Customer psychology

Customers do not decide the way a spreadsheet says they should. They follow defaults, fear losses and keep what confirms what they already believe.

Start with the mistakes our minds make. Behavioral economics names loss aversion, the power of default and confirmation bias. Survivorship bias is the story of the planes that came back, and the same error shows up when a founder looks only at the customers who stayed. Eight subconscious mistakes and twenty lessons from social psychology widen the list.

Then how this plays out when people choose. Ten bizarre details that influence customers online, and eighteen cognitive biases to use in conversion optimization, or to avoid being caught by. Some people struggle to decide at all. Susan Weinschenk shows how psychology informs UX, and a short note in French says to make a choice, even a bad one.

Last, emotions, habits and AI. Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion ran on nearly 700,000 users. Nir Eyal and Andrew Chen explain habit-forming products, and a note on a Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study suggests that the more we trust AI, the less we think for ourselves.