I'm re-reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational right now. It's still amazing to me how completely manipulable we are. I just finished the first chapter, which deals with the phenomenon of how our decision-making processes are so predictably skewed by changes to the choice pool. The example Dan brings up in the book is an experiment where photos are taken of students who … [Read more...]
Prediction: Facebook will sell you back your privacy
Facebook today altered their privacy settings to tame what they called "something of a Frankenstein monster" of a privacy control panel. Facebook's claim is that the way new features had been added caused the number of privacy setting checkboxes to grow like weeds. That may be true. However, Facebook also leaned on a phenomenon regarding opt-in and opt-out behavior (first … [Read more...]