document updated 16 years ago, on Jul 15, 2008

I enjoy studying common problems in human behavior. They're interesting because:

they occur to the best of us
though they're typically small problems, they can have very measurable effects when accumulated across larger populations (e.g. stock market trading)
as with black box testing, failures teach you far more about how something's internals work than the successes
studying them has practical side effects: you become better equipped to avoid them, and (if that's your game) better equipped to exploit them in others

Some of them can be downright spooky, revealing really interesting details about perception.