Orange juiceHotels serve breakfast, and in Germany, they offer a lovely variety of Brötchen (bread rolls), Aufschnitt (slices of cheese, salami, ham, ...), many cereals, coffee, tea, ... and juice. Nearly every time, there are two choices of juice.
One of the two juices is always orange juice. Everybody wants orange juice. It's pure sugar, some vitamins, fresh, pure in taste, kickstarts your
economy circulatory system, goes with everything, it's perfect. It's exactly what you want in the morning to be fit for a taxing day.
The other juice option varies between hotels. Sometimes, it's apple juice. Sometimes, it's multivitamin juice. Apple juice tastes pale in comparison, and multivitamin juice is weird. People rarely want either such juice on its own. They accept it grudgingly when the dispenser for orange juice is already empty. It's the consolation prize for when you're too late at the breakfast and the clerk hasn't yet refilled the orange juice.
Now assume you're a hotel administrator. Your job is to order food and goods to keep the place running. Each noon, you observe how much orange juice and how much apple juice has been consumed that morning. You see that they're about 50:50. Will you conclude that they're equally wanted? Or will you conclude that your clerks are too lazy to check and refill the orange juice dispenser frequently enough?
Nice psychological fallacy. I'm not sure if this already has a name: To wrongly deduce from demand of the second-best good that the second-best good is worth more.
Writing promptsThere are these fancy forum games or level review threads: You pick a topic, say something nice about it, and say something bad about it. I feel like such a writing prompt has a chance to, either on the nice section or on the bad section, generate reviews that are too short and obvious. That's not what the prompt's designer intended; they intended neutral reviews.
The prompt should rather be to pick something you love, and write a one-sided negative review on it, review all its terrible features, wrong design choices, ... With lots of detail. Or pick something you don't like or don't care for, and praise its strong points. (If the topic is prefixed, such as the next level to be reviewed, you must honestly decide whether you like that level or not, and skew your review the opposite direction.)
For clarity, because such a writing prompt is uncommon, the first sentence should explain that the review is deliberately skewed against the writer's overall opinion. It's also good to have several people write on the same prompt, to produce at least one review of each skew.
Maybe I should review some computer/board games like this. Or write nice things about some rant topic? Look how convenient all the white webpages are: I can install a single browser plugin that inverts all colors, and it'll turn every website black. Were many websites nastily dark already and easy on the eyes, then I'd have far more hassle adjusting the plugin to each site. And if web designers decide to decorate their website with token smiling people that do nothing related at all, the color inverter will give them cyan skin, they'll look like Frankenstein's monster. Allows me to focus on the facts in the text.
Very hard to not fall into irony. <_< Irony shouldn't be the point of the prompt.
-- Simon