Scientific Definition
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Plain-English Definition
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Feynman Explanation
The middle pricing tier exists to make tier three feel reasonable.
Core Principle
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Mechanisms
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
The middle pricing tier exists to make tier three feel reasonable.
Examples
- Three pricing tiers where the middle one is a setup for the top one.
- Pricing pages, comp packages, and strategy options engineered around decoys.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Strip irrelevant options before deciding. Compare only what you'd actually buy.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Strip irrelevant options before deciding. Compare only what you'd actually buy.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Whatever is pre-selected wins more often than it should.
We value things more once they're ours.
The same information lands differently depending on how it's wrapped.
We overvalue things we built ourselves.
Doing something feels safer than doing nothing — even when nothing wins.
Feelings act as shortcuts for facts.
Over-reliance on the first number that hits the table.
We disproportionately prefer rewards now over rewards later.
Believing more information leads to better decisions, regardless of relevance.
When trivial metrics become the target, the trivial becomes the strategy.
Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good.
We treat money differently depending on which bucket it's in.