The Weird and Wonderful World of The Human Brainbox

In CopyWriting | 7 comments | permalink

Ah, the human brainbox. Without it we would be useless, we would probably spend our days leaving stupid comments on YouTube videos and voting for George Bush… ah, hold on… ;-)

The good old human brainbox is actually an amazing piece of kit, but it is not as reliable as you may think. Actually, it can do some pretty strange things.

Today I am going to tell you about a psychological FACT that will blow your brainbox into little shreds. It certainly amazed me. At the end of this little fable I would like YOU to describe what you think the moral of the story is, and how we can use this moral in business.

Here we go…

Scientists would take two people (person A and person B)and put them in a room and they put $100 worth of $10 notes on the table, and they would tell person A that he could choose how the $100 was split between the two people. e.g 50/50, 70/30, 80/20, or if he wanted he could even just take the entire $100.

However, there was a catch. Person B was then given two options:

1) He could keep the share that person A decided

2) He could refuse and neither of them would get a penny

This experiment was always done with two strangers, and the experiment showed that the threshold that person B was willing to accept was 80/20 (i.e if he was offered $20 or less he would rather both of them got nothing).

This is based on people not liking it when they get the short end of the stick. Emotion comes into play, and it is not pretty.

You may be thinking, but Dean, these people were probably fairly wealthy, $20 is not much money, so it was worth doing it out of principle.

Well here is the thing, they took this experiment to a third world country and they did it with $1000. Now bear in mind that $200 at the time was two months wages. Do you think the results changed?

NO!

They stayed exactly the same.

People would turn down two months salary just because the other guy was getting a far better deal.

Isn’t this incredible?

People would rather starve than see someone else get the better end of a deal.

So your task for the weekend is to decipher the moral to this story, and see if you can make it applicable to business. The person with the best response wins a red Ferarri*

Leave your comments below, don’t be shy, have a guess.

Dean

* The red Ferrari will be an image of a red Ferrari taken from Google images ;-)

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7 COMMENTS

  • imma

    basically if they’re too greedy, they’re refusing to let you have more, so you’d rather get revenge
    ‘thou shalt not screw over thy neighbour’? *grins*
    50/50 would be nicest, though it’s difficult to be that even handed when you get to choose
    The application to business would be : you need the people you’re doing deals with to feel valued(not too screwed over) by you or they’ll go somewhere else

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  • http://bloggingbits.com Mohsin

    Umm.. create a product and give everyone a bonus gift with the purchase of that product. If you run a draw and give only one of your customers an expensive gift, then, according to your fable, others are going to be annoyed about this injustice :D

    It means draws are bad for a companies’ reputation!

    Lame?

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  • http://deanhunt.com Dean Hunt

    two really good answers thus far.

    Keep them coming.

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  • Dare

    It’s human nature..the feeling of importance. Everyone wants to feel important. By giving the one more than the other you “subconciously” you’re not worthy, you’re unimportant. That’s hurting the ego and the feeling of importance. So the person reacts by not allowing nobody to have the money and it that way according to him it will be right, justice.
    It’s interesting thing that human depends of emotions, and if you learn the right stuff about them you can absolutely rule the world…

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  • http://www.mandogmachine.com Tom

    It not exactly about feeling important, it’s all about relativity. I remember reading of similar experiments where peoplewere asked if they would rather like getting 20k and everybody else got 40k or get 10k and everybody else got 5k. The majority picked the lesser amount of money just because it was more than everybody else got.

    The “moral”?

    People like feeling superior to others (maybe that’s what Dare ment when using “important”), it’s part of human nature, Darwin and all…

    The moral for business?

    Make people feel superior. Make them feel they are “in the know”, part of an “inner circle”. etc, etc. The best copywriters of the world use these techniques masterfully.

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  • http://opensourceinnovation.wordpress.com Innovation Catalyst

    The metaphor is the relationship between you and your network of collaborative partners. The $100 represents the potential of the business to be had. However, you don’t have the expertise to get the full amount, you need your collaborators to join your team. As the lead you can expect to keep the lion’s share for yourself but your partners know without them you won’t get the work. So you have to determine how much of the pie to give them to make them happy and keep the relationship going well for future work.

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  • Joe

    Just tried this with my brother, who is 15 years old, he said at 60:40 he would rather us both get nothing.

    Quite a cool experiment.

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