By Julian Baggini

"We do not generally employ people who have spent a career doing something else and who have turned to executive search as a second career. We want our people to be the best at hiring great management. … To do this well you need to get the kind of commitment you have in a first career, not a second one."
Armstrong International advertisement, 2003 campaign (Source: The Economist, 29 March 2003)

The comic alter ego of Graham Fellows, the hapless singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth, had a wonderful line in his stage show when he evangelised to the audience over the merits of a well-known sports drink. "It's isotonic," he said, "it cares for the environment."

As with so much of the Shuttleworth act, behind the banality lies an astute observation. Like many of us, Shuttleworth is easily impressed by the claims made by manufacturers and advertisers for their products, even when he doesn't understand what these claims mean. The mere fact that something is presented as an advantage is enough to win him over.

This is a version of the wider problem that if a claim is made with sufficient strength, conviction or authority, it tends to be accepted whatever its merits. The sub-species of "dubious advantages", however, works this trick in a slightly more sophisticated way. It works by presenting a claim which is factually correct, but in such a way as to make it appear like an advantage.

The classic version of this comes with the many foodstuffs which are advertised as "95% fat free" or similar. There is nothing at all factually incorrect about this. But the way that the claim is splashed over the packaging makes it evident that this fact is supposed to describe an advantage. What could this advantage be? Many consumers will assume that it means the product is healthier, or is a better option if they are trying to lose weight. But many such low-fat cakes, for example, are loaded with sugar and a serving can contain just as many calories as other regular-fat alternatives. In short, the fact that something is 95% fat free isn't necessarily an advantage, even though it is being sold to you as one.

Once you become alert to this, examples leap off the supermarket shelves and the advertising billboards. Why is it good that something contains Guarana if the amount it contains is less than that required for it to have any effect, assuming it has a desirable effect anyway? Why is it better that something comes in a new, bigger size, if the price has increased proportionally? Why should we rejoice that a cereal now comes in a foil bag when it was perfectly crispy in the old plastic one?

What makes the Armstrong International advertisement particularly interesting is that by spelling out so clearly why recruiting people starting their first career is supposed to be an advantage, they are being more open than those who merely imply their dubious advantages, but they also thereby make the questionable nature of this advantage clearer. For it just doesn't seem at all evident that people are more committed when on their first career than their second. Indeed, many people just drift into their first career, and the move to a second one often requires more commitment. And people on their second career have more experience, including that concerning which kinds of people makes great managers. Prima facie, then, the claim that this feature of their recruitment practices is an advantage is questionable and it seems unlikely that any empirical evidence exists to back it up.

The presentation of dubious advantages probably works because we are cognitive misers who will always make as few judgements as possible to get by. We prefer "that's true" or "that's false" to "the factual part of that claim is true but its implied advantages are not real." The latter requires us to distinguish the factual content from the evaluative implication of a claim and when we're glancing at advertisements or product packaging, that can be a cognitive task too many. It's not that we're stupid, it's just that we are already bombarded by commercial messages and we're doing all we can to filter them out. Also, there aren't many of us who are at our mentally sharpest when doing the shopping.

Julian Baggini is editor of The Philosophers' Magazine.