Episode · Stuff You Should Know · 2025-04-10
Books mentioned on Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
In the late 90s, a large chunk of the field of social psychology started dedicating itself to figuring out ways to subtly persuade and influence people’s everyday decisions without their awareness. If you’re into freedom of choice, this was a close call.
Josh Clark discussed Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Summary of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and others, and Happiness by P. Richard G. Layard and others.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a seminal exploration of behavioral psychology that examines the two systems of the human mind—intuitive thinking and deliberate reasoning—and how cognitive biases drive systematic errors in judgment.
Discussed“Uh Daniel Conorman, he was a Nobel already a Nobel Prize winning um economist. Uh he wrote thinking fast and slow and it was essentially an introduction to um nudge economics and priming for the for the the average person. And it was a huge bestseller.”
Where to get it
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Summary of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Summary of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, and better me explores how choice architecture can influence human behavior and decision-making.
Discussed“Another Nobel economist named Richard Thawer co-wrote a bestseller called nudge colon improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. And in that book he talked about social priming experiences”
Where to get it
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Happiness
Discussed“Uh there was another guy we talked about the nudge earlier uh in 2008. Another Nobel economist named Richard Thawer co-wrote a bestseller called nudge colon improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. And in that book he talked about um social priming experiences uh benign paternalism or that nudge that you know you kind of mentioned earlier toward making”
Where to get it
