Business Book Review: Mind Over Mind by Chris Berdik
Berdik shares the science behind the power of expectations and how our future-focused brains can bend reality.
My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 286 pages
Publisher: Current
Released: 2012
Key Takeaways for Personal Branding
Can your expectations shape your reality? Learn how the great expectations of your brain affect your attitudes, behaviour and outcomes.
If you love facts and stats, journalist Chris Berdik delivers back-to-back science in this research-rich book. A testament to Berdik’s journalistic pedigree, he takes a hard facts approach and minimises his personal voice and perspective. It’s the perfect read for the pragmatically predisposed. From an emphasis on medical science to sports, wine and more references, Berdik provides something for all preferences.
The Price-Quality Heuristic
In 2001, Frédéric Brochet, a wine researcher from the University of Bordeux, proved the power of price on expectations and perceptions. He packaged an average wine in two bottles, a pricey Grand Cru bottle and a cheap bottle of table wine, serving it to sommeliers. The wine experts praised the wine poured from the pricey packaged bottle, describing it as “excellent, balanced and flavoursome”. The same wine, poured from the cheap bottle, was described as “weak, flat, unbalanced and volatile”.
The price-quality heuristic can be fairly accurate when it comes to products with more objective measures of quality, such as durability or performance. However, for experiential goods like wine (requiring humans’ undeveloped fine flavour distinctions), leisure or entertainment, price-quality becomes less accurate.
Marketers can use price to create preferences. Economists call this the price-quality heuristic, which posits that we assume the more expensive, the better.
Self-perception Theory
Self-perception theory posits that in addition to your brain observing, perceiving and interpreting the world, your brain is also observing, perceiving and interpreting you. These expectations of yourself influence your attitude and behaviours to match the assumptions you’ve made about yourself.
In one 2012 research study, a large group of women were asked to try on sunglasses for what they were told was a marketing study. All participants were given the same sunglasses, though some were described as ‘designer’, and some were deemed ‘counterfeit’. Those who received the ‘counterfeit’ glasses cheated more in the cognitive exercises facilitated during the research. Their self-perception altered their moral code.
Can I get you a coffee or a tea?
Title details matter.
Fun fact: Research has shown that people who are given a warm drink are more likely to judge a stranger’s personality as warm compared to those who are given a cold drink.
Favourite Quotes
“Ultimately, the value of money is based on expectations of a future exchange, which requires trust that others will value the money just as we do based on their own expectations of future exchanges. Money is an act of faith in one another.”
Mind Over Mind by Chris Berdik is Available on Amazon.
