Three Mind Rules: Anchoring, Typical Thing, and Examples

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 Anchoring Rule

        People have tendency to stick to the number in their mind, regardless of how irrelevant it is. 

A Test of How Arrogant You Are

Consider the following experiment. Divide test subjects into two groups. Ask the first group ‘Did Ghandhi die when he was 10 years old?’ Everyone is likely to get the answer ‘no’, which is the right answer. After that, you let the subject guess the age when Ghandhi died.

For the second group, ask a different question: ‘Did Ghandhi die when he was 150 years old?’ Well, most people would, again, get the answer right. Then you ask them to guess the age when Ghandhi died. 

The interesting result is that the average guess of the first group is lower than that of the second group. People have tendency to stick to the number they hear, and most of them don’t know about it.

Grocery Shopping

        Grocery stores also apply the anchoring value to their strategy. When they say ‘limited 12 per family’. People unknowingly anchor their mind on the number 12 and adjust downward. If you limit the number to 8, the average number sales would be less.

How to Use Anchoring Rule

        Ask people a question like ‘do you know that the number of something is, say, 300?’ Then you put your number at the end. This question is unimportant. You don’t expect a ‘yes’ from the other side. You ask this question only to get the number 300 into their head. Now, move to the second step.
        Ask people to provide their own number. This estimated number would lean towards the number you just pushed into their head. If your number is nonsense, this number estimated by the other side would be even more nonsense. However, the other side believes very strongly in this number because it’s their choice. Admitting their estimation is nonsense is equivalent to admitting that they fail in the estimation. And, people won’t like being a failure.

“For every problem, there is a solution that is  simple, clean, and wrong.” H. L. Naken

The Rule of Typical Things

        Psychologists called this rule the  ‘Representativeness heuristic’. This rule says that people favor the choice that makes sense even if it’s wrong.
        For example, consider two cases: tomorrow it’s gonna rain, and tomorrow it’s gonna be cloudy and it’s gonna rain. Even though the latter is less likely (it’s need to be both cloudy and rain), most people still believe the latter is more likely just because it fits in with their belief. It’s typical. It should be true.

The Example Rule

Psychologists called this rule the  ‘Availability heuristic’. Example rule: People believe that what easily comes to mind is more common. Consider a following question. Which of the two following patterns is more common in  dictionary: _ _ _ _ _ n _ and _ _ _ _ ing? Most people will choose the latter one, even if the latter one is a subset of the former one and is thus more common.
        So, you can use a rare consequential event as a scaring marketing tactics. If you want to sell earthquake insurance, do it right after an earthquake. People will buy it, even if the study shows that the chance of having an earthquake is minimum right after the previous one. They just can’t stop themselves from believing in it.

SOURCE: The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain 

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

   About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make  notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.