In 1999, on being introduced to the Internet for the very first time, do you know what I did? Like many others, I created a dozen new email accounts. But once I realised the futility of having so many email addresses I discarded almost all of them and stuck to my Yahoo mail. It stayed that way until Gmail arrived.
Some of the Gmail features were quite attractive as compared to Yahoo but what made the former very tempting was its policy of invite-only registrations. You couldn’t get a Gmail account unless someone with Gmail invited you. This made me want it even more. But why?
Folks at Google certainly understood human behaviour better than anyone else. They used the principle of Scarcity Bias to make their product more appealing.
Scarcity principle states that people assign more value to opportunities when they are less available. In other words, things seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited. This bias stems from the basic human tendency to shun losses.
Daniel Kahneman, who is known for his pioneering work in the field of behavioural economics, came up with the Loss Aversion theory, which explains the root of many of the human psychological biases. The theory says that human beings are motivated more by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. This is especially true under conditions of risk and uncertainty.
Put simply, the threat of potential loss plays a powerful role in human decision making.
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