Social Hacking

  In the last entry (8) I talked about how the human mind always tries to predict all situations. Even if we not always realize this it does happen as part of our will to survive. This preemptive judgment is often done by our subconscious. We don't realize that we have done the judgment we can't really tell if its right or wrong. I will talk more about how our subconscious mind affects us in my next post (hopefully). This technique however, can be used as a very effective way to persuade someone and it is widely used (a little bit to often actually).

  Can you think of any situations where you have let your subconsciousness affect your decision making? Read the question once again. Does it really make sense? I don't have a thesaurus with me but the question is the opposite of a tautology. Yes, I had to use a big word for once. A tautology is a statement or question that is always answered with true or yes. So the opposite: the only possible answer is no. Why? Well since it's your subconscious, you don't really know that it helped you make the decision. Fun side note, but lets keep moving.

  What I wanted to get to is that you are constantly affected. The most obvious example is when going to the supermarket or the mall. Do you think that almost all prices end with 99 cents because it looks good? No, it's to trick you. You might not know it but naturally your brain thinks $4.99 is a lot less then $5.00 (more than a single cent according to your mind).

  I believe it has something to do with our sense of counting. Even infants, who can't speak yet, have the ability to count. There has been multiple studies made on this subject and they all show the same thing, infants can count before they even can walk or talk. I will go on out on a tangent now to tell you how these studies are executed. You put an infant so it can see a empty surface. Then you show the infant that you put between three and seven objects (I believe it was up to seven) on the table. Then you cover the objects with a screen so the baby can't see them. If you secretly remove one of the objects the baby will react in some way to the fact that one object is mysteriously missing. However, if all objects are still on the table the babies expression will be more or less unchanged.

  So the point I wanted to make, about how we think that $5.00 is so much more than $4.99, was that we can subconsciously count very effectively with small numbers. Small numbers is an important part here and the decimal point helps us to make the numbers smaller. Our subconscious mind compares 4 with 5 and the difference is quite large in that case.

  One more example of something that our brain automagically interpenetrates for us: Say that you want your salary as often as possible so your boss gives you some options. Either you get your salary once a month, 12 times a year, about once every 4 weeks, or once every 30 days. Yes, it's stupid when you see these alternatives in a row, however, the alternatives do look different if presented by themselves.