It’s 1966, and an actor has just spilled coffee all over his suit. He is part of a famous experiment run by the social psychologist Elliot Aronson, in which 48 students listened to what they were told was an audition for a quiz programme.
Half of them heard a candidate who was almost faultless, scoring 92% of the questions correctly; the other half heard a candidate who only managed 30%.
Then, on half of the tapes, right at the end, there was a clatter of a chair and a voice: “Oh my goodness, I’ve spilled coffee all over my new suit.”
The students were then asked how much they liked him.
The brilliant candidate who spilled his coffee was rated the most likeable of the lot, more so than the identical brilliant candidate who kept his suit clean. The mediocre candidate who spilled his coffee was rated the least likeable of all.
This is known as the pratfall effect: competence makes you impressive, but flaws make you human. And it turns out human outperforms impressive.
Too good to be true
Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center analysed millions of product ratings and found that the likelihood of a consumer making a purchase does not rise in a neat line towards 5-star perfection. It peaks somewhere between 4.2 and 4.5 stars, but then drops as the rating creeps towards five. In no category they examined was the optimal score five stars.
Next time you promote your “5-Star Service”, consider the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam – an institution that has gone out of its way to vanquish any illusion of a quality experience.
In 1995, its owner appointed marketing agency KesselsKramer and the resulting campaign cheerfully promised no hot water, no lift, no guarantee of clean sheets, and no certainty of loo roll. Occupancy went up by 42%.
Now, this is not an argument for running a terrible business. The Hans Brinker works because it costs about thirty quid a night, but it also works because they self-promote with an honesty that negates perfection.
Which brings us to estate agency
We are an industry in pursuit of perfection. Immaculate photography with make-believe skies, response times quicker than Liam Neeson in Taken, glossy websites espousing Google ratings that must, at all costs, remain at 5.0.
Every one of those choices is well intentioned, but collectively they form the image of ourselves the public trusts least.
Most agents are adopting AI for efficiency, rather than quality. That’s an understandable choice, and it’s also the crux of the problem, because AI defaults to polish and perfection.
When you script a video with ChatGPT and use a teleprompter app, your smooth script entirely erases the quirks and charisma that make you unique. Property descriptions read like a travel brochure, using phrases that have Roy Brooks spinning in his grave. Images lean towards a perfected version of reality, when authenticity is what your audience wants. Your emails are warm in exactly the way a machine understands warmth.
In a global study of 8,000 consumers published by Klaviyo this year, only 7% said that visibly AI-generated marketing made them trust a brand more, while 31% said it made them trust the brand less. Animoto’s 2026 report found that 83% of consumers have watched a video they suspected was AI-generated and 36% said it would lower their opinion of the brand behind it.
Our customers don’t want homogenised polish; they want warts-and-all humans – and increasingly, with extra warts.
Where to leave the mess
As Jennifer Lawrence ascended the stage to collect her Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook in 2013, she stumbled on the steps in a moment that Vogue later said, “changed celebrity forever.”
Having collected her award, she then received something that none of the Oscar-winners had been given earlier in the evening – a standing ovation. The only difference between Lawrence and her fellow stars was that trip on the steps, and that was all it took for the pratfall effect to win our affection.
If a similar slip happened in an estate agency video, we would stop filming, reset, and go again – until we got the perfect take. Or we would just use AI.
Keep it.
Keep the bit where the dog barks, where you say the wrong street name and correct yourself, where the wind blows your hair into your face.
Write, or at least rewrite, in your own voice, including those turns of phrase that a machine would never produce, because it hasn’t been trained on a 42-year-old man who grew up on episodes of Dad’s Army and Just a Minute.
And when a three-star review arrives, resist the urge to treat it as a crisis. It is doing more work for you than the five above it.
Earn the spill
The part that gets forgotten in every LinkedIn post about “authenticity” is that in Aronson’s experiment, the pratfall effect only worked for the candidate who had already demonstrated he was competent. Without that… you’re just a prat.
Being wonky is not a strategy, but being wonky while you’re excellent is.
The agents who stand out in their local markets aren’t flawless; they are the ones you can still tell are more human than machine.
Toby Martin is a competent trainer and consultant, and a deeply flawed human.
