The Technic Alley

Here is an interesting “nudge” that I noticed near my local school recently. On one of the bigger streets adjacent to the school, the “School 25 MPH” sign tends to get ignored by many drivers; probably some larger signs would help. There is one particular intersection that gets really busy just before school time in [...]

In his book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell describes an experiment where a store that offered over twenty different types of jam sold significantly less jam than another store that offered only six. Gladwell’s explanation for this is that when we are presented with too many choices, we get a lot of information to process and make [...]

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
This is Malcolm Gladwell’s second book after “The Tipping Point.”  In The Tipping Point, Gladwell writes about how sometimes things considered little and insignificant can unexpectedly cause big changes. Blink is about something very different; it is about how much information processing is done by our mind at [...]

Do you remember your very  first experience with virtual reality? Was it the flight simulator that you played on your PC? Or that car racing game on your PlayStation? Or tennis on your Wii?
It’s none of the above. You experienced virtual reality for the first time when you were a child, and someone told you [...]

Ever since I stumbled upon the book Predictably Irrational, I have been fascinated by the field of behavioral economics. I have looked for other books or articles on the subject, and found Freakonomics, Sway, and The Tipping Point, to name a few. Why did I find these interesting? It is because they seem to have [...]

In his book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell writes about “Sensation Transference.” He describes what a beer manufacturer realized when they tried to figure out why their competitor’s beer was always doing better in the market, in spite of their beer being of good quality, having good advertisements, and having been priced competively. After a series of [...]

In his book, “Predictably Irrational,” Dan Ariely describes what he calls the IKEA effect.  This concept has been selected as one of  Harvard Business Reviews’  Breakthrough Ideas for 2009.
The essence of this effect is to make us “love what we build.” It’s what you feel when you go to IKEA (or Home Depot, or whatever [...]

I just saw this interesting post titled “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance” by Shankar Vedantam from Washington Post’s Department of Human Behavior.  The article talks about how “stereotype threat” can affect our responses to a challenge, and consequently, our performance.
Here is one experiment described in the article:
Sociologist Min-Hsuing Huang recently decided to [...]

Picture this. You walk from home to the movie theatre which is a block away. You watch a movie that has a very sombre story involving a lot of old people and the problems they face. Then you walk back home. The next day, you do the exact same thing, except this time, you watch [...]

I was just browsing through my Google Reader this morning, and this MedicalNewsToday article caught my eye.
There is an experiment described in the article. A group of volunteers take part in a test. In the test, they are made to believe that they saw a laptop being stolen. They are then asked to identify who stole [...]