The psychological design tricks that McDonald's trusts to tempt you into buying its preferred menu items

McDonald's deploys a number of design tricks that are intended to tempt you to buying from its more expensive, higher-margin new menu: they're largely trivial and obvious (putting up big pictures of the menu items, animating the preferred menu-items to catch your eye), though sometimes the explanation for these rests in highly speculative accounts of the evolutionary pressures on early hominid (the idea that we are attracted to moving things because it helps us "spot predators" -- an evidence-free conjecture based on the imagined lives of our distant ancestors who left no record of their social conditions). (more…)