Psychology

The book talks about randomness, associated maths, and the psychological biases which interfere with a more stochastic approach to thinking about life.

KBB is used in the US for estimating the value of a used car before buying/selling it. While helping friends buy used cars, I felt that it always overvalued the car. I feel there is an anchoring effect in play here. A car owner (seller) feels happier checking the value of their car since it is being reported higher than what they expect. This provides a nice room for providing a discount for converting the buyer....

The book is an interesting take on what it takes to attain a happy marriage and why only ~30% of us end up in happy marriages. The book is divided into three sections - what is love, why we fail in the game of love and what can we do differently to succeed at it. The nature of love Why happily ever after is so hard to find In the western world, 50% of marriages end up in divorce, ~10-15% are separated without divorce and ~7% go along with an unhappy marriage which implies only 30% live happily ever after. Being “in love” is equivalent to having a “liking” (fairness, kindness, loyalty) and a “lust” (sexual desire). Post-marriage, liking declines at about 3% annually while lust declines 8% annually (in first 7 years of marriage) => from a long term perspective, it’s better to invest in liking than lust. Children’s fairy-tale belief about love is a beautiful girl falling in for a brave hero and they fall for each other in minutes. This is far from what happens in reality

The book talks about various psychological tactics used by compliance practitioners like salespeople, waiters, car dealers, and fundraisers to influence us into saying yes to something to which ideally we would have said no. The author went and took sales jobs as a car salesman and waiter to see these tactics in action. He referred to these tactics as six weapons of influence. Each of them forms the basis of a chapter in the book. Weapons of influence Weapons of influence consist of identifying fixed action patterns and exploiting them. Compliance practitioners use them as a basis for influence.