Attention affects our thoughts and actions far more than we realise. Daniel Kahneman, along with Amos Tversky, is one of the fathers of behavioural economics; ‘the focusing illusion’, as he calls it, causes us to vastly overestimate the significance of anything to which our attention is drawn. As he explains: ‘Nothing is as important as we think it is while we are thinking about it. Marketers exploit the focusing illusion. When people are induced to believe that they “must have” a good, they greatly exaggerate the difference that this good might make to the quality of their life. The focusing
...more
