Bad Decisions

We’d like to think it’s all about the journey, but our brain prefers to remember the outcome. In this episode, Mel and Dan discuss the peak-end rule, and how neglecting to pay attention to the end could be costing you dearly.

Everybody makes bad decisions, but how do we make amends? Turns out our instincts often guide us to follow bad decisions with worse decisions. In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the sunk cost fallacy, and how knowing when to cut your losses can be the smartest decision of all.

With thousands of decisions to make every day, wouldn’t it just be way easier if some of them were made for us? In this episode, Mel and Dan unpack how the default bias influences everything from binge-watching to voter turnout, and explain how marketers can become the Kleenex of their category.

Ever gone shopping for someone else and decided you deserved a gift too? In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the dark side of altruism, and how the decisions we make are often guided by a desire to balance out our emotional states.

Despite our best intentions, selecting options that provide sensible, long term benefits over impulsive, short term ones, seems pretty much impossible. In this episode, Mel and Dan explore how our desire for instant gratification can be used to market products for today, as well as products for tomorrow.

When we’re trying to determine the value of something, we tend to place far too much reliance on the first piece of information we stumble across. In this episode, Mel and Dan look at ways that pricing strategies influence our judgement, and how game shows make us feel like losers when we’re actually winning.

Turns out we really love being right. So much so that our brains systematically ignore things that don’t fit with what we already believe to be true. In this episode Mel and Dan look at how marketers can make the most of what customers already believe.

If all of our friends jumped off a cliff, chances are we would too. Same goes if that cliff is a new restaurant, movie or fashion label. In this episode, Mel and Dan look at how our innate desire for social connection can be a marketer’s best friend.

Cars, homes, pens, mugs - it doesn’t matter what it is - if it’s ours, chances are we'll think it's more valuable than it really is. In this episode, Mel and Dan look at why we're always going to be disappointed when we sell something second hand, and how marketers can make their products irrationally valuable in the eyes of consumers.

We all want more choices, right? Well, no. Not according to the data anyway. In this episode Mel and Dan look at how choice can adversely affect our ability to make decisions, as well as what good marketers can do to tip things in their favour.

Of all the mental tasks we suck at performing, estimating the likelihood of something really good or really bad happening is right up there. In this episode, Mel and Dan unpack the ingredients that lead to our terrible mental calculations, and discuss how we can reconfigure them to create more compelling ads

Welcome to Bad Decisions, the podcast that helps marketers understand why we choose what we choose, why we think what we think, and how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain. Each episode, Dr Melissa Weinberg (performance psychologist) and Dan Monheit (ad guy) will explore a different heuristic (behavioural quirk) that causes us to make poor decisions. In doing so, they’ll draw from th...