things tied to an ongoing personal narrative: building a skill, fitness transformations, learning a craft, or working on a project with a next chapter.
Stories keep developing, which gives your brain a moving target to reach for rather than a static item to get bored of.
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Curious to hear from this community: Have you found effective frameworks to catch yourself before the hedonic treadmill kicks in, or do you deliberately steer your spending toward experiences/learning over objects?
(PS: Put together a short 3-minute visual breakdown exploring this dynamic and why the brain normalizes static purchases here: https://youtu.be/XW-JdonhHv4)
I keep noticing the same pattern. A team does real work upfront: maps the friction points, understands the psychology, builds a genuinely thoughtful model for why people behave the way they do in a given context. Then a few steps later, what actually ships is a crude version of it: a countdown timer, a nudge stripped of its nuance, a policy reduced to a slogan.
The thinking wasn't wrong. It just didn't survive the trip from research to execution.
I see this most directly in marketing and growth work. A well-reasoned behavioural model collapsing into "add urgency + scarcity" by the time it reaches a live campaign. But I suspect this isn't unique to marketing at all. I'd guess it shows up in public health messaging, product design, policy rollout, anywhere there's a handoff between the people who understand the "why" and the people who have to ship something fast.
A few theories on where the "collapse" happens:
The person who understands the psychology isn't the person who builds the thing, so nuance gets compressed into whatever the next person can act on quickly.
Tools force a translation. A rich behavioural model doesn't fit neatly into existing workflows, so it gets reduced to fit the tool rather than the other way around.
Incentives reward shipping fast over shipping right, so the simplest interpretation wins, not the most accurate one.
Curious whether others have seen this in their own domain, and if anyone's found a real fix, not just "communicate better," but something structural that actually closes the gap.
I’m currently mapping out my master’s options to break into behavioral science, decision science, I-O psychology, or people analytics roles outside India (targeting the US, UK, or EU).
I’m looking for blunt, honest insights—especially from alumni, international students who navigated visas, or anyone working in these fields.
The programs on my shortlist are:
US: Penn (MBDS), Baruch (I-O Psychology)
UK: LSE (Behavioral Science), Warwick (Behavioral and Economic Science)
EU: University of Mannheim, VU Amsterdam
My Core Questions:
1. Job Outcomes & Titles
In the first 6–12 months post-graduation, what job titles did you and your peers actually land?
Which industries were the most welcoming (e.g., consulting, tech/product, health, policy, finance)?
2. Visa & Sponsorship Realities
For international students (F-1/OPT in the US, or skilled worker visas in the UK/EU), how realistic was long-term sponsorship?
What specific types of companies or roles were actually willing to sponsor?
3. ROI & Program Shortlisting
Knowing what you know now, would you do the same master’s again?
If you were in my shoes (international applicant, ~2 years of work experience, targeting corporate/applied behavioral roles abroad), which 2–3 programs would you prioritize?
4. Alternative Paths
If the ultimate goal is applied behavioral science or I-O work within organizations (and not clinical work or pure academia), is there a different master’s you’d recommend instead? (e.g., standard I-O Psychology, HCI/UX, Data Science, Public Policy, or Behavioral Economics)? Why?
As the title says, if you were to start your own business that somehow leverages some principle(s) of behavioral economics, what might your business be?
I’m conducting a short anonymous survey for an independent research project on consumer decision‑making. It takes about 5 minutes and explores how price, reviews, brands, and psychological factors influence purchasing decisions. Please take it.
Checkout service changed how it calculates a discount. Diff was clean, tests passed, and an automated review found nothing to flag. Two days after deploy the invoice service started producing wrong totals. It was consuming that discount value and had always assumed it arrived already tax-adjusted. That assumption lived in the invoice service's code and nowhere else. Nothing in the checkout repo, its tests, or its schema said the value was being treated that way downstream.
So the change was correct by every check that could see it. The check that would have caught it would have needed to know about a service that wasn't in the PR.
The contract test route is the obvious answer, and I think it's the right one. But it only works if someone thought to write the test for that specific assumption, and the whole problem is that nobody knew it was an assumption. It was just how the invoice code happened to work.
What I keep going back and forth on is whether there's a cheaper habit than full consumer-driven contracts for the small stuff. Something like listing, for any field that crosses a service boundary, what the consumers do with it. Maybe that's just a comment on the schema. Maybe it rots in six months like every other comment.
We’re currently working on a research project and would really appreciate your help. We’ve made a short Google Form for our study, and your participation would mean a lot to us!
Please take a few minutes to fill it out, and if possible, share the form with your friends or in other groups as well. It would really help us reach more participants.
What are the leading departments in the world as far as behavioural microeconomics are concerned? I’m talking about research and PhDs.
I love behavioural economics and I hate finance (and a lot of macroeconomic subjects/fields). I know there are a lot of T10 universities in the US have great researchers that focus on behavioural macro-finance, but I don’t know how they are ranked in behavioural microeconomics?
Are there specific departments that lead the way? Specific journals? Specific economists/researchers?
The hypercorrection effect basically says that errors committed by you with high confidence are more likely to be corrected than the low confidence errors. Do y'all agree with this? Why do y'all think this even happens in the first place?
Hey I’m a mixed methods UXR. Recently, I have gotten interested in the field of behavioral economics and wanted to get ideas on how to best learn about it. I want to learn it from the perspective of applying it to being a better UXR and being able to better contribute to product growth. I am not good at following long and heavy readings so wanted to get an idea on which resources to use.
Went down a rabbit hole on this after realizing how lopsided the actual protections are at a mortgage closing, and the research behind why the "sign here" part of the process works the way it does turned out to be more specific than I expected.
Start with the deadline itself. John Payne, James Bettman, and Eric Johnson published research in 1988 showing that under real time pressure, people don't think faster, they switch decision strategies entirely, trading careful comparison for simpler rules that feel adequate but that they'd abandon given more time. A closing date functions as an unusually hard deadline: movers booked, a rate lock expiring, other people in the room waiting specifically on you. Rereading page 40 of a mortgage note starts to feel less like due diligence and more like holding up a line.
The second mechanism is about the shape of the request itself. Ellen Langer, Arthur Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz's famous 1978 study found people comply with a request the moment it's wrapped in the simple shape of a reason, regardless of whether the reason explains anything. Worth noting the actual finding is more specific than the popular version: this only held for small requests. When they scaled up the ask in a follow-up condition, the placebic reason stopped working and people wanted a real explanation. A "sign here" tab is built to always read as the small version, dozens of times in a row, even though the aggregate request, a decades-long mortgage, is about as large as personal finance gets.
The regulatory history is the part I didn't expect. Before 2015, borrowers got four separate disclosure documents from two federal laws that didn't talk to each other, a Good Faith Estimate and an initial lending disclosure early on, then a settlement statement and a second lending disclosure at closing, overlapping and inconsistent enough that comparing final numbers to what you'd been quoted took real effort. After 2008 made that confusion impossible to ignore, Dodd-Frank created the CFPB in 2010 specifically to fix it. The Bureau spent roughly five years testing draft forms directly with consumers before TRID ("Know Before You Owe") took effect October 3, 2015, replacing four documents with two and locking in the three-day review window by law. Penalties for knowing violations run from tens of thousands of dollars per day into the millions for the most serious cases.
What the law never touched is the hour that follows the window. Five pages got three protected days. The other fifty to a hundred got nothing.
Curious whether anyone's seen research on regulatory interventions that fixed the disclosure but left the delivery mechanism (one sitting, one signature session) completely untouched. This feels like a common pattern, get the information right, never touch the format it arrives in, but I haven't found much treating it as its own category of partial fix.
Hey everyone. I just wanted to let you know a group of incredibly rich people who live in reality have notified us that there is finally something smarter than them, and we should all be terrified, because if it’s anything like them, intelligence means destruction of all life around it. To those communities whose world ended centuries ago, they want you to know, this time it’s really real.
Just interviewed Thorsten Hens, professor of financial economics at the University of Zurich and one of the top finance minds Europe, and we got into why financial markets are so difficult to understand, even when you've spent decades studying them.
He brought up George Soros and reflexivity. His example, paraphrased: the weather doesn't give a shit what I think about it. But if I think the AI bubble is about to burst, I might sell. If enough people do the same, that belief starts affecting prices. Your prediction can help move the thing you're trying to predict.
I brought up Keynes's beauty contest analogy, which I think gets at a really fun part of this. In the newspaper competition he describes, you pick six faces from a hundred photographs, and the prize goes to whoever comes closest to the average choices of everyone playing. So picking the faces you personally find prettiest won't necessarily get you anywhere. You have to think about what everyone else will pick, while they're also trying to work out what everyone else will pick.
And then you can keep going: what do I think other people think other people think? These are the higher-order beliefs we got into.
Thorsten drew a massively useful distinction: these interactions drive shorter-term market fluctuations, while fundamentals drive long-run growth, so value-investors still win long-term, BUT he points out that these speculative cycles can last years, which makes “short term” a slightly uncomfortable phrase if you're the one sitting in it.
Curious how people working on this separate the effects in practice. How do you distinguish a market responding to new information from one responding to what people expect everyone else to believe, or do you not engage in the game at all, and stay long-term?
I wasted an embarrassing amount of time today trying to solve a problem that was worth almost nothing. That’s when it hit me. Tbh, my brain has been doing some very questionable accounting.
I can spend 40 minutes comparing prices to save $5. Take a less convenient route because it’s cheaper. Fight with a website for an hour rather than pay a small fee. Fix something myself even when I hate doing it.
And somehow this feels financially responsible.
Paying $10 to make the problem disappear feels wasteful.
Strange, right?
Because my time is another cost hiding in that trade. It’s opportunity cost. A concept I happily apply to college, jobs, housing, and almost never to a dumb little decision on a Tuesday afternoon.
The money is visible. The alternative use of my time isn’t.
If I pay $10, I watch it leave my account. If I spend 45 minutes saving that $10, nothing visibly leaves my account, so the transaction feels free.
Unemployed or underemployed? It gets even stranger. It’s very easy to start pricing your own time at $0 because nobody is currently paying you for it. Any positive dollar amount you save can start looking like a win.
Except that hour was never actually free.
It could have gone to a job application, a workout, sleep, someone you love, another annoying task that actually matters, or just an hour of your one finite life.
So here’s the thought I’m going to test:
If someone offered me, like, $10 to do this annoying thing for 45 minutes, would I take the job?
Same money. Same time. Weirdly different decision.
But I don’t think “time is money” is quite the answer either.
Not every hour has an hourly rate. If the alternative is doomscrolling, 20 minutes hunting a discount might genuinely be worth it. Cooking can save money and be enjoyable. Learning to fix something saves money today and may pay out again tomorrow. And an hour of exhausting customer-service calls is not the same currency as an hour spent doing something you like.
Which made me realize I’ve been asking the wrong question.
Real cost looks more like:
what it costs me now + what it costs me later + what it costs me to feel that way while doing it.
Turns out the same math works on money itself.
Being good with money means knowing what’s cheap and what’s expensive. Maybe being good with money means knowing what something is actually worth to you.
I’m trying to replace “That’s expensive” with “Is it worth what it costs?”
Because those are not the same thing.
$10 can be too expensive for something I don’t value and ridiculously cheap for something that gives me back an hour of my life.
And saving $10 can be absolutely worth 45 minutes today — and not worth five minutes tomorrow.
The price tells me what something costs. It doesn’t tell me whether it’s worth paying.
What’s something you spend money on that other people call “expensive,” but is completely worth it to you? And what’s something “cheap” you’ve realized isn’t worth its real cost?
