Dr. Paul Piff from the university of California, Berkley proved what we all suspected.. rich people behave like jackasses.

How imaginary wealth creates jackasses…

In his first study, Dr.  Piff had two college students play monopoly against each other. But one student was given substantial advantages…

The ‘richer’ student got three times more money at the beginning of the game. He got $400 instead of $200 when he ‘passed go’ and… he got to roll the dice two times for every roll the ‘poor’ student made.

After only 15 minutes, the ‘rich’ student started displaying dominant behavior.

He would tap his piece harder against the game board, make fun of the ‘poor’ student for having less money and use dominant body language like lifting his arms in the air or snickering.

And to top all that, when asked to explain why they won, the ‘rich’ students talked about the techniques they used and the smart purchase decisions they made. Almost none of them remembered the overwhelming advantages they were given.

In just 15 minutes, the game created a mindset of entitlement in ordinary students.

The unbelievable rich people zebra-crossing experiment

In another experiment, Dr Piff checked if drivers of luxurious cars behaved differently than drivers of low-priced cars by testing if they would stop and let a pedestrian cross at a zebra crossing  (In California where the test was conducted, drivers are bound by law to stop and let a pedestrian cross at a zebra crossing).

The results were mind blowing… After 100s of tests, the results showed that the drivers of the lowest price-category cars stopped almost 100% of the time.

While the drivers of the highest price-category cars (Mercedes, Porsche, etc’) stopped only 50% of the time.

This is worth repeating – rich people disobeyed the law (and behaved like raging jackasses) 50% of the time!!!

But what does it have to do with sales objections?

Within the sea of jackassary and evilness, Dr Piff made one promising revelation – that small psychological nudges made a huge difference in the attitude of rich people.

If they were shown a short 15-minute video about child poverty, rich people became just as willing to donate their time and money as poor people.

Rich people are not evil at their core – the set of advantages they have causes them to adopt a mind set of entitlement. But when ‘shaken’ out of their mindset, they become just as helpful and kind as poor people.

The same can be done with your customer’s mindset…

For example …

If you have a training product, a major purchase-objection your customer might have is that he doesn’t have time to learn new things.

In that case, instead of bullying him with advice like:

“Get up an hour earlier!”

Or …

“Work after your wife and the kids have gone to sleep! – I worked from 10:00pm to 1:00am every night and look at how successful I am!”

or my favorites…

“Double down and do the work”  and… “You can have anything you want but not everything you want”.

Instead, try to gently shift their mindset by showing them how much fun they can have while learning.

Or … how implementing what they learn will actually free up their time.