Consider this. You buy a 100-year-old rosewood cot. You like the cot because of its elegant design and for the quality of rosewood. Sometime later, an expert at restoring old furniture inspects the cot and tells you that the rosewood is hardly 30 years old. You, perhaps, do not fancy old furniture, but may have had a similar experience buying rare art or other antique. The question is: Will you still like your artefact just as much after you find that your acquisition is after all not so antique?
If you are a typical individual, your joy of owning the rosewood cot would diminish substantially. Yet, you liked the quality of the rose wood and the furniture’s design when you bought it! What happened? Your behaviour can be the result of what psychologists call value attribution.
Value attribution refers to our tendency to attribute value to an object based on perceived value rather than on objective features! Your value for the cot primarily comes from your belief that it is 100 years old, and not just from the fact that the cot is elegant, authentic rosewood furniture. Your perceived value for the cot, hence, diminished when you found that it was not very old.
Whether it is buying a vase at an art gallery or buying branded jeans at a boutique, we often suffer from value attribution. This behaviour can prove costly! Why? You may be willing to pay a higher price if the art dealer gives you a context to the painting- the painting’s age, for instance, and the reason the artist chose the theme. The context also gives you the opportunity to tell a “story” to your friends when you display your artefact.
And if you are wondering whether we really perceive a different value based on the context, consider this experiment: The Washington Post asked Joshua Bell, one of the leading violinists in the world, to dress casually and play at a subway station in Washington DC. You would expect commuters to stop and listen to him; for Joshua Bell had played the violin to a sold-out audience just some days earlier to his appearance at the subway station. Yet, almost no subway commuter stopped to listen to his music! The same violinist but a different setting and people’s perception of his music was different!
Now, if we liked the music or the rosewood furniture based only on its objective features, context would not matter. Yet, context often drives value. And sometimes this behaviour leads to bad choices— for instance, when we believe that discounted products are inferior because they are cheaper!
(The author is the founder of Navera Consulting. Feedback may be sent to >knowledge@thehindu.co.in )