Was the phrasing of the Scottish referendum question designed to create division?

It is a trick which often works on children. Do not tell them to eat vegetables; instead ask whether they want broccoli or spinach.

Question such as ‘Red or white?’ or ‘Still or sparkling?’ are examples of placebo choice: a psychological hack which works rather like the placebo ‘door close’ buttons in lifts (which are usually not wired up to anything but exist to give impatient people the illusion of control).

Such questions give the feeling of choice without offering much at all. The hack needs to be viewed with caution since it can subtly transmute ‘I prefer B to A’ into ‘I want B’. Watch out for canny estate agents who show you a slightly inferior house just before they show you the one they really want to sell.

If you think you can’t be manipulated, then next time you go for a restaurant meal in a group, see how difficult it is to avoid drinking wine. Restaurants do everything they can to make sure you drink wine, since it is disproportionately profitable (unlike, say, gin; I have no idea what a bottle of Château de l’Effet d’Ancrage costs, so they can get away with buying it at £8 and flogging it at £35 without anyone feeling ripped off).

So they put wine glasses on the table by default, and hand you a menu suggestively called ‘a wine list’. Of this, the first five pages consist of an insanely large variety of wine, with a lonely page at the back for those deviants and misfits who prefer to drink something made by people who have evolved to the level of ingenuity required to grow hops and practise distillation. But merely scanning that back page feels like reaching for the top shelf in a newsagent’s (for younger readers, that’s the analogue equivalent of forgetting to delete your browser history).