psychology

“The Barnum effect refers to the tendency for people to accept as uncannily descriptive of themselves the same generally worded assessment as long as they believe it was written specifically for them on the basis of some ‘diagnostic’ instrument such as a horoscope or personality inventory.”

By offering people one decision rather than ten, we can aid the decision-making process and, more often than not, work to maintain flexibility in choice, while offering a more attractive alternative.

if we hear about something while eating delicious food, we tend to associate the matter in question with the positive feelings elicited by the food.

‘A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.’

Third, dopamine is one of those aforementioned reward chemicals, a feel-good drug produced by the brain to drive behavior.3 Dopamine feels really good. Cocaine is widely considered the most addictive drug on earth,

At some level of interconnectivity we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so

our minds love nothing more than jumping to conclusions.

Most importantly, folktales and fables do not create the same level of connection between storyteller and audience as a personal story.

I ended up with a picture in my head of a market economy as a far-from-equilibrium communications network that uses prices to transmit information about wants and scarcities to people who make production and consumption decisions, exactly as Friedrich von Hayek4 explained almost 90 years ago.