There has been a new discovery in psychology, a finding that
is dominant enough to affect all our lives and almost all aspects of our lives.
About a year ago, psychology researcher Norbert Schwarz and his team conducted
a study into the inner workings of the minds of two people during a specific
type of a conversation – where one is trying to impress the other and expect
something in return, like a job or their money, and the other is listening to everything
that is being put on the table and making up a decision whether to give them
what they expect. The results of the study surprised even the researchers
enough that they categorized its generality as a paradox and called it ‘The
Presenter’s Paradox.’
The idea is simply this: Whenever you are on the presenter’s
end of submitting a list of your accomplishments, you mention all of your
accomplishments, regardless of how big or small they are, instinctively assuming
that the person you are presenting them to is adding them all up. The person on
the receiver's end, though, hears a completely different story. They don’t add
you accomplishments, they instinctively average them out. If you scored a 750
on GMAT (say 10 points for this), organized a college festival in the capacity
of a student president (say 10 points again), served as the editor-in-chief of
the college magazine (10 points), and then also mention that you came second in
a cooking competition (2 points), your hope is that your score adds up to 32 as it has in your head;
when in reality, from the perspective of the judge, you only scored an average
of 8, as opposed to scoring an average 10 had you not mentioned the cooking
competition bit at all (not 10+10+10+2=32, but 32/4=8). In short, quality, not
quantity.
This phenomenon of adding-versus-averaging has caused quite
a sensation in psychology fields in the past year since its publication.
Follow-up studies – a total of seven – have found the same behavior exhibited
in a variety of different circles. In one study, customers were asked to price
an ipod without any freebies and another identical ipod that came with a free
song. On average, they were willing to pay $242 for the one without the free
song and $177 for the one with the free song. This seems counterintuitive. Why
would anyone pay more for less? (Here's another neat example of this same phenomenon). In a second study with different participants,
they reversed the scenario and asked them to guess which one a customer was
more likely to buy, and 92% of them said the one with the free song would sell
more. Our reasoning dramatically transforms when we are presenters and
receivers, and it turns out that this reasoning takes place completely
differently in our subconscious mind than our conscious.
I had written a blogpost a year ago about the brain having
evolved to conserve every last bit of neuron in order to save brain space,
because it only has a limited amount of gray matter to work with for a million
of its callings. It only allocates the absolutely-necessary number of neurons
to any task and not a neuron more – it’s frugal but it gets the job done like a
pro. Averaging is a much better way of conserving brain space than summation.
In the above example, 8 is a much simpler number than 32 – not just in terms of
the number of digits but also in terms of how it is arrived at. In the case of
summation, the brain begins with the first number, adds it to the second, adds
this new number to the third...and with each iteration the number gets not only
bigger but more importantly much different than the previous summation. However,
in the case of average, the brain only has to vaguely average out the first two
numbers, and from the third number onwards the average will be much closer to
the average of the first two and not vary significantly – and any significant
variation in new items added will immediately tell you whether the average has
gone up or down with just a glance at the numbers without having to do the
math. You instinctively know that the average of three 9s and two 8s is higher
than the average of three 9s and two 8s and a 3, without even knowing what that
average is. You know, instinctively, that the average of the whole set has gone
down with the addition of a number that is significantly less than the average
of the first five; and if this newly added number is not significantly less
than the average of the first five, you again know instinctively that the
average hasn’t changed much – a very simple but effective tool in
decision-making that consumes much less brain power than having to individually
add up each number and remember the new summation each time. This logic applies
whether you are dealing with 4 items or 10, although the study hasn’t been
conducted for very large number of items so I don’t wish to speculate there.
The brain has evolved over millions of years to do this kind
of averaging without associating concrete numbers to anything. It comes
naturally to us – provided we are at the receiver’s end.
This finding has significant impact on how you should
conduct yourself, be you an interviewee (presenter) or be you designing a
product for sale (presenter), be you gifting many gifts on someone's birthday (presenter) or be you accepting punishment (receiver). Yes, it
even applies to how you perceive punishment, which was one of those 7 studies. Participants
of the study were asked to choose between two punishments for littering: a)
$750 fine, or b) $750 fine plus two hours of community service. Paradoxically,
86% of the participants chose option B because they reasoned that it was less
severe than option A – which is ridiculously, obviously not true. Not only
that, but they also reasoned that option B was significantly less severe than
option A. The Presenter’s Paradox had come into play, (this time being not the
presenter but the receiver) and their brains averaged out the overall
punishment, because not many perceive community service as a severe form of
punishment in comparison with a $750 fine, so the overall perception of the severity
of punishment diminished.
As a general rule, in any situation where you are either
presenting, or are being presented, multiple items with the expectation of an
impeding decision of approval or selection, stop and ask yourself which side of
the fence you are on (presenter or receiver) and:
- Remove items that reduce the overall quality of your presentation if you are the presenter, or
- Add, don’t average, all the items if you are the receiver.
Now then, since I have the habit of relating everything I
read or observe to filmmaking/filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick had noticed, or at
least had an inkling of, this phenomenon back in the 70s, as is visible in this
quote:
“It is not so important to make a good film as it is to not make a bad one.” - Kubrick
He knew that if he made a bad film, his good films will not come for his rescue and his overall reputation would suffer. He ended up making only 11 feature films in his entire career. Had Sydney Lumet made only 11 good ones, instead of the 50 eclectic feature films he did make, he too would’ve been revered alongside Kubrick, not an inch lower. The saying “less is more” isn’t all bullshit.
