42 Effects You Should Know: Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of 42 interesting ‘effects’ worth knowing.
Think of the bellow as random bits of knowledge that could become useful or finally give you the name for something you've repeatedly observed.
You can catch up on the first 21 ‘effects’ by reading Part 1.
22. The Primacy Effect
The order in which we receive information matters.
The ‘primacy effect’ describes our tendency to give greater weight to information that comes earlier in a list or sentence.
For example, when you try to remember something from a long list of words, you will remember those listed at the start instead of the middle.
Awareness of this cognitive bias is important because your opinion can easily be manipulated based on your first impression of something.
23. The Delmore Effect
We prioritise the simple over the important.
The Delmore effect describes ‘our tendency to provide more articulate and explicit goals for lower priority areas of our lives’.
In other words, we’re good at distracting ourselves from doing the most important things by focusing on doing the easy stuff instead.
24. The Rhyme As Reason Effect
We judge things that rhyme to be more truthful.
Research has proved what many good advertisers intuitively know: we evaluate rhyming statements as more truthful.
This phenomenon, also called the Keats heuristic, occurs due to a combination of the aesthetic qualities of words that rhyme (i.e. they sound nice) and the fluency heuristic (how easy it is for our brain to process the information).
As a result, sayings that rhyme can be powerful persuasion tools.
For example, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” was famously used by O.J. Simpson’s lawyer to acquit him of Nicole Simpson’s murder in 1995 despite the overwhelming evidence against him.
25. The Veblen Effect
Demand doesn’t always decrease in line with price.
Traditional economic theory states that the demand for a good should decrease the more expensive it becomes.
Contrary to this idea, a Veblen good (named after the Norwegian economist Thorstein Veblen) describes a product whose demand increases with price. Luxury cars, yachts and high-end fashion are all examples of Veblen goods.
26. The von Restorff Effect
To be remembered, you need to be different.
The von Restorff effect describes the phenomenon whereby multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
It is named after the German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff who discovered that when she presented participants with a list of categorically similar items, they remembered the one distinctive item on the list better than the others.
27. The Werther Effect
We are prone to mimicking the behaviour of others.
The ‘Werther effect’ is named after the protagonist in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
It describes the phenomenon that humans tend to copy the behaviour of others even if it’s destructive.
An extreme form is copycat suicides.
28. The Ringelmann effect
People make less effort when part of a team.
The conventional wisdom is people achieve more when they are part of a team. But do they?
The ‘Ringelmann effect’ is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases.
Why does this happen? Because more team members mean more people to pass the buck to.
29. The Matthew Effect
The more you have, the more you get.
Has it ever struck you as odd that wealthy celebrities receive so much free stuff?
Car companies lend them their latest models, clothing brands send them their hottest threads, and everyone who attends the Oscars leaves with a goody bag of expensive gifts.
Surely, these people with more than healthy bank accounts are the least likely to need it?
This strange phenomenon is known as the Matthew effect.
It refers to a famous Bible verse (Matthew 25:29): “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
In other words, the more you have, the more you are likely to get.
30. The Halo Effect
How a first impression positively influences your perception of a person's other qualities.
Sometimes referred to as the ‘what is beautiful is good principle’, the Halo effect describes the tendency for our initial impression of a person to influence what we think of them overall.
For example, we may assume an attractive person is also smart, kind and healthy.
31. The Pygmalion Effect
People rise to the level expected of them.
The ‘Pygmalion effect’ is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy named after a story from Greek mythology.
It’s the idea that people rise to the level of what others expect of them.
So, for example, if a teacher wants their students to get the best possible grades, they should tell them that they believe they’re capable of getting good grades instead of telling them if they don’t work harder, they’ll continue to do poorly.
32. The Golem Effect
People fall to the level expected of them.
The Golem effect is the opposite of the Pygmalion effect.
It describes the phenomenon of someone in a superior position (such as a boss or teacher) having low expectations for a subordinate, resulting in poorer performance.
In other words, lower expectations lead to lower levels of performance.
33. The Denomination Effect
All money is not valued equally in our minds.
The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g. bank notes)
Similarly, we tend to spend more money on plastic cards than when holding cash.
34. The Hawthorne Effect
We behave differently when we’re being observed.
The Hawthorne effect is named after a set of experiments in a Chicago factory in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
It explains an unavoidable challenge with research involving human beings: it’s very difficult to determine how a subject’s awareness of being observed modifies their behaviour.
However, recent research suggests that the Hawthorne effect may be based upon flawed evidence.
35. The Cobra Effect
When solving one problem, we inadvertently cause others.
‘Unintended consequences’ occur when you apply simple solutions to complex problems.
One famous example involves snakes in British colonial India. An infestation of venomous cobras forced local officials to respond to the problem.
The solution?
They put a bounty on cobra heads to incentivise locals to kill them. Initially, this seemed to be successful as the heads started rolling in.
However, it wasn’t long before everyone realised the snake population wasn’t reducing.
In fact, the numbers were steadily increasing. The reason?
Incentivised by the cash reward, enterprising locals began breeding cobras to kill them.
So instead of solving the issue, the authorities had inadvertently made it worse.
36. The Baader-Meinhof Effect
Something you’ve recently paid attention to starts appearing everywhere you look.
The Baader-Meinhof effect (also known as the frequency illusion) describes the phenomenon whereby something that has recently come to your attention suddenly seems to appear everywhere shortly afterwards.
E.g. You buy a new car, you see the same make and model everywhere.
37. The Truthiness Effect
We make rapid judgments about the truth of a claim.
The Truthiness effect describes our natural tendency to make intuitive and rapid judgments about the truth of a claim.
This makes us particularly vulnerable to ‘fake news’.
38. The Forer Effect
We think vague personality descriptions apply to us.
Also known as the Barnum effect after the famous showman P.T. Barnum, the Forer effect describes our natural tendency to think that a generic personality description applies specifically to us.
For example, any description in a newspaper horoscope.
39. The Lake Wobegon Effect
We tend to rate ourselves better than average.
The ‘Lake Wobegon effect’ is sometimes known as the ‘better-than-average effect’ or the ‘superiority bias’.
It refers to a fictional town featured in a recurring segment, ‘News from Lake Wobegon’, for an American radio programme.
E.g. 80% of drivers rate themselves as better than average.
40. The IKEA Effect
We value things more if we’re involved in making or creating them.
Have you ever had a garage sale and been completely insulted when someone offered you a low price (in your opinion) for a cabinet that you once made?
If so, it is because you are experiencing the IKEA effect.
This effect explains that we place a disproportionately high value on self-made products and find it hard to part with them.
41. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
Taking the news at face value even when we know it’s likely wrong.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect describes the phenomenon of believing newspaper articles outside your area of expertise, despite acknowledging that neighbouring articles in your area of expertise are completely inaccurate.
It’s named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann because the author Micheal Crichton who coined the term, spoke to the renowned scientist about the phenomenon.
42. The Streisand Effect
The coverup can be worse than the crime.
The Streisand effect is named after the American singer and actress Barbara Streisand.
She once attempted to prevent a photographer from publishing an image of the California coastline that happened to include her mansion.
Attempting to censor this information had the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of it.
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