How to fool a Human? - A Psychological aspect

Credits: jsums.edu

Whenever you go to a market, what do you see? Street hawkers selling fruits and vegetables, as I always see in Pakistan. They try to attract you to their stall by screaming out loud:

Ek dozen keley 40 rupees may or dou dozen keley 70 rupees may, taaze aur mazedar, sirf aap klieye!

which translates to:

One dozen banana for 40 rupees and two dozens for 70 rupees, fresh and delicious, only for you! 

But why they do it, they are literally doing a loss for themselves. Let's do simple kindergarten mathematics: 40 + 40 counts to 80, isn't it? Therefore, by giving away two dozen for 70, they are actually losing 10. But the question in our brain remains, why are they doing this?

Street Tactics

Colorful Brain Actions

The above scenario is easy, but it isn't. The way we think, our brain can be played with some 'evil' tactics. Our brain is having an inefficiency to recognize some complex situations. Moreover, our brain reflexes most of the time never correspond and respond to conditions. That's the reason we fail to do things in the first place.

Let's discuss a little about Dopamine. As described by psychologytoday.com: Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them.

So decremented Dopamine level would result in slower reaction to general and specific criterion and situations with considerably perplexed conditions. You will be baffled in these kind of scenarios as you don't know how to react productively. So sleep tight if you are a night owl, therefore, you may not have to handle your nightmares all the time.

Coming back to the hawker scenario, the hawkers attracting you to their stalls are just an example of fooling a human brain. The bestseller book on human psychology, Influence: Psychology of Persuasion, written by Robert B. Cialdini, says in his book:

There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and who employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want.

I'll do it if you give me a 'genuine' reason!

These words never contradict to the scenario mentioned, right? Here Cialdini used the term automatic influence. This is explained again by Cialdini in the following words:

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. 

The hawkers in above scenario use this weapon, "fresh and delicious, only for you!" This means, if you give a reason, people will certainly get trapped in your 'death trap'. And, the most interesting part is, even if your reason is not genuine, specifically, even if your banana is not fresh and delicious, people will still buy them. If two or three people start to gather around that stall, the screaming hawker with the increasing crowd will attract more and more crowd towards it. This is called 'automatic influence'. The second and one of the important things is the inability of the human brain to think in a rush. In a crowd, you rush making your brain unable to think and enabling the seller to fool your brain.

Personal Experience

I experienced such kind of situation when I went to grocery store, located nearby where I live, to buy some sugar. It cost me 40 bucks, I gave the seller 50 bucks. He should have given me 10 bucks back but it was the right moment for him to play with me, as accurately as possible.

Yeh chocolate lelo, sirf 10 rupees ki hai, bohat achi hai! 

This translates to:

Buy this chocolate, it costs 10 rupees only, it is very good! 

On reply, I said yes. On half way back to my home, until this time I realized that I have been fooled.

Again that shopkeeper used my rush behavior and gave me a reason to buy that chocolate even though I didn't want to but I did. Also he used a word 'only'. This actually activated the automatic influencing weapon directed just over my head. The moment he shot me, and I got automatically influenced.

There are plentiful excavations from our observations which we seemingly ignore thinking they are just as irrelevant in our work-space as salt and pepper served with a nice and hot cup of coffee. I figured this one situation out from my thinking pattern. This is again explained by Cialdini in the words:

Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

We are exposed to multiple but similar situations and conditions ample times that we think is a normal world criterion. I have a question: How many times are you exposed to these kinds of situations and got out most of the time? We actually can't remember, this is a complexity issue which our brain cannot simply understand. We are having largest and an intelligent brain which is scientifically and religiously proven fact.

Expensive = Good

Now we'll discuss another important factor which the marketers and sellers use profoundly which is the equation that expensive equals good. We all have been exposed to and been trapped in such scenarios many number of times.

Have you heard of the two tailor brothers, Sid and Harry Drubeck, back in 1930's? 

Picture depicting the tailors. Credits: Getty Images

This story is mention in Robert B. Cliadini's book. Sid and Harry worked together to sell suits in tailor shop. Sid was to deal the customer while Harry was sitting behind. Whenever a customer arrived, Sid dealt with him. A customer chose a suit and wanted to buy it for which he asked Sid its price. Sid always shouts to Harry for the prices for which Harry replied with the price of desired suit which was $42. Sid pretended to have a little problem in hearing the price for which Harry told the price again. Sid told the customer that the price of the suit is $24. Customer immediately bought it because, apparently, it was a good value.

This shouting, pretending for hearing problem and a 40% discount on the suit's price were all tactics used to sell that suit. A stereotypical phenomenon works just on target which is: the more expensive a thing is, the more good it is. $42 suit is definitely an expensive item for which customer thought was a good item. Giving a discount on it by as much as 40% should definitely be a very good value which was directly going under the customer's head, therefore, he bought it. Those brothers were not giving customer good values anyway as the price was much lower than $24.

Once Albert Einstein said:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

What to do?

Ardor to speak, we certainly could do nothing for this mind confusing things which of course all from the giant companies to a small scale industry uses to get as much work done in low cost to generate high profits. The only thing we can do is to focus on things, and by thinking not too much as time never pauses for anyone. If we wanna pause time, read these articles: Will anything travel faster than the Speed of Light? and Definition of Light - An accuracy never known!

Focus, think, and reason can be helpful for you and me as well. If you suggest more terms which we can use to get out of baffled criterion, mention them in comment section down. Thanks for reading!

Zain Ul Mustafa

Cakes, conspiracies, and computers are my daily pills.

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