The Fringe Freaks

It is well known that when we have limited information about a target, we use that information to form our perceptions of the target. Since the perceptions were based on limited information, we end up with potentially wildly incorrect perceptions. A simpler example of this is when we stereotype people based on a small amount of information. If the stereotype is based on a large amount of information, it can be fairly accurate. If not, it can be grossly inaccurate. Always, a stereotype is a generalization that obviously does not apply to everyone in the group.

So, why am I talking about this? Well, I was aghast at the ridiculous reaction of some people in India to the infamous Richard Gere - Shilpa Shetty kiss. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can view the 1-minute video of the kiss on YouTube here. Richard was in India on a charitable mission on AIDS prevention and was being honored by Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty when he was overcome with emotion and gave her a hug and kiss on stage. Okay, so maybe he went a little bit overboard for being on stage. I'm not so sure I would have been completely under control if I was standing next to that lady. But that's beside the point. Some nutcases went completely batty over this apparent insult to all of India or a slap in the face of chastity in the country or some such thing. There were protests, effigies burned (the usual) and then some publicity-seeking, grandstanding, sanctimonious lawyer filed a lawsuit. A supportive judge was so offended by the video that he issued a waarant for the arrest of both Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty for public indecency or something like that. Of course, the press in India and around the world are having a field day (it even made the newspaper in Duluth, Minnesota).

Of course, as usual, it is just a small group of fringe freaks who are getting all the attention from a story-hungry press corps. But, as the story wends its way around the world, people with limited information about India (which would be most of the world), quite understandably start to form impressions of the country based on these weird stories they hear. Of course it is not reasonable or fair, but it happens. And, they probably go around telling others what they know about India. Believe it or not, I have actually had people (educated people) come to me and ask if we eat chilled monkey brains regularly in India after they watched the Indiana Jones movie (Temple of Doom). Oh well, if you have to ask, let me tell you, they're delicious!

What Am I Thinking?

Okay, I've got to take a break from my opinions to honor Dilbert here. Strangely, a lot of Dilbert's strips seem to mesh with my own experiences. So, just when I start my blogging experiment, the pointy-haired boss decides to do the same? Weird ....

If you can't read the strip clearly here, just click on it and you'll get straight to the strip on the Dilbert site.

So, who wants to write my blog so I can figure out what I'm thinking?

The Path to Happiness Pt. 1

Now before I get people inflamed, let me start with a disclaimer. This post is meant to be introspective and not prescreptive in any way. That is, I am in no way qualified to advice anyone on happiness. This is just my "journal entry" on something that worked for me.

In true "infomercial" style, let me tell you what I used to be like. I was one of the many who would slam my hand on the steering wheel and curse (under my breath) when I was cut off by some careless driver. Hitting a series of red lights when I was in a hurry would get me fuming and (occasionally) even blaming the lights. While these were never serious impairments, my breakthrough came when I read one of the many quotes my great-grandfather used to print on holiday cards he sent to friends. It's something you've all seen or read: Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference (attributed variously to people including St. Francis of Assissi). It suddenly hit me that when I curse at the old lady talking on the cell phone while driving or even more ridiculously yell at the traffic light for turning red, I am affecting no one but myself! It really hit me that there is NO point in getting frustrated at something or someone if it is having NO effect on them. I'm not kidding, it really made a difference (now this is sounding like a paid announcement). Now really, every time I find myself getting angry or frustrated at something, I stop and ask myself if this frustration is doing anything other than putting me in a bad mood. If not, I have the option of either doing something to change the target of my frustration or letting it go.

Now, it has even got to the point of being weird. I remember a time when I was (again) in a hurry to get somewhere and ran into a red light. The moment I hit the steering wheel and cursed (and I mean something as terrible as "damn those damn lights"), I realized what was happening and burst out laughing. I got to my destination late, but in a good mood. It even works when I get frustrated with people. I realize there's no point in getting angry and frustrated if the other person is oblivious to my anger. I'm doing just the opposite of achieving my objective. The person causing the anger is happy and doing fine while I sit and stew and mess up my day. So, if I'm not prepared to confront the person, I just let it go and actually force myself to stop getting angry.

That's weird, isn't it? But hey, it works for me. I find myself more happy than not and if I'm so angry that I can't let it go, I confront the person with my problem. So, my "path to happiness, part 1" is simply to either let people know exactly what they're doing that's bugging you or just drop it and not let it bug you at all. Easy!

Not Hungry? How about the "Ladies' Cut" Steak?

Can the label used to describe the size of a steak dramatically influence your willingness to order it at a restaurant? Are we so affected by these labels that we won't buy a product just because of how its size is described? Seems ludicrous, right? But a ton of research on "reference group influence" has shown that we go out of our way to identify with certain groups and dissociate ourselves with other groups.

But in a study recently published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, authors Katherine White and Darren Dahl wanted to see whether our desire to avoid associating with certain groups can be used to manipulate our choices. Their experiment was simple. Subjects were asked to look at a menu and pick an item to eat. They were told they were in the mood for steak, but not too hungry. The menu they were given had a 12oz steak and a 10oz steak. The 12oz steak was always referred to as the "House Cut." However, for the 10oz, half the subjects saw it labeled as "Chef's Cut" and the other half saw it labeled as "Ladies' Cut." Just this labeling had a huge effect on men. When the 10 oz was called the "Chef's Cut," 47% chose this and 53% chose the 12 oz. However, when it was labeled "Ladies' Cut," only 5.3% chose the 10oz and 94.7% chose the larger "House Cut." If you are a restaurateur, here's an easy way to move people to a larger and more expensive item on your menu. For women, of course, the "ladies' cut" label had no effect on choice. Interestingly, men also rated the 12oz steak significantly more favorably than the 10oz steak in the "ladies' cut" condition, but not in the "chef's cut" condition. This effect was dramatically reduced when subjects in a follow-up experiment were told they would be having the dinner they ordered alone in their room. Thus, it was the concern for what other people would think (if a man ordered the "ladies' cut") that drove their choices.

Isn't it fascinating how just the label given to an item can so strongly affect our choices? It becomes particularly worrying when we consider how this tendency can be used to manipulate our choices. The use of reference groups in advertising (the cool people all use the product) is an application of this effect. A third study showed the effect of "ladies' cut" on men's choices was reduced for men who had low levels of "public self-consciousness." Perhaps the way to reduce obesity is to label all servings over a certain size the "Fat Man Meal" or something like that. Or, maybe if we were all a little less concerned about what other people think, we'd be less susceptible to such manipulation.

Are You Always in the Slow Lane?

Part of the reason I am so intrigued by consumer psychology is that I see its effects first-hand on my behavior. I am more susceptible to these influences than most. We are constantly affected by how we process information and how we use what is readily available and fail to account for unavailable information when we make our choices. That sounds rather vague.

Have you ever felt that the grocery store line you join always seems to slow down. Why is it, that the moment you join a line, the other lines start moving faster while you get caught in the one line with a price check?

First, try this card trick out and see if you can figure out how it's done. If you tell me you figured it out immediately, you're either very smart, a psychologist, or a liar. Do you see how this card trick relates to your grocery store experience? Well, the underlying psychological process is the same. We tend to remember certain parts of an experience and forget others. When we later make a decision, we tend to "overweight" the remembered information. So, when you think of all your grocery store lines, you just happen to remember all the times you got stuck in a line and forget all the other times you sailed right through. So, it appears to you that you're always in a slow line. An empirical evaluation of all your grocery store line experiences will show that you often don't get stuck in the slow lane. Now can you figure out the card trick? What do you focus on and what information do you ignore?

This problem of selectively remembering only "special" or salient events can affect everything from business decision making to personal relationships. You may start to feel your spouse is always cutting you down in public, or that he never puts the toilet seat down. This frustrates the spouse because as far as he remembers, he always puts the seat down ... you get my drift. Of course, there are many more significant implications to this basic psychological process, but this is good enough for one post.

Is Your Life Worth 2 Minutes of Time?

One of the concepts covered in my consumer behavior class is called the "commitment/consistency principle" which basically suggests that once people make some form of commitment towards something, it is more likely they will agree to another similar request to stay consistent with their earlier commitment. If you can get someone to make some sort of physical commitment, it automatically causes a psychological commitment that can then be exploited (essentially you are able to "change their mind"). For example, it has long been known that petitions have the power to not just find out what people believe but to decide what they should believe.

Imagine a pleasant, smiling person someone comes up to you and says "Excuse me, would you be willing to sign this petition in favor of cleaner water in our state?" Most people (whether they know much about the issue or even care much about the state of water, are likely to agree to this request. Now imagine you get a call the next day thanking you for signing the petition and asking whether you will donate to the cause of cleaner water in the state. Would you contribute? Plenty of research on this "foot in the door" technique has shown that people who signed the petition are much more likely to contribute than those who didn't. The interesting part is that research has also shown that the people who sign the petition actually come to believe in the cause more than people who didn't sign the petition. So, such commitments can not only affect your future behavior, but also form attitudes about things where you earlier had no firm beliefs. One of the factors that make commitments more effective at changing future behavior is making the commitment "active" ( written or verbal instead of just mental).

That was all just background for the main point of this post. I recently saw a flyer in the mail for Gerber Life Insurance (or something like that) that had this dramatic headline "Isn't your child's future worth $1 a day?" and then proceeded to explain how for this small daily cost, your child could be insured in case something should happen to you. Just looking at this ad raised a simple question in my mind. Would it make any difference to the effectiveness of the campaign if the headline instead had read "Is your child's future worth $1 a day?" While the difference in the two headlines is trivial in semantic terms, I think the cognitive process of these two questions are different. The former is almost framed as a rhetorical question while the latter almost demands that the reader make an answer. My guess is that the latter would make for a more active commitment than the former and thus may be more effective. A third version could include two check boxes below the question with YES and NO as the two options. This again seems to enhance the need for the reader to respond and thereby make a more active commitment.

Why should you care? I have no idea. I think this would make for an interesting experiment and thought I would document this idea here for possible future use. Wouldn't it be interesting if changing TWO LETTERS in an ad could have a measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ad? This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me. Now you know.

Hope You Feel Better About Yourself ...

Our local newspaper posted the infamous picture of a victim of the Virginia Tech shooting on its cover page last week (picture credit: ALAN KIM/THE ROANOKE TIMES) and that created an expected uproar. Many thought it too graphic and inappropriate while others thought that it reflected the horrific realities of the carnage.

While the subplot to this was the perception among some who were offended that the picture showed the victim's genitals (I wonder what they'd see in Rohrschach ink blots), I'm going to focus on an interesting sideline in a commentary by a journalism professor. While holding up the cover page, he asked his journalism class what they thought and whether they would have published the picture. As expected the reaction was mixed - some people saying yes and others saying no. The argument in favor was that the picture instantly told the horrific story of what had happened and drove home the impact of the shootings.

To me, the fascinating follow up question was that when they were asked if they would change their mind if the killings had happened locally, the almost unanimous answer was that if this had been a local killing, they certainly would not have run the graphic picture of "one of their own" being dragged, bleeding out of harm's way. Why? Why is it okay to show a graphic image of a killing that happened a few thousand miles away and not okay to show a similar image of a local shooting?

The anonymity afforded by the geographic distance of Virginia also affords all of us a psychological distance that lessens the emotional impact of anything that goes on. That is why most of us can so easily handle graphic killings of people as long as it is happening on a different continent many miles away from home. This simple psychological self-protection scheme helps us better handle life. If every death or every killing that happens in the world had the same psychological impact on us as the killing of a neighbor, we would soon be unable to function. At some point, though, we must pause to think that each person killed is someone's neighbor, father, mother, sister, child ...

In Stanley Milgram's famous experiment on obedience, he found that as the "victim" of the shocks were made more immediate to the "teacher," (by bringing him physically closer), the likelihood of continuing the shocks dropped dramatically. People were much more willing to hurt someone (to the point of killing them) if the victim was more physically (and thereby psychologically) distanced from the subject. The implications are chilling -- you are less likely to feel the pain and suffering of other people who are far away and so you are less likely to react and do anything about it. In fact, you may even take active efforts to support killing as long as the impact of that killing was not immediate.

I once had a conversation with someone about the 9/11 tragedy. He said that we ought to just go after all these terrorists and just kill them one by one with no questions asked. He said that our civil liberties are constraining us to the point of protecting cold-blooded killers who hide behind these protections. When we moved to "collateral damage" and the danger that a few innocents may be killed if we sent squads after terrorists with no oversight, he shrugged and said it was just the cost and the benefits would far outweigh the loss of a few innocent lives. That sent a little chill down my spine. While I'm sure he wouldn't feel the same way if I was the one being led away because of some innocent misunderstanding, I know that millions of others who don't know me would simply shrug their shoulders and write it off as a small price to pay for getting quickly at a large number of evil people.

This is not an anti-war statement. As mentioned earlier, we can't start feeling the emotional impact of every death. This is just a normal psychological defense mechanism to help us get through life feeling relatively good. It's just that the implications of this normal reaction are scary. Your normal psychological effort to feel good about yourself could lead to few people rushing to my defense if I'm falsely accused of being a terrorist.

Hope you feel better about yourself!

FutureWatch - Online Relationships & Marketing

I spent an absolutely fascinating morning with a friend of mine who runs a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) business in town (check out www.aimclear.com). Despite being quite savvy about the web, I was just blown away by the sophistication of the tools he showed me he used to help his clients build better, more focused online presences. Wow!

It got me thinking about how different marketing of the future will be from today. As a professor, I feel I am responsible for keeping up with these trends to try and help my students understand exactly how they need to relate the material I'm teaching them to the world they will face tomorrow. We talk in class about word-of-mouth effects and the traditional admonition to monitor and manage word-of-mouth communications because people are three times more likely to repeat a negative experience with your product than a positive one. That's all good and fine, but our marketing graduates today need to have a much more sophisticated understanding of how technology is changing the pattern of relationships among individuals. Word-of-mouth networks and information sharing on products are now done virtually among many segments of consumers. Any marketer failing to understand this is doomed to watch the future world pass him or her by. Marketers also must concern themselves not only about managing communications among networks of targeted consumers but actually creating word-of-mouth exchanges about their products. I think there are going to be some more significant breakthroughs within the next few years in how technology is used to manage the flow of marketing information in an online world. It is still not widely understood and I think many of the traditional theories of word-of-mouth interactions will need to be revised to take into account these changing communication patterns. These students are going to find themselves in a new world of marketing communications and they better be prepared. I am doing my part by trying to better understand these developments and relate it to the theory I cover in class.

Everything I cover on reference group influences will also need to be altered for this new virtual-supported world - but more on that in a later post.

God, Morality, & Science

My local newspaper today had a letter to the editor from a local priest who argued that the "history of the Catholic church is a record of great love ..." (!!) and that "No God means no moral norms ..." For some reason, people regularly assume that the biggest benefit of a belief in God is the creation of a moral center in all of us sinning beings. This brought to mind an excellent session I saw at the Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason & Survival conference in 2006 that is completely available for viewing on the web. I haven't watched the video of all the sessions, but found the time to watch the first one (watch it here). It was absolutely fascinating to hear presentations by Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, and Michael Shermer about the conflict between Science, Reason and God. They all ultimately believe the same thing, but had quite differing viewpoints on how strongly we should oppose a belief in God. One argued that because science is based on reason and evidence-based inference, it is not compatible with a belief in God. They reiterated the important point that a lack of belief in God is NOT the same as a belief in no God - an important distinction that many fail to see.

Anyway, one key point made by Sam Harris (I think) was that scientists (and believers in reason) need to reclaim the right to "morality." They argue that there is no evidence that believers are any more moral than non-believers. In fact, there is evidence to the opposite. People from countries with increasingly secular worldviews and less belief in God tend to do more for the poor and be more generous in terms of charitable giving (such as the Scandinavian countries). I firmly believe that belief in God (or lack of it) has no bearing on an individual's morality, decency or generosity. How do we eliminate this faulty perception that Godless people are immoral?

To me, the highlight of the video was a quote attributed to Steven Weinberg that now hangs on my office wall: "Science does not make it impossible to believe in God. It makes not believing in God possible." Exactly!

Class Canceled!

You just knew it had to happen. After the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech, where a student gunned down numerous faculty and students, it was to be expected that there would be overreactions to any perceived threat at Universities around this shocked nation.

Well, we were all informed (via email in a timely manner) that a professor the University of Minnesota Twin Cities had found a bomb threat and this resulted in the campus being evacuated and classes being canceled. Of course, the campus had no choice but to do this. To me, the interesting fact is that this reaction is quite different now, because of the situation, than it would have been had we not been so temporally close to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

I can imagine opportunistic organizations taking advantage of this to sell expensive "remote student contact" systems to campuses at astronomical prices. Administrators will probably fall over themselves to show that they are being responsible by pointing to huge expenditures on high-priced, high-tech systems that will allow every student to be instantly contacted should there ever be a repeat of the Tech situation. Is it worth it? Well, I'd say yes if you consider the costs and benefits not purely in economic terms but social and psychological terms. Think how you would feel if you didn't do it and then faced a crisis where the system would have helped.

Psychologists refer to this as "counterfactual thinking" and it has a huge influence on our present behavior. While traditionally counterfactual thinking has focused on our thinking about a past that did not happen, there is increasing interest in future counterfactuals (thinking about a possible future) and its impact on our behavior. A Google search for "counterfactual thinking" or "counterfactual thought" should provide you with enough research articles to keep you busy through the next crisis.

Interestingly, a whole other stream of research suggests that "copycat" killings are more likely after such a widely publicized incident. In psychology, this has been referred to as the "Werther Effect" and the findings by researchers studying this are chilling. Although the Werther Effect has dealt with the impact of highly publicized suicide stories on the suicide rate, the underlying psychological factors would apply just as well to highly publicized murder stories. Let's hope we don't see a spate of such killings on campus in the next couple of months.

Banner Advertising Benefits

Okay, so I teach my consumer behavior class about the "mere exposure effect" which says that exposure to stimuli can lead to liking even when no attention is paid to the stimuli. Well, a recent study that is to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research soon tests the mere exposure effect in the context of banner advertising. We are constantly exposed to the content of banner ads even though we may not direct any attention towards them. This study, by Rohini Ahluwalia at the Carlson School of Management and her colleagues, suggest that banner ads may result in positive affect (liking) even when we don't pay attention to them. As a result, using click-throughs as a measure of the effectiveness of banner ads may be inappropriate. That is, banner ads may be positively influencing consumers even though you never pay enough attention to the ad to click through to the advertiser. Very interesting application of the mere exposure effect. Click here for a pdf of the full paper.

DO NOT READ THIS ...

Couldn't resist, could you?

Actually, I don't know why I'm doing this. Increasingly, people are recommending that professionals stay away from posting information on the Internet because something they say now could come back to haunt them years from now. Do I really want a permanent record of my random thoughts over the years? Let's look at the pros and cons.

The biggest dangers are that (a) I may regret something I say here, (b) someone wildly misinterprets something I write, (c) someone takes a comment out of context and accuses me of mean, ugly, and nasty thoughts, or (d) I embarrass someone I respect and love by making one of my (in)famous throwaway comments. These are not trivial dangers. I am well known for making rather extreme comments without considering whether someone will interpret it wrongly and be hurt by it.

On the other hand, I have never inhibited my actions and thoughts for fear of some future, unpredictable consequence (and this has got me in trouble). Also, people who really know me realize that I never disparage anyone intentionally. One of the worst crimes, in my book, would be to maliciously hurt someone else - physically or emotionally. If you tell me you were hurt by something I wrote, I will apologize and/or delete any offending comments.

So what's the up-side? Well, recently, I accidentally ran into an old blog on my trip to Australia (http://rvinaustralia.blogspot.com/) and found it fascinating to read about my trip. It helped me relive some pleasant memories and feelings. I am also quite a "contrarian." I often take extreme positions that I don't necessarily believe in just to see how people argue against my point of view. I always find arguing with people (who don't take it personally) to be a great learning experience. For the same reason, about the only people I don't get along with well are sensitive people who assume there is some deeper meaning in everything I say. But, I don't meet too many of those since I suspect they go out of their way to avoid me! Getting back to the point, I thought a personal blog would work much the way a journal does. It will allow me to chronicle thoughts on a variety of issues that I can read at a later date and then go back and laugh about. Why not a private journal? Because I spend so much time in front of a computer and computers today are easier for me to access (anywhere and any time) than a physical book. Also, I occasionally find that I have some ideas I want to share with others. With a blog, I can simply point people to a particular post.

So, this blog will be about my thoughts regarding consumer behavior, politics, religion, or anything else that interests me. Everything I write here may not be exactly what I really believe, but it will, in some mysterious way, be revealing in terms of what I'm like.

Hey, it's an experiment. Let's see if it even lasts beyond the first post!