During an interview, your potential new boss asks you to
briefly describe your qualifications.
At this moment, you have a single objective: be impressive. So
you begin to rattle off your list of accomplishments: your degrees from Harvard and Yale, your prestigious
internships, your intimate knowledge of essential software and statistical
analysis. “Oh,” you add. “And I took two semesters of Spanish in
college.” Not technically an impressive accomplishment, but since the
company does a lot of business in Latin America, you figure some Spanish is
better than none at all.
Or is it?
Actually, it isn’t.
You’ve just fallen victim to a phenomenon that psychologists have
recently discovered, called the “Presenter’s Paradox.” It’s another fascinating
example of how our instincts about selling – ourselves, our company, or our
products – can be surprisingly bad.
The problem, in a nutshell, is this: We assume when we
present someone with a list of our accomplishments (or with a bundle of
services or products), that they will see what we’re offering additively. If going to Harvard, a prestigious internship, and mad
statistical skills are all a “10” on the scale of impressiveness, and two
semesters of Spanish is a “2,” then we reason that added together, this is a 10
+ 10 + 10 + 2, or a “32” in impressiveness. So it makes sense to mention your minimal Spanish skills –
they add to the overall picture.
More is better.
Only more is not
in fact better to the interviewer (or the client or buyer), because this is not
how other people see what we’re offering.
They don’t add up the impressiveness, they average it. They see
the Big Picture - looking at the package as a whole, rather than focusing on
the individual parts.
To them, this is a (10+ 10+ 10+ 2)/4 package, or an “8” in
impressiveness. And if you had
left off the bit about Spanish, you would have had a (10 + 10+ 10)/3, or a “10”
in impressiveness. So even
though logically it seems like a little Spanish is better than none, mentioning
it makes you a less attractive candidate than if you’d said nothing at all.
More is actually not better,
if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your
offerings. Highly favorable or
positive things are diminished or diluted in the eye of the beholder when they are
presented in the company of only moderately favorable or positive things.
Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert
Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter’s Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when
buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod,
cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing
to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the
one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free
song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping
$65!
Perhaps most
troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of
marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more
attractive to buyers, 92% of them
chose the package with the free download.
More just seems like it must be better when you are on the
presenter’s end, even though it doesn’t seem that way at all when you are on
the consumer’s end. And somehow,
despite the fact that we are all both presenters and consumers in our everyday lives, we just don’t make the
connection.
The same pattern emergences when you are creating deterrents
or negative consequences to discourage bad behavior. In another study, participants were asked to choose between
two punishments to give for littering:
a $750 fine plus two hours of community service, or a $750 fine. 86% of participants felt that the fine
plus community service would be the stronger deterrent. But they were wrong – in fact, a
separate set of participants rated the $750 with the two hours of community service as significantly less severe
than the fine alone. Once again,
they reasoned that the overall punishment
was on average less awful because two hours of community service isn’t so
had.
If the bias in presenter thinking is so pervasive, how can
we stop ourselves from making this kind of mistake? The short answer is that we need to remind ourselves when
making any kind of presentation to think Big Picture. What does the package I
am presenting look like taken as a whole, and are there any components that are
actually bringing down its overall value or impact?
Three 10’s and a 2 is not better than three 10’s. A free carwash with the purchase of any
new car is not going to make your
cars seem more valuable. If your
very expensive luxury hotel rooms offer ocean views, silk sheets, and a Jacuzzi,
don’t mention the ironing board in the closet or the coffeepot. And unless you speak Spanish well, keep your ability to count to ocho and ask where la bibioloteca is to yourself.
