Why do we buy more things than we need?

There are several psychological explanations for our society's consumerism.

Your six-year-old son asks you to buy him a bicycle and you, who have not yet received your monthly salary, refuse. But there are also other reasons that justify your decision: this month you have exceeded your credit card expenses, and you have not yet finished weighing the advantages and disadvantages of buying a bicycle for your child at such a young age.

But as you well know, your child can be very insistent. Again and again, he asks, begs, pleads, begs you to buy him a bike.. But it seems that with each new negative answer you give him, the child, far from getting discouraged and forgetting the initiative, comes back with more force.

Each new onslaught from your little toddler is a little more irritating than the last, and you feel that you are beginning to cross your threshold of patience.

After a long and tedious process, the child begins to show some signs of understanding and finally ends up accepting that he's not going to have the bike; he opts to ask you with his best angel face, "Well, will you buy me a chocolate then?"

How could he refuse such an insignificant request? Of course, in this context, you decide to buy him a chocolate.

The million-dollar question is this: would you have bought your son the chocolate if he asked for it in the first place, instead of the bicycle? Most likely, no.

Do we buy what we don't need? Community Services

As part of an experiment, a psychology professor asked his students if they would be willing to work two hours a week for free for the next two years as part of a program to rehabilitate juvenile offenders. Of course, no one agreed. Agreeing to such a request was little short of immolating oneself in life..

But then the professor came back with a lesser, much more reasonable request. This time he asked his students if they would be willing to accompany a group of juvenile delinquents on a two-hour trip to the zoo.At the same time, in another group of students, however, the teacher asked them directly to volunteer for the trip to the zoo, without the previous exaggerated request.

What happened? Well, of this second group 17% agreed, compared to 50% of the first group, which had previously been asked to make the exaggerated request..

The similarity of these cases

Note that in both proposed cases the modest order remains unchanged.. Both the chocolate that our son wanted and the walk through the zoo that the teacher required before his students, does not change.

However, and strange as it may seem, the presence of a first request much more demanding, so inadequate that in all likelihood it would be rejected, significantly increased the chances of a positive response to a second request, by the way, much more discreet. And perhaps this is due, in part, to the contrast generated between the two requests.

Relativity beyond Einstein

It so happens that the brain does not get along very well with absolute concepts; in order to determine whether something is big or small, fair or unfair, it needs to be guided by a reference parameter. In our examples, the first order is a good point of comparison, accessible in the brain, within reach.

Relativity is the key. And the money spent on a chocolate, relative to the outlay required for a bicycle, seems a trifle not worth analyzing in depth. Similarly, a two-hour visit to the zoo seems like a much smaller order than it really is, compared to two years of unpaid work.

Public image

Another reason that may contribute to this overt foolishness may be the need to appear to others as inherently good, cooperative, or well-disposed to the needs of others. Whether we admit it or not, we are all concerned, to a greater or lesser extent, with the image we convey..

We have no qualms about refusing a request that seems absurd to us because we feel that we run no risk of being judged negatively. But when the request for collaboration is reasonable, and especially if we have already said no the first time, it is much more difficult for us to resist for fear of being seen as selfish, individualistic or something worse, which could damage our reputation or good name.

What's more, contrast colors our perceptions and induces us to exaggerate the differences between the objects our brains are comparing.. Of course, this is not something we do consciously. Often the contrast is generated by contiguity in time; that is, between two stimuli that are presented successively, as in the example above of the child asking for a bicycle first and a chocolate later. This is a singular phenomenon to which we succumb permanently and which has serious implications for the way we see the world.

If a six-year-old child, even unintentionally, can manipulate us in this way, then we can be manipulated, there are also a lot of crafty salesmen who have no qualms about who have no qualms about openly manipulating us.

Shopping and manipulation: a few more examples

You go to a store because you need a new pair of shoes. If the salesperson who serves you has experience in the field, he will probably first show you a pair of top-quality reinforced leather shoes, imported from the principality of Luxembourg, at a very high price.

Then, as soon as a negative expression of discouragement appears on your face, the salesman will rush to show you another pair of shoes, also of excellent workmanship, he says, but of a cheaper price that, according to the contrast generated, you will perceive as much cheaper than the price of the shoes, you will perceive as much cheaper than it really is..

With the first offer, the salesperson will be establishing a parameter of comparison, an initial price that will function as an "anchor" from a perceptual and psychological point of view. Mentally tied to this starting point, the price of the second pair of shoes, which is undoubtedly the one that the store employee wants to sell you from the beginning, will seem much lower than it really is.

It is worth clarifying that following the reverse procedure, that is, showing you the "cheap" shoes as soon as you set foot in the shoe store, and the "expensive" ones afterwards, is a very bad strategy that is detrimental to the seller's interests, since having established a low "anchor" price, which will work as a comparison model for everything you can offer later, will only serve to make the customer perceive as an excess what a priori could be normal values and in accordance with the footwear sales business.

Car dealerships are constantly using this psychological trick to sell us things we weren't really planning to buy. to sell us things that we were not really planning to buy.

The relative price of cars

When we buy a new car, and once the paperwork is finished, the price of the vehicle becomes the point to which we will mentally refer when the salesman starts offering us, one by one, what will probably end up being a cataract of accessories.

"For only $100 more, you can have automatic window lifts," the salesman tells us. And we think that's an excellent idea. After all, we just bought a $15,000 vehicle... and $100 seems like a big deal to us. Of course, once we accept, the salesman will offer us the inclusion of an automatic transmission, the salesman will offer us the inclusion of a music player for only an extra $200.. A bargain, we think.

And then, upholstered seats with washable leather, additional state-of-the-art GPS, and a whole battery of insurance and extended warranties for figures that will seem negligible compared to the original value of the car; that's not counting the dozen or so taxes that are added on and never mentioned to us the first time around.

And what if we need to buy a suit?

Well, the salesman who knows that the human brain makes value judgments based on comparison, or at least intuits it, only once we have shelled out a good amount of money for the pants will offer us a suitable shirt, which matches perfectly.

And then a tie; after all, a suit without a tie is an incomplete suit.. But only in the second instance, once the price of the suit has settled in our mind as a benchmark that constitutes the measure for everything that comes after.

Beauty and attraction

As if this were not enough, we apply the same criterion to the perception of people's beauty.. Suppose, if you are a heterosexual man, I show you a picture of a woman. I let you look at the picture carefully and then ask you to rate how much you like that woman by giving her a score from 1 to 10.

Surely, his appreciation of the female beauty he has just seen will be contingent on the comparison model he finds in his mind at that moment.

Many studies have found that men rate a woman's beauty much more negatively if they have previously browsed through a magazine. if they were previously browsing through a fashion magazine saturated with images of models while they had to wait to participate in the experiment, compared to the assessment made by another group of men, who were asked to entertain themselves by looking at an old newspaper.

The same phenomenon has also been observed when men, before giving an aesthetic score to a woman, are asked to watch a television program starring actresses of recognized beauty. After exposure to a young woman of extraordinary beauty, men tend to undervalue ordinary female beauty, but beauty nonetheless.

Concluding

To sum up. The brain has difficulty thinking and making decisions in absolute terms.It always needs a point of reference, something that functions as an accessible parameter of comparison.

We know whether something is good or bad, big or small, expensive or cheap by looking around us, analyzing the context in which we find ourselves, and comparing the object of our interest with something else that, of course, belongs to the same category.

The problem lies in the large number of scammers who intuitively know this curious property of the brain, and use it to swindle us or sell us things that, under a more cold and rational analysis, we would realize that we do not want or need to buy.