Contrast-Misreaction Tendency.

 

Few psychological tendencies do more damage to correct thinking. Small-scale

damages involve instances such as man’s buying an overpriced $1,000 leather

dashboard merely because the price is so low compared to his concurrent purchase

of a $65,000 car. Large- scale damages often ruin lives, as when a wonderful

woman having terrible parents marries a man who would be judged satisfactory

only in comparison to her parents. Or as when a man takes wife number two who

would be appraised as all right only in comparison to wife number one.

 

A particularly reprehensible form of sales practice occurs in the offices of

some real estate brokers. A buyer from out of the city, perhaps needing to shift

his family there, visits the office with little time available. The salesman

deliberately shows the customer three awful houses at ridiculously high prices.

Then he shows him a merely bad house at a price only moderately too high. And,

boom, the broker often makes an easy sale.

 

Contrast-Misreaction Tendency is routinely used to cause disadvantage for

customers buying merchandise and services. To make an ordinary price seem low,

the vendor will very frequently create a highly artificial price that is much

higher than the price always sought, then advertise his standard price as a big

reduction from his phony price. Even when people know that this sort of customer

manipulation is being attempted, it will often work to trigger buying. This

phenomenon accounts in part for much advertising in news- papers. It also

demonstrates that being aware of psychological ploys is not a perfect defense.