Use psychology to help your customers relieve mental burdens

Here’s some fascinating behavioral research:

Through the experiments, the researchers homed in on a hypothesis: People appear wired to incur a significant physical cost to eliminate a mental burden.

In particular, Dr. Rosenbaum said, people are seeking ways to limit the burden to their “working memory,” a critical but highly limited mental resource that people use to perform immediate tasks. By picking up the bucket earlier, the subjects were eliminating the need to remember to do it later. In essence, they were freeing their brains to focus on other potential tasks.

Savvy marketers will use this knowledge to help their customers relieve mental burdens.