CET-6 Listening Lectures: The Decoy Effect and the Hawthorne Studies

Recording One.

Today I want to show you how a single useless option can change what you buy.

Economists call it the decoy effect.

The economist Dan Ariely once tested it with a magazine advertisement.

Readers could buy the online edition for fifty-nine dollars,

the print edition for a hundred and twenty-five,

or print and online together — also for a hundred and twenty-five!

Nobody chose print only. Why would they?

But eighty-four percent of his students chose the combined offer!

Then he removed the print-only option, which nobody wanted.

Suddenly, most students chose the cheaper online edition instead!

The useless option made the combined offer look like a bargain.

So when a choice feels obvious, ask yourself who designed it.

Questions sixteen to eighteen are based on the recording you have just heard.

Question sixteen. What is the lecture mainly about?

Question seventeen. What happened when the print-only option was removed?

Question eighteen. What does the speaker advise listeners to do?

Recording Two.

In the 1920s, researchers visited a factory near Chicago called the Hawthorne Works.

They wanted to know whether better lighting made workers more productive.

When they made the lights brighter, output went up.

But when they made the lights dimmer, output went up again!

Even the group whose lighting never changed worked harder.

One explanation is that the workers knew they were being studied.

The attention itself, not the light, changed their behaviour.

Today, many researchers think the effect was weaker than first reported.

But it still reminds scientists to be careful when people know they're being watched.

Questions nineteen to twenty-one are based on the recording you have just heard.

Question nineteen. What did the researchers want to find out?

Question twenty. What happened when the lights were made dimmer?

Question twenty-one. What do many researchers think about the effect today?