

Cognitive Lode – Brain gems for decision-makers - famfamfam
http://coglode.com/

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ttctciyf
I find a lot of this interesting and plausible, but have to take issue with:

> _Hedonic Adaptation_ ... Enjoyment of a television program is actually
> enhanced by commercial interruptions, despite what viewers say.

I haven't read the study cited, so can only imagine the reasoning and data,
but I suspect a lot is hanging on the way enjoyment is measured here. One way
of measuring it might be to give people a choice between watching with and
without commercials. I'd be pretty surprised if more chose "with." (Do people
always act to maximise their own perceived enjoyment, all else being equal? Is
there an objective measurement of enjoyment, beyond self-reported perceived
enjoyment? Deep philosophical issues lurking here.)

I don't dispute the principle - my personal struggle with chocolate
consumption bears out its applicability to abstinence/pleasure trade-offs
there. But this particular datapoint doesn't ring true. Perhaps if the
interruptions were furnished by pure radio silence I might be more amenable.

An anecdote relayed by my old CS tutor: in one production-line, where the shop
floor "enjoyed" pop music via the radio, it was found that a regime of 15
minutes on / 15 minutes off gave the best results. As he put it: "When it's
off they can look forward to it coming on; when it's on, they can look forward
to it going off."

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vidarh
Jonathan Haidt touches on this in "The Happiness Hypothesis", though not
specifically applying it to TV watching.

There's the standard issue of measuring happiness, sure, since it's hard to
find other than a self-reported subjective measurement for it.

But in general, the principle that what matters most to keep us happy is a
steady "upwards trajectory" where things keeps getting somewhat better is
getting quite decently researched from a lot of angles. According to Haidt,
the studies he refers to in his book supports the claim that once basic needs
(food, shelter) has been met, happiness deviates from a lot of what we people
tend to think:

It is only mildly correlated with wealth, for example, and then largely
because being wealthy allows for more opportunity for an upwards trajectory.
However, people who suddenly come into wealth (e.g. lottery winners) report a
lot of happiness for a short interval after winning, but then quickly return
to "base level".

And another example of the "hedonic adaptation" is that while mental illness
such as depression can have a long term impact on happiness, but most other
illness does not. Amputees, people with long term horrible chronic illnesses,
people who are told they have only a few years left to live etc., that we
often feel sorry for and assume will be miserable, all tend to return to base
level happiness fairly quickly on average with the exception of those with
degenerative conditions that put them on an ongoing downward trajectory. In
fact, some groups will tend to be _more_ happy than typical: Those who are
slowly _recovering_ from a horrible situation, and who thus see steady
improvement in their situation.

With respect to the TV example, I find it quite plausible (with the caveat
that I've not read the study either), as pacing in story-telling has _already_
follows a pattern where you set up tension, release it and slows down the
story, then set up tension again, for pretty much as long as people have been
telling dramatic stories.

Pretty much all movies follow a pattern with "tension release" at least once
or twice before the climax as well. I remember my English teacher drawing up
diagrams of pacing a bunch of movies when I was in school even.

A perfect example of the alternative - to try to maintain an upwards
trajectory as much as possible - would be Crank and Crank 2 with Jason Statham
(though arguable even those movies cycle through periods with "lulls" in the
action, just on a very accelerated schedule), which indeed tries to keep an
insane pace throughout. In those movies it's used as a gimmick (Statham needs
to keep his heart going with drugs etc. in the first movie, and needs to keep
an artificial heart charged in the second, with antics that in no way try to
be realistic at any point), but when you contrast the start of the first movie
with the latter parts of the second, you see the result: To make it feel like
the pressure is "kept up" the pace keeps accelerating to absolutely ridiculous
levels. It's almost tiring to watch.

That ad breaks could provide some of the function in TV programs would thus
not seem strange to me at all.

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ttctciyf
Well, I suppose there is a presumption of an enjoyable TV program to start
with. I'd overlooked that. I suppose it's quite possible (and maybe even
common) to craft TV that is so awful that even the commercials serve to
improve the experience (some celebrity game shows come to mind, not to mention
certain news outlets...)

But if we assume TV that people have elected to watch in the first place, what
do you think of the argument that viewers would likely choose the "without
commercials" option?

Assuming this is so, are they fooling themselves into inferior enjoyment?

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vidarh
I do believe viewers would likely choose the "without commercials" option
ahead of time, but chances are good that they would enjoy it less. We're
horribly bad at guessing what will provide the best payoff for us over time.
And even when we _know_ , we are horribly bad at making use of that knowledge
rather than letting ourselves be led by impulses.

To take the lottery example: How many people do you think would opt for $1m
today vs. $10000 this year, $12000 the following year, $14000 the year after,
and so on, until they'd have received, say, $3m? Pretty much all research into
both lottery winners and the way we judge rewards now vs. later indicates that
most of us would likely opt for the $1m now, yet be less happy for it over
time vs. an option where we can look forward to steadily increasing rewards
over a long period of time.

I'd be willing to be that you could show people data on how the options would
likely affect their happiness, and the majority of people would still opt for
the $1m now, and go out and start spending.

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raverbashing
Round Price Preference

Yes, please, let's stop the 99.99 crap. And with sales tax the point is moot

Even better, let's not have more than 3 significant digits on prices (ok,
maybe 4 or 5 for high value items)

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mantrax3
Ron Johnson thought that, so removed the cheap pricing tricks from JCPenney.

People stopped buying.

He was fired.

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adwf
Yeah I was going to say that the round pricing rule here is one of the more
controversial ones. It's been proven time and time again that prices set at
.99 will outsell their rounded competition by quite a way. It doesn't even
have to be cents or pennies, something priced at $49 will outsell the one at
$50.

I remember hearing of one study (I read this in Priceless by William
Poundstone, good book), that compared the exact same product sold at $44, $39
and $34 through a split-tested mail order catalogue. Obviously, the $39
outsold the $44 as it was cheaper - but bizarrely, the $39 also outsold the
$34.

There is a very weird power to the number 9 in pricing, I wouldn't
underestimate it. If anyone wants further reading, I suggest googling "Charm
Prices".

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vidarh
One explanation I've seen, is that the "9" prices have come to be associated
with discounts. $34 sounds like it was set based on cost. $39 sounds like it
was set to be cheaper than something.

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torbjorn
This is a visually appealing interface for wikipedia's list of cognitive
biases.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

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netghost
This is fun stuff. I'd love to read more of them in the future, but there's no
feed link. Has RSS really died? I'm often surprised by how many sites skip
including these now.

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oakesm9
No probs! Follow our twitter feed
[https://twitter.com/coglode](https://twitter.com/coglode) We'll be putting
all new gems out via that. Hope that helps!

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digitalengineer
If you enjoy this, you might like 'To Sell is Human'. It's full of little
treasures. [http://www.danpink.com/books/to-sell-is-
human/](http://www.danpink.com/books/to-sell-is-human/)

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steamer25
FWIW, I couldn't get it to load in Firefox. Switching over to Chrome worked in
case anyone runs into the same problem.

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AnimalMuppet
Firefox worked for me...

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mantrax3
The fallacy recognition fallacy:

The idea that if you recognize one of those fallacies at play, it's the
dominant fallacy and hence correcting it will lead to the predicted results.

Reality is a complicated mesh of variables, and we judge it with a complicated
mesh of heuristics.

Studying the fallacies is good, but don't think you suddenly have an
explanation & solution for all the problems you see around yourself.

~~~
oakesm9
Great one Mantrax3! We'll add that on [http://coglode.com](http://coglode.com)
I think!

