Lone Gunman

The endow­ment effect is old news: the amount that we value an object increases once we take own­er­ship of it. The ‘extended ver­sion’ shows that the impact of the endow­ment effect increases with time: our val­u­a­tion of an object increases more and more as the amount of time that we own it also increases. This is known as the length-of-ownership effect.

A recent study pub­lished in the jour­nal Judge­ment and Deci­sion Mak­ing¹ has taken an even deeper look at this effect: study­ing how touch­ing an object increases both our attach­ment to that object and how much we value it… even if we don’t own it (also in pdf). Here are the key find­ings of this ‘pre-ownership expo­sure study’:

• Touch­ing an object will increase our attach­ment to it and val­u­a­tion of it, whether we own it or not.
• The longer we touch or han­dle an un-owned object, the greater we will value it and feel attached to it.
• Sim­ply think­ing about an un-owned object increases our val­u­a­tion of it and how much we feel attached to it.

Related find­ings, cited in this article:

• If an object is being sold at auc­tion, the amount that we value the object will increase as the length of the auc­tion increases.
• Own­ing a coupon for an object increases our emo­tional attach­ment to that object.
• Mak­ing an item the “focus of a com­par­i­son” increases its attrac­tive­ness and the prob­a­bil­ity that it would later be selected. We will also feel more attached to the item and will value it higher.

via @stevesilberman and Life­hacker (sug­gest­ing that this duration-of-exposure effect’ is an expla­na­tion for why we have clut­tered homes.)

¹ What, you’re not read­ing Judge­ment and Deci­sion Mak­ing? You should; it’s bimonthly and open access.

After ten years of play­ing the same Civ­i­liza­tion II cam­paign (my favourite game ever), Red­dit user Lyc­erius has ended up cre­at­ing a dystopian semi-self-sustaining world, where the three remain­ing “super-nations” are in a con­stant state of espi­onage and nuclear war.

The details of Lyc­erius’ “hell­ish night­mare” world are absolutely fas­ci­nat­ing: the mil­i­tary stale­mate; the 1700-year war; and the global warm­ing epi­demic that led to melt­ing ice caps, famine, and the end of cities. This is the polit­i­cal situation:

The only gov­ern­ments left are two theoc­ra­cies and myself, a com­mu­nist state. I wanted to stay a democ­racy, but the Sen­ate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war before the Vikings did. This would delay my attack and ren­der my turn and often my plans use­less. And of course the Vikings would then break the cease fire like clock­work the very next turn. […] I was forced to do away with democ­racy roughly a thou­sand years ago because it was endan­ger­ing my empire. But of course the peo­ple hate me now and every few years since then, there are mas­sive guer­rilla […] upris­ings in the heart of my empire that I have to deal with which saps resources from the war effort.

This reminds me of Mag­nas­anti: the total­i­tar­ian city cre­ated in Sim City 3000 that sus­tains the max­i­mum pop­u­la­tion (six mil­lion) for 50,000 years. The inter­view with it’s ‘maker’, archi­tec­ture stu­dent Vin­cent Ocasla, is worth a read.

Keep these peo­ple away from town plan­ning depart­ments, please.

Mag­nas­anti via Kot­tke

I’m cur­rently watch­ing Carl Sagan’s excel­lent Cos­mos: A Per­sonal Voy­age. I feel com­pelled to post the fol­low­ing quote from episode four, Heaven and Hell, as it stood out for its ele­gant argu­ment for the strength of sci­en­tific ideas and for not reject­ing uncom­fort­able (if incor­rect) ideas:

There are many hypothe­ses in sci­ence which are wrong. That’s all right. It’s the aper­ture to find­ing out what’s right. Sci­ence is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must sur­vive the most rig­or­ous stan­dards of evi­dence and scrutiny.

The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross con­tra­dic­tion to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some sci­en­tists attempted to sup­press Velikovsky’s ideas.

The sup­pres­sion of uncom­fort­able ideas may be com­mon in reli­gion or in pol­i­tics, but it is not the path to knowl­edge. And there is no place for it in the endeav­our of science.

We do not know before­hand where fun­da­men­tal insights will arise from about our mys­te­ri­ous and lovely solar sys­tem. And the his­tory of our study of the solar sys­tem shows clearly that accepted and con­ven­tional ideas are often wrong and that fun­da­men­tal insights can arise from the most unex­pected sources.

And if you think this only applies to wacky astro­nom­i­cal ideas or insights about our solar sys­tem… well, then you’re delud­ing yourself.

I can’t wait for the updated Cos­mos pre­sented by Neil deGrasse Tyson; it’ll be the best thing on TV since sliced bread.

Why do unre­solved issues linger in our mind, mak­ing us pon­der them for days on end? Why are cliffhang­ers so suc­cess­ful in get­ting view­ers to tune in to the next episode? How can we over­come pro­cras­ti­na­tion? These ques­tions can be answered by learn­ing about the psy­cho­log­i­cal concept/theory known as the Zeigar­nik effect.

‘Dis­cov­ered’ by Soviet psy­chol­o­gist Bluma Zeigar­nik back in the 1920s, the Zeigar­nik effect states that we remem­ber incom­plete or inter­rupted tasks bet­ter than com­pleted tasks.

And so, to those ques­tions. It’s easy to see how the Zeigar­nik effect could be respon­si­ble for the suc­cess of sus­pense as a dra­matic device, but for over­com­ing pro­cras­ti­na­tion? Use the effect to your advan­tage and start at the sim­plest, small­est part of your task. After that, the unfin­ished nature of the larger task will push you toward action.

Beware, though: the effect has been shown to dimin­ish if we don’t expect to do well on the inter­rupted task (or are oth­er­wise com­pletely not motivated).

via @jonahlehrer

Pick up any tabloid news­pa­per today and take note of how many arti­cle head­lines are phrased as a ques­tion. I under­stand that these head­lines are an attempt to pique our inter­est (or the result of lazy copy editors/writers), but are they a good idea? What is the end result of using a ques­tion as a head­line or arti­cle title?

Now we know, thanks to Betteridge’s Law of Head­lines:

Any head­line which ends in a ques­tion mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

Named for Ian Bet­teridge, this sim­ple maxim was first explic­itly found in jour­nal­ist Andrew Marr’s 2004 book, My Trade. This is why the law tends to be “uni­ver­sally true”:

Because of a sim­ple prin­ci­ple of head­line writ­ing: if a story has enough sources to have a high chance of accu­racy, a head­line will be assertive (e.g. “Microsoft to release OS update on Fri­day”). If sources are weak, or only a sin­gle source is found, head­line writ­ers will hedge their bets by pos­ing the head­line as a ques­tion (e.g. “Will Microsoft release an OS update on Friday?”).