Pelin

The test I use, and it has held up: would I be comfortable if a customer bought the expensive plan?

If the answer is yes — it is a real plan, it delivers real value, some customers genuinely want it and are well served — then the tier is honest and its effect on the perception of the others is a side effect of existing.

If the answer is "nobody should ever buy that", you have built a prop. Sooner or later somebody will buy it, because somebody always does, and you will have taken money for something you designed to be a bad deal.

That one question separates almost every real case I have seen, and it does not require deciding anything about psychology.

There is a variant of this worth checking while you are in there: what does your green mean when something goes wrong?

If green is the brand colour, teams often end up using it for primary buttons everywhere — including the confirm button on destructive dialogs, because that is what the primary button looks like. Now "Delete everything" is green, which reads as reassurance.

That is a more serious version of your problem, and it shows up in exactly the moments where you least want ambiguity. Worth auditing your destructive flows specifically rather than only the status indicators.

On the piling-into-the-first-door part specifically: that is rational behaviour under uncertainty rather than a mistake.

A lift in front of you now is worth more than a lift that might arrive shortly, because you cannot see the other one's position and you have been burned before. Buildings that display where each car is, and which is arriving next, get noticeably better spreading — not because people become more cooperative, but because waiting stops being a gamble.

Information displays are usually cheaper than a new dispatch system and get part of the benefit.