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The Logic of Long Lines
The Atlantic: Earlier this week, Chipotle had a one-day buy-one-get-one-free special to promote their new-ish (and hugely unpopular) tofu tacos. Critics have been taking down the "free"-ness of this promotion in two ways: One, claiming the free burrito requires saving the receipt and—much like a coupon—many will inevitably get lost in bags, eaten by dogs, or thrown away accidentally. Secondly, critics say, the crowds during free-food promotions will make waiting in line not worth it simply due to opportunity cost. ... But long lines aren't always unproductive: Some waits increase the appeal of a product.
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On Tinder, Taking a Swipe at Love, or Sex, or Something, in New York
The New York Times: On a recent night, with Valentine’s Day looming, I went out for drinks with a woman I know and a few of her friends. It was a Thursday, and the bar they chose, Bondurants, on the Upper East Side, was packed with people just like them: good-looking, semi-affluent millennials, downing craft beer and milling about in hungry-looking, monosexual clusters. My acquaintance, Dana, who is 25 and works in public relations, is an enthusiastic, some might say obsessive, user of the dating app Tinder. She, like her friends, will often spend hours blithely swiping through its gallery of digitized faces — at work, at home, even in busy pickup bars.
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How Real Are Facebook Friendships?
The Atlantic: Editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul’s recent column “How to Be Liked By Everyone Online” describes how social media “has upended social and psychological norms” by changing some words to their opposite, or at least giving them a very different gist than they initially had. With Facebook, "to friend" has become a verb, and yet to do so, in the social-media sense, is a fairly passive act, Paul said. In real life, when a friendship ruptures, it’s a major event. But just as it’s easy to start a Facebook relationship, it’s virtually effort-free to end one. The personal investment on either side of “unfriending” somebody is infinitely lower than offline.
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We Know How You Feel
The New Yorker: Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963. Henson had been hired to make the film for a conference that the company was convening to showcase its strengths in machine-to-machine communication. Told to devise a faux robot that believed it functioned better than a person, he came up with a cocky, boxy, jittery, bleeping Muppet on wheels. “This is computer H14,” it proclaims as the film begins.
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The Smart Way to Teach Children About Money
The Wall Street Journal: It’s time to rethink how we teach children about money. For all the effort parents put into helping their children understand dollars and cents, and for all the effort schools put into formal lessons in personal finance, most children still grow up into adults who can’t properly save, spend and budget. Now researchers—from psychologists to economists to communications experts—have started asking why. And the one theme that comes out of their research loud and clear is that we’re doing it all wrong. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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The Toddlers Are on to You
Pacific Standard: Your toddler might be even more perceptive than you think. New research suggests that children as young as 13 months can understand that people's judgments of their peers aren't always true or accurate. The claim is likely to remain controversial, but if correct, it suggests that human beings develop a deep understanding of the social world around them much earlier than previously thought. At issue is what psychologists call theory of mind. Roughly speaking, that’s the ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes and reason based on their beliefs, even if those beliefs are demonstrably false.
