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Managing my money for young adults
Managing my money for young adults

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4 Your biases do affect your shopping

What pressures lie behind your shopping choices?

People around you exert influences, as you know, and their opinions or their styles can have an effect on your own shopping. But there are also other influences on how you spend your money – ‘short-cuts’ in your thinking, and assumptions in the way you make shopping decisions. These are used by marketing experts all the time, and they’re called ‘heuristics’.

We all use heuristics – ‘shopping beliefs’ – to assess situations where there’s only limited information available to us.

People sometimes pay a higher price for an item or a service they want because they think the higher price equals higher quality. So they’re using price as a mental short-cut to assess quality. But any link between price and quality might or might not exist, or at least the difference in price might not mean a difference in quality, especially when it comes to more expensive branded items.

The next video describes heuristics and how they operate in our lives. Do you recognise any of the heuristics presented here? Which ones influence your behaviour?

Download this video clip.Video player: mmmft_1_video_week3_section_heuristics.mp4
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