Which do you want first: the good news or the bad?

First impressions play a crucial role in social perception, shaping how individuals assess others in professional, academic, and interpersonal contexts. Psychological research highlights the significance of cognitive biases, such as the primacy and recency effects, which influence how people interpret and recall information.The Primacy Effect and Cognitive AnchoringThe primacy effect describes the tendency for initial information to impact judgment disproportionately. When individuals encounter...

Imagine an asset price that crashes to a low point, rebounds sharply as bargain-hunters step in, and then gradually declines. Such behavior can be modeled with a smooth function whose turning points represent locally overvalued and undervalued regions. A convenient example that captures rebound followed by decay is:The high and low points of this curve are identified using the first derivative test, which determines where the function changes from increasing to decreasing or vice versa. To...

Information is everywhere and its presentation—such as how and when items are presented—can impact our perceptions and decisions surrounding the info. This broad concept umbrellas framing effects—influences that occur due to the way information is framed in its appearance, whether it’s purely the order or the specific wording of a message. Let’s take a look at numerous ways in which two versions of something can objectively say the same thing, yet we respond in different ways based on the...

The serial position effect is a cognitive phenomenon where individuals are more likely to recall the first and last items in a list compared to those in the middle. This effect is divided into the primacy effect and the recency effect. The primacy effect is observed when the initial items in a list are remembered better. This occurs because these items are rehearsed more frequently or receive more elaborative processing, allowing them to be encoded into long-term memory more effectively. For...

A heuristic is a general problem-solving framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). You can think of these as mental shortcuts that are used to solve problems. Different types of heuristics are used in different types of situations, and the impulse to use a heuristic occurs when one of five conditions is met (Pratkanis, 1989):

Work is done on an object when energy is transferred to the object. In other words, work is done when a force acts on a body that undergoes a displacement from one position to another. By definition, the work done by a force is the integral of the force with respect to the displacement along its path. Forces can vary as a function of position, and displacements can occur along various paths between two points. The magnitude of a force multiplied by the cosine of the angle that the force makes...