influence

There are many, many discussions and arguments written about healthcare. There should be. This will be a historical change.

In the midst of these discussions, errors of logic and reasoning creep into the fray. Sometimes, these ‘mistakes’ seem like devices meant to antagonize the talk-show guests or to boost ratings. Other times, they feel like devices meant to help convince the audience to agree with the speaker’s argument.

So I spend too much time debating the fallacies than understanding the issues. Here’s a post walking through many of the same things I’ve experienced with teaching fallacies.

Link:

When it comes to health care, which nation do we want to be?

In the previous post, we discussed 2 headlines and why they worked. I’ve already mentioned the benefits in the headlines, so you should read that post first and make sure you understand it. .

Today I want to discuss the use of logic in the second headline. And I don’t mean the common usage of the word logic, like ‘Oh, that’s logical.’ I’m talking about the formal definition of logic – the use of AND and OR in structuring the offer.

The second headline uses the phrase ‘and/or’ several times through it. You can presume that the writer wasn’t intending to confuse the reader.(At least, let’s hope that’s the case.)  That leaves us with the idea that the phrase was to suggest the flexibility of the offer.

Did it work? Was the flexibility shown? I don’t think so.

Here’s why – When someone is reading a headline, you can assume that they are in a hurry. You have a few precious seconds to make a connection or you’re in the weeds. The reader will turn the page, leave your site, or throw your piece in the trash. You want the headline to be appealing and uncomplicated. By introducing the ‘and/or’ phrase, you create this convoluted array of combinations that’s confusing.

Imagine that the reader is humming along, reading your headline. Then she gets to the ‘and/or’ part and she stops to think,

‘Wait, does mean that it is included or that it isn’t included?’

More importantly, the language makes her stop just long enough to say,

‘This sounds like some type of trick. They are making it unclear so that they’ll have a loophole to get my money.’

And after that, she’s gone. One more prospect who’s left you.

Don’t add complications to the headline. Make it simple.

I’m reading a book called “50 Case Histories on How to Write and Design Ads that Work.”  So far, it’s interesting. The editors of the book reviewed the results from successful ads (both consumer and business) and reported on the aspects of the winning letters. I’d change some things in the book, but it’s interesting nonetheless. You could get a great list of ideas from this book.

Here’s one of the examples tested for an ad on insurance:

Headline 1: “Great new insurance plan pays hospital, surgical expenses”

Comment: Not great, but it’s short and direct. And the benefit is obvious. 

Headline 2: “Now great new insurance plan offers you protection for hospital, surgical, and/or doctors’ bills and/or lost income.”

Comment: This headline has no rhythm or flow, but it does offer more benefits. 

The first headline pulled in double the response. (That’s not surprising. It is easier to read and it flows.) The editors claim the second headline should have done better, since it’s providing more benefits. More benefits equals higher results, right? In general, yes.

In this case, there are two flaws in the copy. 1 – The underlying story going on in the customer’s head. 2 – The use of logic (specifically, the word ‘OR’).

Let’s talk about the first one. Stories.

Every person on the planet is living in their own reality. Even you. Now, I’m not talking about the crazy people you see in the insane asylums or the people who have been hit with demetia. I mean every person on the planet – even the sane – is living in their own reality. They have their own history, language, experiences, and stories. Any experience is filtered through this lens of reality.

By the way, this means you, too.

As you read the headline above, you are running through an internal story. In the first headline, the story is – “Well, I know I have to pay hospital bills and they sometimes get expensive, so it would be nice to get money to pay them off.” The basic idea is ‘Free money’ or ‘Free hospital care.’ 

That’s a fairly compelling benefit. 

In the second headline, the same benefit is described as ‘protection from …..” Although logically equivalent, the story going through someone’s head is different. The reader is thinking, “Protection!?!? I need protection from the hospital…? Are they the mafia? Do they mean protection from disease? Am I going to get sick if I go to the hospital? Wait, what if I die?” and so on….

By using the word ‘protection’, the story inside a reader’s head becomes, ‘The hospital is going to do something to me that forces me to need protection.’ 

That’s not really the best motivator. In fact, I bet this headline scared more people away from the hospital.

Just because you are adding more benefits doesn’t mean that the reader is interpreting them as such. Always pay attention to the story going on in your reader’s head. Remember, you are writing for their reality, not yours. 

As for the second attribute – Logic – I’ll cover that one tomorrow.

Today, it’s common to hear about marketers, politicians, and cult leaders manipulating and cooercing people with commericials and slogans. Back in 1957, it was non-existent. Vance Packard’s book, The Hidden Persuaders was the first attempt at documenting and describing advertiser’s use of psychological ‘motiviation research’ to influence consumers.

The book lacks the academic front normally associated with these types of industry descriptions. It’s both good and bad. The prose lends itself to great (and sometimes grandiose) explanations, but it lacks the references of footnotes to properly provide authority. Readers who don’t mind the lack of footnotes are in good company with this book.

From a practioners viewpoint, I appreciated the examples and demonstrations in the book. More interesting for me was the use of anitquated examples (but were perfectly acceptable in 1957) to illustrate the principles.

One such passage describes the practice of ’selling emotional security’ to influence the purchase of home freezers. This technique is well-known, but to see the description in the context of 1957 products was awkward.

The book provides good information and I suggest anyone serious interested in persuasion (or advertising) pick up a copy.

A heuristic is a mental shortcut we – all humans – use in our decision making process. We develop heuristics because the costs associated with considering and evaluating EVERY decision would cripple our mental processing. We would constantly overheat our brains trying to make the simplest of decisions.

For example, if you are in a busy building and you are leaving, you don’t stop and carefully calculate which exit is the most efficient route to save you time. You also don’t stop and evaluate the relative safety of the door opening and the frame around the door. You also don’t stop to consider the possibility that you will become lodged in the door never to escape. There are a million other things you don’t evaluate.

What happens in your brain is something like this-

You: I want to leave the building.

Brain: Follow the other people leaving the building.

And, just like that, we’re outside.

A heuristic is not inherently good or bad, it just is. However, social psychologists and behavior specialists are coming to realize that there are some heuristics that can lead us down faulty decision making paths.

And that’s where the fun begins.

Bad Science has a great article on the ‘copycat suicide’ effect, where media reporting of suicide can increase the chances of suicide in other people.

Copycat suicide is sometimes called the ‘Werther Effect’, after Goethe published his 1774 novel ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ which depicted Werther’s suicide and was reportedly followed by people imitating the same method to end their lives.

It’s an interesting effect because it shows the influence on the media on what people usually think of the most extreme of decisions.

An excellent 2003 review article on the subject found that the effect holds for all media reports of suicides (including fictional ones) but celebrity suicide is most associated with subsequent deaths. Interestingly, it notes that the largest known increase followed the death of Marilyn Monroe.

The review also found found that the greater the coverage of the suicide, and the more details in the reporting, the larger the increase in subsequent deaths.

Because of this, there are now media guidelines for reporting suicide, and the Bad Science article reports on a particularly bad example where the journalist reported exactly the sort of thing most associated with increased risk in a single story – virtually nothing except details of the suicide method.

One of the most interesting bits of the Bad Science piece doesn’t appear in the print version. However, it discusses research that found the majority of people who attempt suicide and survive are pleased they did some years later:

There is a literature which I think is extremely powerful, and yet unanimously ignored by mainstream media, and that is the follow-up data on what happens later in life to people who have felt so suicidal that they have made serious attempts on their own lives.

In extremis Pajonk et al followed up a large number of people who they picked up in intensive care after very serious suicide attempts. Amongst those who survived, and did not have serious psychotic illnesses, six years later, the majority were happy and well, living productive family lives, and were – we might reasonably interpolate – glad to be alive.

Link to Bad Science article on media reporting of suicide.
Link to review article on media and suicide (with open-access link).

Why should you spend time studying influence? It takes lots of time and reading the research reports certainly isn’t the best use of your time. Right?

There are three big reasons you should be paying attention to influence, persuasion, and human behavior.

1. It helps you in your business. By understanding the nature and idiosyncrasies of buying behavior, you learn to improve your marketing, messaging, and product in order to make more sales.

2. It helps you recognize your own behavior. When you understand influence and persuasion, you can instantly see the techniques being used on you. This gives you a chance to put more thought into your decision. You may decide that you want to the buy the item, but at least you are making a conscious decision.

3. It provides a foundation for discussion and eliminates hand-waving. More times than not, a business owner will adamantly insist on a particular campaign or the wording of a phrase. Alternatively, they will summarily dismiss some ideas that are put on the table. In both situations, the owner believes that they have ‘insider’ knowledge of their industry and they know better than anyone else. By studying influence, you can discuss the specific techniques and research behind your campaign ideas.

And, for me, there is a fourth reason. I find this stuff insanely interesting. I’ve always been interested in learning how things work. Learning how the brain works is a natural extension to this curiosity.

New memory study records the activation of human brain cells deep inside the living brain.

The mystery of what happens in our brains when we remember something is fascinating not only from a scientific perspective but also because the experience of recall can be so, well, memorable. Thinking backwards we become sensory time travellers; recalling sights, sounds, events, emotions – all in the blink of an eye. But what happens in our brains when we travel backwards?

For years scientists have told a story that goes roughly like this: when we experience something – say riding a bicycle for the first time – a network of neurons in the brain are activated. Then, later on, when we recall that first experience, that same network, or something like it, is activated again.

There is some round-a-bout evidence that this is exactly what is going on, but nothing direct. That is, until now. A US and Israeli research group have provided the strongest evidence so far that this story is accurate by recording individual neurons inside the living human brain.

Brain surgery for epilepsy

Recording the firing of individual human brain cells for experimental purposes is tricky as it’s obviously highly unethical to cut people’s heads open just so that scientists can satisfy their curiosity about how memory works. In this case though participants in a study carried out by Gelbard-Sagiv et al. (2008), reported in the prestigious journal Science, were undergoing brain surgery anyway and so agreed to an experiment.

The volunteers all had epilepsy which had not responded to drug treatments. So, as a last resort they had consented to surgery, the first stage of which involves implanting electrodes into the brain in order to locate the exact source of the seizures. The probes were inserted into the medial temporal lobe, near the hippocampus, an area of the brain central to memory and how we remember events.

To treat their epilepsy effectively patients must then wait until they have a seizure so that neurosurgeons can locate the exact area of the brain that they need to treat. It was during this time that the experiment was carried out.

Experiencing, then recalling, The Simpsons

The experiment involved showing the thirteen patients short clips (5 to 10 seconds) of famous people, characters or animals who were engaged in some activity. For example some of the clips were from the comedy shows The Simpsons and Seinfeld. They then recorded the activity of any neurons that were in range of the probe.

In total the researchers recorded the electrical signals of 857 individual neurons which they found specifically responded to one or other of these clips by increasing their firing rate, either singly or multiply. This is the memory trace being laid down in the brain.

Then participants were given a task to distract them after which they were asked to freely recall any of the clips they had seen earlier. Two very cool things happened. The first was that when participants recalled a particular video, say the clip from The Simpsons, exactly the same neuron (or neurons) increased its firing rate as had been activated when they watched the clip in the first place.

This is a nice finding but be careful about interpreting it – it doesn’t mean that there’s one neuron or a series of neurons that responds to The Simpsons. What it does mean is that, for whatever reason, this particular neuron was activated by this particular scene, almost certainly with a network of other neurons across the brain. But because researchers were only measuring a tiny proportion of the brain’s neurons, they only saw the activation in one or sometimes a few neurons.

The second thing they noticed was that the neurons began to fire about 1.5 seconds before participants were conscious of remembering the particular clip. Effectively the researchers could predict which clip the patients were in the process of remembering before they actually said they became aware of it.

Resurrection of past neuronal activity

This study provides strong evidence that memory works through the reactivation of specific individual neurons in the hippocampus. Effectively things that happen to us activate networks of neurons in the brain, and when we recall past events at least some of these same neurons fire again.

One of the authors of the study, Dr. Itzhak Fried, describes it like this: “In a way then, reliving past experience in our memory is the resurrection of neuronal activity from the past”.

Calling memory a ‘resurrection of neuronal activity from the past’ might not sound like a terribly poetic description for one of our most profound experiences, but it’s a phrase memory researchers will be very happy to hear because it suggests they’re on the right track.

Memories Are Made Of This sung live by Dean Martin in 1956:

» Find out more about the 7 sins of memory.

[Image credit: Benedict Campbell]

“It’s all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.” ~Mick Jagger

New research suggests self-control can be improved using abstract reasoning.

Temptation comes in many forms, often so potent, so animal, that it seems impossible to resist. Eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much or letting the heart rule the head. We get instant messages from deep in the gut that resonate through the mind, trying to dictate our behaviour.

One of humanity’s most useful skills, without which advanced civilisations would not exist, is being able to engage our higher cognitive functions, our self-control, to resist these temptations. Psychologists have found that self-control is strongly associated with what we label success: higher self-esteem, better interpersonal skills, better emotional responses and, perhaps surprisingly, few drawbacks at even very high levels of self-control (Tangney et al., 2004).

People, being only human, find the constant battle with basic urges is frequently too great and their self-control buckles. However, recent experimental research by Dr Kentaro Fujita at Ohio State University and colleagues has explored ways of improving self-control, where it comes from and why it sometimes deserts us.

Based on new research, along with studies conducted over the past few decades, Dr Fujita and colleagues have proposed that abstract thinking and psychological distance are particularly important in self-control.

1. Evidence that abstract thinking improves self-control

It never ceases to amaze just how different two people’s views of exactly the same event can be: one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. But the way in which we view people or events isn’t just constrained by unchangeable patterns of thought that are set in stone. Dr Fujita and colleagues explored the idea that simple manipulations of how we construe the world can have a direct effect on self-control. Their hunch was that thinking from a more abstract, high-level perspective increases self-control.

In their research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Fujita et al. (2006) used a number of experiments to test the idea that self-control is affected by how we construe or interpret events. The problem for the researchers was manipulating aspects of people’s construal without them realising: this required some deception.

In one of Fujita et al.’s (2006) studies participants were told they were going to take part in two separate experiments – one on personality and another billed as a student survey. In fact this was just a cover story as the two pieces of research were designed to work together.

Experimenters used the ’student survey’ as a cover to manipulate levels of construal. They needed participants to be thinking in either a high-level way (abstract – seeing the whole forest) or a low-level way (concrete – seeing individual trees). They did this by getting participants to think about their level of physical health, but in two different ways:

• High-level construal condition: participants were asked to fill in a diagram which encouraged them to think about why they maintain good physical health. Participants tended to put answer such as: “To do well in school.” This got them thinking about ends rather than means – the ultimate purpose of physical health.
• Low-level construal condition: in contrast participants in this condition were asked to think about how they maintained their physical health. Naturally they responded with things like: “Go exercise”. In other words they focused on means rather than ends, the actual process.

Just before this manipulation of construal level, in a study they were misinformed was separate, participants were told their personality was being tested physiologically through holding a handgrip. This handgrip was designed to be difficult to squeeze together but participants were told to hold on as long as possible. This provided a baseline measurement of their grip strength.

Just after the manipulation of construal level participants had dummy electrodes attached to their arm and were told that their personality could be measured while they squeezed the stiff handgrip again. This time, though, they were told that the longer they could squeeze the handgrip the more accurate the information would be. The question was: how well could participants forget the temporary discomfort of holding the handgrip once they had been told about the desired goal of getting information about their own personalities?

The results confirmed Fujita et al.’s (2006) suspicions. They showed that participants in the low-construal thinking condition (thinking about means rather than ends) held on to the handgrip for, on average, 4.9 seconds less than they had during the baseline measurement.

In contrast those in the high-construal condition held on for 11.1 seconds longer than their baseline measurement. Whether participants were thinking about means or ends had a really significant effect on how long they squeezed the handgrip. Those participants who had been encouraged to think in high-level, abstract terms demonstrated greater self-control in enduring the discomfort of the handgrip in order to receive more accurate personality profiles.

Along with this design Fujita et al. (2006) also carried out other studies using different measures of self-control and different ways of inducing either high-level or low-level construal. These produced similar findings. People in the high-level construal condition were consistently:

• More likely to avoid the temptation of instant gratification.
• Prepared to make a greater investment to learn more about their health status.
• Less likely to evaluate temptations like beer and television positively.

2. How personality and the situation affect self-control

Self-control is not just affected by how we are thinking at a specific moment, that would be too easy. We have each developed different amounts of self-control. Some people seem to find it easy to resist temptation while others can be relied on to always yield to self-gratification. To a certain extent we have to accept our starting point on the self-control sliding scale and do the best we can with it.

Although a few people have very high (or very low) levels of self-control, two-thirds of us lie somewhere near the middle: sometimes finding it easy to resist temptation, other times not. Naturally the exact situation has a huge effect on how much self-control we can exert. One property of different situations central to self-control that psychologists have examined is ‘psychological distance’.

Research reveals that people find it much easier to make decisions that demonstrate self-control when they are thinking about events that are distant in time, for example how much exercise they will do next week or what they will eat tomorrow (Fujita, 2008). Similarly they make much more disciplined decisions on behalf of other people than they do for themselves. People implicitly follow the maxim: do what I say, not what I do.

It’s not hard to see the convergence between the idea of ‘psychological distance’ and high-level construal. Both emphasise the idea that the more psychological or conceptual distance we can put between ourselves and the particular decision or event, the more we are able to think about it in an abstract way, and therefore the more self-control we can exert. It’s all about developing a special type of objectivity.

3. How to improve your self-control

Fujita et al.’s (2006) studies, along with other similar findings reported by Fujita (2008), suggest that self-control can be increased by these related ways of thinking:

• Global processing. This means trying to focus on the wood rather than the trees: seeing the big picture and our specific actions as just one part of a major plan or purpose. For example, someone trying to eat healthily should focus on the ultimate goal and how each individual decision about what to eat contributes (or detracts) from that goal.
• Abstract reasoning. This means trying to avoid considering the specific details of the situation at hand in favour of thinking about how actions fit into an overall framework – being philosophical. Someone trying to add more self-control to their exercise regime might try to think less about the details of the exercise, and instead focus on an abstract vision of the ideal physical self, or how exercise provides a time to re-connect mind and body.
• High-level categorisation. This means thinking about high-level concepts rather than specific instances. Any long-term project, whether in business, academia or elsewhere can easily get bogged down by focusing too much on the minutiae of everyday processes and forgetting the ultimate goal. Categorising tasks or project stages conceptually may help an individual or group maintain their focus and achieve greater self-discipline.

These are just some examples of specific instances, but with a little creativity the same principles can be applied to many situations in which self-control is required. Ultimately these three ways of thinking are different ways of saying much the same thing: avoid thinking locally and specifically and practice thinking globally, objectively and abstractly, and increased self-control should follow.

[Image credit: brothaloveimages]

When the music goes up, the beers go down.

At some point during the evening, in bars across the land, two things happens: the lights go down and the music goes up.

Lowering the lights signals the real beginning of night-time fun: with dimmed lights and alcohol beginning to work its magic the business of loosening up after the day’s exertions can truly begin.

But turning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is shouting, the bar becomes even noisier and soon people start to give up trying to communicate and focus on their drinking, meaning more trips to the bar, and more regrets in the morning.

Of course this is exactly what bar owners are hoping for. People sitting around quietly nursing their drinks for hours are no good for profits. Talkers aren’t the best drinkers. At least that is the received wisdom in the industry. And this received wisdom turns out to be accurate according to field studies conducted in French bars by Professor Nicolas Guegen and colleagues.

Drink up

One study by Gueguen et al. (2004) (PDF) found that higher sound levels lead to people drinking more. In a new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, Gueguen et al. (2008) visited a bar in the west of France to confirm their previous finding in a naturalistic setting. Here, they observed customers’ drinking habits across three Saturday nights, in two different bars in the city.

The level of the music was randomly manipulated to create the conditions of a true experiment. It was either at its usual volume of 72dB or turned up to 88dB. For comparison: 72db is like the sound of traffic on a busy street while 88db is like standing next to a lawnmower.

Sure enough when the music went up the beers went down, faster. On average bar-goers took 14.5 minutes to finish a 250ml (8 oz) glass of draught beer when the music was at its normal level. But this came down to just 11.5 minutes when the music was turned up. As a result, on average, during their time in the bar each participant ordered one more drink in the loud music condition than in the normal music condition.

The observers even measured the number of gulps taken to finish each drink – the level of the music was found to have no effect on this. So the faster drinking was as a result of more gulps rather than bigger gulps.

Drinking instead of talking?

Since the volume of the music was randomly manipulated this experiment suggests that louder music causes more drinking, but what it doesn’t tell us is why. Some think that people drink instead of talking while others have argued that they drink more because the music creates greater levels of arousal, which then leads to more drinking.

Evidence from a study carried out in pubs in Glasgow, Scotland by Forsyth and Cloonan (2008) does back up the idea that people do, at least partly, drink because they can’t talk to each other. Perhaps further studies comparing lone drinkers with dyads and bigger groups would confirm or disprove this idea.

Whatever the real reason, or combination of reasons, this kind of study is very persuasive about the causal connection between louder music and more drinking because the experimenters have taken the time to go to a bar, set up the random experimental manipulation and then actually observe people to see what they do in a real live environment.

On top of that, from the point of the view of the participant, I think it would definitely enhance your night-out to find out that you’d been inadvertently furthering psychological science by sinking a few cold ones. Or is that just the researcher (or beer-drinker) in me coming out?

» This is part of a series on the psychology of the everyday.

[Image credits: john and Thomas Hawk]