Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior by Nick Kolenda Read Free Book Online Page A

incredible music? Is it really possible for someone to be blown away by Bell’s performance at a theater yet remain completely unfazed by him in a subway station? After reading this chapter, you’ll understand why that outcome is very possible. The explanation behind that surprising phenomenon relates to our expectations and how they mold our perception of the world.
    THE POWER OF EXPECTATIONS
    Similar to mindsets, our expectations largely dictate our perception of the world. Whenever we develop expectations for a certain event, our brain often molds our perception of that event to match our expectations. We see what we expect to see. We hear what we expect to hear. We feel what we expect to feel.
    Placebo effects are a clear example of that concept. When researchers test a new drug on patients, they give some people the actual drug, and they give other people a fake version of the drug (i.e., a placebo) that produces no effect. This procedure is needed because our expectations can often dictate the outcome of treatments. We usually show signs of improvement after receiving a placebo merely because we expect to show signs of improvement.
    Although placebo effects are typically associated with testing new antibiotics, your expectations influence you every day. Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi? Recent research has revealed some interesting findings in that choice. Because Coke is the dominant brand, most people have developed the expectation that Coke tastes better, and research confirms that people do prefer Coke over Pepsi in non-blind taste tests (i.e., when people know which drink they’re consuming). But an interesting phenomenon occurs when the taste tests are blind. When people aren’t told which drink they’re consuming—an event that eliminates expectations from the equation—more people prefer the taste of Pepsi (McClure et al., 2004).
    Perhaps even more interesting is that this “Pepsi Paradox” is completely eliminated for people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotion. People with this brain damage prefer the taste of Pepsi, even when they know which drink they’re consuming, because they’re not susceptible to the emotional expectations stemming from the popularity of Coke (Koenigs & Tranel, 2008).
    When our brains are healthy, high expectations can lead to more neural activity in the brain region associated with pleasantness. A group of researchers studied neural activity in people when they drank wine that was marked at various price points, and even though they used the same wine in each condition, the wine that was marked at higher price points had sparked more neural activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, the brain region associated with pleasantness (Plassman et al., 2008). People found the taste of wine more pleasing when they merely believed it was purchased at a higher price. Therefore, expectations are very powerful because they can mold our perception, even from a biological perspective.
    Not only can expectations mold our perception, but they can also influence our behavior. In another experiment, some people purchased an energy drink at a full price of $1.89, whereas other people purchased the same energy drink at a discount price of $.89. The researchers wanted to examine whether people’s knowledge of the drink’s price would influence their performance on a mental task, and the results were pretty enlightening. People who purchased the drink at full price performed significantly better than people who purchased the drink at a discount, even though the drink was exactly the same in each condition (Shiv, Carmon, & Ariely, 2005). People who purchased the drink at full price developed higher expectations for the drink’s effectiveness, thereby causing them to perform better on the mental task, whereas people who purchased the drink at a discount developed lower expectations, causing them to perform worse on the mental task. Even something