Welcome to the Weekly Medius PsychNews. Every week, we select five thought-provoking Psychology articles from the hundreds published in journals and other media. Psychology Drives Everything.

 

 Using Cognitive Biases for Pricing Decisions:
How should we price our product? Should we start low, deliver value and then demand a higher price? Or should we start high? Most people are aware of price-quality heuristic, maybe not by that name. Heuristics, simply put, are the mental shortcuts that people employ to make quick judgements. Price-quality heuristic is the essentially the connection one tends to build between price and quality. In other words, the high price is high quality. The price-quality heuristic forced to answer the broader question- how do we want to position ourselves. Do we want our firm to be a no-frills version of big Market Research firms or do we want to be the domain specialist? We knew we wanted to be the latter, so we decided not to price ourselves lower than the incumbents. Awareness of price-quality heuristic helped us make that call.  Full article.
What Is Your Social Reputation? An evolutionary perspective on why reputation matters:
People work hard to cultivate a positive reputation. We want our names to elicit respect. We want others to see as on the “good” side of the “good/bad” divide. And efforts by others to damage our reputation can really make us angry. In humans, one’s reputation matters quite a bit. Full article. When You Can’t Stop Seeing the Negative in Everything—Even Though You’re Grateful:
You wake up and instantly think about everything that needs to get done. You walk into your kitchen, and see only what’s out of place. You believe you can always do more, and so can your family. You hyper-focus on unchecked tasks, problems, flaws, mistakes, rainy days, dust and dirt. You can’t help but be negative, and many times you don’t even notice it. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. You’re grateful for what you do have—like your loved ones and your life—but you just can’t seem to climb out of that negative mindset. Full article.
Tornado Brain: Taming the Whirlwind of Anxiety:
Anxiety feels like showing up to the start of a marathon with zero preparation. You haven’t trained a day in your life, and you have no idea what you’re doing. Common sense tells you this is a long race, you need to pace to survive. But without warning, and out of your control, a powerful force won’t let you. It takes over and you sprint the first few miles, burn out, then fall to the side of the road confused and frustrated. Is everyone else experiencing this? How are they able to control their speed and finish this race? Full article.
What You Think May Not Be What You Feel:
One of the first things I do when meeting with clients who want to repair deficits in their self-image is to help them identify precisely what these deficits are. And to better assist them in their personal exploration, I hand them a sheet that pinpoints well over 100 negative beliefs common to individuals I’ve worked with over the past 40 years. Full article.