Ten: Self-Interest and the Interesting Self
(EN: This is a particularly bad chapter. The author immediately departs from the alleged topic and spends the entire chapter chattering about random topics without a central theme. It's interesting chatter, but not at all coherent.)
The chapter opens with a discussion of individualistic and collectivistic societies, particularly in the way that a person's orientation motivates them to behave. Collectivists are primarily focused on conformity to group norms, whereas individualists pursue their own standards.
There is no society that is purely one or the other. Even in collectivistic cultures, people are concerned for their own personal welfare and find ways around the system to ensure their personal survival and pursue their personal interests. Even in individualistic cultures, people participate in groups and accept that their success depends on their ability to compromise when dealing with others.
The author does seem a bit confused on the topic of egocentricity, suggesting that it is a characteristic of individualistic cultures that individuals want to be distinctive and to be respected by others, and much of their behavior is to gain esteem and status as individuals.
(EN: This is a common mistake because a true individualist does not care what others think of him and does as he pleases. He is not motivated to gain esteem in the eyes of others, nor cares for his rank and status in the context of a society - these are all characteristics of the collectivist, who places primary concern on what others think of him, because this defines his status in the group to which he belongs.)
(EN: It's also worth noting that what exists in most western cultures is not individualism, but multi-collectivism. A given person sees himself as belonging to multiple groups with conflicting norms and struggles to define a consistent set of personal values and practices that are compatible, though not perfectly so, with the multiple groups to which he belongs.)
Brand Consciousness
The author switches topics to brand consciousness. Particularly in the present day, consumers are bombarded with brand messaging and it's increasingly difficult for a single brand to come to their attention.
Psychologically, there is only so much the mind can handle, and to reduce the cognitive load the mind groups and categorizes things, sweeping thousands of unique things into larger chunks. We do not see the trees, but instead we see a forest. We do not see an individual brand of toothpaste because there are rows of shelves with identically shaped cartons with minor differences of the labeling - one must stand out by being significantly different in order to get attention.
(EN: This is a careful balance. Being different gets attention, but being too different loses it: a person looking for a tube of toothpaste is going to ignore anything that is the "wrong" shape. Or if it is noticed, people will think there is something wrong with it - like wine that comes in a box rather than a bottle.)
Loose fact: for retail displays, a recent study suggests that being the center of a shelf is the best placement and results in a 44% better selection rate. The eye tends to fix on the center of an object, and if a number of objects are seen as a group, they fix on the object in the center of the group and do not often look to the sides unless they notice something unusual.
In terms of clutter, advertising has clearly gone overboard. When advertisements were rare, people would pay attention. But when they became ubiquitous, people began to ignore them. Studies have shown that, in television, the more advertisements that are run in a program, the fewer the audience even remembers seeing. The phenomenon of "banner blindness" for online advertising is well documented: people automatically ignore anything that is shaped like an ad.
Drifting further, it's mentioned that "in context" ads on web sites are not as effective as assumed - about 80% of people are able to spot in-context ads and recognize them for what they are. They react negatively to both the brand (which is seen as intrusive and annoying) and the publication (whose credibility suffers for pandering to advertisers).
Sensory Branding
All data enters the mind as raw sensory perceptions: we see the colors and shapes before we decide what something is. The more senses that are engaged, the more data we have to associate to something, and the more we feel certain in our interpretation.
He speculates that Apple's stores are a key to its success. In a time when most computer manufacturers sell online, in a medium where people have only words and pictures to related to a brand, the store environment enables people to touch the products - this added sensory stimulation creates a sense of greater connection with a brand.
He mentions an experiment at Ohio State, in which students were asked how much they would pay for identical coffee mugs. Those who were able to handle the mugs bid 60% more for them than those who were given a brochure.
Human contact is briefly mentioned - the ritual of shaking hands adds a tactile component to a person we've just met. And the people to whom we feel the greatest connection are often those whom we have touched most often. However, touch is also invasive - being touched by a stranger causes people to feel uncomfortable. One study in Australia had an actor who would "accidentally" touch people on the shoulder while they were shopping in a store - and the result was that people who were touched spent 40% less. (EN: The author doesn't make the connection, but there is a difference between touching and being touched - the former is empowering, the latter degrading.)
When it comes to branding, sensory stimulation is valuable only if it is consistent. We recognize a product by its packaging, so when the packaging changes it violates our expectations. It's much in the way we might fail to recognize a friend we have known for a long time if he has changed his hairstyle, or fail to recognize a police offer when we meet him in mufti.
Anatomy of Habits
The author suggests that there are three components of a habit: a cue that triggers behavior, the behavior itself, and the reward received. (EN: This is rather high-level as there are other steps in the process: the memory of the previous event, the decision to activate the habit rather than seek a new option, the evaluation of whether the action was successful in past, and likely a few other components.)
To win customers away from other suppliers, it is necessary to create a new habit. That is, the trigger and reward are the same, but the behavior is different. To do this, one must convince a customer that there is a better way than they are used to achieve the reward, and this information must reach them before the trigger is activated.
It is also possible to play on customer dissatisfaction - when they receive marginally acceptable results, they may still repeat the behavior. This is often used by diet brands, because they are well aware that many customers fail to lose weight, and they can suggest that their product will create greater satisfaction than the one they usually use.
There's a suggestion that it takes two weeks to change a habit, which is why a single "free sample" generally is not effective. A "taste" is a novel experience, not an established behavior. If the sample can provide two weeks' supply, it has a much higher chance of becoming their new habit.
Operant Conditioning: Carrot and Stick
The author mentions some of the neurological bases for operant conditioning, using rewards or punishments to shape human behavior. Human minds are far more sophisticated than Pavlov's dog and Skinner's pigeons - but at the same time they share some of the most basic processes.
Any reward causes positive emotions, coupled with the release of dopamine and other hormones that accentuate pleasure. Any punishment releases norepinephrine and other hormones that cause unpleasant stress.
Brands can readily leverage the reward mechanism - couponing and free samples are common practices that give customers the hormonal "rush" that associates positive feelings to the brand. Punishment is more difficult, and is most commonly leveraged by suggesting a social stigma for undesirable behaviors (using a different product or brand).
So while human behavior is subject to more complex cognitive processes, we are still motivated on a fundamental level to seek pleasure and avoid displeasure, so reward/punishment still tend to work, though in less precise and predictable ways.
In human experimentation, there is no evidence of perfect and reliable reaction to stimuli - merely an increased chance that a punishment or reward will influence behavior. A reward or punishment does not ensure a behavioral change, merely a higher likelihood that the behavioral change will result.
Each victim decides for himself whether the stimulus and response are related and how to behave in future, and a reward/punishment merely tip the scales in one direction. That is, the punishment that is administered is seen as a part of the cost of gaining the benefit of the action, and in some cases can act to make the benefit seem all the more valuable - hence something that is declared illegal or immoral becomes more appealing rather than less.
One of the shortcomings of experimentation is that the situation they present is unnatural - pressing one button provides a reward and pressing a different one incurs a punishment. Most real-life situations involve an exchange of pain for pleasure: humans undertake unpleasant effort to achieve a reward, and consider whether the pleasure (reward) we receive is worth the effort (punishment) to obtain it.
In essence, we do not receive a treat for pressing one button and a shock for pressing another. There is only one button that administers both a shock and a treat, and out motivation to press it is based on a highly subjective and situational assessment of whether the pain is worth the reward. And to make matters even more complex, we are aware that our assessment entirely subjective - that we may be wrong in our estimation of the pain and pleasure involved.
The author mentions video games as a kind of experiment in human behavior. They generally start of very simple, with little effort required to win small rewards, and slowly increase the difficultly, offering greater rewards for more difficult tasks. If a game is too difficult at the onset, users quit playing quickly; if a game offers too little reward as the difficulty increases, they lose interest in continuing. A good game, one that engages players for a long period of time, gets this balance right.
As for things that offer the same reward for the same action, there is a principle of hedonic adaptation, where the opportunity to earn a given reward becomes diminished over time. The author refers to an experiment (without sufficient reference to confirm it) about subjects who were to perform a task to receive a piece of chocolate - those who were given a piece before the task were less enthusiastic in completing the task than those who were not - in the same way that a hungry animal will put more effort into obtaining food than one that has recently been fed.
There is the notion of random or intermittent rewards being more interesting than those with a reliable outcome: rats would press a button more often if they received food sometimes. But this does not hold entirely true for human beings, who assess the likelihood of success and are more attracted to things that are reliable than those that are unreliable (hence the fact that there are more people who are willing to work low-wage jobs than to try to go into business for themselves). There is the saying that "insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result" - so an action that returns a variable reward is irrational, uncertain, and less desirable.
Pathways Of The Mind
The author buys into the myth that experience "literally" reshapes the brain. (EN: He provides no references to any source, and the theory that the brain is physically affected by experiences has been disproven by neuroscientists. Various inspections of the physical organ show no difference among individuals except in cases of birth defects, injuries, and diseases that damage the brain tissue. While people become ingrained in habits and form different mental frameworks, it is purely psychological, not physiological. I'll edit accordingly: while the mind becomes programmed, the physical organ of the brain is not affected.)
Habituation is the most obvious way in which the mind becomes programmed: when a person finds a method of doing something that is successful, that method becomes reinforced - and the more consistent and reliable the method, the less likely the person is to try any other approach to solving a problem.
When there is a commonality among habits, the mind becomes programmed to a specific way of thinking, and likewise does not attempt any other problem-solving methodology if the primary methodology has been successful in multiple situations. A mathematician becomes accustomed to reducing everything to numbers and ignoring any non-numeric data or qualitative form of analysis.
It is not that the mind is incapable of finding alternate approaches or thinking in different ways, but that it defaults to its habitual ways of thinking, often to the exclusion of all others. The habituated mind will attempt other methods if the default method fails - but it is often the case that if the default method fails, a person simply gives up. Or as a defense mechanism, it ignores any negative feedback and declares itself to have been successful, even when failure is obvious.
It is also suggested that the mind works differently due to external factors. For example, handwriting changed the way that the human mind customarily works. Before information could be written down, people had to remember much more information. Orators and storytellers would memorize long tales. But when something could be written down and read, there was no longer a need to memorize. It is not that the human brain has changed, but that there is no longer a need to develop the psychological skill of memory - so few people do.
To take it a step further, the typewriter (and word processor) changed the way in which people record information. The skill of "typing" replaced the skill of "writing" - and in the modern day few people write anything down, even to the point that cursive writing is no longer taught in schools. Again, a person is still capable of learning to write, but there is no need to do so - so the mental skills are not developed.
And further still, the Internet has changed the way in which people process information. Before a world of information was available in any location and any time, people had to use reasoning to determine whether an assertion was likely to be true. They had to make decisions based on limited information, applying reasoning skills to solve for many unknowns. Critical thinking is now less common, and will become even more rare as a "digital generation" comes of age, having never had to think for themselves.
It is also suggested that while thinking skills are on the decline, research skills are on the rise: people may be losing the habit of thinking, but are developing skills of finding information - and some suggest this is more efficient and powerful. A person who reasons through things comes to a better conclusion, but more slowly. A person who does not think, but is skilled at finding information, can make a bad decision more quickly.
While this seems unfortunate, people learn from their mistakes - and in this case the lesson is to better evaluate sources of information. People are already cynical about advertising messages and the pronouncements of self-proclaimed authorities, and tend to seek out more sources of information and evaluate their credibility. They cannot evaluate whether the information is correct, but they can better evaluate whether the source is likely to be reliable.
Unfortunately, this skill does not seem to have developed just yet: consumes "snack" on information, and often do not consider the source. They tend to believe the first source that seems credible, and advertisers and those with political agendas are becoming more skilled at giving the appearance of credibility.
But rather than considering the present situation to be a step in the decline of mankind, it would be better to consider it an awkward phase in the evolution of thought. It is unlikely people will return to practicing critical thinking skills, but likely that they will become better at gauging the reliablilty of sources - and ultimately, this will still result in making better decisions, whether the original source of the information is internal or external.
Brain Plasticity
While the mind becomes programmed to specific ways of thinking, it is a mistake to suggest that it becomes "hard-wired" to these patterns. Instead, the mind is soft-wired: it tends to default to certain patterns, but is not entirely incapable of deviating from them, and even changing the basic programming.
A behavior becomes habitual because it is successful - and so long as it remains successful it is perpetuated. But when the habitual behavior fails to produce the expected results, a persistent individual will try other things. Likewise, when a given method of thinking fails, a persistent individual will explore other perspectives. If these alternatives prove to be successful where the original habit failed, then the original habit may be abandoned - or at the very least, there will be less of a tendency to go to the default without considering alternatives.
But until a problem is encountered that habits cannot solved by existing methods, people will continue to fall back on those habits. Even if they are inefficient, they remain effective, and they are more convenient than thinking and learning to do things differently. Human behavior is relatively rigid, but it is not immutable.
Sidebar: Psychological Effects of Technology
There's a sidebar with a number of observations/theories about technology's effects on the mind - some are attributed to studies, others seem a bit like folklore:
- A study about dreams observed that older adults, who came of age during the era of black-and-white television, are also more likely to dream in black and white.
- Those who use technology (phone/tablet/computer) before bedtime have a harder time falling asleep, as the brain remains highly stimulated.
- It's also observed that human eyes are especially sensitive to blue light emitted by television and electronic screens, which makes it more difficult to sleep
- Mobile and social technology users have higher levels of general anxiety and less ability to focus on the present moment - even when they are not online, they are concerned they might be missing out on something.
- It's alleged that the short format of social media is further contributing to the decrease in the human attention span and the ability to comprehend longer messages (EN: This is a common belief. A counterpoint is that people are bombarded with more information and are more selective about what they give attention and tend to scan things that are uninteresting.)
- It's also suggested that there has been a general decrease in memory skills, because having instant access to information means that people do not need to use/practice traditional memory skills.
- This echoes studies from the 1970s that reported that the use of pocket calculators had decreased the ability of students to do mental calculations
- Observation/interview studies report that mobile users sense "phantom vibrations" from their devices, and sometimes even when they are not carrying them. On the other hand, those who use different "ring tones" in silent mode are also more sensitive to different durations/intensities of vibration.
- Video games have often been credited for increasing visual and spatial skills, but are also criticized for narrowing the field of perception: players show greater sensitivity within the center of their field of vision, but less in the peripheral field.
- In addition to decreased attention, technology decreases an individual's patience. There is an expectation of immediate satisfaction, which comes with increased impatience that decreases overall pleasure.
- Even from the days of television, there has been an inflated sense of confidence in consumers. Because they have seen something on television or online, they feel overconfident in their knowledge of it. This is particularly true of skills - to watch someone doing something does not convey the ability to do it.
- Technology decreases problem-solving skills. While early adopters of technology must exercise mental skills to learn how to use it, late adopters do not gain these skills because the device/software is debugged and intuitive. They tend to use only the most obvious features and do not explore and learn the full capabilities of the technology.
- And last, there is increasing evidence that social media causes people to become less socially competent - virtual interaction is not the same as personal interaction, and in fact it teaches bad habits and antisocial patterns of behavior.
Social Media as Social Posturing
There are various uses for social media, but chief among them is social posturing - attempting to create an impression of oneself through associating with the "right" people and liking the "right" brands to pose as a member of desirable social groups.
The initial purpose of Facebook was to facilitate social interaction among college students - to meet people online as a way to initiate an offline friendship. (EN: My understanding is it was about dating among college students, but whatever the intended purpose was, the way in which it was used was never singular or particularly consistent.) But its current use has very little to do with arranging social interaction: many people connect to "friends" whom they have never met in person and never intend to meet in person.
One status symbol online is to have thousands of "friends" on Facebook, but in real life people generally maintain friendships with fewer than 100 people. The rest are not real friends, but merely admirers - and this is not social, but decidedly anti-social behavior. The narcissist wishes to be admired by many with whom he has no personal interaction.
The author then strays into the area of intentional fakery: people who create a character online who is nothing line their real-world selves and engage in a sort of role-play, which occurred long before social media. Sometimes, it is for ulterior motives (scamming people out of money, even kidnapping and abduction), but most times it's just for the engagement and status they vicariously enjoy while acting out a part.
For marketers, the problem is authenticity of the data. There is a wealth of information in social media about people's tastes and preferences - but it is all filtered, skewed, and falsified. Meanwhile, actual purchasing decisions are driven by an individual's actual tastes and preferences - and if the two are different (as they clearly are), then the ideas that marketers get from social media are highly unreliable.
Loose Bits
It's well known that women's clothing sizes are highly unreliable. This is due to "sympathetic sizing." That is, brands make dresses slightly larger than the size stated on the label so that women feel positive about the it. With social pressure to be thinner, they are delighted if they find a "size four" dress that fits them when they wear a "size six" in other brands.