Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) Read Online Free PDF Page A

patient insisted. “It’s a feeling of not being able to control my standing.” The woman managed a few steps in her heels, bracing herself against the wall. “Are you hypnotizing me? Because that’s kind of sneaky.”
    Dr. Eskildsen spoke not to his patient but to an intercom on the wall: “Okay, Jim, our subject has popped.”
     
    Paul Hoffman had been an Air Force navigator in the South Pacific. Home from the war, he earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and became an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, where he found he didn’t much like teaching. Instead, Hoffman nursed a dream of establishing a think tank to study human decision making. He got his chance in 1960. Using a $60,000 National Science Foundation grant and a mortgage on his home, Hoffman bought a Unitarian church building at Eleventh and Ferry and rechristened it the Oregon Research Institute. Hoffman believed that some research was best done without the red tape of a university. A prime example of that came in 1965.
    The designers of a New York office building presented Hoffman with a problem. The tenants on the building’s top floors would be paying the highest rents. The architect and engineers were concerned that these top floors would sway in Manhattan’s stiff winds. They didn’t want their prize tenants to feel vulnerable. To prevent that, they needed to know exactly how much horizontal swaying was noticeable. There did not seem to be any data on that.
    As Hoffman recognized, they needed to do an experiment in psychophysics. A “just noticeable difference” is the smallest perceptible amount of a stimulus (in this case, the swaying of a room). There was an extensive psychophysical literature, going back to the nineteenth century, on how to measure just noticeable differences. It would have been easy enough to build some sort of moving cubicle. But Hoffman knew that had he told people the experiment’s purpose, they would have been expecting the cubicle to move. That expectation would cause them to detect motion—or
say
they detected it—much sooner. “So I began tothink,” Hoffman recalled. “How would you invite a person to come down to an office and sit in a room, for some purpose or other, and be able to start that room in motion?”
    Hoffman rented a space in a Eugene office building at 800 Pearl Street and constructed a fake optometrist’s office. The examining room was on wheels. A soundproofed hydraulic mechanism, originally designed to move logs through a sawmill, caused the room to sway back and forth with increasing speed and displacement. The vibration-free movement could range from an inch to twelve feet. Paul Eskildsen, a psychologist who also happened to be a licensed optometrist, agreed to play that role. During the course of seventy-two bogus eye exams, they slowly cranked up the speed of the room’s swaying until the subjects “popped”—that is, said something to indicate they noticed. The data Eskildsen and Hoffman cared about was how much the room had to be swaying for “patients” to notice. Physical descriptions (pregnancy, high heels, etc.) were carefully recorded, as were their words:
I feel that I’m not stable. I feel like I’m on a boat. Back in Pennsylvania we had to take drunk driving tests by walking on a line . . .
    It’s unpleasant. You probably have me on an X-ray or something. Maybe I’m on
Candid Camera . . .
    I think you’re taking away my gravity or something . . .
    Eskildsen was not immune. Every day he got seasick, went home to recuperate, and came back the next morning to get sick again.
    The results showed that the threshold for noticeable swaying was about ten times smaller than the building’s engineers had been assuming. Though this was not what the clients wanted to hear, they were intrigued by Hoffman’s methods. Architect Minoru Yamasaki and engineer Leslie Robertson visited Oregon and insisted on taking a “ride” in the contraption. They were