The Technic Alley

I just read a post in Dan Ariely’s blog about the new expanded version of Predictably Irrational.
Ariely writes:
 
Predictably Irrational was first published in February 2008, and given the relative ease of modifying books these days, I decided to add some of my reflections on the stock market crisis — and create an expanded edition of [...]

Have you thought of a feature or an application that you wished your PC or Notebook  supported? What if you could design it yourself?
WePC.com is a social network that was recently launched by Intel and Asus, aimed at giving users an opportunity to share their ideas and insights on future designs as well as vote [...]

As I am listening to the audio version of the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, I am beginning to notice the numerous daily “nudges” we experience, and have become accustomed to.
I drive to work and turn my car’s ignition off, and I hear [...]

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 [...]

In my post Irrational Economics, I quoted some surprising observations from an article in The Atlantic titled “Dismal scientists: how the crash is reshaping economics.” I wrote:
“What the article says is that a lot of the economics theories that are being used today haven’t advanced at all in the past 80 years or so. While [...]

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 [...]