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…we seem to prefer people, places, and things that remind us of ourselves.

Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all investments users make to improve their experience.

…the status quo is the path you’re already on or the way you’ve always done things. The bias is that we have a preference to stick with those decisions, methods, and paths that we’ve already set upon, and a resistance to veering from them into something new or different.

Millions of dead people have shown us their preference to die rather than forgive.

…consumers don’t in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.

…market research tries to predict people’s preferences, but increasingly, decisions are influenced by the opinions of other consumers and experts.

…in the new information environment, we can expect faster uncertainty resolution regarding the product quality, regarding preference fit, and regarding product acceptance by relevant others.

…experiments show that sometimes we are willing to rely so much on other people, that we are willing to push aside not only our preferences, but the evidence in front of us.

The existence of stable preferences sounds pretty obvious, but for the past few decades, researchers in the area of behavioral decision theory have raised serious doubts about the existence of any such stable preferences.

It is hard to predict the success of a product ahead of time by measuring individual consumers’ preferences and then try to use these preferences to predict consumers’ future decisions.