Study 002 / perception
Judge four offers, then compare your responses.
Rate four offers, one at a time. See all your responses together before exploring the explanation.
This voluntary demonstration changes how information is presented. Some details, including any simulated claims, are explained after the final step. You can reveal them or leave at any time.
Your responses stay in this browser tab. No research data is submitted.
Read the mechanism firstStudy 002 / The price that changes nothing
01 / Observation
A price can be accompanied by a crossed-out reference, a popularity badge, or a stock message.
02 / Hypothesis
Changing only this surrounding claim may change stated value, urgency, or confidence.
03 / Mechanism
A reference price supplies a comparison point. Scarcity and popularity are different candidate mechanisms and are presented as separate variants.
04 / Experiment
Judge four offers one at a time: a crossed-out €79 reference beside €29 first, then a popularity badge, a stock claim, and finally €29 alone. Give value, urgency, and confidence ratings for each before the explanation. The notebook and €29 price stay the same. The replay removes all surrounding claims from four offers.
05 / Result
The reveal compares all submitted ratings with the exact offer shown. Differences or identical ratings describe this visit; they do not establish an effect or immunity. An early reveal preserves completed ratings and marks unrated offers explicitly.
06 / Alternative explanations
Order, repeated exposure to the notebook, remembering earlier ratings, suspicion, prior prices, the study title, and expectations about the task may affect the comparison. The fixed order cannot isolate a causal effect within one visit. Starting with promoted offers is a presentation choice; we have not established that it delays recognition of the pattern.
07 / Real-world use
Retail labels, sale pages, restaurant menus, travel listings, and subscription comparisons.
08 / Ethical dimension
The price reference, stock claim, and popularity label are invented within this disclosed demonstration. In ordinary commerce, their truth and relevance are central to judging the intervention.
09 / Countermeasure
Cover the reference and badges. Decide what the object is worth for your purpose before comparing offers.
Short summaries in our own words: what the research found, why it belongs here, and where its conclusions stop. These papers provide background; they do not report results from your visit.
Study anatomy / Explanatory schematic
Primary research
Tversky and Kahneman described how an initial reference can influence later estimates. A crossed-out price gives the notebook just such a comparison point. This is the background for the anchoring question; the paper does not validate our particular discount, stock message, or popularity badge.
Valuation experiments
These experiments found that arbitrary starting points could influence initial valuations even when later choices followed a coherent pattern. That matters when several offers feel consistently judged: consistency alone does not show that the reference point was irrelevant. Their procedures differ from the fixed sequence of offers here.
Behavioural and fMRI experiment
Participants tasted the same wines under different price labels. Higher labels increased reported pleasantness in the study, alongside changes in a brain signal associated with experienced pleasantness. Price context can reach beyond a bargain calculation; this does not establish a neural effect from viewing our notebook.
A demonstration can make a mechanism inspectable. One person’s response, or a replay after disclosure, cannot identify a causal effect or establish nonconscious influence.