34 masters. 40 criteria. 6 stages. Zero guessing.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Kahneman's Nobel-winning research established that human thinking runs on two systems: System One is fast, automatic, and unconscious; System Two is slow and deliberate. Most decisions, including whether to engage with a business, are made by System One before System Two ever gets involved. With longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, Kahneman's work on Prospect Theory also showed people feel the pain of a loss roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure of an equivalent gain — the foundation of loss aversion.

APPLIED TO: Trust · Stage 02

Cialdini's six principles of influence — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity — document the specific mechanisms that cause people to say yes. Trust signals have to appear before commitment is requested, not after.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Fogg's Behavior Model states that an action only happens when motivation, ability, and a trigger converge at the same moment. Remove any one, and the action doesn't happen, no matter how strong the others are.

APPLIED TO: Perception & Trust · Stages 01-02

Nielsen's research established that people form their expectations from how most websites work, and that breaking those conventions increases mental effort. His reading-pattern research documents exactly where on a page people actually look first.

APPLIED TO: Perception & Decision · Stages 01 & 03

Miller's famous 1956 finding established that working memory reliably holds only around seven items before things start getting dropped. Past that point, decisions get deferred and people disengage.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Iyengar's well-known research on choice overload showed that how options are sequenced and grouped — not just how many exist — determines whether anyone chooses at all.

APPLIED TO: Trust · Stage 02

Thaler's work on nudges and mental accounting showed that small, well-placed changes in how a choice is presented — defaults, framing, structure — can significantly shift behavior without restricting any option.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Mehrabian's communication-consistency research established that when what's said and how it looks conflict, how it looks wins. Strong claims on a visually inconsistent page get quietly discounted by that inconsistency.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Gigerenzer's research on fast and frugal heuristics shows people rely on simple mental shortcuts to make good-enough decisions quickly, especially under uncertainty.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Ekman's research on micro-expressions showed people detect inconsistency between what's said and how it's shown almost instantly, and subconsciously.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Cooper's goal-directed design principle holds that good design starts from what the visitor is trying to accomplish, not from what the business wants to show off.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory shows comprehension breaks down once mental effort exceeds working memory capacity — even when every individual piece of information is accurate.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Bjork's research on desirable difficulties shows some effort aids memory — but effort spent decoding a confusing layout only causes people to give up, not to remember more.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Norman established the idea of affordances and signifiers — that things should make their correct use obvious through design alone. When a page deviates from expected patterns, it creates friction that erodes trust before a customer can say why.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Weinschenk's applied research translates lab-level behavioral findings into consistent, measurable patterns in how real people act online.

APPLIED TO: Trust & Decision · Stages 02-03

Simonson's research on context-dependent choice, including the compromise effect, shows people rarely judge an option alone — they judge it against whatever else is presented next to it.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Lindgaard's Carleton University research found that people form a lasting visual-appeal judgment about a website in as little as 50 milliseconds — long before they've read a single word.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis found that emotion isn't separate from decision-making — it's the mechanism that makes fast decisions possible at all. People with damage to emotional processing become worse decision-makers, not more rational ones.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance showed people are uncomfortable holding two conflicting thoughts at once — and will act to resolve that discomfort faster than they'll act on a neutral statement they can simply file away.

APPLIED TO: Trust · Stage 02

Ariely's research on pricing psychology, including the decoy effect, showed people rarely evaluate a price in isolation — they evaluate it against whatever comparison point is placed near it, predictably and consistently.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Tversky co-developed Prospect Theory and the heuristics-and-biases research program with Daniel Kahneman, publishing the original framing and loss-aversion studies together in peer-reviewed journals including Econometrica and Science. Much of what carries Kahneman's name alone in popular use was originally joint, peer-reviewed work.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Sunstein's peer-reviewed research on choice architecture (with Richard Thaler) documents how the way options are structured and defaulted — not just what they are — measurably changes what people choose, independent of persuasion or content.

APPLIED TO: Trust · Stage 02

Slovic's peer-reviewed work on the affect heuristic established that people frequently judge risk and value using a fast emotional reaction — "how does this feel" — as a substitute for slower, deliberate analysis.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan's peer-reviewed research on scarcity showed that feeling short on time or money measurably narrows attention and changes decision-making — a visitor under real or perceived pressure processes information differently than one who isn't.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Simon's Nobel-winning concept of bounded rationality established that people don't exhaustively evaluate every option — they satisfice, picking the first option that clears a "good enough" bar, especially under time or information constraints.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Schwartz's 1966 theory of market sophistication holds that every market moves through stages of awareness — a message that lands in one stage falls flat in another.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Ries's 1981 positioning theory holds that a business doesn't win by being better — it wins by owning a single distinct word or idea in the customer's mind before a competitor claims it.

APPLIED TO: Perception · Stage 01

Trout's research alongside Ries established that the mind rejects complexity and defaults to the simplest available distinction between options — the business that gets there first, in the fewest words, tends to win the position.

APPLIED TO: Trust · Stage 02

Ogilvy argued that advertising's job is to sell, not to entertain, and that clarity and honest claims consistently outperform cleverness — a discipline he insisted on decades before it was measurable at scale.

APPLIED TO: Trust · Stage 02

Hopkins's 1923 book was among the first to argue advertising should be tested and measured like an experiment, not judged on taste — every claim should be traceable to a reason, not an opinion.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Ramadan's research on category-creating companies found they grow faster and more durably than category competitors, because they set the terms of comparison instead of accepting someone else's.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Peterson's work alongside Ramadan and Lochhead documented that category creation is a repeatable discipline, not a lucky accident — a specific, learnable sequence rather than a matter of timing.

APPLIED TO: Presentation · Stage 04

Lochhead's writing on category design argues that most businesses lose by default the moment they accept an existing category's rules, rather than defining their own.

APPLIED TO: Decision · Stage 03

Schwartz's peer-reviewed research on maximizing versus satisficing found that people who exhaustively compare every option before deciding end up less satisfied than those who pick the first option that clears a "good enough" bar — distinct from, and building on, the choice-overload research already credited to Sheena Iyengar above.