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HUMAN BIAS: THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
3 human biases I try to weave in to every marketing campaign...
Niall Ratcliffe
November 16, 2025
In partnership with
Morning!
I’m embarrassed to say I woke up at 11 am this morning. I had my first late night in forever (1:30 AM), and my body was not used to it. I’m 24 going on 50, I swear. I can’t hack it anymore.
Anyway, this week we’ve been working night and day to get our final campaign of the year over the line for noticed. and I spent the back end of this week building out the final parts of the launch.
Now, you might think that at this point my time would be spent tweaking social content, double-checking that all the automations work, and maybe some admin. That would be true. But more than anything, I’ve been thinking about the human biases we can lean on and use to make this a massive success.
So today I wanted to share 3 human biases that I think will dictate the success of our upcoming launch and how you should use them in all of your marketing campaigns.
Let’s get into it!
THE ESSAY
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And there are 1000s (if not millions) of ways to market anything.
People can tell you that certain tricks or tactics work - and they might - but like everything in life, as times change, the tricks & tactics that work today won’t work anymore. There will be new tricks, new hacks, and new tactics.
Marketing changes, industries change. But what doesn’t change are the inherent human biases that have been there for hundreds of years. They were here 1,000 years ago and they’ll be here 1,000 years from now.
I try my best to weave as many of those biases as possible into every campaign we run. And this week, as we’ve been polishing off our last campaign of the year, I’ve been thinking more and more about the specific human biases we’ve leaned on.
These three are the ones I come back to over and over again, and how I’ve integrated them into past campaigns:
Bias 1: The Price–Quality Heuristic
In 2023, we had the idea to create a “Toolkit” to help companies tell better stories in their marketing. At the time, we were talking a lot about the importance of storytelling in marketing and companies were paying us £1000s to help them do it.
So, we thought, “What if we created a toolkit so they can do it for themselves internally?”
Our thought process was simple:
We’d create this toolkit targeted at marketing managers and small business owners to tell better stories in their marketing
They’d look through it, try it themselves, have some success, then decide to pay us to help support them.
But most of all, they’d give us their email to get access, and we’d be able to market our services to them.
Makes sense, right?
Then, about 2 months into building the toolkit, we realised we’d made it too valuable - which feels ironic to say, but it was true. We meant to make it useful and give it away for free, but by the time it was done, it was exponentially more valuable than any free product. (To this day, I still think it was probably worth £200-£300.)
This is where the human bias kicks in.
We realised that by giving it away for free, everyone would see it at a “free” level of quality, reducing the number of people who would download it. If we wanted this to be as successful as possible, we had to charge for it so people understood the value.
This is what you call ‘The Price-Quality Heuristic’.
A simple mental shortcut humans use when making purchasing decisions. They judge the quality of a product or service based on its price.
Free product = Low-Value
Paid product = More Value
So we added a £1 price tag to the toolkit. Instantly raising its perceived value.
Then, once a prospect had bought it, that’s when the second bias came in… The Effort Justification Bias.
When someone pays for something (even just £1), they expect to get something more valuable than a free product. They put more effort in, got their card out, paid with their hard-earned money, and they want more for it.
This is Effort Justification.
So when we delivered £200-£300 of value within the toolkit.
They think, “This is great. I made the right call. ” Their brain upgrades how they see you, and you gain an extra layer of trust because of it. Which comes in handy when selling to them at a later date.
That’s why the £1 strategy works (and why you see so many marketers use it nowadays).
The Price–Quality Heuristic gets them in the door, and Effort Justification makes them trust you after they’ve bought.
Bias 2: The Power Of Now
Earlier this year, Alex Hormozi broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling non-fiction book (with $100M Money Models selling over 2.9 million copies in 24 hours).
A crazy achievement, but what a lot of people forgot to analyse was the thing that happened after all of these people bought the book.
Once you paid the $15 for his book, you fell on a confirmation page that had a few things.
You got instant access to a PDF version of the book (even though you were getting a physical copy too)
You got access to a video course (for free) and access to an audio version of the book (again for free)
You got an offer to an in-person workshop with Hormozi in Las Vegas at a massively reduced price
It was an overwhelming amount of value, immediately after purchasing.
And this is where the ‘Power of Now’ bias comes in.
Humans are wired to want value now. Even if the thing we’re waiting for is better, our brain still prioritises whatever we can get instantly. In behavioural science, they call this Hyperbolic Discounting - but “the power of now” is much easier to remember ahah.
When someone buys something, there’s a tiny window where they’re asking themselves, “Was that a good decision?”
If you give them something valuable immediately:
The doubt disappears
The purchase feels justified
And their trust in you increases instantly
On the other hand, most people sell their book, people wait a week for it to be delivered and the excitement dies down. That’s why so many books end up collecting dust on the shelf.
Hormozi did the exact opposite, and that’s why he didn’t just sell a sh*t ton of books, he made a sh*t ton of money and made 100,000s of people super fans.
I think the ‘Confirmation Page’ is one of the most underrated sales pages on the planet. We’ve spent hours building and writing ours for this next launch.
Marketing isn’t just about making a sale, it’s what happens after it too.
More on that in the next bias though…
Bias 3: The Commitment Effect
I’ve already said it, but you can’t overlook the confirmation page. If the last bias didn’t convince you, this one should.
It’s called ‘The Commitment Effect’.
The bias is simple: when someone takes a small action, they become far more likely to take the next one.
A lot of the top mobile apps use this all of the time to get people to take more action immediately after downloading. Just look at Duolingo…
The moment you create an account, you’re not left to figure things out. They immediately give you a tiny first step:
Set a goal
Do your first 30-second lesson
Hit your first “streak”
Just small commitment after small commitment while they have the momentum.
This also works incredibly well to upsell people from a low-priced product to a high-priced product. For example, you’ll see a lot of ad agencies run low-ticket ‘audits’, then once someone’s paid, immediately upsell them to a larger package or retainer (sometimes even before the audit takes place).
That’s the Commitment Effect.
Small steps lead to bigger ones because once people have said “yes” to something, the floodgates have already opened.
This is once again why confirmation pages are so important.
Start small → get a commitment → immediately make an offer.
There are probably another 10 that I could add to this newsletter. Especially as I’ve just got ‘The Choice Factory’ by Richard Shotton, which covers a lot of these. But if you found it interesting, let me know and I can do another newsletter breaking down human psychology & biases and how you can use them in marketing.
For now, that’s all we’ve got for today.
I hope you enjoyed. I hope you found it interesting, but most of all, I hope it helps your marketing.
Until next Sunday,
— Niall
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