Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition
by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
106 Left-Digit Effect
People give more weight to the left-most digits of prices in buying decisions.
People judge the difference between $5.00 and $4.99 to be larger than between $5.01 and $5.00, even though the differences are the same. Why? When viewing a price, people have an outsized emotional reaction to the first digit in the sequence, giving more weight to its value. In cultures that read from left to right, this reaction is based on the left-most digit in prices. In countries that read top-down or right-left, the effect is based on the top-most or right-most digit, respectively. The effect applies to all numbers or measurements, including weight on a scale, available bytes of disk space, running times in a race, and driving speeds relative ...
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