Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category

People are often surprised to hear I’m a devoted football fan and Cardiff City supporter. Perhaps it doesn’t gel well with people’s perceptions of me (whatever those may be); however, I find football gives me an exciting break from daily concerns, and a chance to be part of the tribal culture inherent within us all. [...]

January was the month that Twitter lurched towards the British mainstream. Stats show an astronomical rise in site and search traffic, and the rich and famous are now falling over themselves to connect with their fawning public. One may ask why this tipping point has happened first in the UK, rather than the States or [...]

Our tiny brains are reaching social saturation point. Any heavy email receiver, Twitter user or RSS subscriber will tell you that there comes a point whereby the flow of inbound information is more than we can handle. The result is a flood which can often only be stemmed by giving up and hitting that reset [...]

Some things aren’t meant to be measured. It’s bad enough that people read so much into their blog stats, follower numbers etc, but now we have more evil forces like Twitterank. The number of people willing to surrender their privacy to its password anti-pattern is even more astonishing given its payoff: a dimensionless, reference-free number. [...]

One of the benefits of following smart people on Twitter is that I regularly pick up on techniques and principles I’ve not heard of. I don’t remember who first mentioned the MAYA Principle, but I investigated and found a powerful idea I think is worth sharing. MAYA, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, is a heuristic coined [...]

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti Control is a slippery thing. It’s important to our lives; we need it to rationalise and justify our decisions, but sometimes it’s simply beyond our influence. The well-known fundamental attribution error is a clear example of how we overstate human involvement [...]

One of the most widely used metrics in e-commerce is conversion: simply a measure of the proportion of people who go from x to Sale, where x might be simply visiting the site, or perhaps adding something to the basket. Of course, increasing conversion is generally a Good Thing because it makes big red lines [...]

Two artists polled the musical tastes of the American public, then composed two songs containing the most widely-loved and -hated musical components. The Most Wanted Song is short, bland and unpleasantly reminiscent of Luther Vandross. The Most Unwanted Song is over twenty minutes long, and features tubas, rapping opera singers, accordians, and (hideously) a chorus [...]