Too Much Information

We are all familiar with TMI, Too Much Information. Usually we hear it when we are exposed to some gory or elicit detail we’d rather not hear. It has however a more serious application when it comes to how we make decisions.

In these days of big data, ubiquitous connectivity and apps at every hands turn we often have lots of data about the choices we need to make in life, be that at work or at home. Too much information however can impede our ability to make decisions.

On the face of it, this is counter intuitive. We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. Knowledge is power and information feeds knowledge.

However when presented with loads of facts, we have difficulty in selecting out the items that really matter, it takes time and effort that we may not have. Worse still, the key pieces of information that should influence our decisions remain hidden and unused.

Malcom Gladwell makes this point in his book Blink. He tells a story about Cardiologist Lee Goldman at Chicago's Cook County Hospital.

Goldman used some statistical rules which mathematicians designed for telling apart subatomic particles. He fed a computer data of hundreds of files of heart attack cases and crunched the numbers into a “predictive equation” or model.

Four key risk factors emerged as the most critical tell tale of a real heart attack case:

1. ECG (the ancient electrocardiogram graph) showing acute ischemia

2. unstable angina pain

3, fluid in the lungs

4. systolic blood pressure under 100

Previous to this Cardiologists took quite an amount of time looking at patients, got information on weight, gender, lifestyle, how they came to be admitted, what their living conditions were at home. Goldman got Cardiologists to park their instincts and thirst to find out everything about a patient and used his 4 simplistic reference points. 

Outcomes improved on wards and fewer of the patients who were sent home from ER represented back at a future date with a heart attack. Using four simple facts that mattered led to better decisions.

Gladwell makes another point on how knowing less can improve our decisions. Not quite as serious as heart attacks but still interesting. For years it was believed that women could not play in orchestras as well as their male counterparts. Men dominated the ranks. 

Then someone had the bright idea to put in a screen for auditions where the musician was only heard and not seen. The blind audition was born. The number of women in major US orchestras increased fivefold. Decision makers knew less about their applicants (their gender) and now made their call on what was the core question, how well someone could actually play.

The take away is that when you have a decision to make, look at the information available to you. Try to critique what is important what and what is background noise. Write down the facts that influenced your decision, were these the facts that really mattered? Try to resist gathering KPI after KPI just because you can. 

You are your Habits

Aristotle once said "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit". If you want to know why your life is where it is today, look at your past habits. Better still, if you want to know where your life will be ten years from now, look at your current habits. Our levels of exercise, diet, work routines and pretty much everything else we do on a daily basis decide much of our future success and current choices.

A 2006 study by Duke University found that up to 40 percent of what we do every day is driven by habit rather than deliberate decisions. The autopilot kicks in as soon as we get out of bed and includes how we dress, what we do for lunch, how we greet the family when we get home from work, how much time we spend relaxing, playing or chatting. Eventually bed time routine takes over and the day is done.

This raises a simple point. If you want to change your life, (be that career, fitness levels or work life balance) your habits should be first port of call. There is no shortage of self-help books that will tell you how to quit a habit, start a habit, what sort of habits exceptional people have. It is all very interesting stuff, but in reality how difficult is it to create a new habit or better still, ditch a bad one?

Habit formation research from University College London suggests that there is no one standard length of time required for a habit to form. It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days. It will come as no great surprise that this period of time depends on how hard the new activity is and how much effort and commitment is required. Getting your 5 a day of fruit and veg might be a little easier and quicker than learning Chinese for half an hour every evening.

The research does suggest however that, for most new tasks the 66-day mark is when repetition becomes automatic and the habit takes root. These researchers did note that if you’re going to miss a day from your new found daily routine, skip a day that is further along in the 66-day period, since the pay back for habit formation counts more in the early days.

Another tip in learning a new habit is not to go for the complete personal makeover. Especially coming up to New Year it’s tempting to go for it all in one fell swoop. You start changing your exercise, diet, how you work etc. That is a lot of new behaviour to adhere to, especially in the critical first 2 months. Changing one habit can be difficult enough and is no mean feat so don’t spread yourself too thin and try changing everything at the same time.

CharlesDuhigg, has written an interesting book on habits, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Duhigg uses some good examples to explain how habits work. He looks at N.F.L. coach Tony Dungy, who, with lots and lots of practice, taught his players a small number of important moves they could perform without thinking, particularly at crucial moments in a game. When the players were exhausted, autopilot kicks in and everyone does their job. You don’t have to be an NFL line-backer to appreciate this. Pretty much the same thing happens when we get home after a night out, maybe feeling a bit groggy, take off our shoes and socks and barely know we did it.

As well as personal habits, we also have shared social habits. Some of these have been around for generations, such as shaking hands when we meet. Others are continually changing. We have seen this in the recent past where wearing a seat belt in the back seat of the car is now a well ingrained social habit; it was a very different story in the 1980s. These habits are changed by policy makers altering the norms in our society. This is the same principle behind de-normalising smoking via bans in bars, the work place and some public areas. The idea is to make not smoking the default social norm and hope that becomes our shared habit or custom.

Having habits is ultimately a good thing. They allow us to do routine tasks without wasting mental energy or having to make the same decisions over and over every day. Habits also allow us to operate within acceptable social norms so we can function as a society. Ultimately we humans are creatures of habit and it’s a case of trying to have more good habits than bad habits and being aware of how to change the habits we don’t want. List your daily habits and see which ones you want to keep. Bet you have more habits than you realise.

Why a bonus might be a bad idea

You have a business problem to solve or a new project to get live. In order to make sure your people deliver, you decide to offer a bonus, stock options or some other incentive to get the job done. This might be a really bad idea and here is why.

Way back in 1945 Karl Duncker had his candle problem experiment posthumously published. It was a task based on problem solving. Participants were given a candle, some matches and a box of tacks. They were then asked to fix the candle to a cork board on the wall. They needed to do it in such a way that when lit, the candle wouldn't drip wax on the table underneath the cork board.

The solution (spoiler alert), is to use the box holding the tacks as a candle holder, attach the box to the wall and put the candle in it. Most people solve this eventually but they solve it a lot quicker if the tacks are out of the box and the box is seen as a separate piece of equipment.

When the tacks were in the box the participants saw it only as a tack-box, not something they could use to solve the problem. This phenomenon is called ‘Functional fixedness’.

Sam Glucksberg added a very interesting step to this in his 1962 paper, “Influence of strength of drive on functional fixedness and perceptual recognition”. He decided to incentivise people to solve the candle problem. One group got money for solving the problem, the quicker they solved it, the more money they got. Another group were offered nothing, they were just asked to solve the problem.

When the tacks were presented outside the box (making the solution more obvious) the group that were incentivised out-performed the group that were paid nothing. This is what we would expect, rewarding results improved performance.

However, when the problem was presented in its more complex form with the tacks in the box, the incentivised group did significantly worse than the group paid nothing. Incentives killed performance and results. The bonus for getting it right back-fired big time. Participants with no financial incentive took 7:41 minutes to solve the problem, the people who were incentivised, took 11:08 minutes to solve the problem.

Glucksberg found that not only did the financial incentive make people slower at problem solving, the slowness increased with the incentive. The higher the monetary reward, the worse the performance. This was not a one off, the result has been replicated over and over in other experiments.

The key point is that incentives narrow our focus. When participants are incentivised, they can’t see the solution to the problem (the box holding the tacks). They think mechanically not creatively. Narrowing our focus inhibits this creative thinking and gets us straight into the task as we see it.

The lesson here is that if your employees have to do something straightforward, like putting regular parts together or following a specific instruction on an assembly line, financial incentives work well for these mechanical tasks.

However when we need do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives damage performance. When we need to think out of the (candle) box, offering a financial incentive keeps our focus in the box. We don’t see the big picture and solutions prove more elusive.

For the types of jobs many people have in the 21st century knowledge economy, bonuses and incentives are a bad motivator. Worse than not getting results, they damage performance, it’s not that they don’t do any good, they actually do harm.

Giving a bonus to software developers to get a project delivered on time or Business Development Manager to get a new commercial product live or a Marketing Executive to hit a sales figure are all the types of tasks that Glucksberg and others have shown, suffer when people are incentivised.

This has been well documented and repeated since 1962 and yet pretty much ignored in most management strategies. It is a mistake that companies continue to make today, more than 50 years since Glucksbergs first publication. 

It could go some way in explaining the disastrous performance of our banks, which had a well embedded bonus culture in senior management, the guys who should have been watching the big picture. It may explain why many well-funded start-ups disappear shortly after venture capitalists arrive. Most VC funding involves the current management staying on for a while and the company or its share price hitting incentivised targets for set time period. The creative thinkers that set up and got the company going now have their creative thinking dimmed and their focus narrowed by VC penalties or bonuses.

The next time you offer or are offered a bonus think again. Fifty years of research suggests that you will lose sight of the big picture and your days of thinking outside the box could be over.

Daniel Pink has an excellent TED talk which covers this and is well worth a listen.

The Future is more valuable than the Past

We care more about the future than about the past. Several studies have shown that we value events in the future more than we value equivalent events in the past.

The nineteenth century American author Herman Melville (he of Moby Dick fame) is often quoted on this – “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation.”

As one study puts it, the person who buys a cookie and eats it right away may get X units of pleasure from it, but the person who saves the cookie until later gets X units of pleasure when it is eventually eaten plus all the additional pleasure of looking forward to the event. Looking forward to stuff increases the enjoyment we get from it and hence we value it more.

In research by Caruso and colleagues they found that students wanted more money for a mundane job they would do in the future than for one they had already done in the past, and mock-jurors awarded more money to an accident victim who was going to suffer for a year than who had already suffered for a year.

The results consistently show that once something has happened, we value it less than we did in the lead up to an event. This has a few practical implications for how we pay for services and compensate clients or employees.

If you work in the legal profession, it may be wise to get compensation agreed for your client before they recover from their injuries. If you are drafting a service level agreement with a supplier you would be better off having any punitive reimbursement amounts agreed in advance rather than calculated afterwards. If you are trying to get a bonus organised, get it agreed before you achieve your targets rather than after, don’t go into your boss looking for a rise because you have had a good year. Once it’s in the past your boss won’t value it as much as he might have done six months earlier.

There is also another point to note here. If we plan stuff in the future and take the time to think about it or actively anticipate it, we will feel better. A supporting study by Bryant has found that people who devote time to anticipating enjoyable experiences report being happier in general. Bonuses and compensation aside, it pays to savour. 

We come up with more creative solutions for others

In work, some managers have a tendency to assign a problem or issue to a specific subordinate. It literally becomes ‘their problem’ and it’s up to them to solve it. Some would see this approach as one that encourages responsibility and ownership of the task in hand. In other words, if you make someone directly accountable, they will be more motivated and perhaps more effective in coming up with a solution.

Some research however casts doubt on this approach. Being too close to a problem or being personally involved in it can affect our ability to come up with creative solutions. This is based on an idea called the "Construal Level Theory" - the notion that distance from a problem provokes a more abstract thinking style.

Evan Polman and Kyle Emich at New York University examined how we are more capable of mental novelty when thinking on behalf of strangers than for ourselves. They conducted four studies involving hundreds of undergrads.

In one study they found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves. In another study, participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month.

When it came to problem solving the trend continued. Participants were given a tower puzzle. They were asked to explain how one could escape a tower by cutting a rope that was only half as long as the tower was high. (The solution is to divide the rope lengthwise into two thinner strips and then tied them together). Participants were more likely to solve the problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves.

This could explain why we sometimes surprise ourselves when giving advice or solutions to others. We are more likely to be creative and think in an abstract way when sorting out someone else’s problem rather than our own. This could impact on how we assign problems (like the tower puzzle) to co-workers. Perhaps we could construct the task so that they see it as someone else’s problem but one they are asked to help solve.

Next time you have a problem to delegate, try and create some healthy distance between the conundrum and the person coming up with the solution. You might see improved results.

Motivation via The Goal Gradient Effect

Charting progress is important. If you are a software developer, keep a list of the bugs you fix and knock them off one by one. If you are cold calling, keep track of the calls made and hopefully a few sales too. This sounds a bit obvious, we are likely to track work we have completed. The point here however is that it’s a good idea to visually display the work completed as progress, so you can see a list or some other evidence that you are getting places. This is known as the Goal Gradient Effect.

An article on Business Insider explains this in a neat way. It cites a study in the Journal of Market Research which looked at a coffee shop that uses frequent buyer cards. Regular customers were given frequent buyer cards. Each time they bought a cup of coffee they got their card stamped. When the card was filled they got a free cup of coffee. However there were two different scenarios:

Card A: The card had 10 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card all the boxes are blank.

Card B: The card had 12 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card the first two boxes are already stamped.

The research looked at how long it would take to get the card filled. Would it take longer or shorter for scenario A vs. scenario B? After all, you would have to buy 10 cups of coffee in both scenarios in order to get the free coffee. So does it make a difference which card you use?

The results say it does. Card B gets filled faster than Card A. It is the Goal-Gradient Effect in action.

The goal-gradient effect was first noticed in research with rats where they would run faster as they got to the end of the maze and closer to their food reward.

The goal-gradient effect makes us accelerate our behaviour as we get closer to our goal.

The take-way here could be these two points. Firstly, the closer we get to our goal the more motivated we are. Therefore structuring peoples work schedule (to have goals tangibly close and not weeks or months away) or sales targets becomes an important part of ensuring people are motivated and pushing themselves.

Secondly, the progression towards a goal can be an illusion or contrived (as shown the in coffee shop research). Giving someone a ‘head start’ or making it look like you can start progressing straight away improves motivation. Getting back to the software developer, give them some short ‘easy’ bugs first to get the ball rolling. For the cold caller, have the early targets based on getting the sales script right rather than closing any sales.

For the marketing people, maybe the coffee shop customer behaviour has lessons for how we distribute loyalty card points or explain bulk purchase schemes. We like our goals, almost as much as our coffee. 

More information doesn't neccessarily improve our decisions

You have decision to make, you decide to confer with a colleague who is well informed and a good logical thinker, an all-round bright guy. Sounds like just the person you need. Perhaps not.

A study by Nyhan and colleagues at Dartmouth University looked at how people can come to hold false beliefs. The study provided parents with comprehensive information about vaccines. The idea was to counter the false beliefs that some people have about the links between vaccines and autism. The better informed people become, then the more willing they would be to vaccinate.

Interestingly this was not how it turned out. Having people well informed, giving them more objective facts, didn't make people more likely to vaccinate. People just used the additional information to support or rationalise their pre-existing view point. Worse still, it gave them ‘evidence’ to hold their views a little more tightly. They became more polarised and extreme in their opinions.

In one way this is not surprising. It touches on a number of well-known biases such as the confirmation bias, where we take information that suits us and ignore everything else. It also highlights how our thinking is very much guided by our belief systems. We tend to use facts to feed our beliefs.

In another study Lewandowsky and his colleagues at the University of Western Australia had participants read a report about a robbery at a liquor store. Everyone read the same report, but in some cases racial information about the perpetrators was included and in others it wasn't. In one scenario, the suspects were Caucasian, and in another that they were Aboriginal. At the end of the report, participants were told that the racial information was incorrect and should be ignored.

Participants were then asked to recall details of the robbery (type of car used) and also to speculate on aspects of the crime (who may have carried it out, why was violence used).Separately, participants took part in an assessment of racial prejudice against Aboriginals.

All the participants recalled the details of the crime. However the participants who scored highest on racial prejudice continued to rely on the racial misinformation that identified the robbers as Aboriginals, even though they knew it had been corrected. They answered the factual questions accurately (type of car, times, what was taken) but still relied on race when speculating on who carried out the crime.

This is similar to Nyhans study. Providing facts and correcting the record does not change beliefs that easily. It is not that people are ill-informed, it is that they use facts to bolster what they believe.

The point here is that being well informed or getting access to more information may not improve our decisions or choices. We simply follow our beliefs. If we are good logical thinkers then we will be able to neatly organise the facts to create a decent argument as to why our beliefs are right. 

The smarter we are, the better we can weave our supporting argument. This is why we see relatively smart (and in fairness some dumb ones too) people pro and anti global warming, liberal and conservative. They have beliefs that are not shifted by information and can create a logical rationale to support their stance.

Getting back to where we started, rather than choose someone who is very well informed or really smart when conferring, find someone with an open mind (they can still be smart), who does not have strong beliefs on the subject matter in hand. Give them the facts and you may get a more objective appraisal, as long as your own beliefs do not get in the way.

Will that promotion or new job make you feel happier?

Are you working hard to get that promotion or new job in the hope that it will make you happier? Do you drive home from work thinking that if only you got that lotto win and could quit your job, you would be happy? Maybe it’s time to think again.

Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University has done a lot of research on “Affective Forecasting” of what we think will make us happy in the future. In other words, how good are we at predicting our future happiness or other emotional states.

In his 2007 book ‘Stumbling on Happiness', he goes into this in some detail. It turns out that we are really bad at predicting what will make us happy in life. His research consistently found that the things we do in search of happiness like moving house, changing job, winning the lotto don’t make us feel happier, though we expect that they will.

Gilbert links this to the strength of human resilience. We are not the delicate beings which self-help books or day time TV would have us believe. When we suffer real tragedy or disaster, we often recover more quickly than we would expect to. We can rediscover happiness. This is a good thing. As a species it makes us more adaptive and helps us cope with the woes of life.

The downside is that good things which happen to us are also less effective in the long term than we might think. Winning the lotto, getting the new job or house, doesn't feel as good or last as long as we expect it will. Resilience works both ways. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy, back to how we normally feel about life. 

According to Gilbert, if you want to know how happy you will be in the future, look at how happy you are now and that will probably answer your question.

This is not to say that we can’t aim to feel happier, we can. It’s just that we overestimate how much happier a specific item or event like a new car, job or house will make us feel. It is not that simple. Moving house or job to spend more time with loved ones or earning more money to do more of the things we enjoy, can make us happier, as long as these things are important to us.

These events or changes are more like an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that we routinely waste because the things we think will make us happy often don't. If that extra salary from a new job is spent on a bigger mortgage and the rewards and stressors in our life have increased in equal measure then don’t expect to feel any different.

If you are wondering if the promotion, job or some other windfall will make you happier, look at what is important in life. Ask yourself if the resulting change will allow you to do more of these important things. If it does then great, if not, then maybe focus on a change that will.

Truth & Photos

Ever been in a position where you were designing a brochure and wondered whether you should put in a particular photo? You might have decided against it because you felt a generic photo might look bland or you had trouble getting a photo that fitted well with the point you were trying to make.

It turns out that the choice of photo might not really matter that much, the important thing is to have a photo and almost any kind will do.

The BPS reports on a study involving New Zealand and Canadian students which found that including a photo with a statement made us more inclined to believe a statement accompanying the photo was true. The participants were given a series of statements saying if well known and obscure celebrities were either dead or alive. As fast as they could, without compromising their accuracy, the students had to say whether each statement was true or not. Crucially, half the statements were accompanied by a photo of the relevant celebrity and half weren't.

The statements with the photo were rated more likely to be true. As the researchers put it, the presence of the photo seemed to "inflate truthiness".

Another study with 70 New Zealand undergrads was similar but this time uninformative photos accompanied obscure general knowledge facts. For example, "Macademia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" was presented alongside a photo of macadamia nuts that provided no clues as to the veracity of the statement. The same effect was found - the students were more likely to wager that a fact was true when it was accompanied by an uninformative photo

So if you are designing a brochure and have testimonials that say your software is best of breed or your customer service has an approval rating of 99% or your deliveries are always on time, include a photo of a PC, Customer Service Agent or Delivery Guy. Generic non-descript photos are no problem, it need not be actual people or items. People will be more likely to rate your claim as true.

The same could be true for how you design websites, how politicians design election material or how you organise your eBay shop or any other on-line profile you may have. Any kind of photo will "inflate” the "truthiness" of your proposition. Guess I should have included a photo as part of this post.

Boring is not all bad

Barack Obama has a well reported practice of never wearing anything other than blue and gray suits. According to the president, “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make too many decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” This ties in with the idea ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has another take on this. The authors tested the idea that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. The study used a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function to determine if decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices.

Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing takes a greater toll than just deliberating.

There are a few lessons in this. Like Barak Obama, try to focus your limited patience and executive function on the stuff that matters. Spending time at the deli counter figuring out what sandwich to have is not a great idea if you have to go back to the office and make some complex or important decisions on how to manage scarce company resources.

If you are a retailer, you could provide a variety of choices and have customers making decisions just for the sake of it. This may lower their self control and get them to spend a little more freely.

 If you are a consumer and have just made a load of decisions e.g. where to park, whether to buy on credit or pay cash or whether to take out an after sales contract or not, be wary of your self control. It could be on the slide and you may be about to buy something you don’t really need.

If you see some guy in work wearing the same suits everyday and eating the same boring lunch, he could be the go to guy for some of those big decisions or someone to trust with that big marketing budget where self control could be tested. 

The Menu, lessons for your brochure?

We all know restaurants are under huge pressure in this recession. Unlike most in retail, they still have a very important card to play – the menu. It’s an opportunity to place an advertisement in every customer’s hand before they part with their money and in any business that’s priceless. However, menus don’t just work on price and the route to the customers heart may not be through the stomach or wallet, but the subconscious. Menus are specifically designed to quietly influence your selection and here is some of the ways it’s done.

One popular technique is Decoy Marketing, basically increasing the price of one item, to make sure the item you really want to sell looks like good value. This can then be combined with careful layouts. Eye tracking studies have shown that when customers open a menu, their eyes go right to the top of the page on the right side. Armed with that knowledge, chefs place the menu item that will give them the most profit at the top of the page. Then, your eyes normally drift to the center of the page. That’s where many chefs place their absolutely most expensive item (decoy). The customer is not expected to buy that item, but the psychology of menus indicates the customer will then glance again at the top items and order one of those. After all, it now looks like good value.

Wine lists are notorious for decoy sellers. Research shows that customers shy away from the most expensive item, or the least expensive, for that matter, the second-most expensive bottle on a wine list tends to be a top seller.

We know that symbols cause behavioral changes particularly money signs (£, €, $, etc). That is why we see actual cash notes and the amount displayed with a big ‘£’ sign on game show competitions every week. The potential reward feels like real money. This works in reverse when we are paying for something, for example some people find it mentally easier to pay by credit card than hand over actual cash. Menu designers try to minimize pricing cues that might remind people they are paying real money for their meal. A study published by Dr. Kimes at Cornell University found that when prices were given with dollar signs, customers spent less than when no dollar signs appeared and apparently even the word “dollar” triggered this “the pain of paying”. We spend more when we see ‘10’ than ‘£10’. To keep it low key, the price should also be at the very end of a menu description and should not be in any way highlighted.

Research also suggests brand names help sales. Restaurants are increasingly using what is known as co-branding on their menus, hence you will see a ‘Darn of Aberdeen Salmon’ on a menu beside ‘Cod in Crispy Guinness Batter’. You can almost taste the quality.

This description can be taken a step further. It is shown that vivid adjectives not only sway the customer’s choice but can also leave them more satisfied at the end of the meal, than if they had eaten the same item without descriptive labeling. Hence we see language that suggests expertise and satisfaction. This is why we see dishes described as “handcrafted,” “triple-basted,” “slow-cooked,”, “homemade” and “slammed with flavor.”

Getting back to the layout, a few basic techniques work very well. Our eyes are drawn to boxes, and customers are statistically more likely to order whatever is inside them. Incidentally you will also see this in newspaper advertisements. This is yet another way to guide you into buying the most profitable items.

When prices are printed in neat, right-justified columns, customers glance down the line to compare prices. If you want people to avoid the cheapest option, a centered justification leaves the prices scattered and very difficult to compare. This gently encourages the customer to order what they want, not pick the cheapest price.

Next time you are ordering in a restaurant, see if you can spot a few of these techniques. It will give you something to talk about over the meal, in case your dinner date turns out to be bit of a bore.