Naanum Hero Da!
Apparently, there’s a punch dialogue in a Tamil film which I didn’t see but only heard. The hero says: ‘Once I make my mind, even I can’t change it’.
Who says it or in what context is immaterial to this article but what was said is very relevant to the topic of this discussion.
Once we attribute a certain value to a person or thing, it dramatically alters our perceptions of subsequent information. Psychologists term it the Value Attribution Bias. In other words, once we attribute a certain value to something, it’s very difficult to view it in any other light. The initial value we attribute cloud our subsequent views of the same thing.
The bias is so powerful and potent that it affects us even when the value we assign is completely arbitrary.
A simple experiment conducted by three researchers, the findings of which were subsequently published in the ‘Journal of Marketing Research’ explains it.
The researchers picked three groups of students and told them they were checking the intelligence-enhancing properties of a beverage called SoBe, which they said increased mental acuity of those who drank it. To test the acuity, the researchers explained to the students that they had developed a thirty-minute word jumble challenge that the students would have to solve after drinking a glass of SoBe.
The first group was the control group which meant they were to take the test and solve without drinking SoBe.
The second group was told to pay $2.89 for SoBe and were served the drink.
A third group was given SoBe but was told that the university had gotten a discount and that they need to pay only 89 cents for it.
When the researchers tabulated the results, they found something interesting. Let the drums roll please….
The second group, that paid $2.89 for SoBe, performed slightly better on the test than did the group that received no SoBe. And if you think, SoBe should indeed be intelligence-enhancing, here is the clincher. The students who drank the cheap SoBe, the 89 cents group, performed the worst of the three groups. Which means, they performed poorly even when compared to the first group that didn’t drink SoBe.
Note, it’s the same drink. Never mind if it enhances intelligence or suppresses stupidity. Given that the same SoBe was served to the second and third groups, we can only conclude that it was the value the students attributed to the SoBe that made the difference in their test scores.
As idiotic and as stupid as it may sound to you, the more expensive SoBe made the students smarter and the cheaper SoBe made the students, well dumber!
The journal article that carried the findings was aptly named: ‘Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay For’!
Expectations change the reality we live in. The value that we attribute to something fundamentally changes how we perceive it. When we get something at a discount, the positive expectations don’t kick in as strongly. We tend to discount the benefits as well.
Guess we are like that Tamil film hero after all. Once we make up our mind, even we can’t change it!