Rory Sutherland

It's in my book, Alchemy, which is, imagine you're turning up to buy a secondhand car and you turn up at the house, nondescript house, and the car's parked outside the house.

And you have a looky-loo at the car and you judge the, you know, whether the pedals are worn and the condition of the body work, and you have a look around the car.

And you decide you're interested in paying, let's say, $5,000 for this car.

So you go and ring on the doorbell of the vendor.

And the door is answered in one situation by, for example, a female vicar.

Okay?

Could be Catholic.

Well, they can't be Catholic.

But, you know, Episcopalian, doesn't really matter.

Okay?

Female vicar.

And it's a tidy, clean house.

At that point, you probably upweighed what you're prepared to pay by 20% or so.

In a parallel universe, the door is answered by a guy in his underpants.

In other words, someone with no shame.

In that instance, you devalue the car, I suspect, by about $1,000 or more.

In fact, you may not even buy it at all.

And what we're doing here is we're effectively saying, what I'm going to do is a stand-in for the question, do I buy the car, which I don't have the technical knowledge to answer.

I'm going to ask a supplementary heuristic question, which is, do I trust the person who's selling the car to me?

And it's an interesting question.