The commonness fallacy: Commonly chosen options have less choice appeal than people think.

Distal protection: maybe less than you think.

Distal protection devices appear seductively simple, elegant, and beneficial to both physicians and patients. Why would you not want to use something called “distal protection?” To not use “distal protection” during carotid angioplasty and stent placement (CAS) sounds irresponsible, like not practicing “safe sex.” In a simple world, distal protection devices would do exactly what their name imp...

You have more capital than you think.

Senior executives typically delegate the responsibility for managing a firm's derivatives portfolio to in-house financial experts and the company's financial advisers. That's a strategic blunder, argues this Nobel laureate, because the inventiveness of modern financial markets makes it possible for companies to double or even triple their capacity to invest in their strategic assets and compete...

From wealth to well-being? Money matters, but less than people think

Hunter-gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists.

The idea that hunter-gatherer societies experience more frequent famine than societies with other modes of subsistence is pervasive in the literature on human evolution. This idea underpins, for example, the 'thrifty genotype hypothesis'. This hypothesis proposes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were adapted to frequent famines, and that these once adaptive 'thrifty genotypes' are now respons...

Better discrimination of small changes in commonly encountered than in less commonly encountered auditory stimuli.

Results from 3 auditory tasks revealed that small changes made in stimuli commonly encountered in everyday life are more easily discriminated than are the same changes made in stimuli not as commonly encountered. The tasks required discrimination of a frequency difference in 1 tone of 6-tone chords or nonchords, discrimination of a duration difference in 1 note of common tunes or nontunes, and ...