Why "Expensive" Sticks in Your Memory Longer Than "Cheap"

Human attention is wired with a strong negativity bias — unpleasant experiences are processed more intensely and remembered longer than neutral or pleasant ones. A single price shock, like gas jumping 30 cents overnight, leaves a sharper emotional mark than months of quietly stable prices ever will.

This is compounded by how visible certain prices are. Gas and grocery prices are checked constantly and displayed publicly, so their increases are impossible to miss. Meanwhile, prices that have gotten cheaper over time — electronics, flights, many household goods — fade into the background because nobody re-checks a price that's going down.

The result is a public perception of "everything is expensive" that can run well ahead of what broad price indexes actually show, not because the data is wrong, but because human memory was never built to average things out fairly.

The bottom line: Your sense of "the economy" is built from the prices that hurt, not the ones that quietly helped.