Nudged

Neediness loses negotiations

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

This is connected with the art of negotiation. The game theorist John Nash demonstrated that protagonists bargain more effectively when they are less needy. The less you fear not getting what you want, the more likely you are to get what you want. The logical conclusion follows: in any negotiation, your best strategy is an internal as well as external question. Can you ‘will’ yourself into a state of relative indifference, and thereby negate anxiety-induced neediness?

Teaser headlines tease nobody

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Which headlines work best?

When a big US advertising agency tested headlines for print ads, they ran the same ad with three different headlines. One delivering news, one promising a benefit and one arousing curiosity, Which do you think out-pulled the others? (The answer’s in the following text box.)

The benefits headline performed best.

When I ask delegates on a writing workshop to vote, they usually go for the teaser headline-the one arousing curiosity. I guess the thinking is, people are naturally curious so if you set them a puzzle, they’ll want to find out the answer. Here’s why that reasoning doesn’t stack up in the real world.

If you write a headline like this one:

Why are freelance copywriters like dried apricots?

Most people’s reaction is, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

You have to remember that for print advertising, your ad will be nestling among editorial, ie all that stuff your reader paid for and wants to mad. Why should they stop doing what they want to do-reading about cars or hi-fi, for example–just so they can solve your little puzzle? If people want puzzles, they do Sudoku.

If, on the other hand, you write a headline like this one:

How this freelance copywriter can help you double your sales

I think they’ll want to know more.

Once you pick a side, you go blind

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

One important study of the power of such decision-making frames was published in 1984, after a researcher from Northwestern University asked a group of participants to list reasons why they should buy a VCR based on their own experiences. Volunteers generated dozens of justifications for such a purchase. Some said they felt a VCR would provide entertainment. Others saw it as an investment in their education or a way for their families to spend time together. Then those same volunteers were asked to generate reasons not to buy a VCR. They struggled to come up with arguments against the expenditure. The vast majority said they were likely to buy one sometime soon. Next, the researcher asked a new group of volunteers to come up with a list of reasons against purchasing a VCR. No problem, they replied. Some said watching television distracted them from their families. Others said that movies were mindless, and they didn’t need the temptation. When those same people were then asked to list reasons for buying a VCR, they had trouble coming up with convincing reasons to make the purchase and said they were unlikely to ever buy one. What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. The two groups were demographically similar. They should have been equally interested in buying a VCR. At the very least, they should have generated equal numbers of reasons to buy or spurn the machines. But once a participant grabbed on to a decision-making frameThis is an investment in my education versus This is a distraction from my family -they found it hard to envision the choice in a different way.

People we think of as exceptionally creative

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books-Benjamin Spock’s The Common-Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946-combined Freudian psycho-therapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.

“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”

Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers.

Colours mean what culture says

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Colours, of course, aren’t inherently meaningful. Their meanings are created by the people who live with them. This is why a single colour can mean different things in different places. In the West, white has long been identified with light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In English green is the colour of envy, but in French it is the colour of fear, in Thai of rage, and in Russian, sadness or boredom. 11 In US politics, red is conservative and blue progressive; in Europe, it is the other way around. These kinds of colour meanings also tend to change over time. Most people today think of blue as masculine and pink as feminine, and dress their offspring accordingly. But only a hundred years ago these metaphors were reversed. ‘The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl,’ one parental guide instructed in 1918. ‘The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.’ 12 All colours are ambiguous - even supposedly unambiguous ones.

The smartest shortcut is hidden in the scrapheap

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

In fact, the technician had become known as ‘Mr Troubleshooter’. So JSB asked him what he did that was different. The technician said: “Well suppose this copier here had an ‘intermittent image quality fault’, what would you do?” So JSB looked in the handbook, which said: “Print out 1,000 copies, sort through until you locate the bad ones, then compare the faulty ones against the original.” The technician said: “If you print 1,000 copies at five seconds per copy, that’s 200 minutes, or three hours. Plus all that wasted paper and ink.” JSB asked him what he did that was different. The technician said: “I walk over to the waste-bin and turn it upside down. I know every copy in there is bad, that’s why it was thrown away. Then I compare them against the original and I’ve got my answer. Saves three hours printing, plus all that paper and all that ink.”

Why creative work needs constraints

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Joyce uses the analogy of a playground.” Researchers found that when you put up a fence around a playground, children will use the entire space-they’ll feel safe to play all the way to the edges. But if those walls are removed, creating a wide-open playground, the space the children choose to play in contracts: they stay toward the middle and they stick to each other, because that’s what feels safe. This, Joyce suggests, is what happens in the creative process. When there are no clear limits in the brief itself, we aren’t sure what boundaries to explore and push against. We end up without the necessary focus and passion of which Marissa Mayer speaks. In fact, one of Joyce’s surprise findings was that in the absence of explicit constraints, the unconstrained teams created more conflict, stemming from all the different unarticulated assumptions and PON ee Oo oe ream members created in thei owa head seas aamrlte ian

Why we invent patterns in random noise

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

As pattern people, we crave reasons for why things happen-even when good reasons don’t exist. In 1944, the psychologists Marianne Simmel and Fritz Heider of Smith College in Massachusetts discovered how deep this tendency runs with a simple animation of shapes moving haphazardly around a screen. In their study, thirty-five of the thirty-six participants who watched the animation described a larger triangle as a bully that was chasing the “valiant” and “spirited” smaller shapes. The participants’ minds couldn’t resist imbuing the shapes with causation, narrative, even personality.

Great copy starts from the reader's point of view

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Mary Wear says: “Know your target audience. Not intellectually, but intuitively. Think like them, empathise with them, identify with them.” Steve Hayden says: “If you want to be a well-paid copywriter, please your client. If you want to be an award-winning copywriter, please yourself. If you want to be a great copywriter, please your reader.” John Salmon says: “You should write from the standpoint of the reader’s self-interest.” Steve Harrison says: “Read your copy and check that ‘you’ appears three times more than ‘I’ or ‘we’. This helps you write about the subject from the reader’s perspective.” Later in this book, we’ll explore the deeper idea of cognitive empathy that underlies all this.

Restaurant bubbles

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

There are two restaurants in a town, the Ritz and the Savoy. Albert does not much mind which one he goes to but chooses the Ritz. Ben, coming next, is leaning slightly towards the Savoy but, seeing that Albert is at the Ritz, decides that it must be better. Catherine is also persuaded by Albert and Ben’s choice that the Ritz must be the place, and so is David. By the time we get halfway through the alphabet, to Mary, everybody has chosen the Ritz and nobody the Savoy. But then Neville, who is next, has a very strong preference for the Savoy, partly because the Ritz is by now very crowded. Olivia, seeing Neville’s choice, follows him, so does Peter, and so do the rest, right through to Zak. And then something strange happens. Halfway through their meal, all those who chose the Ritz hear that everybody else is going to the Savoy. They leave, in a rush, to go from one to the other, to the Ritz’s chagrin. Think of all those who initially chose the Ritz as people who invested in dot.com shares during the late 1990s, or the rush by banks and other institutions into dodgy mortgage-backed securities in the 2000s, and then think of the rush to get out as they realised they had invested in worthless companies or securities, and you have a pretty good analogy for how bubbles build up and are burst.