Digital Hive

Let's all try to use our right hemispheres, OK?

I discovered this incredibly cool YouTube video of Dr Jill Bolte Taylor (actually, she's an neuroanatomist) describing her own experience with a stroke (brain hemmorhage). It's fascinating to hear her describe how her reduced brain function affects her abilities and perception; particularly interesting is her description of how the right and left lobes of the brain differ, and how it's easy to let the left (linear, serial processing) lobe dominate our human experiences.

Interesting stuff........

The Rationale Behind our Irrational Ways

     As human beings, we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, capable of overcoming our emotional impulses. Yet it turns out that we not only tend to act irrationally, but we do so in a predictable fashion.

    

     In the new book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions,” Dan Ariely, a professor at MIT, offers an empirical approach to reveal the underlying logic to our illogic.  In a recent New Yorker article, he states, “our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic.  We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.”  He argues that we’re so attached to certain kinds of errors that we’re not capable of even recognizing them as errors.

    

     Ariely’s field, behavioral economics, has been around for about 25 years mostly as a result of the work done in the 70's by Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.  After examining how people deal with uncertainty, they found that there were consistent biases to the responses and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts—what they deemed “heuristics.”  Some of these heuristics were fairly obvious, such as making inferences based on our own experiences (i.e.: people who’ve recently witnessed a traffic accident will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash).  But others were more surprising or even silly.  For example:

• Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the UN.  By spinning a wheel of numbers in front of them, they found that they could influence the subjects’ responses: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.

• Ariely and a colleague asked students at MIT's Sloan School of Management to write the last two digits of their Social Security number at the top of a sheet of paper.  Students were then asked to record (on the same piece of paper) whether they were willing to pay that many dollars for a fancy bottle of wine, a not-so fancy bottle of wine, a book or a box of chocolates.  The students were also told to record the maximum amount they’d be willing to spend on these items.  At the end of this exercise, Ariely asked the students whether they thought their social security numbers influenced their bids at all.  The students of course dismissed the idea, but after Ariely tallied the results he found that students whose SS number ended with the lowest figures (00 to 19) were the lowest bidders.  For all of the items combined, they were willing to offer $67 on average. The students in the middle group—20 to 39—were somewhat more free-spending, offering $102 on average. The pattern continued up to the highest group—80 to 99—whose members were willing to spend an average of a $198, or three times as much as those in the lowest group, for the same items. And these are MBA candidates!

• In another study, subjects were willing to help out others—moving a couch, performing a tedious exercise on a computer—when they were offered a reasonable wage. However, when they were offered less money, they were less likely to make an effort. Yet when they were asked to help for free, they started trying again.

     Tversky’s and Kahneman’s initial discoveries have been confirmed and extended over the years in dozens of experiments and even awarded them the Nobel Prize in 1996.  This research even extends to democratic theory—demonstrating how voters decisions’ are influenced by factors such as how names are placed on a ballot—as well as Americans’ inability to save money.  Clearly this work had some disruptive implications for the field of economics—after all, how can you regard people as rational calculators if their decisions are influenced by random numbers?

    

     We can see this at work both in the online and offline marketing world.  For example, Amazon.com offers “free super saver shipping” if you increase your order (which often costs us more than we originally intended to spend—but we ration that we’re ‘saving’).  Ariely also gives the example of the board of prices at Starbucks, where it’s the other numbers on the board influencing your opinion on what the tall non-fat cappuccino is worth (and not the interplay of supply and demand as microeconomics would have us believe).

    

     We need to become more aware of these patterns and also learn to accept our irrationality  humanity.

What cognitive science tells us about PPT

Thanks to Gareth Kay at Brand New for calling out this interesting post on i09 about cognitive scientist Stephen M Kosselyn's recommendations about how PPT can be tailored to the way the human brain processes information.

According to Kosselyn (as quoted on io9) the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work:

Don't offer me too much functionality!

Snaps to Organic's Three Minds blog for shedding light a very interesting piece of recent research from the University of Chicago. As described in a NYT article the study documented that when people are offered a choice between multifunctional and singly functional objects, they prefer singly functioned.

The experiment had people choose between a plain pen and a pen equipped with a laser pointer. The plain pen was selected in virtually all instances.

This seems to fly in the face of what we think as interactive marketers - aren't we supposed to give people lots of functionality? Isn't that marketing as a service?

Well, maybe not.

"What happens, the researchers showed through other studies, is that connecting one tool or method to multiple goals weakens the mental association between that means and any one goal. Take jogging, for instance. Participants in one study were informed that jogging both strengthens muscles and increases the body’s level of oxygen. But after the researchers subliminally reinforced the participants’ association between jogging and one of those goals — strengthening muscles — participants irrationally deemed jogging less effective for boosting oxygen."

It seems to have more to do with the meaning of the functionality than with the functionality. I guess the learning for us is: if you're giving people lots of ways to interact with a brand online and you don't want to confuse them or inhibit their response, make sure it all hangs together as part of a single experience, message or takeaway.

Thoughts?

There's a physiological reason for optimisim - but use in moderation

Check out this great WSJ article about the optimistic brain (reg. req'd. until Rupert Murdoch decides to give it away for free, but that's an entirely different story for now).

The article reports: "Two research teams exploring the anatomy of expectations offer a new perspective on the power of a positive outlook. For the first time, scientists at New York University have mapped the upbeat brain -- finding in a cluster of neurons the size of a martini olive the seed of a sunny outlook on life. At its core, the brain is built for optimism, their work suggests.

"Mapping brain behavior with an fMRI medical imaging scanner, NYU neuroscientists Talia Sharot and Elizabeth Phelps identified the neural networks underlying this optimistic outlook. Their work, published in Nature, was presented earlier this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.

"By studying neural activity in 15 healthy U.S. volunteers, they learned that our brains imagine positive future events about our own well-being more intensely and vividly than negative possibilities.

"These rosy thoughts triggered one key brain region most strongly. Called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, this neural nub is active whenever we think of hopes and aspirations. "This region of the cortex may actually be taking information and transforming it in a way that creates this optimism bias," Dr. Phelps said.

"Optimists, the Duke finance scholars discovered, worked longer hours every week, expected to retire later in life, were less likely to smoke and, when they divorced, were more likely to remarry. They also saved more, had more of their wealth in liquid assets, invested more in individual stocks and paid credit-card bills more promptly."

Sounds good, right? But don't take it too far. "Those who saw the future too brightly -- people who in the survey overestimated their own likely lifespan by 20 years or more -- behaved in just the opposite way, the researchers discovered. Rather than save, they squandered. They postponed bill-paying. Instead of taking the long view, they barely looked past tomorrow. Statistically, they were more likely to be day traders. "Optimism is a little like red wine," said Duke finance professor and study co-author Manju Puri. "In moderation, it is good for you; but no one would suggest you drink two bottles a day."

Download the science_journal_wsj.com.pdf by clicking here