New Scientist columnist David Robson outlines five thinking errors marketers use to push purchases before Black Friday

New Scientist columnist David Robson has published an explainer on why people buy, timed as shoppers approach Black Friday. The piece says the urge to purchase is not only a matter of want or price. It is also a set of mental shortcuts that commercial prompts can tilt. The column frames five thinking errors as tools marketers already use to push a sale, rather than as results from a new experiment.

The text available here does not reproduce those five errors, the papers behind them, or any sample size. What is on the record is the claim: companies take advantage of how brains weigh impulse against restraint. That claim sits in a long behavioral-economics literature — loss aversion, anchoring, scarcity cues, social proof — but those mechanisms should not be read as measurements newly taken for this column. Treat the piece as synthesis by an attributed writer, not as a trial.

The distinction that matters is between a bias as a description of judgment and a tactic as a design choice. A crossed-out “was” price, a countdown, or a default add-on does not invent a desire so much as it changes the comparison a shopper makes in the moment. False cues — invented scarcity, clocks that reset — raise a separate ethics and consumer-protection question from whether the shortcut itself is real. The column’s value, on the evidence in hand, is that framing of hidden commercial architecture, not a new dataset.

Anyone buying under time pressure is in the frame, especially in the Black Friday window the column invokes. The stakes are ordinary and immediate: money spent, items added that were not planned, and the gap between what a shopper meant to do and what the page made easy. Methods note: this is magazine commentary, not a peer-reviewed study with a stated sample; the limitation is that the underlying experiments are not reproduced in the source text, so the strength of any single “error” cannot be graded from this report alone.