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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.

Nearly every ad you see online is tailored just for you. These digital ads are powered by vast, hidden datasets that allow advertisers to make eerily accurate guesses about who you are, where you've been, how you feel and what you might do next. While targeted ads may be familiar by now, how they work - and the power they have - often seems invisible. We decided to lift the veil on this part of the internet economy, so we bought some ad space. We picked 16 categories (like registered Democrats or people trying to lose weight) and targeted ads at people in them. But instead of trying to sell cars or prescription drugs, we used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself.

Citizen-generated data is especially important for women's rights issues. In many countries the lack of women in positions of institutional power, combined with slow, bureaucratic systems and a lack of prioritisation of women's rights issues means data isn't gathered on relevant topics, let alone appropriately responded to by the state. Even when data is gathered by institutions, societal pressures may mean it remains inadequate. In the case of gender-based violence, for instance, women often suffer in silence, worrying nobody will believe them or that they will be blamed. Providing a way for women to contribute data anonymously or, if they so choose, with their own details, can be key to documenting violence and understanding the scale of a problem, and thus deciding upon appropriate responses.

Aleks Krotoski explores why science is being drowned out by Snake Oil online, and how the balance can be shifted to keep desperate people from being exploited. But despite there being more scientific information online than ever, in the modern day the power of the internet has completely flipped. Verified science and medicine are crowded out by a plethora of misinformation and snake oil salesmen. From the relatively harmless quackery such as infrared light treatments or 'wellness' focused diets, to conspiracy theories around vaccinations that are influencing political policy, and have resulted in outbreaks of dangerous, preventable diseases across the world - what is happening online is having a tangible impact across the globe. Aleks Krotoski explores how the infrastructure of the internet allows medical misinformation to thrive, finds out how people can be drawn into communities centred around medical misinformation and conspiracy theory, and how both scientists and every day internet users can redress the balance online.

Very cool visualisation, showing the power of thinking in manageable numbers. If Australia were just 100 people, what would it look like? New census data gives us an opportunity to find out, and provides some surprising insights into the state of the nation.

"I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters of religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's," wrote Mark Twain. Having written a book about our most common reasoning errors, I would argue that Twain was being rather uncharitable - to monkeys. Whether we are discussing Trump, Brexit, or the Tory leadership, we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events - but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction. And the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why.

A new paper published in PLOS One by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich Ecker tests the power of inoculation; not against disease, but against the sort of misinformation that created the conditions leading to Minnesota measles outbreak. Inoculation theory suggests that exposing people to the tricks used to spread misinformation can equip them with the tools to recognize and reject such bogus claims.

In 1967, following riots in Detroit, Philip Meyer used survey research methods, powered by a computer, to show that college-educated people were just as likely to have rioted as high school drop outs. His story was one of the first examples of computer assisted reporting and precision journalism, in which journalists use social science methodologies to extract and tell stories. In recognition of his contribution to the area, each year's best computer-driven and precision stories are celebrated through the Philip Meyer Journalism Award. The Award's 2016 winners have just been announced, with the successful entries showcasing techniques derived from quantitative and qualitative methods, such as surveys using randomly-selected respondents, descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, social network analysis, content analysis, field experiments, and more.

The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance - even an allergy - to taking math and statistics seriously. For decades, the court has struggled with quantitative evidence of all kinds in a wide variety of cases. Sometimes justices ignore this evidence. Sometimes they misinterpret it. And sometimes they cast it aside in order to hold on to more traditional legal arguments. (And, yes, sometimes they also listen to the numbers.) Yet the world itself is becoming more computationally driven, and some of those computations will need to be adjudicated before long. Some major artificial intelligence case will likely come across the court's desk in the next decade, for example. By voicing an unwillingness to engage with data-driven empiricism, justices - and thus the court - are at risk of making decisions without fully grappling with the evidence. This problem was on full display earlier this month, when the Supreme Court heard arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case that will determine the future of partisan gerrymandering - and the contours of American democracy along with it. As my colleague Galen Druke has reported, the case hinges on math: Is there a way to measure a map's partisan bias and to create a standard for when a gerrymandered map infringes on voters' rights?

Electric vehicles are better for the climate than gas-powered cars, but many Americans are still reluctant to buy them. One reason: The larger upfront cost. New data published Thursday shows that despite the higher sticker price, electric cars may actually save drivers money in the long-run. To reach this conclusion, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated both the carbon dioxide emissions and full lifetime cost - including purchase price, maintenance and fuel - for nearly every new car model on the market. They found electric cars were easily more climate friendly than gas-burning ones. Over a lifetime, they were often cheaper, too.

When it comes to inequality, a growing body of evidence shows that people across countries underestimate the size of the gap between the rich and poor, including their wages. This can undermine support for policies to tackle inequality and even lead to apathy that consolidates the gap. But how exactly are existing perceptions of inequality measured by social scientists?

Interesting discussion of a contentious issue related to the idea of a 'basic income' (but here, in a development context). Martin Ravallion (former Chief Economist of the World Bank, now at CGD) published a useful paper this week asking exactly this question. As he says, there's no simple answer - which is why the question is so interesting. Both 'the right to work' and 'the right to income' aim to secure a more fundamental right: freedom from poverty. Workfare has a long history, notably in India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) guarantees (in theory) up to 100 days work per year, paid at a minimum wage, to anyone who requests it. Cash transfers (often with conditions) have expanded enormously in recent years, while the hot topic of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has advocates across the political spectrum. Which of these approaches is most cost-effective? Ravallion sets out the arguments clearly.

There's a form of casual violence that kills 1.25 million people a year (3 times more than malaria) and injures up to 50ODI roads cover million more. 90% of the deaths are of poor people (usually men) in poor countries. No guns are involved and there's lots of things governments can do to fix it. But you'll hardly ever read about it in the development literature, although road safety did make it into the Sustainable Development Goals (as did everything else, it has to be said) - targets 3.6 and 11.2 for SDG geeks. So hats off to ODI (again) for not only painstakingly building the case for taking action on a major cause of death and misery in poor countries (see below), but also exploring the politics and institutions that so far have prevented governments from taking action.

Duncan Green (an advisor for Oxfam), writes a great blog on use of evidence in international development and aid. This one (a guest post) is really interesting on how we measure inequality... 'You would think a question like 'Is inequality going up or down?' would be relatively easy to answer, but sadly it is not. At Oxfam we have identified the growing gap between rich and poor and the impact of high inequality as a serious crisis. But how serious is it really?