If a baseball and a bat cost $1.10 together, and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?
Solution
5 cents. System 1 thinking often leads to mistakes in this type of problem.
A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” How is that possible?
Solution
The surgeon is the boy’s mother. This puzzle illustrates the persistence of gender discrimination.
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Solution
47 days. To answer correctly, you need to ignore your system 1 and use your system 2.
Alan is smart, hard-working, impulsive, stubborn and jealous.
Ben is jealous, stubborn, impulsive, hard-working and smart.
Who should you hire?
Solution
They are the same, but a priming effect often make people prefer the first candidate.
08-04-2021
Part two – The benefits of bite-sized
Like so many people, last year I found myself in the position of having to move a large event – The Association for Business Psychology Annual Conference – online. For those that missed the first blog in this series, you can find it here.
Last time, we talked about keeping it simple. As mentioned, our website went down during the event – something uncontrollable that is hard to predict or avoid. However, by keeping the event bite-sized, we minimised the impact of both the website crash and other potential tech issues. This is how…
‘Bite-sized’ – aka don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Historically, ours was a two-day event, including 20+ speakers in three simultaneous timeslots. Our first reaction was to replicate the same structure online, but we stuck to our second principle: bite-sized.
We decided to have two speakers per day over two weeks, essentially breaking it into smaller, more manageable parts, a strategy we call ‘One step at a time’. This structure provided us with a long list of benefits:
The results: we had an unseen number of delegates attending our sessions. Between 50-70 watched live and 30-50 during the evening reruns. In face-to-face conferences, delegates had to choose which session to attend, so speakers typically had 20 people per session. Our post-conference satisfaction survey showed how happy our attendees were: “I didn’t think I would be able to attend many of the sessions due to work but so far I’ve managed to watch every session and even join some discussion. It was a great idea to spread it over a longer timeframe, and really helps to balance commitments 🙂“. We also managed to attract delegates from the US, South Africa, and many European countries – something we certainly couldn’t have pulled off before.
It wasn’t something we expected, but we’ve learned for future conferences to attract a greater audience with online content. That’s the benefit of trying something new – experimentation yields optimisation, which we discuss in more detail in part three of the series.
If you’d like to learn more about how salience and easiness can impact behaviour in the mean time, you can learn more from our blogs, check out our podcast, or get in touch directly if you have any questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts.