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Everything this site owes to someone: the evidence behind each claim, the six studies that hold up the second question, and the shape and the images.

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The studies that almost never show up

Each of these six measures a famous law in a body that is not the body it was made in, and none of them tends to show up when the law is cited.

Bravo et al., 1993 · Fitts’s law

They repeated Fitts’s law in six adults with cerebral palsy and six without. In the group without, the law held. In the group with, it did not hold for most. It is the only measurement of Fitts outside the typical body that I found, and it is thirty years old.
Apicella et al., 2014 · Endowment effect

They went to measure the endowment effect among the Hadza, hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. In the isolated groups the effect did not appear; in those who live alongside tourists, it did. What looked like a property of the human mind tracks exposure to the market.
Sharif et al., 2022 · Aesthetic–usability effect

They asked ten screen-reader users what makes a sonification pleasant. On average, the sound that pleased most was not the one that was clearest, but the difference did not pass the statistical test, and the authors themselves say so. It stands as a hint that the question of the aesthetic–usability effect makes sense in an interface without images, and that no one has answered it yet.
Choi; Nisbett; Norenzayan, 1999 · Fundamental attribution error

They compared the fundamental attribution error across cultures and found less error in collectivist cultures, with a caveat about method that the article itself makes, and that is almost never cited alongside.
Chen, 2013 · Temporal discounting

He measured whether speaking a language that marks the future grammatically changes how much a person saves. It is the most seductive finding on this site, and the author himself later published its limits.
Mani et al., 2013 · Cognitive load theory

They tested the same Indian farmers before and after the harvest and found a difference in performance on a cognitive test. The authors calibrate the set of effects at around thirteen IQ points, and say the field effect is three quarters of the laboratory one. The brain didn’t change, the bank account did. Cognitive load has a component that is not on the screen.

Credits

Where the shape of this site comes from

This site exists because Laws of UX exists. Jon Yablonski solved, there, the problem I had: how to take a concept from psychology and hand it to whoever designs, one idea per page, without diluting it and without demanding that the person already knew what it was about. The ruler of this work is his ruler: one concept at a time, a short answer right at the opening and the primary source at the foot. Here the translation into design comes after the mechanism and the body the law presumes, because nobody should apply a law before knowing how much it was measured, and in whom.

What passes through that ruler here is something else: the cut is neuroscientific and the bibliography is my own. The debt is one of form, and it is the largest this work has.

Anatomical illustrations

The figures in the original work were screenshots and third-party images, cited under academic use. Publishing in the open demanded another base: I replaced them all with freely licensed works.

The visual pathway, seen from below
OpenStax · Anatomy and Physiology (2016) CC BY 4.0

The outer, middle and inner ear
OpenStax · Anatomy and Physiology (2016) CC BY 4.0

The sensory homunculus of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1)
OpenStax College; derivative work by Ederporto · Anatomy & Physiology (Portuguese edition) CC BY 3.0

The olfactory epithelium and bulb
OpenStax · Anatomy and Physiology (2016) CC BY 4.0

The peripheral vestibular organs in the inner ear
Christian Pfeiffer, Andrea Serino and Olaf Blanke · Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience (2014) CC BY 3.0

The limbic lobe, in sagittal section
OpenStax College; vectorised by Marnanel · Anatomy & Physiology CC BY 3.0 · labels translated into Portuguese

The dopaminergic pathways and the reward circuit
NIDA — National Institute on Drug Abuse; derivative work by Quasihuman · Dopamine pathways Public domain · labels translated into Portuguese

The lobes of the cerebral cortex
OpenStax · Anatomy and Physiology (2016) CC BY 4.0

3D model of the brain — the object that rotates on the cover
neutralize · Brain CC BY 4.0 · converted to an edge mesh and reduced to 16 bits

3D model of the ballerina — the figure that rotates in The body
dam1997 · ballerina CC BY 4.0 · converted to an edge mesh and reduced to 16 bits

Typography
Geist and Geist Mono, by Vercel SIL Open Font License 1.1

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