Chapter 1

Levers of Influence

(Power) Tools of the Trades

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

—Leonardo da Vinci

This book presents numerous research results that at first appear baffling but can be explained through an understanding of natural human tendencies. A while ago, I encountered such a finding when I read a study that gave volunteers an energy drink designed to increase mental abilities. Some volunteers were charged the retail price of the drink ($1.89); others were told, because the researcher had made a bulk purchase, they’d have to pay only $0.89. Both groups were then asked to solve as many mental puzzles as they could in thirty minutes. I expected the second group, feeling good about the price break, would have tried harder and solved more problems. Wrong, the opposite occurred.1

The outcome put me in mind of a phone call I had received years earlier. The call came from a friend who had opened a Native Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it. The story involved a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, and the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving. She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area, with no luck. She even told her sales staff to “push” the items, again without success.

Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled an exasperated note to her head saleswoman: “Everything in this display case, price x ½,” hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been sold. She was shocked, though, to discover that because the employee had read the “½” in her scrawled message as a “2,” the entire allotment had sold at twice the original price.

That’s when she called me. I thought I knew what had happened but told her that if I were to explain things properly, she would have to listen to a story of mine. Actually, it isn’t my story; it’s about mother turkeys, and it belongs to the science of ethology—the study of animals in their natural settings. Turkey mothers are good mothers—loving, watchful, and protective. They spend much of their time tending, warming, cleaning, and huddling their young beneath them; but there is something odd about their method. Virtually all of their mothering is triggered by one thing, the “cheep-cheep” sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features of the chicks, such as smell, touch, or appearance, seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the cheep-cheep noise, its mother will care for it; if not, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it.

The extreme reliance of maternal turkeys on this one sound was dramatically illustrated in an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural predator whose approach is to be greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experiment found even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string to a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. However, when the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the cheep-cheep sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming enemy but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.

Click, Run

How ridiculous a mother turkey seems under these circumstances: She will embrace a natural adversary just because it goes cheep-cheep, and she will mistreat or murder one of her chicks just because it doesn’t. She acts like an automaton whose maternal instincts are under the control of that single sound. The ethologists tell us that this sort of thing is far from unique to the turkey. They have identified regular, blindly mechanical patterns of action in a wide variety of species.

Called fixed-action patterns, they can involve intricate sequences of behavior, such as entire courtship or mating rituals. A fundamental characteristic of these patterns is that the behaviors composing them occur in virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time. It is almost as if the patterns were installed as programs within the animals. When a situation calls for courtship, the courtship program is run; when a situation calls for mothering, the maternal-behavior program is run. Click, and the appropriate program is activated; run, and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.

The most interesting aspect of all this is the way the programs are activated. When an animal acts to defend its territory, for instance, it is the intrusion of another animal of the same species that cues the territorial-defense program of rigid vigilance, threat, and, if need be, combat; however, there is a quirk in the system. It is not the rival as a whole that’s the trigger; it is, rather, some specific feature: the trigger feature. Often the trigger feature will be one tiny aspect of the totality that is the approaching intruder. Sometimes a shade of color is the key. The experiments of ethologists have shown, for instance, that a male robin, acting as if a rival robin had entered its territory, will vigorously attack nothing more than a clump of robin redbreast feathers placed there. At the same time, it will ignore a perfect stuffed replica of a male robin without redbreast feathers. Similar results have been found in another bird, the bluethroat, where the trigger for territorial defense is a specific shade of bluebreast feathers.2

Before we enjoy too smugly the ease with which trigger features trick lower animals into reacting in ways wholly inappropriate to the situation, we should realize two things. First, the automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work well most of the time. Because only normal, healthy turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that single cheep-cheep noise. By reacting to just that one stimulus, the average mother turkey will nearly always behave correctly. It takes a trickster like a scientist to make her automatic response seem silly. The second important thing to understand is that we, too, have our preset programs, and although they usually work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can dupe us into running the right programs at the wrong times.

This parallel form of human automaticity is aptly demonstrated in an experiment by social psychologist Ellen Langer and her coworkers. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library’s copying machine: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: 94 percent of people let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Under those circumstances, only 60 percent complied. At first glance, it appears the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words because I’m in a rush.

However, a third type of request showed this was not the case. It seems it was not the whole series of words but the first one, because, that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word because and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” The result was once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information was added to justify their compliance. Just as the cheep-cheep sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from mother turkeys, even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat, so the word because triggered an automatic compliance response from Langer’s subjects, even when they were given no subsequent reason to comply. Click, run.3

Although some of Langer’s additional findings show that there are many situations in which human behavior does not work in a mechanical, click-activated way, she and many other researchers are convinced that most of the time it does, For instance, consider the strange behavior of those jewelry-store customers who swooped down on an allotment of turquoise pieces only after the items had been mistakenly offered at double their original price. I can make no sense of their behavior unless it is viewed in click, run terms.

The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a simplifying principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: expensive = good. Research shows that people who are unsure of an item’s quality often use this stereotype. Thus the vacationers, who wanted “good” jewelry, saw the turquoise pieces as decidedly more valuable and desirable when nothing about them was enhanced but the price. Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality, and a dramatic increase in price alone had led to a dramatic increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers.

READER’S REPORT 1.1

From a doctoral student in business management

A man who owns an antique jewelry store in my town tells a story of how he learned the expensive = good lesson of social influence. A friend of his wanted a special birthday present for his fiancée. So, the jeweler picked out a necklace that would have sold in his store for $500 but that he was willing to let his friend have for $250. As soon as he saw it, the friend was enthusiastic about the piece. But when the jeweler quoted the $250 price, the man’s face fell, and he began backing away from the deal because he wanted something “really nice” for his intended bride.

When a day later it dawned on the jeweler what had happened, he called his friend and asked him to come back to the store because he had another necklace to show him. This time, he introduced the new piece at its regular $500 price. His friend liked it enough to buy it on the spot. But before any money was exchanged, the jeweler told him that, as a wedding gift, he would drop the price to $250. The man was thrilled. Now, rather than finding the $250 sales price offensive, he was overjoyed—and grateful—to have it.

Author’s note: Notice, as in the case of the turquoise-jewelry buyers, it was someone who wanted to be assured of good merchandise who disdained the low-priced item. I’m confident that besides the expensive = good rule, there’s a flip side, an inexpensive = bad rule that applies to our thinking as well. After all, in English, the word cheap doesn’t just mean inexpensive; it has also come to mean inferior.

Simplifying by Betting the Shortcut Odds

It is easy to fault the tourists for their foolish purchase decisions, but a close look offers a kinder view. These were people who had been brought up on the rule “You get what you pay for” and had seen the rule borne out over and over in their lives. Before long, they had translated it to mean expensive = good. The expensive = good stereotype had worked well for them in the past because normally the price of an item increases along with its worth; a higher price typically reflects higher quality. So when they found themselves in the position of wanting good turquoise jewelry but not having much knowledge of turquoise, they understandably relied on the old standby feature of cost to determine the jewelry’s merits.

Although they probably didn’t realize it, by reacting solely to price, they were playing a shortcut version of betting the odds. Instead of stacking all the odds in their favor by trying painstakingly to master each feature signifying the worth of turquoise jewelry, they simplified things by counting on just one—the one they expected to reveal the quality of any item. They bet price alone would tell them all they needed to know. This time because someone mistook a “1/2” for a “2,” they bet wrong. But in the long run, over all the past and future situations of their lives, betting those shortcut odds represents the most rational approach.

We’re now in a position to explain the puzzling result of the chapter’s opening study—the one showing that people given a drink said to boost problem-solving ability solved more problems when they paid more for the drink. The researchers traced the finding to the expensive = good stereotype: people reported expecting the drink to work better when it cost $1.89 versus $0.89; and, remarkably, the mere expectation fulfilled itself. A similar phenomenon occurred in a separate study in which participants were given a pain reliever before receiving small electric shocks. Half were told the pain reliever cost $0.10 per unit while the other half were told it cost $2.50. Although, in actuality, all received the same pain reliever, those who thought it was more expensive rated it much more effective in dulling the pain of the shocks.4

Such automatic, stereotyped behavior is prevalent in much of human action because in many cases, it is the most efficient form of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex ever on this planet. To deal with it, we need simplifying shortcuts. We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects of each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then respond without thinking when one or another of the trigger features is present.

image

Figure 1.1: Caviar and craftsmanship

The message to be communicated by this Dansk ad is, of course, that expensive equals good.

Courtesy of Dansk International Designs

Sometimes the behavior that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We accept their imperfections because there is really no other choice. Without the simplifying features, we would stand frozen—cataloging, appraising, and calibrating—as the time for action sped by and away. From all indications, we’ll be relying on these stereotypes to an even greater extent in the future. As the stimuli saturating our lives continue to grow more intricate and variable, we will have to depend increasingly on our shortcuts to handle them all.

Psychologists have uncovered a number of mental shortcuts we employ in making our everyday judgments. Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive = good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes. Especially relevant to this book are those heuristics that tell us when to believe or do what we are asked. Consider, for example, the shortcut rule that goes, “If an expert said so, it must be true.” As we will see in chapter 5, there is an unsettling tendency in our society to accept unthinkingly the statements and directions of individuals who appear to be authorities on a topic. That is, rather than thinking about an expert’s arguments and being convinced (or not), we frequently ignore the arguments and allow ourselves to be convinced just by the expert’s status as “expert.” This tendency to respond mechanically to one piece of information in a situation is what we have been calling automatic or click, run responding; the tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all of the information can be referred to as controlled responding.

Quite a lot of laboratory research has shown that people are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the desire and the ability to analyze it carefully; otherwise, they are likely to use the easier click, run approach. For instance, in one study, university students listened to a recorded speech supporting the idea of requiring all seniors to pass comprehensive examinations before they would be allowed to graduate. The issue affected some of them personally, because they were told that the exams could go into effect in the next year—before they had the chance to graduate. Of course, this news made them want to analyze the arguments carefully. However, for other subjects in the study, the issue had little personal importance, because they were told the exams would not begin until long after they had graduated; consequently, these students had no strong need to carefully consider the arguments’ validity. The study’s results were straightforward: those students with no personal stake in the topic were primarily persuaded by the speaker’s expertise in the field of education; they used the “If an expert said so, it must be true” rule, paying little attention to the strength of the speaker’s arguments. Those students for whom the issue mattered personally, on the other hand, ignored the speaker’s expertise and were persuaded primarily by the quality of the speaker’s arguments.

So it appears that when it comes to the dangerous business of click, run responding, we give ourselves a safety net. We resist the seductive luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available information when an issue is important to us. No doubt this is often the case. Yet I am not fully comforted. Recall that we learned that people are likely to respond in a controlled, thoughtful fashion only when they have both the desire and the ability to do so. I have become impressed by evidence indicating that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics. Sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time so tight, the distractions so intrusive, the emotional arousal so strong, or the mental fatigue so deep that we are in no cognitive condition to operate mindfully. Important topic or not, we have to take the shortcut.

Perhaps nowhere is this last point driven home more dramatically than in the life-and-death consequences of a phenomenon that airline-industry officials have labeled Captainitis. Accident investigators from the US Federal Aviation Administration noted that, frequently, an obvious error made by a flight captain was not corrected by the other crew members and resulted in a crash. It seems, despite the clear and strong personal importance of the issues, the crew members were using the “If an expert says so, it must be true” rule in failing to attend or respond to the captain’s disastrous mistake.5

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Figure 1.2: The catastrophic consequences of Captainitis

Minutes before this airliner crashed into the Potomac River near National Airport in Washington, DC, the accompanying exchange occurred between the pilot and copilot concerning the wisdom of taking off with ice on the wings. Their conversation was recorded in the plane’s black box.

Copilot: That reading doesn’t seem right.

Captain: Yes, it is.

Copilot: Naw, I don’t think it is. [Seven-second pause.] OK, maybe it is.

Copilot: Larry, we’re going down.

Captain: I know it.

[Sound of impact that killed the captain, the copilot, and sixty-seven passengers.]

© Cohen/Liaison Agency

The Profiteers

It is odd that, despite their current widespread use and looming future importance, most of us know very little about our automatic behavior patterns. Perhaps that is so precisely because of the mechanistic, unthinking manner in which they occur. Whatever the reason, it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work.

To understand fully the nature of our vulnerability, let’s take another glance at the work of ethologists. It turns out that these animal behaviorists with their recorded cheep-cheeps and clumps of colored breast feathers are not the only ones who have discovered how to activate the behavior programs of various species. One group of organisms, termed mimics, copy the trigger features of other animals in an attempt to trick the animals into mistakenly playing the right behavior programs at the wrong times. The mimics then exploit this altogether inappropriate action for their own benefit.

Take the deadly trick played by the killer females of one genus of firefly (Photuris) on the males of another firefly genus (Photinus). Understandably, the Photinus males scrupulously avoid contact with the bloodthirsty Photuris females. However, through centuries of natural selection, the Photuris female hunters have located a weakness in their prey—a special blinking courtship code by which members of the victims’ species tell one another they are ready to mate. By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship program causes them to fly mechanically into death’s, not love’s, embrace.

In the struggle for survival, nearly every form of life has its mimics—right down to some of the most primitive pathogens. By adopting certain critical features of useful hormones or nutrients, these clever bacteria and viruses can gain entry into a healthy host cell. The result is that the healthy cell eagerly and naively sweeps into itself the causes of such diseases as rabies, mononucleosis, and the common cold.6

It should come as no surprise, then, that there is a strong but sad parallel in human behavior. We, too, have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own brand of automatic responding. Unlike the mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, our automatic programs usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept. Although they vary in their force, some of the principles possess a remarkable ability to direct human action. We have been subjected to them from such an early point in our lives, and they have moved us about so pervasively since then, that you and I rarely perceive their power. In the eyes of others, though, each such principle is a detectable and ready lever, a lever of automatic influence. Take for instance the principle of social proof, which asserts that people are inclined to believe or do what they see those around them believing or doing. We act in accord with it whenever we check product reviews or star ratings before making an online purchase. But, once on the review site, we have to deal with our own brand of mimics—individuals who counterfeit genuine reviews and insert their phony ones. Fortunately, eBox 1.1 offers ways to spot the fakes.

EBOX 1.1

Here’s How to Spot Fake Online Reviews with 90 Percent Accuracy, according to Science

A new computer program identifies phony reviews with incredible accuracy.

By Jessica Stillman. Contributor, Inc.com@EntryLevelRebel

When you buy products online, for either yourself or your business, reviews probably weigh heavily in your decision-making. We check to see other buyers’ opinions on Amazon, opt for the five-star option rather than the one with only four and a half stars, or book the Airbnb with the most enthusiastic former guests.

Of course, we all also know these reviews can be bogus—either paid for by the seller or maliciously placed by the competition. A team of Cornell University researchers decided that building a computer program that could spot bogus recommendations sounded like a useful thing to do.

So what are the tells that a “five-star” hotel room might end up being moldy and cramped or that a highly rated toaster might die before you get through a single loaf? According to the Cornell research, you should beware if a review:

Of course, these subtle tells alone probably won’t make you a master of spotting fakes, but combined with other methods of checking a review’s trustworthiness, such as watching out for various types of verified buyers and suspicious timestamps, you should be able to do a lot better than random chance.

Author’s note: Minding the mimics. Online review sites are in an ongoing battle with fake reviewers. We should join the fight. One set of comparisons shows why. From 2014 to 2018, customers’ favorable responses to online reviews went up in every category (for example, those who read reviews before buying rose from 88 percent to 92 percent), except one: those who trusted a business that had positive reviews dropped from 72 percent to 68 percent. It seems the mimics are undermining our confidence in the worth of the shortcut information we seek.

There are some people who know very well where the levers of automatic influence lie and who employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter, requesting others to comply with their wishes, and their frequency of success is dazzling. The secret to their effectiveness lies in the way they structure their requests, the way they arm themselves with one or another of the levers of influence that exist in the social environment. To do so may take no more than one correctly chosen word that engages a strong psychological principle and launches one of our automatic behavior programs. Trust the human profiteers to learn quickly how to benefit from our tendency to respond mechanically according to these principles.

Remember my friend the jewelry-store owner? Although she benefited by accident the first time, it didn’t take her long to begin exploiting the expensive = good stereotype regularly and intentionally. Now during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by substantially increasing its price. She claims that this is marvelously cost effective. When it works on the unsuspecting vacationers, as it frequently does, it generates an enormous profit. And, even when it is not initially successful, she can then mark the article “Reduced” and sell it to bargain hunters at its original price while still taking advantage of their expensive = good reaction to the inflated figure.7

Jujitsu

A woman employing jujitsu, the Japanese martial art, uses her own strength only minimally against an opponent. Instead, she exploits the power inherent in such naturally present principles as gravity, leverage, momentum, and inertia. If she knows how and where to engage these principles, she can easily defeat a physically stronger rival. And so it is for the exploiters of the levers of automatic influence that exist naturally around us. The profiteers can commission the power of these principles for use against their targets while exerting little personal force. This last feature of the process gives the profiteers an enormous additional benefit—the ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation. Even the victims themselves tend to see their compliance as a result of the action of natural forces rather than the designs of the person who profits from that compliance.

An example is in order. There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, which affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. If the second item is fairly different from the first, we tend to see it as being more different than it actually is. So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we estimate the second object as being heavier than we would have estimated it if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one. The contrast principle is well established in the field of psychophysics and applies to all sorts of perceptions. If we are watching our weight and at lunch we are trying to estimate the calorie count of a cheeseburger, we’ll judge it as being much higher (38% higher in one study) in calories if we first estimate the calories in a salad. In contrast to the salad, the cheeseburger now seems even more calorie rich. Relatedly, if we are talking to an attractive individual at a party and are joined by a comparatively less attractive one, the second will strike us as being less attractive than he or she actually is. Some researchers warn that the unrealistically attractive people portrayed in the popular media (actors, models) may cause us to be less satisfied with the looks of the genuinely available romantic possibilities around us. The researchers demonstrated that increasing exposure to the exaggerated sexual attractiveness of sensual models in the media lowers the sexual desirability of our current mates.8

Another demonstration of perceptual contrast is one I have employed in my classrooms to introduce students to the principle. Each student takes a turn sitting in front of three pails of water—one cold, one at room temperature, and one hot. After placing one hand in the cold water and the other in the hot water, the student is told to place both simultaneously in the room-temperature water. The look of amused bewilderment that immediately registers tells the story: even though both hands are in the same bucket, the hand that was in the cold water feels as if it is in hot water, while the one that was in the hot water feels as if it is in cold water. The point is that the same thing—in this instance, room-temperature water—can be made to seem very different depending on the nature of the event preceding it. What’s more, the perception of other things, such as college course grades, can be affected similarly. See, for example, in figure 1.3, a letter that came across my desk several years ago from a university student to her parents.

Figure 1.3: Perceptual contrast and the college coed

Dear Mother and Dad:

Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay?

Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by a worker at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burnt out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show.

Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him.

Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an F in Chemistry, and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective.

Your loving daughter,

Sharon

Author’s note: Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an A in psychology.

Be assured the nice little lever of influence provided by the contrast principle does not go unexploited. The great advantage of the principle is not only that it works but also that it is virtually undetectable. Those who employ it can cash in on its influence without any appearance of having structured the situation in their favor.

Retail clothiers offer a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store to buy a suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money? Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse. If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend much more on the purchase of a sweater, but the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle advises: sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison. The same principle applies to a man who wishes to buy the accessories (shirt, shoes, belt) to go along with his new suit. Contrary to the commonsense view, the evidence supports the contrast-principle prediction.

It is more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first; to fail to do so not only loses the force of the contrast principle but also causes the principle to work against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one makes the expensive item seem even more costly—hardly a desirable consequence for sales organizations. So just as it is possible to make the same bucket of water appear to be hotter or colder depending on the temperature of previously presented buckets of water, it is possible to make the price of the same item seem higher or lower depending on the price of a previously presented item.

Clever use of perceptual contrast is by no means confined to clothiers. I came across a technique that engaged the contrast principle while I was investigating, undercover, the compliance tactics of real-estate companies. To learn the ropes, I accompanied a salesman on a weekend of showing houses to prospective home buyers. The salesman—we can call him Phil—was to give me tips to help me through my break-in period. One thing I quickly noticed was that whenever Phil began showing a new set of customers potential buys, he would start with a couple of undesirable houses. I asked him about it, and he laughed. They were what he called “setup” properties. The company maintained an unappealing house or two on its lists at inflated prices. These houses were not intended to be sold to customers but only to be shown to them so that the genuine properties in the company’s inventory would benefit from the comparison. Not all the sales staff made use of the setup houses, but Phil did. He said he liked to watch his prospects’ “eyes light up” when he showed the places he really wanted to sell them after they had seen the unattractive ones. “The house I got them spotted for looks really great after they’ve first looked at a couple of dumps.”

Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price of a car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another. In the wake of a many-thousand-dollar deal, a couple hundred extra dollars for a nicety such as an upgraded sound system seems almost trivial in comparison. The same will be true of the added expense of accessories, such as tinted windows, better tires, or special trim, that the dealer might suggest in sequence. The trick is to bring up the options independently of one another so that each small price will seem petty when compared to the already determined much larger price. As veteran car buyers can attest, many a budget-sized final-price figure balloons out of proportion from the addition of all those seemingly little options. While customers stand, signed contract in hand, wondering what happened and finding no one to blame but themselves, the car dealer stands smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master.

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Figure 1.4: “A Stellar Idea”

There’s a whole universe of applications for the contrast principle.

The New Yorker

READER’S REPORT 1.2

From a business-school student at the University of Chicago

While waiting to board a flight at O’Hare, I heard a desk agent announce that the flight was overbooked and, if passengers were willing to take a later plane, they would be compensated with a voucher worth $10,000! Of course, this exaggerated amount was a joke. It was supposed to make people laugh. It did. But I noticed that when he then revealed the actual offer (a $200 voucher), there were no takers. In fact, he had to raise the offer twice to $300 and then $500 before he got any volunteers. I was reading your book at the time and I realized that, although he got his laugh, according to the contrast principle he screwed up. He arranged things so that, compared to $10,000, a couple hundred bucks seemed like a pittance. That was an expensive laugh. It cost his airline an extra $300 per volunteer.

Author’s note: Any ideas on how the desk agent could have used the contrast principle to his advantage rather than his detriment? Perhaps he could have started with a $2 joke offer and then revealed the true—and now much more attractive sounding—$200 amount. Under those circumstances, I’m pretty sure he would have secured his laugh and his volunteers.

SUMMARY