by david allan van nostrand | Oct 30, 2017 | Human Behavior, Items in the News, Research
Yet another scientific study has been repudiated. Research that demonstrated how to get school kids to choose apples instead of cookies by branding the fruit has been renounced by the Journal of the American Medical Association. This comes long after the Cornell...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 23, 2017 | Items in the News, Research, Surveys, Voodoo Statistics
I showed my MBA students a newspaper article that said Trinidad & Tobago’s Facebook account rate of 97% ranked #1 in the world. When asked to explain why T&T was at the top, every student readily produced good-sounding reasons. Most concluded they would...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 16, 2017 | Human Behavior, Research
Grossly overweight people are the subject of many studies. In one interesting experiment, scientists manipulated the clocks so when they said 12 noon, it was really 11am. All the subjects went to the dining room, because it was time to eat. The scientists fiddled in...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 9, 2017 | Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior, The Myopia of Experts, Using Information
Executives make a lot of assumptions, and many of them are wrong. Take disposable diapers, for example. Diaperanswers.org says P&G invented the disposable diaper. MotherJones.com says it was Johnson and Johnson. P&G or J&J, take your pick. Marketers and...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 2, 2017 | Human Behavior, Marketing, Organizational Behavior, Voodoo Statistics
What makes ads work is the power of repetition – ads work because they pound names and ideas into our heads over and over again. How else do you explain 21 straight years of Mr Whipple being embarrassed when caught squeezing the Charmin? Some ads work better...
