Social Comparison Theory, first described by social psychologist Leo Festinger in 1954, is centred on the fact that individuals have an intrinsic drive to evaluate

This principle, studied by Pelham, Carvallo and Jones (2003) asserts that people gravitate toward people, places, and things that resemble the self. It is an

Single-option aversion describes the way in which consumers are reluctant to pick an option – even one that they like – when no others are

The Serial Position Effect (notably studied by Ebbinghaus, Murdock, Glanzer and Cunitz) refers to the finding that recall accuracy will vary as a result of

Self-efficacy theory, first defined by Albert Bandura (1984), shows that our own perception of how capable we are of completing a task will influence and

The Scarcity principle was discovered by scientists Worchel, Lee and Adewole in 1975. They conducted an experiment that simply used a jar full of cookies

The Salience Effect explores the why, when and how of which elements are “salient” for different individuals – meaning which elements we are most drawn

Risk Compensation, which was studied in detail in relation to motorway accidents by Professor Sam Peltzman in 1975, describes the way that humans will in

Representativeness Heuristic is a cognitive bias explored by Kahneman and Tversky in their article Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness (1972). It demonstrates that people

It is human nature to compare, and to judge value based on these comparisons, and the world of consumerism is no exception. Most people will