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In this short monologue, Corrado Fontana explains how people instinctively place others on a comparative scale when meeting them. He argues that the questions people ask (e.g., “What do you do?”) trigger an internal ranking based on education level (middle school, high school diploma, university degree, master’s, doctorate) and profession (medicine, law, etc.), which in turn leads to assumptions about the person’s income and social status. Fontana also notes that when a client does not provide a budget, it signals that the client has not yet formed a comparative scale for the problem at hand, indicating a lack of reference point for evaluating solutions.
