• rhacer@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    But it IS how we see prices. If there weren’t science behind it, they wouldn’t be doing it.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      The science is about how you initially react to the number. Your brain will see $19, and immediately you’ll think it’s $19. Only upon further inspection and processing through your cognition, you recognise that its $19.99, which is basically $20.

      It’s that initial reaction they want, to grab your attention. Anyone who is going through life without leveraging their higher thinking will fall for this shit. Anyone who thinks, at all, won’t.

      Unfortunately, there’s a nontrivial number of people who fall into that first category. People who were never taught to think. They just do.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      A lot of marketing strategies are pseudoscience. Just like a lot police investigation practices or body language assumptions.

          • SuperEars@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            This doesn’t meet the bar you want, but my marketing professor called the .99 idea the single greatest thing to come out of marketing in a century.

            • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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              2 days ago

              Sounds about right.

              Marketing hasn’t done anything positive for humanity. It is all just to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need. It is the main driver for the overconsumption.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        2 days ago

        I was watching a PBS documentary about the first humans in the Americas. All the scientists are super cool until you get to the American anthropologist who starts using phrenology to explain why Native American tribes shouldn’t be given repatriation rights, only for a Danish geneticist to say “yeah, this is absolutely a Native American and i am willing to testify to that in any court of law”

        Pseudoscience is still all the rage if it can be used to push a political agenda.