Sadly, the notion that cashpoints use a similarly fake "whirring" sound when dispensing money appears to be a myth – but a pleasing one that, consequently, I intend to help promulgate. This may also be why some voice-recognition customer service lines use prerecorded "typing" sound effects, to make it seem as if your details are being laboriously entered.
In one recent experiment, by the Harvard Business School researchers Ryan Buell and Michael Norton, people using a flight-search site actually preferred waiting 60 seconds over getting instant results, provided they got to look at what appeared to be a running tally of the tasks being executed. This so-called "labour illusion" works even when that someone is a computer, which is why travel-booking sites like make such ostentatious display of searching airline after airline for flights. For knowing which screw to turn: £9,999."īoth stories illustrate a hidden agenda that bedevils how we think about paying for services: we imagine all we want is a specific result, yet as often as not we're equally interested in seeing that someone breaks a sweat on our behalf. The expert is happy to oblige: "For turning a screw: £1. Affronted, the factory owner demands an itemised version. He finally tracks down an expert who takes out a screwdriver, turns one screw, and then – as the factory cranks back to life – presents a bill for £10,000. Perhaps the locksmith should have heeded the timeworn tale of the industrialist whose production line inexplicably breaks down, costing him millions per day. Worse, they even resented paying his fees for what seemed like so little elbow-grease. Now, as a veteran, lock-picking took him mere moments, and his clients, seeing how easy he found it, had stopped tipping. When he was starting out, picking locks took him for ever, and sometimes he'd have to smash them open, but customers appreciated his efforts and gave generous tips.
Business was bad, the locksmith confided. T he psychologist Dan Ariely tells a story about an eye-opening encounter – as opposed to the more normal door-opening kind – with a locksmith.
0 kommentar(er)
