I, once mentioned about the tactics of undertakers, which are based on the idea that people are not inclined to buy the most expensive item. Therefore, sales can be significantly boosted simply by placing a very expensive item next to a more expensive one. This tactic is not only present in the sale of coffins but also in all areas of human activity. A bottle of V.S.O.P. cognac may not seem so expensive when compared to the X.O. sitting right next to it on the shelf.
the relative comparison with worse options. This tactic plays on your emotions and perceptions, making you feel like you’re getting a better deal than you actually are. Instead of evaluating the apartment on its own merits, you end up settling for something that might not meet your needs, simply because it seems better in comparison to the alternatives presented to you.comparativeBusinessmen should keep this characteristic of the human brain in mind when building their product range.
During a study, doctors were given information about a certain substance X that helps with a specific disease.
After reviewing the information about the medication, they were asked if they would prescribe it to their patients. Most doctors agreed to prescribe it, while 28% of them refused to do so.
However, when another group of doctors was given information about two equally effective but different medications, X and Y, 48% decided not to prescribe anything.
It’s obvious that expanding the list of options makes it harder to choose. Surely, each of you can recall a situation where you’re standing in front of a restaurant menu displayed outside, staring at it for a long time, and then deciding not to go into that restaurant at all. This is from the same category.
The more equivalent options you provide for comparison, the more a person starts to think about “the same, but with mother-of-pearl buttons.” In other words, they begin to imagine a fantastic option that includes all the advantages and excludes all the disadvantages from all possible choices.
When scheduling a meeting over the phone, try not to offer alternative times for the meeting. If your client prefers a different time, they will let you know.
One of the most insidious properties of side-by-side comparison is that it makes us focus on every attribute that distinguishes the options we are comparing.
My wife gets “stuck” at the tea display in the supermarket and becomes completely frustrated because she just can’t choose what she needs. If the display only had plain black or plain green tea, she would spend less time and be much happier. Isn’t that why the standard kids’ menu at McDonald’s is called “Happy Meal”?
I spent several hours of my life browsing the website. dpreview.com Cameras. Sony has built-in vibration compensation in the sensor, while Canon features a hot shoe on its compact camera. One camera allows for faster continuous shooting, while the other produces less noise at high sensitivity settings. One has a wide angle, and that’s about it. The other doesn’t have as wide an angle as one might want, but it offers many additional features.
When looking at cameras and their specifications, it’s nearly impossible to decide which camera you need in just five minutes, and you might even start asking silly questions on photography websites.
At the same time, there are attributes that you would consider regardless—weight, size, especially if you’re looking for a compact camera. However, there are many attributes you might not have thought about, and you need to pay attention to them because you’ve entered the “side-by-side comparison” game, and it’s these attributes that set one camera apart from another.
What attributes would concern you if you were buying, for example, a new dictionary?
The thing is, during one study, people were given the opportunity to set a price for a dictionary. It was a new dictionary in excellent condition, containing 10,000 words. On average, people offered $24 for it. Another group was given the chance to price a dictionary with a torn binding that contained 12,000 words. On average, they offered $20.
However, when the third group was allowed to compare the two dictionaries side by side, they offered 19 dollars for the whole but small one, and 27 for the torn but large one.
It is clear that people are concerned about the condition of the cover. However, they only start paying attention to the word count when this attribute is compared side by side.
Let’s summarize.The text for translation: :.
1) Value is determined by comparing one thing to another.
There is more than one type of comparison that we use in this particular case.
We can evaluate something more highly when we use one type of comparison instead of another.
It turns out that in order to understand how beneficial a particular choice is for us…future, then we should use the type of comparison that will be important to us infuture, not inin the presentWhen making a choice, think about it.
We recall the conclusion that in order to understand how beneficial a particular choice is for us…futurethen we should use the type of comparison that will be important to us infuture, not inin the presentТекст для перевода: ..
How often have we made the choice in the supermarket to buy something or not, walking into the store on an empty stomach? It seemed to us that this aromatic, fatty, caviar-filled, smoked sprat would bring us much more pleasure than the carrots we bought from our shopping list. But in reality, the carrots got eaten while the sprat waited for its moment. You can’t eat it for breakfast, lunch is at work, and dinner is on a regular schedule. Are we waiting for the weekend? But for the weekend, we’ve already bought a beautiful herring. (I don’t know how it is in your family, but in ours, we have herring for breakfast on Saturdays 🙂)
Once, volunteers were given the opportunity to describe the pleasure they would get from a bag of chips before they started eating them. The volunteers were divided into two groups. The first group predicted their enjoyment while looking at a chocolate bar, while the second group looked at a can of sardines.
Those who saw the chips predicted a strong pleasure from them. And those who saw the chocolate predicted less. It’s understandable. Chips are good, but chocolate is better. However, both groups were mistaken! What do the sardines or the chocolate bar you saw five minutes ago have to do with the fact that your mouth is now full of delicious, crunchy chips? What will you reach for next: another handful of chips, or will you start unwrapping the sardines or the chocolate?
In other words, the comparisons that the volunteers made unconsciously, imagining how they would eat chips, were completely different from what their perceptions would have been if they had actually eaten the chips.
I once had an amplifier. A good one. Bark-100U. If anyone understands the numbering of audio equipment from the USSR, they’ll know that this amplifier was top-notch. It had magnificent sound, and I just couldn’t part with it. However, it had one problem — it was old and broke down about once a month. At first, I focused on finding great sound, imagining the pleasure I would get from it. However, in life, you need an amplifier that works consistently, not just sometimes, even if it sounds good. In the end, I bought a cheap Pioneer for $70. When I set it up in my house next to the Bark, I could clearly hear the difference in sound and couldn’t even imagine how I would live with this “flatter and more tinny” sound from the cheap Pioneer.
However, I bravely gifted the Bark to someone, and just two weeks later, I didn’t even remember how it sounded. The Pioneer completely satisfied me. And it satisfied me only because I had no opportunity to compare the sound difference on the spot.
You can also go to the store, spend a long time choosing audio speakers, pick the best sounding ones, and then when you get home, realize that they just don’t fit your decor. And having already bought the speakers, you understand that the choice you made in the store, comparing different models and imagining how they would look at home, is not at all the choice you would have made if you were actually at home. This is how I’ve been moving from apartment to apartment with two speakers for the past 15 years. S-90. Hi, Lesha!
Or, it’s a typical situation when you meet people on a trip abroad who seem wonderful to you simply because you’re comparing them to the locals. You understand each other, you share common goals and values. However, upon returning home, after just a couple of meetings, you realize that they are not really your kind of people.
The same motivation drives us when we buy new clothes, shoes, hats, and underwear. We compare them to what we already have and our worn-out items, which is why we derive pleasure from the purchase. However, after two or three weeks, these new items also become worn, and the pleasure fades away. Our closets just end up with less space, and especially for women, the inevitable phrase arises: “I have nothing to wear!”
An interesting side-by-side comparison effect occurs when we want to sell something of our own, such as an apartment or a car.
It has long been known that people derive less joy from discoveries than they do sadness from losses. We are likely to feel more unhappy losing 100 dollars than we are happy finding 100 dollars. Numerous studies and experiments with volunteers show that the anticipation of a potential loss prevents people from taking risks that have the same expected gain.
Here, imagine this: I’m offering you the following deal: We program a random number generator to produce any number from 1 to 100, and if the number is greater than 25, I will double your financial situation—twice the size of your house, twice the value of your car, twice your salary, and so on. However, if the number is less than 25, I will take everything from you and leave you on the street in just your underwear. If you belong to the majority of sensible people, you won’t accept this deal. Yet, from an economist’s perspective, it is rational.
Now, let’s move on to selling, say, your car. How much is your car worth? It’s hard to say. Check your insurance policy; it shows the insured amount. That’s exactly how much your car is worth. Will you sell it for that amount? Sure! I suppose that if a buyer seriously offers you that amount for the car, you might first try to break their ribs if you catch up with them.
Ah, now look at the buyer. What does he see? A used car with some scratches and dents. It’s unclear how it was used, with half-worn tires, a suspension that needs repair, and a rusty exhaust pipe. How much is written in the policy? Aha, of course. For that kind of money, a driver should come with the car too.
But why is there such a difference in assessment? Apparently, it’s because when you were evaluating your car for sale, you viewed the deal as a loss of the vehicle. Meanwhile, the buyer saw it as a find. Both you and the buyer compared your current situation side by side with how happy you or he would be after the deal. As noted earlier, a gain that is equivalent to a loss is subjectively assessed as less significant.
If the buyer were to put themselves in your shoes and truly feel like the owner of that car, they would realize that every penny spent on it is worth it. Similarly, if you stepped out of the role of a car owner and lived without a car, you would likely agree with the buyer’s perspective on the price of that car.
But we really don’t know how to compare such things. When we compare our future state, imagining ourselves in the future, we build that future from the bricks of the present, completely unaware of the substitution.
Once again: The buyer and the seller do not come to an agreement and may even doubt each other’s integrity simply because they make decisions based on comparisons as buyers and sellers, rather than using comparisons that an owner and a non-owner would make.
Do you want your customer to agree with your price? Put them in the owner’s shoes. Make them articulate the benefits they would gain from having the product. What would they allow themselves to do with it, and who else would find it interesting? Immerse them in the future.
As I’ve mentioned before and as we all know, we use our current feelings to understand our sensations in the future, and we make mistakes by comparing not what will be, but what is. Each of us has found ourselves hungry in a supermarket at some point, only to be surprised by how long the receipt turned out to be. We fill the future with our present feelings and try to compare our future state of “me with crackers” and “me without crackers,” using the current feeling of “I am hungry.”
Similarly, when you are completely stuffed, you can’t clearly answer the question, “What will you have for dinner?” because you don’t want to eat! Now, try to use this new understanding to grasp what a client feels when you offer them something “revolutionarily new and stunningly magnificent.” They are full, and they can’t clearly respond to the question of whether they need it.
At the same time, when he really needs it and when he “gets hungry,” you won’t be around. That’s one less thing.
Now let’s conduct a thought experiment. Please assess which is longer on a lion, its hind leg or its tail? Have you assessed it? Are you ready to give an answer? No need. I’m interested in something else. What did you picture in your mind? You first imagined a lion, then zoomed in on its hindquarters, the extended leg, and the tail, which is clearly longer. You essentially conjured a hallucination of a lion in your mind and compared the tail and the leg not of a real lion, but of an imagined one. At the same time, your assessment was quite adequate.
Second experiment: Imagine a situation where drunken teenagers speed past you on the road, aggressively cut you off, and drive away while whooping. What’s your reaction? Huh? Did you feel it? You probably felt a slight sweat on your forehead, your heart rate increased, and an inappropriate word almost slipped out. It’s the same here; to understand your own reaction, we visualize this scene in a way that prompts a response, and then we evaluate our feelings.realWe react to an imagined scene and provide a response. Our understanding of our reaction is a fairly reliable tool for assessment.
Let’s return to the supermarket and ask a hungry shopper the question: “Imagine that you are completely full. Would you want to eat this smoked sprat that you just put in your cart?” The shopper’s reaction will be quick. They will immediately take the sprat out of the cart simply because theypresentedI felt full, compared my satiety to that of a sprat, and made a decision.
You will never be able to sell smoked sprats to a completely full person who has just returned from his mother-in-law’s house, where she fed him to the brim in eternal gratitude for the fact that her son-in-law saved her from her own daughter. However, you can sell him the sprats by asking him to imagine that he is very hungry and then asking him if smoked sprats are tasty.
In large sales, it doesn’t work that way. Decisions are made by more than one person and are usually based on rational choice. However, even here, to help the person understand why he or his company needs your product, you should ask him to describe a situation in which he would really need it and how he would traditionally handle it versus how he would handle it using your product. What benefits would he see from using your product? How would it help him?
How would you feel about a person who constantly passes gas or picks their nose and then eats their boogers? Would you continue your relationship with them? Would you invite them over to your place? Would you still communicate with them? And what if this person were your brother or your boss?
More examples? How would you feel about a presidential candidate who restricted the freedom of protests or used traffic inspectors to sabotage an opponent? Or how would Americans react to a presidential candidate who had an affair with a secretary and the press found out about it? And how did Americans react to the sitting president? How will we respond to a sitting president who is “tightening the screws”?
In the first cases, we would look for motives for condemnation, while in the second, for justification or even support.
Why are we not ready to forgive a job candidate for being late, while we turn a blind eye to the actual discipline of our subordinates or employees?
It seems that we are comparing similar things, yet our reactions are completely different. Why is that? Is it because the nation should unite around the president? Or because relatives are blood-related? Or is it because first impressions are crucial?
Ah, maybe it’s because we are ready to look for more positivity in the things we can’t change. Our first reaction to negative situations is to try to change them. However, if we can’t change the things themselves, we have to change our attitude towards them; otherwise, we simply won’t be happy. A built-in defense mechanism against negativity kicks in, which has developed through evolution. “The salary is low, but it’s good,” as they say in large companies with small salaries.
However, ask people to work for you for 3000 hryvnias a month, or, more reasonably, for 100 hryvnias a day, without taking their heads off, and they immediately refuse. Why? Because they compare the opportunity they want to avoid with the one they can’t escape.
Our judgments about which choice is more correct are also influenced by how inevitable it is. We tend to view inevitable things more positively, even if it’s the gallows.
I keep talking about comparing things side by side, and this morning I was chatting with my wife, who told me about new sneakers that help tone the glutes. We both chuckled, but she pointed out that these new sneakers cost the same as other sneakers from the same brand this season. So, they’re affordable—no more expensive than the others. My question was simple: if you don’t compare them to the neighboring sneakers on the shelf, is their price reasonable? The answer was “no.” Marketers take full advantage of the quirks in human analytical systems to sell something just by placing it next to a comparable product. Oh, they cost the same as the ones next to them, but they supposedly tone your glutes? Well, of course, then it’s the ones that tone the glutes. It’s so easy to overlook the option of going to an outlet store for last season’s sneakers. 🙂
Interestingly, our preferences for one thing or another often depend not only on real side-by-side comparisons but also on imagined ones. We tend to place greater value on things or events that we obtained with great effort. This is where a person’s “internal self-defense” comes into play, presenting the actual as desirable. This effect can actually explain many phenomena, from the consequences of courting a partner of the opposite sex (and the tactics used in such courtship) to the evaluation of war outcomes. The more difficult something is to obtain, the more it is valued.
For example, during one study where students volunteered, they were offered the chance to join an elite university club. The initiation ceremony for this club involved three electric shocks. Naturally, the students were divided into two groups. One group received very strong, almost shocking electric shocks, while the other group received much milder ones, just for formality’s sake.
Interestingly, the students who received a greater boost ended up loving the student club more than those who received a lesser boost. Moreover, a separate test showed that knowing the purpose for which the students were undergoing the trials resulted in them feeling less physical pain.
In a person, as we can see, a defensive mechanism kicks in, and they seek and find a positive perception of what has happened to them. “Yes, but now I’m a member of an elite club.” Moreover, it’s interesting that the weak electric shocks were not strong enough to trigger this very mechanism of “internal defense.” It turns out that for such a mechanism to activate, the experience must be sufficiently intense.
Do you still not understand what keeps totalitarian regimes and cults in power? Why can a tyrannical boss be loved by their subordinates? Or how can someone literally love an object, like a car, just because it was expensive to acquire?
The fact that people place greater value on what they have obtained through effort is something that sellers and marketers take advantage of by sending promotional leaflets in envelopes rather than just handing them out. When we pull a flyer out of an envelope, we already assign it more value, and it’s likely to end up in the trash later than a flyer without an envelope. Moreover, we instinctively find a place for each item, and we do the same for the leaflet—back into the envelope and onto the table in the hallway. 🙂
Presence and absence.
Continuing the theme of the cunning nature of how our brain works, when comparing anything, I will talk about what was not there. That is?
To begin with, I’ll explain how the experimenters taught a pigeon to receive food after pressing a key. They set up two keys in the cage and occasionally illuminated one of them. When the light was on, the pigeon could peck at the illuminated key and receive a reward. An interesting result of the experiment was that the pigeon didn’t even consider pecking the other key, which wasn’t illuminated, even though a tasty grain would have been waiting for it there as well.
People, in fact, haven’t strayed far from this pigeon and are generally unable to assess the absence of something rationally. There’s a joke about how dolphins don’t actually save sailors; they just play with them, nudging them around like a ball. Those sailors who happen to be nudged to shore claim that they were saved by dolphins. Other sailors—well, they don’t tell any stories at all 🙂 We can’t evaluate the results of a dolphin’s actions based on the sailors they “saved,” and we draw the false conclusion that dolphins save sailors. But who do they not save?
This phenomenon is actively exploited by religious figures of various faiths. The message is as follows: “Look, he prayed hard and God granted him his wish,” or “Look, he didn’t eat meat and he got better,” or “Look, he got circumcised and found a wallet full of money,” and so on. And people believe it!
Also, following the various types of priests, our “dove-like” brains are being used by politicians. XXX built a road! Hooray! Excuse me, but what did he…didn’t build, but just stole?.
How many Muslims do you think there are?did not commitTerrorist attacks? No one really thinks about this. It’s simply assumed that terrorist attacks are the work of Islamists. However, the dry… statistics The number of terrorist attacks in the USA indicates that 94% of all terrorist acts in the country were committed by non-Muslims.
The inability to understand and compare what has happened with what hasn’t fuels human superstitions. For us, pigeons are precision bombers. If we park our car under the neighbor’s garage, that will be the very day the pensioner decides to take his Zaporozhets out to bask in the sun.
A long time ago, subjects (Americans) were asked which of two pairs of countries were more similar to each other: (Ceylon, Nepal) or (East Germany and West Germany). The majority chose the second pair. It’s surprising that the choice didn’t change when another group of subjects was asked, “Which countries are the least similar to each other?” But how can two countries be both similar and dissimilar at the same time?
Here, once again, the mechanism of the impossibility of assessing absence was at play. The Americans knew less about Ceylon or Nepal than they did about Germany, and they provided answers that were influenced by the question—they subconsciously began to recall the common features of the two Germanys.ignoring the absencedifferences), if the question was about commonality and various traits (ignoring the absencecommon features) – if the question was about differences.
When people buy a big, rugged SUV, they tend to choose it for its ability to go where a regular sedan can’t. However, they often don’t consider where that big, rugged SUV will actually take them.it won’t workIn reality, you only need to “deal with the mess” once a year, but parking in tight spaces is something you do every day.