Buying In - (Page 51) buying in 51 make people buy a more expensive variety of chocolate. One of the experiments involved 105 undergraduates, divided into two groups. All completed a six-question form, which included a self-sophistication rating on a 1–7 scale. All were also asked to unscramble twelve sentences. Then, in what the subjects were told was an unrelated task, they read some information about two candy bars and answered another questionnaire. One of the candies, Aero bars, cost $1.09. The other was called Valrhona, a fancier-looking, $1.69 bar. For the first subjects, there was indeed no relation between the sentence unscrambling and their choice of candy bar. And when asked to choose which of the bars they would prefer to buy, 73 percent chose the cheaper Aero, often saying they had based their decision— quite rationally!—on price. For the other half of the subjects, however, most of the scrambled sentences contained words like “opera,” “champagne,” and “sophisticated.” The subjects in this group, then, had been primed for sophistication. And 80 percent of them picked the Valrhona. Those who picked the more upscale bar were asked specific questions about their choices, and of course they tended to mention rational things like quality. A handful of subjects, when questioned, guessed that the unscrambling exercise may have affected their choice, but none correctly surmised how. In other, similar experiments, involving whether to see a highbrow or lowbrow movie or what to order at a restaurant, subjects were consistently unable to draw a link between the subtle priming and their choices. The interpreter was at work. In addition to processing what’s happening right now, the interpreter helps us sift through all the information that is not necessarily reaching us instantly or directly, but is lurking in
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