Last summer I fell straight into a trap that, I’ve since learned, is common when shopping on the web. It got plenty of reviews online, but a mediocre average rating owing to the fact that, in many cases, it didn’t cling at all. Yet in some semi-conscious back corner of my brain, I figured that a product bought by so many people couldn’t be so bad. In both cases, we seem designed to find sheer quantity (of product reviews, of encounters with an ad) reassuring at a gut level. This is, perhaps not coincidentally in my case, the kind of reasoning it’s notoriously harder to practise when you’re tired.

Source: The Guardian November 10, 2017 15:00 UTC