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How many times have you checked your phone today? Why are messaging apps, email and social media so hard to resist? How come we always end up watching another episode? In recent years, media and technology have perfected the lucrative art of gaining and holding our attention. This extraordinary feat has changed the behaviour of billions of people, and especially the young, by current medical standards, we are experiencing an unprecedented, global pandemic of addiction. But what exactly is an addiction and what, if anything, might we do about it? From cliff-hangers to earworms, from religion to pornography, and from the awesome allure of the 'Kim Kardashian Hollywood' app to the unexpected benefits of the 'butt-brush effect', Irresistible blends fascinating stories with ingenious science to explain how and why we all got hooked

Abstract
Consumers assess their well-being subjectively, largely by comparing the present state of their lives to the state of comparable others and to their own state earlier in time. The authors suggest that consumers similarly assess their financial well-being, and when these evaluations highlight a deficit in their financial position, they pursue strategies that mitigate the associated sense of financial deprivation. Specifically, consumers counteract the relative deficit in their financial resources by acquiring goods that are consequently unavailable to other consumers in their environment. The results from five studies suggest that the inferiority and unpleasant affect associated with financial deprivation motivates consumers to attend to, choose, and consume scarce goods rather than comparable abundant goods. These effects diminish when scarce goods are limited because other people have already obtained them and when consumers attribute their unpleasant feelings to a source unrelated to financial deprivation.

Abstract
Purchases fall along a continuum from ordinary (common or frequent) to exceptional (unusual or infrequent), with many of the largest expenses (e.g., electronics, celebrations) being the most exceptional. Across seven studies, we show that, while people are fairly adept at budgeting and predicting how much they will spend on ordinary items, they both underestimate their spending on exceptional purchases overall and overspend on each individual purchase. Based on the principles of mental accounting and choice bracketing, we show that this discrepancy arises in part because consumers categorize exceptional expenses too narrowly, construing each as a unique occurrence and consequently overspending across a series of discretely exceptional expenses. We conclude by proposing an intervention that diminishes this tendency by helping consumers consider their spending on exceptional items as part of a larger set of purchases.

AbstractOne major challenge facing policy-makers is to design education and workplace training programs that are appropriately challenging. We review previous research that suggests that difficult training is better than easy training. However, surveys we conducted of students and of expert sport coaches showed that many prescribed easy rather than difficult training for those they coached. We analyzed the performance of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball teams in postseason tournaments to see whether the existing research, largely on individuals in short-term situations, would generalize to teams in the long run. Indeed, playing difficult nonconference (training) games modestly improved performance for NCAA teams in the postseason. Difficult training particularly benefitted teams that lost many nonconference games, and the effect of difficulty was positive within the range of difficulty NCAA teams actually encounter, making it clear that difficult training is superior. We suggest that our results can be generalized beyond sports, although with careful consideration of differences between NCAA basketball teams and other teams that may limit generalizability. These results suggest that policy-makers might consider amplifying the difficulty of team training exercises under certain conditions.

AbstractThis article introduces a novel distinction between foods as a function of the frequency with which consumers eat them, and investigates how this distinction influences dietary beliefs and decisions. It compares food types perceived to be consumed relatively infrequently (i.e., infrequent foods) to those perceived to be consumed relatively frequently (i.e., frequent foods). Across an analysis of archival data from a popular calorie tracking app and five experiments examining hypothetical consumption decisions, findings support the conclusion that infrequent foods provide unique challenges for consumers. All else equal, consumers select larger portions of infrequent (vs. frequent) foods. Further, consumers are less likely to compensate (i.e., eat less) after consuming equal amounts of infrequent versus frequent foods. This pattern of results arises because consumers erroneously believe that infrequent foods have a smaller impact on their weight than frequent foods do, even in the presence of caloric information. Optimistically, participants can be taught to overcome this bias through a brief informational intervention.