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3: How Perception Creates Emotion

View the warning on the contents page regarding "facts" presented by this author.

In the past few decades, companies placed a greater emphasis on "customer care," but in a very superficial manner: front-line staff who engaged with the customer were encouraged to be superficially pleasant to customers, by way of scripts memorized by rote and ritual pleasantries of social interaction.

The author considers these to be "gimmicks rather than true customer-focused strategies" and suggests employees were not really aligned to the values and ideals of the firm for which they worked, and as such it was easily recognized as a thin and disingenuous veneer by customers.

(EN: I don't think the author has it quite right: it was not a matter of alignment, but empowerment. Employees orientation often features the values of the firm, and management preaches customer service, then uses policy and procedure to compel employees to act in ways contrary to the professed principles of the firm, and prevent them from providing quality customer service.)

While these companies had the intention of improving the customer experience, the practice was flawed: the assumption being that quality service meant "being nice" to the customer. But common civility is common - most firms will be nice to the customer in a superficial manner, and this is not a competitive advantage. It is necessary and expected, but superficial pleasantry alone does not generate positive emotions about a particular brand.

What does generate emotions? The answer quotes Aaron Beck, an authority on cognitive psychology, who maintains that emotions follow perception. However, the reverse is also true: that our emotions also precede perception, in that our emotional state sets an attitude that acts as a filter on perception.

(EN: Again, not far enough. "Perception" is not a thing unto itself, but a perception of something - which is to say that past experiences, both first-hand and reported, create an immediate emotional reaction but also a long-term perception that will be carried forward to future experiences. As such, perception is merely a link between experience and emotion. Perhaps the author means to "surprise" the reader with this fact later in the chapter, but for now, it seems like an oversight that may lead him in the wrong direction.)

What is perception?

The notion of perception is not merely witnessing something, but realizing or understanding it - which his a process not only of receiving sense-data, but attempting to integrate this new information into the information stored in memory.

Specifically, it is an active, rather than passive, process: people don't merely believe what they see, they see what they believe - and if what they see does not correlate to their beliefs, there is a chance they will disregard or dismiss it.

This is what makes creating perception difficult: you cannot simply tell a customer what to think of you and expect them to accept it. You may provide an experience, but in their perception of the experience, the customer determines what is real and what is not.

The author refers to a common optical illusion where a single illustration can be interpreted as being either a young woman or an old woman. When initially shown the image, people see one or the other, but their perceptions are already divided. More interestingly, some people can never "see" the alternate even when it is pointed out to them.

And naturally, this is a metaphor for brand perception: some people "see" you one way, others a different way, and there are often several perceptions rather than just one or two. And some people will never change their minds about it, in spite of the most tedious effort to show them the alternate perception.

The author boldfaces a statement: "the more ambiguous your customer experience, the less likely your brand will be perceived correctly."

(EN: An immediate reaction ... what is "correct" in terms of perception? My sense is that the author means "the way you want it to be perceived." But I disagree - as there are many instances in which those inside a business who want to dictate what their brand ought to mean to people are totally out of touch with reality, and there are numerous examples of instances in which companies blew lots of cash trying to "correct" the image of the brand when they were the ones who were wrong-headed about their own brand identity.)

The author returns to the optical illusion and makes some changes that he believes will guide the audience to more clearly see the young woman rather than the old, implying that a few minor adjustments to emphasize certain lines and de-emphasize others will help people perceive what you want them to.

Returning to concepts: the author uses the term "sensation" to indicate raw sense-data that is received by a person, and which that person then translates into a perception. Sensation is entirely physiological and the user is generally helpless to avoid sensing something.

But sensation does not guarantee recognition - at any given time, a person senses quite a lot. A person standing before an audience senses every single face in the room, but will not be able to recall most of them later. He may selectively focus his attention on a few, which will be stored in memory, but most of what is sensed is simply lost.

As such, there are four steps in perception:

  1. Sensation - Reception of sense data
  2. Selection - Conscious recognition of some of this data
  3. Interpretation - Deciding what the selected data means
  4. Reaction - An emotional response to the interpretation

(EN: Two points of interest, here: First, the author contradicts what he suggested earlier, about emotion occurring before rational interpretation. Second, he also seems to entirely reject the notion of "subconscious" perception - which is admittedly subject to much conjecture, but has not been adequately disproved.)

Sensation

We typically speak of sense-data in terms of the basic five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. There is some argument that additional "senses" exist, but this remains largely conjectural - the suggestion that we can sense "motion" apart from sight, touch, or hearing has been suggested but not conclusively proven. As such, focus on the "classic" five.

In general, these senses perceive phenomena from the environment at limited range:

In many instances, the senses work together - scent and taste are so closely related that the tongue cannot clearly interpret flavors without the scent of the same items. There's also some suggestion that some senses can override others, such that if you are presented with a piece of food that "looks" moldy, a subject may say it tastes foul even if the mold is not real.

Generally, senses work in conjunction with one another: we comprehend better when multiple senses are engaged - such as being able to see someone's face when they are speaking. It's also disconcerting when we learn to associate such things - like watching a video where the sound-track is slightly off.

The division between sensation and other "steps" to perception is not so distinct, though it's suggested that association, in the Pavlovian sense, may short-cut some of the later steps in the process, and evoke a reaction, sensation must still take place before all else.

(EN: This calls to mind some experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, where sensations were cross-wired: a color would evoke the memory of a flavor - just as in Pavlov's sense, the sound of a bell evoked a reaction to something perceived by taste. It's an interesting observation, but I wonder if it is reliable, being that the subjects' altered state calls their testimony into question and, in any case, has little to do with influencing a customer who isn't a dog, stoned, or both.)

Selection

With all senses in perpetual reception at every waking moment, we are bombarded by sense-data and would likely be overwhelmed if everything we sensed evoked a cognitive or emotional reaction. As such, the mind must be selective in determining which sensory input it will process at any given time.

The author suggests that 95% of filtering is entirely without choice or awareness, and there's some argument as to whether we store this input, even for a fraction of a second, or immediately discard it.

(EN: The notion of storage of sense data is also a matter of some conjecture - the author doesn't dwell on it, as it's likely little use to his thesis, but there is some evidence that things that are sensed but not noticed are stored in memory, and that a person under hypnotism can recall a level of detail that includes many sensations that were assumed to have been entirely ignored.)

As such, only a tiny fraction of sensation is passed to the next stage of perception (interpretation). The author's contention is that the wiring of the brain, the beliefs and values, influence which data make it through the filters. He discounts, also, the notion of innate filtering, in that the details a person notices are highly subjective and vary according to the experience of individuals.

No two people have identical beliefs about everything, and perfectly identical life experience - so it follows that no two people will filter the same experiences (packages of sensations) in the same manner. There are some cultural similarities among values, but everyone's experience is individual, as there is no culture where there are not some fringe element of those that seem to make the conscious choice of rejecting the norms.

(EN: Another interjection: one theory I find compelling is the notion that we filter out what is familiar or unimportant or unchanging - the things we see every day cease to take our attention, but the things that are different attract it. There is some evidence that this is not entirely subjective: regardless of experience or beliefs, if you show a picture of a grid of black numbers with one red one, everyone recalls the red one. Or if everything is still but one object is in motion, everyone recalls the object in motion. This doesn't contradict the author's point entirely, but it does cast some doubt on the generalization that it is entirely unpredictable what a given person will "filter out.")

The author suggests that "we know from research" that if people are shown a particular belief they hold is logically incorrect, they will instead reject the conflicting information and hold to their beliefs. This is often a reason why it is difficult for a new product or a new brand to make an impact on customers: it cannot overcome existing beliefs.

(EN: The author has leapt from perception to cognition here and is implying a similarity that may not exist. In terms of perception, the difference principle maintains that people will notice a new product or new brand, but the choice to adopt it is an entirely different matter that functions on a different level entirely. The same assumption of similarity may be said of his view that beliefs govern perception - I don't accept they do so at this particular stage: you will sense something and it will make it through the filters, and it will be rejected later.)

This is where marketing is targeted to demographic segments: people who live in a similar area, are the same gender, are the same race and ethnicity, etc., tend to have similar, though not strictly identical beliefs. So if you're intending to get their attention, and make it through their perceptual filters, knowing their beliefs and providing a sensation that agrees with them is more likely to yield success.

(EN: Ultimately, the author has gotten too many things wrong about selection for this to hold much weight. I don't doubt it to be true, but the acceptance or rejection of an idea is not a matter of selection, but of a higher-order emotional or rational reaction. And yes, there is the irony of the situation that I, as a reader, have rejected the author's ideas on this very notion - but that doesn't mean I have failed to perceive it, or that it has been filtered out and ignored - it has been sensed and selected, even interpreted and considered, and then rejected.)

Interpretation

The next step in the process of perception is interpretation, which involves the comparison of the sense-data that has made it through the filters of selection to information stored in memory, to determine what it means.

For example, the sense-data we receive as a jumble of shapes and colors is interpreted so that we recognize it as a human face, and further interpreted to be the face of a particular person whom we know. It does not require significant mental energy to make the connection - puzzling over who this might be - we simply recognize the person, without a conscious process of thought, by comparing sensory input to memory.

Interpretation is necessary before reacting to sense-data, though the process of interpretation in the context of perception is much more less intensive in some situations than in others: when we make a hasty decision, or act on "instinct" or "reflex," it is more accurate to say that we have acted on memory without taking the time to carefully interpret the information by a more complex cognitive process.

It is also true that we often have an immediate interpretation that we later come to recognize was incorrect - this is because interpretation at this level takes place before cognition, our "better judgment," is able to make a more calculated interpretation of the sense data.

Interpretation of sense-data has an enormous bearing on a customer's brand experience: his initial reaction to an encounter with a brand will reflect the memory of his previous interaction, rather than engaging judgment about the present situation. In time, the customer may leverage their cognitive faculties, but their immediate interpretation and resulting reaction comes first from the perceptive interpretation rather than the cognitive, which must overcome and contradict the immediate reaction - if the individual is inclined to do so.

The example is given of a customer who has had a negative experience of dealing with a firm, and who immediately assumes a defensive posture upon their next encounter with the firm: their expectations are driven by past experience, and the present experience must make it past filters based on that experience. That is, their emotional reaction is to expect to be treated badly, and they will be attentive to sense-data that agrees with that experience rather than that which might contradict it.

The difficulty in communicating with any customer is knowing what previous experiences they have associated to your firm in their memory. You may have some insight into a history of events, at least those to which you were a party, but this is only a small fraction of the experiences that customers have stored in their memory, and it is your own interpretation or assumption. The more information you have, the better you will be able to consider probable reactions, which is likely why personal selling is most effective, and an employee who has worked with a given customer in the past can do so with greater facility.

(EN: I have gone far from the beaten path here, and much of the "notes" above are my own interpretation or restatement of some of the points the author made in the actual text, which seemed to be oblique to the topic of interpretation, mixing up cognitive with perceptive interpretation, and leaping ahead to the notion of reaction. One of those instances where "reading notes" are more along the lines of ideas resulting from the text rather than communicated directly by the original author.)

Reaction

The author describes "reaction" to sensory experience: "the brain decides on the most appropriate action" based on the interpretation of sense-data. Again, this reaction depends on memory, like the interpretation of facts, in following a patterned reaction based on past experience.

Of critical importance is that the reaction is based on the subjective perception of the individual - which governed what sense-data was selected and interpreted - rather than what might be considered to be the objective facts.

This is where experience come into play: a person can only react based on perception if they have previous experience. The individual who lacks previous experience often finds himself unable to react quickly to sense-data. (EN: consider the example of a gunshot in a public park - a war veteran will dive for cover, a civilian will look around to see where the noise came from and wonder what it might have been.)

From a perspective of perception, immediate decisions are not made in the rational brain, but on emotion and memory in a matter of milliseconds. The reaction will involve conscious behaviors as well as unconscious ones - facial expressions, for example, are often an immediate emotional reaction rather than a conscious choice.

(EN: Little reinterpretation here - the author stuck pretty well to the topic, and famed it in the context of immediate emotional reaction to sensory perception. My only addition is that it doesn't necessarily end there - there is the "gut" reaction and a more measured reaction - and I expect there would be a great deal of argument over which is most common. It would also be a matter of conjecture to say that one is, in fact, more common than the other, as it's clearly evident that some people act spontaneously and emotionally where as others better suppress their emotions and take a more methodical and measured approach to interpretation and response.)