Should you invest £2 a day or use it to buy lottery tickets?
Maths makes the decision obvious. Suppose you invest two quid every day at the reasonable rate of 10%. It will take you almost exactly 50 years to accumulate £1m. To earn this same £1m in the National Lottery, you would (on average) have to match five numbers and a bonus ball, at odds of 2,330,635-to-1.
If you spent two quid a day for 50 years you would total just over 36,500 tickets and would thus have only a 1-in-63 chance of making that million pounds. However, the available image of immediate wealth subverts this rationality.

At your local pub, you have many beers to choose from. Which is best? If you are like most human beings, the answer is "the most expensive one." A number of studies have shown that by switching price tags, you can switch preferences (for obvious reasons, this is a favourite experiment among university psychology students).

And what about the power of suggestion?
Imagine I handed you a cup of hot coffee and then asked your opinion about a person whom you had recently met; now suppose I instead handed you a cup of ice-cold soda. Experiments show that your opinion of this person would be different because you have been primed to feel warmth or coldness.

Add to the list...
framing (how you present data is as important as the data itself)
impact bias (overestimation of possible outcomes),
confirmation bias (recognising only data that supports your hypothesis)
loss aversion (we stand to gain more than we would lose, but our fear of loss prevents us)
selective perception (seeing what you want to see),and
rosy retrospection (integral to the repeated experience of family Christmas)
...and you seem doomed to blunder through life led by your brain's clumsy irrationality.

found this article on bbc news at work today. found it rather interesting :)

Vivian imagined this on 21:48