Amid celebration and merriness, holidays have a certain facility for inspiring feelings of guilt: did I eat too much food? Did I find the right gifts and give them to the right people? Did I meet my New Year's resolutions? And do I have good ones for the coming year? To borrow from Emerson:...

Continue reading “The Pleasure of Guilt”

Interruptions are increasingly common in everyday life. But what does that mean for consumers trying to make decisions, or marketers trying to influence those decisions? Continue reading “Can’t Finish What You Started?”

​​In every aspect of life, spanning supermarkets to health insurance to career options to superannuation funds, consumers have an astonishing luxury of choice. It’s generally cited as a sign of freedom, but is a dizzying array of choices a way to liberate or debilitate? Continue reading “Higher Goals: How to Deal With Too Many Choices”

Common sense would suggest the following: if you take two objects and differentiate one from the other, then, by definition, they will appear to be more different than they were before, not more similar. Common sense, of course, also once suggested that the sun orbited earth.  A fascinating series of experiments out of the Yale Center for Customer Insights found that our perceptions of similarity are more complicated than common sense—and decades-old academic modeling—suggests. Continue reading “The More Things Change…”