Have you ever gone window shopping but end up with a bag full of stuff? Or felt guilty for not buying anything? Have you ever bought something online and immediately questioned yourself like “why the heck did I do that?”. These are all part of a network of subtle psychological phenomenons that happen in our everyday life. Phenomenons pulling our strings from the depth of our subconscious while we believe we’re acting on our own well-thought-out decisions. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. With no further ado lets take a look at some of them:
1. Commitment & Consistency bias:
ย People tend to be oddly consistent with their proclaimed arguments. We have an instinctual desire to remain consistent with our prior actions and beliefs.ย This is where concepts such as first impression come from. Whereby when you meet someone for the first time, your first impression of them will be the default way you see them from there on out.
Let’s say you go to your friend’s house for the first time. And you happen to meet his Mom yelling and screaming at him. Now even when later you realize that his Mom is actually a lovely & calm person, who rarely lose her cool, it will still prove difficult to erase your first memory of her.
Another common influence of this bias is with physically attractive people. I.e. people we find easy on the eye. The brain has an interesting way of coming to conclusions. Once it recognizes someone as physically appealing, it begin to assign other positive traits to them like: they are probably smart, they are kind, they are hardworking etc. And we have studies proven that physically attractive people get hired more easily and are paid more.
2. Anchoring Effect:
This is the tendency for a person to rely heavily on the first piece of information they receive when making decisions. This cognitive bias takes place when we consider a particular value of an unknown quantity before estimating such quantity.
Let’s say for instance I ask you to pick a random number, and you said 20. Then I proceeded to ask you what percent of people you think are lactose intolerant. Do you know that you are most likely to pick a number around 20% ? Because you are psychologically anchored to the number 20 even though it is in no way relevant to the question at hand.
A legendary example of the anchoring effect happened in 2003, during the premiere of the first iPod. Before the release, rumours were going around speculating the price of the iPod to be at $1000. But when Steve Jobs came on stage and announced the price of the iPod at $499 dollars, the crowd went bananas! They get to pay only half of the price they estimated?! It was an offer that cannot be ignored. And for all we know Apple could ‘ve been the ones that started the $1000 rumour in the first place. By the way spending $499 dollars for an iPod (especially in 2003) is still a lot of money. But they become desensitized to this due to the earlier anchor to a bigger number. You see this discount marketing technique applied everywhere today.
Example 2:
Let say you went to the mall shopping for a suit. One of the sales agent then approaches you. You told him what you’re looking for, he suggested an exquisite tuxedo. You love it, but the only problem is that it’s very expensive. However, he managed to convince you of it fine tailoring and the exquisite materials it was made from. So you close your eyes and buy it. Just before you leave with your neatly packaged tux, he made a complimentary proposal of a necktie to go with it. And of course the necktie’s also damn expensive. But because you’ve already bought something far more expensive, the price of the tie look minuscule in comparison. You’ve become desensitised to the price.
The anchoring effect is prevalent on the price tags of any store you enter. Do you know why most Prices end in .99? You see T-shirts priced at 699p, 799p etc. Or an iPhone priced at $799. I mean it’s just $1 short of $800, might as well just round it up right? But they don’t. Because it is a mechanism retailers use to drive sales.
Ending a price in .99 is based on the premise that because we read from left to right, the first digit of any price resonates with us the most. That’s why people are more likely to choose a product priced at $4.99 than an identical product priced at $5. The product that starts with a 4 just seems like a better deal than the one that starts with 5 (even though it’s just a cent difference). This becomes intriguing when we go back to the $799 dollar iPhone example. Where we are paying $800(-$1) for the iPhone. But in reality our brains are drugged to think it’s a $700 purchase. The additional $99 becomes almost invisible to us.
3. Reciprocity bias:
This reminds me of the saying, “what goes around comes around” – we receive what we give out.
Let say you are out grocery shopping, then you came across a cake stand. The woman behind the stand welcomes you with a sweet smile and asks if you would like to try some cake for free! And you thought, “who would say no to free cake?!๐คท๐พโโ๏ธ”. So you tried a couple of flavors.
And then the woman asks you if you want to buy any. There is a very high probability that you are going back home with some cake that day. This is because of a human reflective instinct that we all have. which is when someone hurt us, we would want them to feel hurt too. And when someone does good to us we also feel a desire to pay that goodness back. Thus, we are shy & embarrassed to leave the woman empty handed after she had offered us her cake for free. So no wonder stores offer free samples (be it perfume, pastry, drinks etc).
[FYI: Free sampling has been shown to boost sales by 2000%โผ๏ธ]
To conclude:
Now you might think that your eyes are open to these phenomenons and you would never succumb to these biases again. Not quite. Actually, you just fell into another bias called the Blind spot bias or The Bias-Bias, which is the tendency to think that “I am less bias than the next person”. You become biased by thinking you are less bias than everyone else.
There is no doubt, human brain is born with unequaled ability when it comes to linguistic prowess i.e. language. A newborn baby can speak a language with perfect grammar and articulation just by observing the parents speaking without ever being taught directly. But when it comes to logical judgments like these, we turn out to be not as rational as we’d like to believe. Even life long experts are still subject to these fallacies. I definitely wield no antidote. But, I have certain insights that I can share with you on how to use some of our fallacies to work for us rather than against us. A chance to do the exploiting for once.
For instance, when it comes to the anchoring effect, make a point of setting the temperature next time you are striking a deal with someone. You can think of this like chess, where white plays first and all black can do is try to counter. i.e The white gets to set the temperature. Thus, as long as white doesn’t make any errors, he is inevitably going to win. So when bargaining with someone, be the first person to propose a price. Set the temperature and let them be anchored to your number.
For the Reciprocity bias, there is actually a story behind it called the Benjamin Franklin effect. The story goes as follows;
Benjamin Franklin was dealing with hostility from a certain fellow politician. However, there was a peculiar book that the politician had in his possession which was of interest to Benjamin. So Benjamin Franklin wrote the politician a letter expressing his interest in the book and requesting if he could do him a favour of lending him the book for a few days. And surprisingly the politician sent him the book immediately. Few days passed and Benjamin Franklin sent him the book back with a note expressing his gratitude. The next time they met, the politician spoke to him with such astonishing great warmth as if they had been best friends all their lives. And they became close friends till death.
This is based on the premise that a person who has already done a favor for a person is more inclined to do another favor for said person in the future.
This is also tied to the psychology of consistency. If we happen to present ourselves as honest or acted friendly towards an individual, then we incline to uphold that proclaimed image. Our brain goes, “we did a favor for them x, we must like them x” and acts accordingly.
So next time things aren’t going as smoothly with someone as you would like, or you want them to be a bit more friendlier towards you, take a page from Benjamin Franklin’s book and just ask them for a little favor.
Going a step further with commitment & Consistency Bias; you can employ it to become more socially outgoing especially if you happen to be an introvert. Just make a habit of presenting yourself as assertive and socially outgoing and your brain will have no choice but to work to remain consistent. Do this long enough and in no time it will mature into a self-proclaimed prophecy I.e. you’re just an outgoing person. ( I discussed this more in depth in a previous blog; https://mgkayzen.com/how-to-become-a-social-butterfly/ )
So there you have it, 3 human fallacies that are intrinsic to our nature (pulling our strings from within), and some ways of using to work for us. Comment down below some cognitive biases/fallacies you’ve seen or experienced.