More Psychological Biases

When two things are compared we heighten their difference. eg. grey next to white looks darker, next to black, its lighter. A tall person seems even taller when next to someone small. A beautiful person is even prettier when surrounded by ugly people.

Use the contrast effect to artificially heighten your own qualities.

The more you know the harder it is to explain it to people that know nothing. To them it looks like your talking nonsense.

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If you wanted popcorn and their was only two options, small and large, theirs a good chance you'd pick small as your not that hungry. But once a medium is added spending a little bit more seems like a better deal, even though you don't actually want extra. This is the decoy effect.

Make yourself a happy medium between easily-achievable and unattainable.

we're more likely to spend when we have change that a note of equivalent price (eg. 10 £1 coins vs £10 note). We don't like breaking notes. The higher the value, the harder it is to spend. would you spend a £500 note?

If you want people to spend more money, give them change.

Small comparisons seem to disagree when we make a decision. Do I spend more money for the pro deluxe + version or do I settle for the basic version? I you have settled for the basic version you quickly relies that your perfectly happy with it and why would you need all those extra features anyway?

Next time your finding it hard to make a decision, remember this.

The length of an experience has little effect on our memory. What more important is how we feel at the start and endow the experience. Drag an experience out longer, so you can end on a happy note. As that's what they will remember.

We find it hard to predict someone else's actions, when our feelings differ eg. you're happy and they're angry. We also struggle to predict how we will act if we where in a different emotional state.

We can combat this by mentally putting ourselves into different states and thinking about how we would act.

We place more value on things we own. Your hat has more value that the same hat sitting on the store shelf.

Since people place more value on things, hype up their simple things and they'll like you more as a result.