The Time Tax: When asked whether they would prefer $50 today or $100 next month, the majority of adults choose the smaller, earlier reward. When asked whether they would prefer $50 in 12 months or $100 in 13 months — mathematically the same decision, shifted forward by one year — the majority flip to the … Read more
The Asymmetric Mirror: When retail investors are asked to explain their winning trades, 82 percent attribute the result to skill; when asked to explain their losing trades, 78 percent attribute the result to market conditions, bad luck, or external manipulation. The two attribution rates would, in a calibrated mind, be equal. Their inequality is the … Read more
The Reliable Overrun: Across more than 500 megaprojects analysed by the Oxford Programme on Major Infrastructure Risk, the average cost overrun was 90 percent, the average schedule overrun was 80 percent, and the average benefit shortfall was 40 percent. The pattern holds for IT projects, kitchen renovations, dissertation completion times, and the lunch you confidently … Read more
The Hindsight Trap: The same decision — identical reasoning, identical inputs, identical evaluation framework — is judged as “brilliant” or “reckless” depending entirely on whether the outcome happened to turn out well. In controlled experiments, judges rated the same trading decision 3.2 times more favourably when the trade made money than when it lost — … Read more
The Crowd Engine: In January 2021, retail investors collectively drove GameStop’s stock from $19 to $483 in 21 trading days, then watched it collapse to $42 over the following month — producing roughly $8 billion in retail losses from investors who bought into the rally past its early stages. The pattern was not an aberration. … Read more
The Asymmetric Memory: Consumers receiving a service experience rated as 9 out of 10 remember the experience moderately favourably, with roughly 75 percent recall at six months. A consumer receiving a 3-out-of-10 experience remembers the experience vividly — roughly 95 percent recall at six months — and shares it with an average of 14 other … Read more
The Same Number, Two Decisions: When physicians are told a surgery has a “90 percent survival rate,” roughly 84 percent recommend it to a patient. When the same physicians are told the same surgery has a “10 percent mortality rate,” only 50 percent recommend it. The data is identical. The framing has produced a 34-percentage-point … Read more
The Labour-of-Love Premium: Adults asked to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture themselves valued the resulting object at roughly 3 times the price they would have paid for the same object purchased pre-assembled. The valuation premium was independent of the actual aesthetic quality of the assembly — some of the self-assembled pieces were visibly worse … Read more
The Premium on a Square Jaw: Investors, voters, hiring panels, and customers consistently rate people higher on traits they have no information about — competence, intelligence, integrity, leadership ability — based largely on their physical attractiveness and superficial demeanour. The phenomenon is so reliable that finance researchers have documented a measurable stock-price premium associated with … Read more
The Stories You Read Are Lying By Omission: The most consequential statistical error in modern startup culture, in self-help literature, in investment advice, and in nearly every form of success-narrative journalism is not in the data presented. It is in the data that was never collected — the failures, the wash-outs, the businesses that closed … Read more