Australian Experiential Learning Centre

Somewhere at the top of the list would have to be killing your own father. Adding a few aunts to the fatality list doesn’t make it any better!

The whole story goes:

A GROOM accidentally killed three relatives at his wedding in Turkey yesterday when he fired into the air with an assault rifle in celebration.

The Anatolia news agency reported eight other people were wounded at the incident at the village of Akcagoze in the south-eastern province of Gaziantep.

The groom unleashed a volley of rapid aerial shots with an AK-47 rifle to celebrate his nuptials, but quickly lost control of the weapon and accidentally raked the guests with bullets, the report said.

His father and two of his aunts died in hospital.

Hopefully  my advice will stop some future  groom from decimating the bridal party.

Peaceful Muslims should “refudiate” the mosque planned near the World Trade Center site.

Sarah Palin has recently compared her use of the English language with that of William Shakespeare. I’ve previously written about how incompetent people are and how they lack the self awareness to gauge their depths of incompetence…But there is no way I would have thought it was that prevalent! Unbelievable! You simply couldn’t make up it up. Its even better than robot zombies!

If you want to add your version of Palin verse, there are some good entries here.

English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Get over it!” tweeted the former GOP VP candidate.

Our brains have not evolved for the environment in which we live. Jaguars have, historically, eaten humans more often than they’ve driven them around at outrageous speeds. The internet has existed for the merest nanosecond of evolutionary history.

An interesting article in the New York Times more accurately describes the evolutionary pressures that resulted in our modern brains when it describes a recent find of 78 flint tools dating back more than 800,000 years ago. The ecosystem in which early humans lived in Great Britain was described as:

The world at the time confronted serious climate change in the form of global cooling. It was the middle of the Pleistocene, the last great ice age that ended 10,000 years ago.

The dense Northern European forests of the Pleistocene ice age contained few animals or edible plants, but food would have been more abundant in the flood plain where the flint tools were found. Mammoth, red deer and elk grazed the grasslands, preyed upon by two species of saber-toothed tigers, the dirk-toothed cat and the scimitar-toothed cat.

The early humans living at this time found themselves filling the role of lower scavenger in this ecosystem. Right behind the giant hyenas that feed off the kills of saber‑toothed tigers.

The world our ancestors grew up in was brutal. Their lives were often short because of it. Our brains capacity to understand the world evolved because  of the pressures this created until such a point that we’ve been able to kill off the saber‑toothed tiger and the giant hyenas. Their legacy resides in how they’ve influenced our brains.

Thinking about my experience buying a suit has made me think of other sales techniques to use the ‘ego extension’ tool to make people have a sense of ownership over what they are about to buy.

This thinking failure can be used any time the sales process engages peoples’ sense that they already own the product. Whenever they start to make decisions about the product / service and what it will ultimately look, feel and be like, then the sale is much closer to being made.

For example, this technique is used when you go to buy a car and, rather than discuss the price, they ask you what ‘extras’ you want in the car. This involves you deciding what features your car is going to have and the eventual price you are going to pay is eventually dependent on it.

It is also used by good salespeople when you are looking at a house. They should , if they are good, ask questions / posit scenarios where you start to imagine you are already living in the house.

The greater the emotional sense of ownership that is induced by the sales process, then the greater the likelihood that the potential client will become an actual client.

How do you let your customers customise your products or services? And if you do, are you asking them to change their eventual product or are you asking them to change your product?

Entrepreneurs can manipulate the sales process so that it is harder for a potential customer to back out of the sale by using a simple and common flaw in human thinking.

I suffered from this just the other day when my decision to buy a suit was ‘manipulated’ by a good salesman.

I’ve mentioned before how easily our sense of self merges with that of a ‘tribe’ with significant implications for how we evaluate decisions. Well, it is true for inanimate objects as well.

For instance, I’ve read that people with bumper bar stickers are more likely to express road rage when their car’s ‘personal space’ is invaded. This is irrespective of whether their sticker say’s “god loves” or “magic happens.” These people have made a stronger link between their sense of self and their car. Alas, I cannot find the reference right now. The effect, however, is fairly well understood.

Knowledge isn’t everything. Even though I knew about the thinking flaw, I was unable to recognise it at the time it was being used. While I had a slight sense of ‘unease’ I went ahead with the purchase anyway.

A canny salesman used this thinking heuristic to ‘assist’ me in buying a suit. I went to town with the purpose of buying a new suit, something I do once or twice a year at most. Because of its infrequent nature, I’d planned to try on a wide range of suits and spend a couple of hours doing it. However, the salesman subtly induced my sense of ‘ownership’ and, as a consequence I bought the first suit I tried on!

In this particular case, I’d visited a number of stores to compare sales prices. When it came to trying them on, I went to one I’d been to before as they give good service.

When I tried the suit on it seemed to fit well. The salesman even confirmed the fact! Then he did a cute trick that ‘smoothed’ the purchasing decision. Rather than ask if I wanted the suit, he asked me to extend my leg so that he could adjust the cuff. Implicit, although never stated, was that it would be used by the tailor to make it fit me perfectly!

The salesman even went so far as to say, “It will hardly require any work at all!”

Now, as soon as I extended my leg I’d made a very large commitment to purchase that particular suit. When the pins went into the leg, it became ‘mine’ rather than one off the rack. This made it much harder to back out of the purchase. I did, in fact, make the purchase then and there.

This technique linked my sense of self with the suit in a very mild and subtle manner. Rather than comparing suits for the next few hours, I went with this one. After all, it fit me so well it hardly needed changing!

Entrepreneurs can use the characteristic that we extend our sense of self identity to objects in our possession to smooth the sales process. We are far more likely to pay for something we already own (even if only in our minds) than for something we have no attachment to at all.