Posts
Comments
I've taken the survey, and realised that I really need to practise making probability estimates.
You might want to consider a list price which is precise to $100 or $1000 rather than a round number, because the anchoring effect seems to be stronger when a price is more exact. The original paper is behind a paywall, but there's a summary in this article.
They looked at five years of real estate sales in Alachua County, Florida, comparing list prices and actual sales prices of homes. They found that sellers who listed their homes more precisely—say $494,500 as opposed to $500,000—consistently got closer to their asking price. Put another way, buyers were less likely to negotiate the price down as far when they encountered a precise asking price.
I know what you mean, and I worried about that when I posted those examples. The problem is that I can't tell if I'm suffering from the hindsight bias when I'm trying to evaluate "Could I believe both this statement and its inverse, regardless of which one was presented as the truth?" In these cases, I can come up with fake rationalisations for both (even though one is more counter-intuitive), which makes me think that they might be invertible. They would need to be tested on people in experiments like the ones in the article by Meyers.
Venting when angry leads to less happiness after the initial catharsis.
In romantic relationships, similar personalities attract, rather than opposites.
The blog Barking up the Wrong Tree also collects psychology experiments of this kind. The posts are often based on single studies, so I don't know how well-established they are, but it's often possible to reverse the result and invent a plausible explanation. Some examples:
Spending money on other people makes you happier than spending it on yourself
Heavy TV-watchers are less happy when given more channel options (which itself is an example of the general finding that having a large number of choices reduces happiness)
Chronically ill patients may be less happier if they hope for a cure
Hi.
I've been lurking here and on OB for a couple of years. As other people have said, there seems to be a large amount of prerequisite knowledge required to post here. I usually find my own thoughts expressed more clearly by someone else in the comments, so I up-vote rather than just adding noise.