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Weber's law 1:17

A 77-second explainer of Weber's law, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.

The Weber's law explainer. Prefer to do it yourself? Try the interactive demo.

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What this video covers

Weber's law states that the smallest change we can notice in something is proportional to its starting size, not a fixed amount. A £1 rise on a £3 coffee is glaring; the same £1 on a £900 laptop is invisible. The "just-noticeable difference" scales with the baseline, so big things have to change by a lot before anyone perceives it.

The same £1 jumped out on the cheap item and vanished on the dear one - because what we notice is a proportion of the starting size, not an absolute amount. That's Weber's law. It's why a tiny tweak reads as "broken alignment" on a small element but not a large one, why emphasis has to scale with context to be felt - and why small, repeated price creeps slip by unnoticed.

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