I learned from Kahneman and Tversky that our minds tend to "anchor" to a number in a sales pitch. How about we repair your gutters?
How much? $4,000. Wow, that's expensive. Well, you qualify for our discounts. Because we like you, you qualify for our Friend discount of $1,000. And you drive a Chevrolet and that gives you our GM discount of $1,000. So, we can do the job for $2,000!
So, good fortune and the anchoring we do in our minds to the first number of 4,000 can make a mere 2,000 be a lucky bargain!
Thinking about that reminded me of Robert Ornstein's list of properties of the human mind:
He wrote a book called "MindReal" that repeats in detail a comment he made in "Multimind". He said that our minds are built from the cellular level up to note things along 4 variables:
Recency – did it just happen?
Vividness – Is it exciting? Colorful? 'Real'?
Comparison – Was it bigger, smaller, faster, slower than usual?
Significance – What did it 'mean'? Was it 'good'? 'Bad'?
I understood anchoring with numbers but it can work with non-numbers, too. Want a cracker? I also have cookies and chocolates, too. The cracker may still be in our mind from precedence. The chocolate may do well because of vividness.
