Companies tend to make decisions assuming that humans behave rationally and logically. We don't.
It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. In real life, most things aren’t logical — they are psycho-logical.
The smallest things can have significant impacts. The way to find these things out is by experimenting and asking the dumb, basic questions.
Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will.
It is easier to get fired for being illogical than for being unimaginative.
Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing. Being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak.
For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.
You can trick ten people once, but it’s much harder to trick one person ten times.
Don't design for average. In some cases, "average" doesn't even equate to a real person. Focus on outliers instead. Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes.
Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones.
The attractiveness of what we choose is affected by comparisons with what we reject.
We constantly rewrite the past to form a narrative which cuts out the non-critical points, and which replaces luck and random experimentation with conscious intent.
Reason arose in the human brain not to inform our actions and beliefs, but to explain and defend them to others. It’s an adaptation necessitated by our being a highly social species. Reason is the brain’s legal and PR department.
Signaling
Reciprocation, reputation and pre-commitment signaling are the three big mechanisms that underpin trust.
All powerful messages must contain an element of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty or extravagance — because rational behaviour and talk convey no meaning.
The potency and meaningfulness of communication is in direct proportion to the costliness of its creation.
Feelings can be inherited, whereas reasons have to be taught, which means that evolution can select for emotions much more reliably than for reasons.
Satisficing
Our brain has evolved not so much to find a right answer as to avoid a disastrously wrong one.
It’s better to find satisfactory solutions for a realistic world, than perfect solutions for an unrealistic one.
Just because it’s irrational, it doesn’t mean it isn’t right.
We will pay a disproportionately high premium for the elimination of a small degree of uncertainty.
While a brand name is rarely a reliable guarantee that a product is the best you can buy, it is generally a reliable indicator that the product is not terrible.
Psychophysics
Give people a reason and they may not supply the behaviour. Give people a behaviour and they’ll have no problem supplying the reasons themselves. (It's easy to fool ourselves with the stories we come up with.)
