Unexpected discoveries
Intriguing and prescient article from January 2002 (nine months before Kahneman's Nobel Prize) describing everybody's favourite cognitive effects - with just a couple of mentions of a then-new buzzword: "behavioural economics". Dan Ariely, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are quoted as psychologists; Richard Thaler, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec all come up, along with pricing consultant Thomas Nagle and a couple of others. It's like the Brat Pack of irrationality. And in the same Google search I discovered Brain Biases , a site with a handy catalogue of cognitive biases, with a brief description, examples and proposed explanations for each. Talking of biases, Eric Barker discovers some research suggesting that showing anger makes a complaint more credible . Correct no doubt; but I hope that people don't act too quickly on this advice. If your goal is a successful resolution of your complaint, credibility is not the only factor. You also need to g...