[dahart]

It’s curious that the “studies” cited all have wildly differing outcomes. It makes the first example given with a 48% increase seem very questionable and possibly misleading, when all the others are single-digit increases at best. How much more do people spend? Is there a stronger meta analysis somewhere?

The bottom of the article launches into spoken number frequencies. The caption under the digit frequencies plot claims “the decreasing frequency of numerals is due to the organization of our mental representation of quantities.” This seems to be simply Benford’s law, and the plot of numbers across languages suggests the same. Assigning this to some mental process or cognitive bias for small numbers seems like it might be inventing an incorrect explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law