Musing
File this one under speculative non-fiction.
I'm listening to David Brook's book, The Social Animal. It's about human cognitive development, decision-making, and mental process.
A lot of it is based on some research done in the 60s and 70s, collectively known as "heuristics," or "experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery." This term has become associated with the evaluation of human-computer interface models - how you expect a website to behave, for example, and what cues you get to do what you do with it, the so-called "intuitive" design of said site.
Some of these heuristics include: priming, anchoring, expectation, framing, inertia, and arousal. Put simply, priming gives people a set of cues they may or may not even be aware of. Their behavior will incorporate these cues (talk to them using words like "tired," "old," "ancient," "weary," and "lame," and they will walk more slowly than if you talk to them using words like "fit," "active," "quick," and "athletic").
Anchoring hands people a value - a number, or a grade, or some other evaluative idea (unrelated to the subject at hand), and then when they are asked to assign a value to something, they'll most likely reflect that "anchor" value back.
Expectation is "you're really going to like this," versus, "don't be too disappointed with," and the predictable likelihood that people will react as you've instructed them to.
Framing sets something up in a context that gives its absolute value relative meaning. For example, if you put a $30 bottle of wine in amongst $6 bottles, the $30 bottle seems very expensive. But if you "frame" it with $120 bottles, it suddenly seems quite cheap.
Inertia is simply that tendency to leave well enough alone. If your television is set to certain color values, for example, most of us won't tinker with them, unless they are so far off it's impossible to ignore.
Arousal predicts that we are more likely to act - and act impulsively - when we are aroused. So, blaring music at your local Abercrombie store results in more impulse purchases than soothing or no music.
None of this is new, of course. Marketers have been using this kind of information for decades to push, prod, and urge us into doing what they want us to do. In one famous study, a group of so-called "creatives" were driven to a test site, where they were asked to come up with an original campaign for some product. They were all driven past a billboard that contained a very specific image. Every single one of the "creatives" included some variation of that image in their "original" campaigns. So much for "out of the box" thinking.
What's of greater interest to me these days is something that has again, been known about for a while, but has been relatively difficult to exploit until recently: flocking behavior.
The Internet has opened a door to not only influence behavior using all the methods shown above, but moreover, to influence behavior simply by the behavior itself. I Tweet because: I Tweet. I watch a viral video because everybody else is watching the viral video. I have a Facebook page because everybody has a Facebook page! I once found a video on an obscure little site I visited from time to time, and found it funny. I noted that it had had a few hundred views. I passed it along to most of my friends. The next time I visited the site, it had several hundred thousand views.
I suppose in a way it's like a yawn - if I am around someone yawning, I'm much more likely to yawn myself.
A yawn, of course, if fairly innocuous. An opinion, or worse a "fact" that spreads like wildfire around the Internet, and that gains credibility simply by virtue of the fact that it is passed from computer to computer, has far broader - and more alarming - implications.
We *think* we think for ourselves. Studies like the ones referenced above make it pretty clear that what we think can be relatively easily manipulated, given enough time and, as advertisers call it, impressions. Now that we add to it the weight of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people sharing our experience - within a very short time frame (hours? minutes?) - what will that mean for our freedom of choice, opinion, separating fact from fiction? It must be true - I read it on the Internet!
I'm listening to David Brook's book, The Social Animal. It's about human cognitive development, decision-making, and mental process.
A lot of it is based on some research done in the 60s and 70s, collectively known as "heuristics," or "experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery." This term has become associated with the evaluation of human-computer interface models - how you expect a website to behave, for example, and what cues you get to do what you do with it, the so-called "intuitive" design of said site.
Some of these heuristics include: priming, anchoring, expectation, framing, inertia, and arousal. Put simply, priming gives people a set of cues they may or may not even be aware of. Their behavior will incorporate these cues (talk to them using words like "tired," "old," "ancient," "weary," and "lame," and they will walk more slowly than if you talk to them using words like "fit," "active," "quick," and "athletic").
Anchoring hands people a value - a number, or a grade, or some other evaluative idea (unrelated to the subject at hand), and then when they are asked to assign a value to something, they'll most likely reflect that "anchor" value back.
Expectation is "you're really going to like this," versus, "don't be too disappointed with," and the predictable likelihood that people will react as you've instructed them to.
Framing sets something up in a context that gives its absolute value relative meaning. For example, if you put a $30 bottle of wine in amongst $6 bottles, the $30 bottle seems very expensive. But if you "frame" it with $120 bottles, it suddenly seems quite cheap.
Inertia is simply that tendency to leave well enough alone. If your television is set to certain color values, for example, most of us won't tinker with them, unless they are so far off it's impossible to ignore.
Arousal predicts that we are more likely to act - and act impulsively - when we are aroused. So, blaring music at your local Abercrombie store results in more impulse purchases than soothing or no music.
None of this is new, of course. Marketers have been using this kind of information for decades to push, prod, and urge us into doing what they want us to do. In one famous study, a group of so-called "creatives" were driven to a test site, where they were asked to come up with an original campaign for some product. They were all driven past a billboard that contained a very specific image. Every single one of the "creatives" included some variation of that image in their "original" campaigns. So much for "out of the box" thinking.
What's of greater interest to me these days is something that has again, been known about for a while, but has been relatively difficult to exploit until recently: flocking behavior.
The Internet has opened a door to not only influence behavior using all the methods shown above, but moreover, to influence behavior simply by the behavior itself. I Tweet because: I Tweet. I watch a viral video because everybody else is watching the viral video. I have a Facebook page because everybody has a Facebook page! I once found a video on an obscure little site I visited from time to time, and found it funny. I noted that it had had a few hundred views. I passed it along to most of my friends. The next time I visited the site, it had several hundred thousand views.
I suppose in a way it's like a yawn - if I am around someone yawning, I'm much more likely to yawn myself.
A yawn, of course, if fairly innocuous. An opinion, or worse a "fact" that spreads like wildfire around the Internet, and that gains credibility simply by virtue of the fact that it is passed from computer to computer, has far broader - and more alarming - implications.
We *think* we think for ourselves. Studies like the ones referenced above make it pretty clear that what we think can be relatively easily manipulated, given enough time and, as advertisers call it, impressions. Now that we add to it the weight of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people sharing our experience - within a very short time frame (hours? minutes?) - what will that mean for our freedom of choice, opinion, separating fact from fiction? It must be true - I read it on the Internet!
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