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1. Getting something extra “for free” feels better than getting the same for less.
2. We’re heavily influenced by the first number.
3. We’re terrified of extremes.
4. We’re in love with stories.
5. We do what we’re told.
6. We let our emotions get the best of us.
7. We’re easily made dumber by alcohol, time, decisions.
8. We’re pained by transaction costs…
9. … but we’re weird about rebates and warranties.
10. We’re obsessed with the number 9.
11. We’re compelled by a strong sense of fairness.

What’s a poetry recital by a behavioral economist worth? The students had no idea. That’s the point. I don’t know, either. That’s also the point. What’s a button-up shirt “worth”? What’s a cup of coffee “worth”? What’s a life insurance policy “worth”? Who knows! Most of us don’t. As a result, the shopping brain uses only what is knowable: visual clues, triggered emotions, comparisons, ratios, and a sense of bargain vs. rip-off. We’re not stupid. Just susceptible.

As Independent Booksellers Week gets into full swing, the Booksellers Association has released figures to suggest outlets with cafes are likely to have higher sales than those without.

Figures based on a survey of 40 BA members reveal that bookshops with cafes saw a 3% growth in overall turnover in 2011, whereas those without experienced a decline in sales of 5.2%. Those bookshops with cafes also experienced a 2% hike in their book sales last year, in comparison to those without cafes which had a decrease in book sales of 4%.

What may still seem to many to be a parochial affair involving Barclays, a 300-year-old British bank, rigging an obscure number, is beginning to assume global significance. The number that the traders were toying with determines the prices that people and corporations around the world pay for loans or receive for their savings. It is used as a benchmark to set payments on about $800 trillion-worth of financial instruments, ranging from complex interest-rate derivatives to simple mortgages. The number determines the global flow of billions of dollars each year. Yet it turns out to have been flawed.

As many as 20 big banks have been named in various investigations or lawsuits alleging that LIBOR was rigged. The scandal also corrodes further what little remains of public trust in banks and those who run them.

In theory, LIBOR is supposed to be a pretty honest number because it is assumed, for a start, that banks play by the rules and give truthful estimates. The market is also sufficiently small that most banks are presumed to know what the others are doing. In reality, the system is rotten. First, it is based on banks’ estimates, rather than the actual prices at which banks have lent to or borrowed from one another. […]

A second problem is that those involved in setting the rates have often had every incentive to lie, since their banks stood to profit or lose money depending on the level at which LIBOR was set each day. Worse still, transparency in the mechanism of setting rates may well have exacerbated the tendency to lie, rather than suppressed it.

Two big changes are needed. The first is to base the rate on actual lending data where possible. Some markets are thinly traded, though, and so some hypothetical or expected rates may need to be used to create a complete set of benchmarks. So a second big change is needed. Because banks have an incentive to influence LIBOR, a new system needs to explicitly promote truth-telling and reduce the possibilities for co-ordination of quotes.

For a long time, primatologists have known that chimpanzees will act out ­social dominance with a special ferociousness, slapping hands, stamping feet, or “charging back and forth and dragging huge branches,” as Jane Goodall once wrote. And sociologists and anthropologists have explored the effects of hierarchy in tribes and groups. But psychology has only recently begun seriously investigating how having money, that major marker of status in the modern world, ­affects psychosocial behavior in the species Homo sapiens. By making real people temporarily very affluent, without regard to their actual economic circumstances and within the controlled environment of a psych lab, the Berkeley researchers aim to demonstrate the potency of that one variable.

It is easy to see Piff’s research as ideologically motivated. The point is to “shed light on some of the consequences of social class,” he says. But whatever his goal, the “results are apolitical,” he says, and the data point in a clear direction. “Would I be less excited if we found that higher-status people were more generous?” he asks. “I’d probably be less excited, but that’s not what we found.”

It need hardly be said that bankers, particularly on trading floors, are overwhelmingly male. This matters. There is much that is comic about the sexualised nature of this male-on-male banter, but it points to a deeper truth about the psychology of organisations. Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks, and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam.

The banking problem is multifaceted: it’s an ethical problem, an incentive problem and a regulation problem. But above all, it’s a problem of having too many over-confident people in the same room.

A group of people high on the same combination of sex, power and risk is bound to make the already very confident feel dangerously invincible, and untethered from any legal or ethical obligation. There was too much confidence on the Barclays trading floor, just as there has been – and somehow continues to be – in the boardroom.

Whether it is a phobia like a fear of flying, public speaking or spiders, or a diagnosis such as obsessive compulsive disorder, new research finds patients suffering from anxiety disorders showed the most improvement when treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in conjunction with a “transdiagnostic” approach – a model that allows therapists to apply one set of principles across anxiety disorders.

Music, you might have been told, can come from anywhere — the sky! the trees! the rushing wind! Well, that’s definitely true, but in recent months we’ve been noticing a lot of more deliberate projects dedicated to tapping very unconventional sources for their musical potential. From the universe’s gamma rays to goldfish, from traffic patterns to brain waves, turns out almost anything in our world can create a beautiful symphony, if only we can figure out how best to listen.

It’s easy to write off our gaming addiction as a waste of time. But game designer Jane McGonigal argues the exact opposite; that games can actually extend our life expectancy. And she has the data to support it.