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Zero Bias

9 Post author: Alexandros 17 November 2010 12:16PM

It seems another bug in the human brain is being uncovered:

"Whereas a 20 percent interest rate may look very large compared to one percent, it may not look as large compared to zero percent. Zero eliminates the reference point we use to assess the size of things," 

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20101015200630data_trunc_sys.shtml

Comments (5)

Comment author: JGWeissman 17 November 2010 05:38:52PM 4 points [-]

In the credit card example, 0% interest prompts me to ask "What's the catch?"

Comment author: Zvi 23 November 2010 11:09:48PM 1 point [-]

At work we have highly variant results, and it has a huge effect on my decisions knowing that it's far more important in terms of how I am perceived (and how I feel, even though I know better) to go from -100 to +100 than to go from +100 to +1000.

Comment author: Manfred 17 November 2010 05:29:02PM 0 points [-]

Interesting, thanks.

Comment author: xamdam 17 November 2010 05:24:52PM 0 points [-]

Interestingly 0 as in "free stuff" is also often mispriced (hence all the 'free offers' you get in the mail).

Comment author: InquilineKea 17 November 2010 08:08:34PM 0 points [-]

Yup, Dan Ariely often talks about this in his books.