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There's one particularly cunning type of pricing strategy that marketers use to get you to switch your choice from one option to a more expensive or profitable one. It's called the decoy effect. Imagine you are shopping for a Nutribullet blender. You see two options. The cheaper one, at $89, promotes 900 watts of power and a five-piece accessory kit. The more expensive one, at $149, is 1,200 watts and has 12 accessories. Which one you choose will depend on some assessment of their relative value for money. It's not immediately apparent, though, that the more expensive option is better value. It's 50% more powerful but costs almost 80% more. It does have more than twice as many plastic accessories, but what are they worth? Now consider the two in light of a third option. This one, for $125, offers 1,000 watts and nine accessories. It enables you to make what feels like a more considered comparison. For $36 more than the cheaper option, you get four more accessories and an extra 100 watts of power. But if you spend just $24 extra, you get a further three accessories and 200 watts more power. Bargain! You have just experienced the decoy effect.

What's the most efficient way to communicate a large amount to a reader? We ran an experiment to find out. The results show that we must give up with senseless "football fields" comparisons and focus on finding out if a number matters or not.

Nice piece on computational thinking and data journalism. For example... This story, published in the UK tabloid newspaper The Mirror, is a great example of understanding how a computer might 'see' information and be able to help you extract a story from it. The data behind the story is a collection of over 300,000 pieces of sheet music. On paper that music would be a collection of ink on paper. But because that has now been digitised, it is now quantified. That means we can perform calculations and comparisons against it. We could: Count the number of notes Calculate the variety (number of different) of notes Identify the most common notes Identify the notes with the maximum value Identify the notes with the minimum value Calculate a 'range' by subtracting the minimum from the maximum The journalist has seen this, and decided that the last option has perhaps the most potential to be newsworthy - we assume some singers have wider ranges than others, and the reality may surprise us (a quality of newsworthiness).

Teach people to think critically about claims and comparisons using these concepts, urge Andrew D. Oxman and an alliance of 24 researchers - they will make better decisions.

By UTS' Stephen Woodcock. Statistics is a useful tool for understanding the patterns in the world around us. But our intuition often lets us down when it comes to interpreting those patterns. In this series we look at some of the common mistakes we make and how to avoid them when thinking about statistics, probability and risk.

Whether it's quitting smoking, reducing alcohol intake or making healthier dietary choices, many of us have habits we'd like to change. But it's really hard to know which treatment path to take. To advise their patients on the best of course of action, doctors sometimes compare treatments using something called the "number needed to treat" (NNT). In deciding whether to embark on a course of treatment, NNT can help. But the term is easily misunderstood by patients, and doctors as well. So it's useful to break down what NNT means.

Some great quotes in this piece! The language of politics warps our democracy again and again, as in this tax calculation. The media must unpack statistics Last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Health Foundation published a report on funding for health and social care. One figure from the report was repeated across the headlines. For the NHS to stay afloat, it would require "£2,000 in tax from every household". Shocking stuff!If you're sitting at a bar with a group of friends and Bill Gates walks in, the average wealth of everyone in the room makes you all millionaires. But if you try to buy the most expensive bottle of champagne in the place, your debit card will still be declined. The issue to be addressed, and one to which there is no fully correct answer, is how we can put numbers into a context that enables people to make informed choices. Big numbers are hard to conceptualise - most of us have no intuitive understanding of what £56bn even looks like.