haha, reminds me of when i first got my gmail account almost four years ago. ah, but i still love it. i guess this theory explains why i keep my hotmail accounts even though i don't use them anymore--they were grandfathered over from when syncing with outlook was free.

Have social psychologists really attempted to redefine the term scarcity? It seems like a particularly stupid thing to do.

Buyers for supermarkets, told by a supplier that beef was in scarce supply, gave orders for twice as much beef as buyers told it was readily available.

In the defense of consumers, this behavior is in fact rational. A shortage increases the likelihood of a stockout in the near future, so it behooves you to buy more now when you can so you can maintain your own personal inventory and avoid the consequences of the coming stockout. This behavior is one cause of the Bullwhip Effect.

This is better described as a "noisy clue" than a "bias." On average the fact that something is rare, in demand, or hidden on purpose is in fact a reason to be more interested in it. Of course sometimes people can use our willingness to follow noisy clues to fool us.

Of course sometimes people can use our willingness to follow noisy clues to fool us.

Right, over time this tactic can become cliche in a given context? I hope I'm not the only one who rolls his eyes when a saleman claims that a certain product model is in short supply. Then again, I just missed a chance to buy a car at the price I wanted by ignoring such a claim and waiting. Or did I (miss a genuine rather than fake chance)?

I find it unpersuasive; ban the post.

I agree with Bobvis: a LOT of this is rational:

When University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms had been banned, they became more opposed to coed dorms (without even hearing the speech). (Probably in Ashmore et. al. 1971.)

This seems straight Bayes to me. The banning of the speech counts as information about the chance that you'll agree with it, and for a reasonably low probability of banning speech that isn't dangerous to the administration (i.e. speech that won't convince), Everyone's Favorite Probability Rule kicks in and makes it totally rational to become more opposed to coed dorms -- assuming, that is, that you believe your chance of being convicted comes largely from rational sources (a belief that practical agents are at least somewhat committed to having).

When a driver said he had liability insurance, experimental jurors awarded his victim an average of four thousand dollars more than if the driver said he had no insurance. If the judge afterward informed the jurors that information about insurance was inadmissible and must be ignored, jurors awarded an average of thirteen thousand dollars more than if the driver had no insurance. (Broeder 1959.)

This too seems rational, though in this case only mostly, not totally. We can understand jurors as trying to balance the costs and the benefits of the award (not their legal job, but a perfectly sane thing to do). And the diminishing marginal utility of wealth suggests that imposing a large judgment on an insurance company causes less disutility to the person paying (or people, distributing that over the company's clients) than imposing it on a single person. As for the judge's informing the jurors that insurance information is inadmissible, well, again, they can interpret that instruction as information about the presence of insurance and update accordingly. (Although that might not be accurate in the context of how judges give instructions, jurors need not know that.) Of course, it seems like they updated too much, since they increased their awards much more when p(insurance) increased but is less than 1, than they did when they learned that p(insurance)=1. So it's still probably partially irrational. But not an artifact of some kind of magical scarcity effect.

Bovis,

I believe the irrational part is that the consumer would buy more meat depending of how scarce the information of scarcity was. For example, consumer overheard the butcher talk about meat being scarce so the consumer buys 8 times more instead of 4 times more (if the scarcity of meat was common knowledge).

Bovis,

I believe the irrational part is that the consumer would buy more meat depending of how scarce the information of scarcity was. For example, consumer overheard the butcher talk about meat being scarce so the consumer buys 8 times more instead of 4 times more (if the scarcity of meat was common knowledge).

Re: "information that appears forbidden or secret, seems more important and trustworthy" Michael Scheuer says the same thing about how the CIA analyzes data. He claims that public sources are often ignored in favor of confidential ones, even when its irrational to do so.

Minor point to speed up finding the book: I believe (or rather, Google believes) that the correct name is "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" (i.e. drop the "Social")

Cialdini also seems to have put out the same info in a textbook (which does not read like one) "Influence, Science and Practice." Amazon reviews say it is nearly identical, except it has chapter reviews and problems. I only mention this because this is the version that was available at my 2 nearest library systems. Very good reading a quarter of the way in-- so thanks for the tip.

EY-- what other books are in the "own 3 copy" club?

Scarce things become objects of envy, increasing social value to ourselves, and they also increases the probable resale value, even in the absence of other information. The scarcity often signals high demand from others, as in the out-of-stock example.

I run an SEO blog and it seems the articles that are most unique or are perceived to be less available, or general insider secrets are a lot more read.

Also, things perceived to be wrong create more interest themselves.

Nice article, worth a lot of money to an avid marketer I'd think.

This reminds me that one of the first things I did when I made my account here was to disabled the setting that had me ignore posts that had been downvoted, because I found I was always clicking the link to view them anyway. So downvoting the post actually made me pay more attention to it then a post with no points at all.

I remember that I used to intentionally put some things that I wanted out of reach, so that I still got that feeling of yearning for it, all the while knowing that if I achieved it then it wouldn't be as great. Then I eventually realized that if achieving something lessens the value of it, then I shouldn't really want it in the first place.

When University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms had been banned, they became more opposed to coed dorms (without even hearing the speech).  (Probably in Ashmore et. al. 1971.)

De-platforming may be effective in a different direction than intended.

Oof, be wary of Tim Ferriss, for he is a giant phony.  I bought one of his books once, and nearly every single piece of advice in it was a bad generalization from a single study, and all of it was either already well known outside of the book, or ineffective, or just plain wrong.  I have had great luck by immediately downgrading the trustworthiness of anything that mentions him, and especially anything that treats him as an authority.  I have found the same with NLP.  Please don't join that club.

Tim Ferriss is an utterly amoral agent.  His purpose is to fill pages with whatever you will buy, and sell them to you, for money.  Beyond that, he does not care, at all.  I expect he has read Robert Cialdini's "Influence", but only as a guidebook to the most efficient ways to extract money from suckers.

This is just a warning to all readers.