Why do we buy more things than we need?

Your six-year-old son asks you to buy him a bicycle and you, who have not yet received your monthly salary, refuse. But there are also other reasons that justify his decision: this month he has exceeded the expenses of the card credit, and you still haven't finished weighing the pros and cons of buying your son a bike at such a short age.

But as you well know, the child can be very pushy. Over and over again he asks, begs, begs him to buy him a bicycle. But it seems that with each new negative response that you give, the child, far from becoming discouraged and forgetting the initiative, returns to the charge with greater force.

Each new thrust from his little boy is a little more irritating than the last, and you feel that you are beginning to cross your threshold of patience.

After a long and tedious process, the child begins to show some signs of understanding and, finally, ends up accepting that he is not going to have the bicycle; he chooses to ask her with his best little angel face: "Well, can you buy me a chocolate then?"

How could he refuse such an insignificant request? Of course, in this context, you decide to buy him a chocolate.

The million dollar question is this: Would you have bought your son the chocolate if he asked you first, instead of the bicycle? Most likely not.

Do we buy what we don't need? Community Services

As part of an experiment, a psychology professor asked his students if they would be willing to work free two hours per week for the next two years as part of an offender rehabilitation program juveniles. Of course, no one accepted. To agree to such a request was little less than immolating oneself in life.

But then the professor came back with a smaller, much more reasonable request. This time he asked his students if they would be willing to accompany a group of juvenile delinquents on a two-hour walk through the zoo. At the same time, in another committee of students, on the other hand, the teacher asked them directly to volunteer for the trip to the zoo, without the prior exaggerated request.

What happened? Well, of this second group, 17% agreed, against 50% of the first group, to which the excessive request had previously been made.

The similarity of these cases

Note that in both proposed cases the modest request remains unchanged. Both the chocolate that our son wanted and the walk through the zoo that the teacher required in front of his students, do not change.

However, strange as it may seem, the presence of a much more demanding first order, so inadequate that in all probability would be rejected, it greatly increased the chances of a positive response to a second application, by the way, much more discreet And perhaps this is due, in part, to the contrast that is generated between the two orders.

Relativity beyond Einstein

It happens that the brain does not get along very well with absolute concepts; In order to determine if something is big or small, fair or unfair, you need to be guided by a benchmark. In our examples, the first order is a good point of comparison, accessible in the brain, close at hand.

Relativity is the key. And the money spent on a chocolate, in relation to the outlay required for a bicycle, seems insignificant and not worth analyzing in depth. Similarly, a two-hour visit to the zoo seems like a much smaller request than it really is, compared to two years of unpaid work.

public image

Another reason that perhaps contributes to this manifest folly may be the need to show ourselves to others. others as an inherently good, cooperative, or well-disposed person toward the needs of the neighbor. Whether we admit it or not, we are all concerned, to a greater or lesser extent, with the image we convey.

We have no qualms about rejecting a request that seems absurd to us since we consider that we do not run any risk of being judged negatively. But when the request for collaboration is reasonable, and especially if we already said no the first time, it is much more difficult for us. resisting the fear of being seen as selfish, individualistic or worse, that threatens our reputation or good name.

Even more, contrast colors our perceptions and leads us to exaggerate the differences between the objects the brain is comparing. Of course, this is not something we do consciously. Many times the contrast is generated by contiguity in time; that is, between two stimuli that are presented successively, as in the previous example of the child who asks for a bicycle first and a chocolate later. It is a singular phenomenon to which we permanently succumb and which has serious implications for the way we see the world.

If a six-year-old child, and even without meaning to, can manipulate us in this way, there are plenty of crafty sellers out there too who have no qualms about openly manipulating us.

Purchasing and handling: some more examples

You go to a store because you need a new pair of shoes. If the salesperson serving you has experience in the business, chances are they'll show you a couple first. of top quality reinforced leather shoes, imported from the Principality of Luxembourg, and of very high price.

Immediately afterwards, and as soon as a negative expression of discouragement is drawn on his face, the seller will rush to show him another pair of shoes, also of excellent manufacture, according to what he tells him, but at a cheaper price than, according to the contrast generated, you will perceive as much cheaper than it actually is.

With the first offer, the seller will be establishing a comparison parameter, an initial price that will function as an "anchor" from a perceptual and psychological point of view. Mentally tied to this starting point, the price of the second pair of shoes, which is undoubtedly the that the store clerk wants to sell you from the beginning, it will seem much less to you than it actually is. is.

It is worth clarifying that following the reverse procedure, that is, showing you the "cheap" shoes as soon as you set foot in the shoe store, and the "expensive" ones afterwards, is a terrible strategy that is detrimental to the interests of the seller, since having established a low "anchor" price, and that will function as a comparison model for everything that you can offer later, will only serve for the client to perceive as excessive what a priori could be normal values ​​and in accordance with the item of the sale of footwear.

Car sales agencies constantly use this psychological trick to sell us things that were not really in our plans to buy.

The relative price in cars

When we buy a new car, and once the paperwork is finished, the price of the vehicle becomes the point at which we we will refer mentally when the seller begins to offer us, one by one, which will probably end up being a waterfall of accessories.

“For just $100 more, you can have power windows,” the salesperson tells us. And we think it's an excellent idea. After all, we just bought a $15,000 vehicle…and $100 seems like a lot to us. Of course, once we accept, the seller will offer us the inclusion of a music player for only 200 dollars extra. A bargain, we thought.

And then, seats upholstered in washable leather, additional GPS of the latest generation, and a whole battery of insurances and extended warranties for figures that will seem negligible compared to the original value of the car; that without counting the dozen taxes that are added and that they never mentioned to us the first time.

And what if we need to buy a suit?

Well, the salesperson who knows that the human brain makes value judgments based on comparison, or at least intuits it, only one Once we have shelled out a good amount of money for the pants, he will offer us a suitable shirt, which matches the perfection.

And then a tie; after all, a suit without a tie is an incomplete suit. But only in the second instance, once the price of the suit has been installed in our minds as a reference point that constitutes the measure for everything that comes after.

beauty and attraction

As if this were not enough, we apply the same criteria to the perception of beauty in people. Suppose, in the event that you are a man and heterosexual, that I show you a photo of a woman. I let him look at the image carefully and then I ask him to rate how much he likes this woman by rating it from 1 to 10.

His appreciation of the female beauty he has just seen will surely be subordinated to the model of comparison he finds in his mind at that moment.

There are many studies in which it has been observed that men value the beauty of a woman much more negatively if before they were flipping through a fashion magazine saturated with images of models while they had to wait to participate in the experiment, compared to the assessment made by another group of men, who were asked to entertain themselves by looking at a newspaper old.

The same phenomenon has also been observed when men, before having to give a score aesthetics to women, they are asked to watch a television program starring well-known actresses beauty. After exposure to a young woman of extraordinary beauty, men tend to underestimate ordinary feminine beauty, beauty nonetheless.

concluding

Summarizing. The brain has difficulty thinking and making decisions in absolute terms, you always need a reference point, something that works as an accessible parameter of comparison.

We know if something is good or bad, big or small, expensive or cheap, mainly by looking around us, analyzing the context in which we find ourselves, and comparing the object of our interest with something else that, of course, belongs to the same category.

The problem lies in the large number of scammers who intuitively know this curious property of the brain, and use it to scam us or sell us things that, under a colder and more rational analysis, we would realize that we do not want or do not need buy.