It's quite a well known teaser: If you have $110 to spend on a bat and ball, or £110 to spend on a ball and bat, and the bat costs 100 more than the ball, how much did you pay for the ball. Did you say $10 or £10 ? In which case you were probably imagining a baseball bat or a cricket bat.
The answer for the ball is of course, $5 or £5. And to spend 100 more on the bat than the ball, you would have to spend $105 or £105 on the bat, depending upon whether you were thinking of baseball or cricket.
It's very easy to get wrong, because our quick counting mind leaps into action... and thinks "I know how to do this; it's easy." And gets it wrong. Meanwhile, the slower analytical thought process is still waking up. Nobel prize winners, Kahneman and Tversky, in their famous book, "Thinking Fast and Slow" call these thinking modes "System One and System Two".
We are intuitive much of the time, because we think we already know the answer. But sometimes, the situation has changed and we need to think a bit harder for longer. Incidentally at other times, rather than calculating, it might be better to experiment. And rather than experimenting, it's sometimes best to use our intuition, which is after all developed from our experience. (This "thinking about thinking" is called "meta-cognition")
I tried this exercise in French, but of course we don't play much baseball or cricket in France; so I changed it to a pencil and an eraser. And it didn't work as a "meta-cognition" exercise because, well, too many people got it right; and not only the ones that knew it already.
This allowed me to develop my own "meta-cognition". When you suggest the image of a bat and a ball to people who have played baseball or cricket, they think "thwack". And the ball in their mind's eye gets hit right out of the park or over the boundary; like in my dreams. But when you think pencil and eraser, you start to think. You might even think about whether a pencil would really cost more than an eraser. You may think about when you did you exams, thinking deeply. I think you would be more likely to get the answer right for these two reasons, and maybe there's much more. You are more inclined to think.
So we know we can influence the way people think, simply by the numbers we use and the words we choose. Use positive words to get a positive response. Use fast-thinking words to get a faster decision. Think how much energy you can get from onomatopoeic words like "thwack" and "crack".
And please be 'mindful' of ethical-thinking, (or someone may spend too much).
