Refusing to spend can signal status just as reliably as spending does — Milan boutique staff rated a woman in gym clothes as the more likely buyer. Meanwhile the psychology shows two entirely different machines producing the same thrifty behaviour, and only one of them feels good.
Legibility asymmetry describes the bias where existing systems are unfairly judged against untested alternatives. This occurs because only established things have visible failures, while challengers remain unscrutinized by reality at scale.
A billion is only three extra zeroes on the page and a thousand times larger in the world. Scale, compounding, and risk all become easier to judge when we change the representation.
behavioral economicscognitioncognitive biasesdecision making
