[jonnathanson]

The observations presented in the article are interesting, but as you suggest, the problem lies with the attribution of these observations to the broad and sweeping set of "[all] people."

We can consider the fitness example in the same light as your analysis of the gift-card example. My corporate gym -- and pretty much any gym to which I've ever belonged -- gets deluged by New Year's resolution newbies every January. By mid-February, most of them are gone.

At first blush, we may be tempted to suggest that "most people" sign up for gym memberships in January, then gradually lose interest. But in fact, we are simply observing one subset of people at one touchpoint. The set happens to have a dramatic impact, so our minds assign it unduly high weight through a cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic). But this subset, in fact, may not even be significant in the overall set of gym users and non-gym users. Perhaps "most people" use the gym on a regular basis. Even more likely, perhaps "most people" don't set foot in the gym at all, New Year's or otherwise. All that we've learned, by observing the New Year's subset in isolation, is how the New Year's subset behaves.