Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms.

Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.

Everything is relative and that’s the point.

We not only tend to compare things with one another but also tend to focus on comparing things that are easily comparable and avoid comparing things that can’t be compared easily.

Although initial prices are arbitrary, once those prices are established in our minds they’ll shape not only present prices but also future prices.

What consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated. 

Anchoring manipulations show that the forces between supply and demand are dependent.

Once market norms enter our considerations, social norms depart.

Living both in social and market worlds has many implications for our personal lives.

When a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time.

Man is not truly one but truly two. 

Every one of us regardless of how good we are under-predicts the effect of passion on our behavior. 

Walk away from the fire of passion before you’re too close to be drawn in. Avoiding temptation altogether is easier than overcoming it.

Even the most brilliant person in the heat of passion seems to be absolutely divorced from the person he thought he was. It’s not just the people make wrong predictions about themselves, their predictions are wrong by a large margin.

Without pre-commitments we keep on falling for temptation. 

Each of the problems we face has potential self control mechanisms. Commit to in advance.

Can previous knowledge modify the neural activity underlying the taste itself?

Expectations are more than a mere anticipation. 

Would placement of the knowledge after the experience evoke a different response? Does it matter if knowledge comes before or after the experience? And if so, which one is more important? Does it reshape sensory perceptions to align with the knowledge?

Biased processes are major source of escalation of almost every conflict.

The likelihood of agreement about the facts becomes smaller and smaller as personal investment in the problem grows.

You get what you pay for, price can change the experience.

The more we understand connection between brain and body, the more things that once seemed clear cut become ambiguous. Nowhere is this as apparent as with the placebo.