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
The Wealth Asymmetry: The pain of losing $100 is not equal and opposite to the pleasure of winning $200. In the neural accounting that quietly drives your investment behaviour, your job choices, and your willingness to start over, losses are weighted roughly twice as heavily as gains. This single asymmetry is the most expensive cognitive … Read more
The Quitting Premium: The most profitable decision you will make in any decade is almost always one you have already postponed for years. The cognitive trap that keeps you in the wrong job, the bad investment, the failing project, and the unrewarding relationship has a name: the sunk cost fallacy. It is one of the … Read more
The Mirror Trap: The most expensive feature of human cognition is not its slowness or its errors. It is the fact that your brain has a hard-wired preference for information that confirms what you already believe — and an equally hard-wired aversion to information that does not. The phenomenon is called confirmation bias, and it … Read more
The Number That Hijacks Your Judgement: A completely random number — one that has nothing to do with the decision in front of you — can shift the answer your brain settles on by 30 to 50 percent. The mechanism is not error or fatigue; it is a structural feature of human cognition that operates … Read more
The Wrong Threat Map: Your brain runs a continuous, automatic risk assessment of the world around you — and it does so almost entirely on the wrong data. The danger you fear is not the danger most likely to harm you, and the gap is not a personal flaw. It is a structural feature of … Read more
The Yesterday Trap: The single most expensive cognitive bias in retail investing is not greed, not fear, not overconfidence. It is the brain’s persistent assumption that whatever happened most recently is the new normal. Markets that went up yesterday will go up tomorrow. Sectors that crashed last month are permanently broken. Asset classes that have … Read more