tomstafford

3D rooms

Perception is a fundamentally underconstrained problem. You get information in through your senses, but not enough information to be absolutely sure of what is causing those sensations. A good example is perception of depth in vision. You get a pattern of light falling on your retinas (retinae?), in two dimensions, and from that you infer a three dimensional world, using various clever calculations of the visual system and some assumptions about what is likely. But because the process remains fundamentally underconstrained, there is always the possibility that you will see something that isn’t really there – that is, your visual system will take in a pattern of information and decide that it is more likely to be produced by a scenario different from the real one.

Which is a all a long winded way of saying: “Look, cool! Illusions rooms!” (thanks Yalda)

They’re painted so that from one particular angle the shapes line up and your visual system flips into thinking that it can see a flat, 2D, pattern when the reality is a disjoint 3D one. Awesome.

There’s plenty more here

Continue reading “3D rooms”

neuroscience and advertising

As well as semiotics and cognitive psychology there is another tool for understanding advertising – neuroscience! Enter neuromarketing [1]. Neuromarketing promises to tell you how your brain responds to branding, or which adverts during the superbowl are most effective (Vaughan did a great job on this one, here, and here), or how alert people are during normal television adverts (“there may well need to be more ads created.” concludes the executive who commissioned the study!)

Neuromarketing leaves people saying things like

But the brain doesn’t lie, and the ad industry is just waking up to the potential of neuroscience. The brain’s seven defined regions – each affecting a different aspect of brain function – literally light up the screen if stimulated. Each one contributes to different cognitive activities; reasoning, analysis, long or short-term memory, high or low involvement processing, emotion, meaning etc.
(Tess Alps, in the Guardian)

The appeal of neuromarketing is the illusion of being able to access some more fundamental explanatory basis for our actions. People may lie to market researchers, or may even deceive themselves, but – we hope – ‘the brain doesn’t lie’. As psychologist and marketing guru Gerald Zaltman said existing methods don’t go nearly far enough in helping [advertisers] move to a closer understanding of their customers [2]

Sadly for marketing science, a straight description of what the brain is doing is of limited use – the marketing implications crucially depend on how you interpret that activity. And the interpretation depends on your theories and assumptions about the mind. If your assumptions are dubious (see the superbowl study) or just wrong (see the Tess Alps quote above) then you’re not going to get anything more than a pseudo-scientific smokescreen.

Perhaps the real appeal of neuromarketing to advertisers is betrayed by this quote from Jonathan Harries, the creative director at advertising agency FCB:

It is very hard for our clients to buy gut feel because every time they approach [a campaign], their jobs are on the line. Neuroscience promises to measure the gut feel, and that is exciting for us. It makes it easier for us to sell what we believe is right [2]

Ref:

[1] Enjoy the marketing of neuromarketing first hand at neurosense.co.uk/

[2] Inside the Consumer Mind : What neuroscience can tell us about marketing, Wendy Melillo, Adweek; Jan 16, 2006; 47, 3

when choice is demotivating

Here’s a way to make people buy more of your stuff – give them fewer options. Douglas Coupland called the bewilderment induced by there being too many choices ‘option paralysis’ (‘Generation X’, 1991). Now social psychologists have caught on (‘When choice is demotivating’, 2000, [1]). Offer shoppers a choice of 24 jams and they are less likely to buy a jar than if offered a choice of 6 jams. Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles – and, what is more, they write better essays. Students given a similar choice of free chocolates (a restricted choice compared to an extensive choice) made quicker choices (not too suprising) and were happier with the choices they did make once they had made them.

ref

[1] Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. 2000. <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/whenchoice.html
“>When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 995-1006.

advertising influences familiarity induces preference

We probably like to think that we’re too smart to be seduced by such “branding,” but we aren’t. If you ask test participants in a study to explain their preferences in music or art, they’ll come up with some account based on the qualities of the pieces themselves. Yet several studies have demonstrated that “familiarity breeds liking.” If you play snippets of music for people or show them slides of paintings and vary the number of times they hear or see the music and art, on the whole people will rate the familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar ones. The people doing the ratings don’t know that they like one bit of music more than another because its more familiar. Nonetheless, when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what’s familiar, even if it’s only familiar because they know its name from advertising

Barry Schwartz. ‘The Paradox of Choice’ (2004)

I think the essential point is correct, but there is a sort of sneaking condescension here: All of you people (the ‘test participants’) only like the things you like because you’re familiar with them, not because of any rational or emotional affection for them (that’s just ‘some account’). What’s more – we (the psychologists) have done experiments which show (admittedly only in some circumstances) that familiarity leads to liking; and from this we’re prepared to generalise to all other circumstances you’re involved in. I parody, but I’m sure you see what I mean.

The fact that we tend to like the familiar isn’t too surprising. There’s even a good evolutionary reason for preferring what worked before – if it didn’t kill you last time, why risk doing something else this time? The single most useful thing you can measure to predict what someone will do in the future is not what they want to do, nor is it what they say they’ll probably do, nor what their friends and family will do, but simply what they did last time – such is the power of habit (For more on this see Hack #74 in Mind Hacks).

But the interesting thing about advertising and branding is the process of it making something familiar to us and us taking this as an indication of preference. In other words, we don’t properly take into account that the brand is not familiar to us for any good reason.

Psychologically it’s not too surprising that this should happen. The study [1] which revived the subliminal perception field involved this mere exposure effect. Participants were shown meaningless shapes for time-spans below the perceptual threshold and subsequently they preferred those shapes to other not previously displayed shapes – even though they had not consciously perceived either set of shapes before.

However, is there any evidence that this kind of familiarity effect can be shown to compete with, or even over-ride, actual good reasons for liking or disliking a brand? Perhaps people are happy to use a fairly arbitrary guideline (familiarity) for unimportant decisions, or decisions where the choices are all pretty good, but when more is at stake familiarity is relegated down the table of influencing factors?

Ref

[1] Kunst-Wilson WR, Zajonc RB (1980). Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207(4430):557-8.

music, wine and will

You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like “It was the right price”, or “I liked the label”. Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn’t.

That’s funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens

This study was done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leicester [1]. They played traditional French (accordion music) or traditional German (a Bierkeller brass band – oompah music) music at customers and watched the sales of wine from their experimental wine shelves, which contained French and German wine matched for price and flavour. On French music days 77% of the wine sold was French, on German music days 73% was German – in other words, if you took some wine off their shelves you were 3 or 4 times more likely to choose a wine that matched the music than wine that didn’t match the music.

Did people notice the music? Probably in a vague sort of way. But only 1 out of 44 customers who agreed to answer some questions at the checkout spontaneously mentioned it as the reason they bought the wine. When asked specifically if they thought that the music affected their choice 86% said that it didn’t. The behavioural influence of the music was massive, but the customers didn’t notice or believe that it was affecting them. Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine [2], or spend more in restaurants [3].

Is this manipulation? There’s no coercion, all the customers are certainly wine buyers who are probably more or less in the mood to buy some wine. But they have been influenced in what kind of wine they buy and they don’t know that they have.

What would be the effect, I wonder, of having someone stand by the shelves saying to the customers as they passed “Why don’t you buy a French wine today”? My hunch is that you’d make people think about their decision a lot more – just by trying to persuade them you’d turn the decision from a low involvement one into a high involvement one. People would start to discount your suggestion. But the suggestion made by the music doesn’t trigger any kind of monitoring. Instead, the authors of this study believe, it triggers memories associated with the music – preferences and frames of reference. Simply put, hearing the French music activates [4] ideas of ‘Frenchness’ – maybe making customers remember how much they like French wine, or how much they enjoyed their last trip to France. For a decision which people aren’t very involved with, with low costs either way (both the French and German wines are pretty similar, remember, except for their nationality) this is enough to swing the choice.

This priming affect is, I believe, one of the major ways advertising works [5]. Simply by making it more likely for us to remember certain things, we are more likely to make decisions biased in a certain way. There’s no compulsion, nobody has their free-will wrenched from their conscious grip. There’s just an environment shaped a certain way to encourage certain ideas. And how could anything be wrong with that?

Refs & Footnotes below the fold:

Continue reading “music, wine and will”

experimental psychology of advertising resources

A few places where you can enjoy the intersection between experimental psychology and marketing research are at:

(labs)

The Food and Brand Lab (was ‘The Illinois Food and Brand lab’, but has now moved to Cornell) found at consumerpsychology.net

The Bangor University: The Experimental Consumer Psychology research group – see this article in New Scientist about Jane Raymond’s research Is advertising flogging a dead horse? (New Scientist, 24 December 2005).

(associations)

The Association for Consumer Research

Society for Consumer Psychology

(journals)

Journal of Consumer Psychology

<a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jws/cbh
“>The Journal of Consumer Behaviour (defunct?)

Journal of Marketing

Journal of Marketing Research

(updated)

Psychology and Marketing

Cognitive psychology & advertising

Here’s another approach to understanding how adverts work – cognitive psychology, as discussed in this Wired article from 2002 (thanks Lauren!)

You’ll probably not be surprised that I’ve lots of sympathy for experimenal psychology as a method for understanding adverts (as opposed to, say, semiotics). A conventional experimental cognitive psychology approach to understanding something about advertising would be:

1. Have an idea, e.g., I think Factor X makes people buy more stuff
2. Come up with an experiment which involves two situations which are identical except for the presence/absence of Factor X.
3. Include some measure which is a good enouch approximation for the behaviour ‘buying’ (it could be actual purchases, or it could be something like memory for the product, or extent of positive feelings for the product, which we just assume will convert into sales)
4. Do the experiment, write up the results, let the rest of the (psychology) world criticise your experiment
5. Do follow-up experiments to re-test your idea and counter criticisms.

Or something like that anyway. Here’s an example from the Wired article:

One example: At the University of Texas at Austin, cognitive science professor Art Markman gave a group of hungry people a few bites of popcorn. Another group got no food. Then he showed his volunteers pictures of products ‚Äì DVD players, shampoo, cars, French toast. The group whose appetite had been whetted with popcorn had a harder time concentrating on the nonfoods. One obvious implication, Markman says: Food samples may actually hurt nongrocery sales.

Now the strength here is that you both check if there is an effect at all, and you narrow down the possibiliies so that you have a rough idea what is causing it (again, cf a semiotic approach). The weakness is that even though you’ve shown an effect in the lab, you’re not sure it will operate outside of the lab (the problem of generalisability), and you’re not going to be sure that, even if it does operate, it isn’t made irrelevant by some other factor that you weren’t looking at with your experimental lens. So, for example, maybe wetting people’s appetites does make it harder for them to concentrate on non-foods, but maybe in real life most people don’t wet their appetites before shopping for non-foods, so the finding is irrelevant. Or maybe everyone wets their appetites, so the supermarket needn’t worry about giving away samples – we’re all peckish anyway. Or maybe we’re more likely to buy non-foods when we’re not concentrating (concentration being the thing actually measured in the experiment), so being peckish actually helps non-food sales.

Anyway, so lots of things could be true, and it takes more than a simple lab study to work out which factors are dominating, but the great virtue of the experimental method is that it gives strong hints as to what sorts of things can be operating and – just as important – what sort of things can’t affect behaviour.

Decoding Advertisements

Judith Williamson’s ‘Decoding Advertisements’ is a classic look at the semiotics of advertising – about how adverts construct and promolgate meaning, necessarily involving the customer in a system of signs and symbols, as a token in that system. It’s a great book and, in some sense, a forerunner of Naomi Klein’s book on Brands, No Logo

I’m going to talk about it because it is exactly not what I am interested in in terms of advertising and psychology.

The first advert discussed in the book (shown below, p18 in the book) is an advert for car tyres. The advert shows a car stopped just before the end of a jetty; the text reports how they drove the car 36,000 miles and then did an emergency stop to test the quality of the tyres. They stopped fine – in other words, ‘these are good tyres’. But – aha! – says Judith Williamson – that is just the overt message of the advert. The covert message of the advert is captured in the image

The outside of the jetty resembles the outside of a tyre and the curve is suggestive of its shape: the whole jetty is one big tyre…The jetty is tough and strong, it withstands water and erosion and does not wear down: because of the visual resemblance we assume that this is true of the tyre as well. In the picture the jetty actually encloses the car, protectively surrounding it with solidity in the middle of dangerous water: similarly, the whole safety of the car and driver is wrapped up in the tyre, which stands up to the elements and supports the car. Thus what seemed to be merely a part of the apparatus for conveying a message about braking speed, turns out to be a message in itself, one that works not on the overt but almost on the unconscious level; and one which involves a connection being made, a correlation between two objects (tyre and jetty) not on a rational basis but by a leap made on the basis of appearance, juxtaposition and connotation.

Is this true? Do the qualities of the jetty occur to us and transfer to the tyres? Does this happen covertly, on an ‘almost unconscious level’. Does this magic bypass the normal rational monitoring of our thoughts? Well, it could be true, maybe. But also, something like it could be true – maybe the image really plays the role of a phallic symbol and suggest to the viewer thoughts of masculine strength and durability. Or maybe something contradictory but similar in style is true – does the image suggest danger, when the tyres are meant to make you feel safe, so that really it is a bad advert. Or maybe people just like to look at a nice picture of a jetty in the sea. Or maybe they like the curves of the jetty, and this makes them feel positive about the thing they see at the same time (the logo of the tyre manufacturer). All of these things could be true – I don’t believe Judith Williamson has any more idea than us which are true, and this is why I’m not interested in the semiotics of advertising at the moment.

The argument advanced in ‘Decoding Advertisements’ misses a critical step. Can it be shown that covert visual imagery affects consumer’s buying behaviour? I don’t doubt that covert visual imagery exists, nor even that in some circumstances has an effect, but does it have an effect in adverts? Till the whole class of influences talked about is demonstrated to be in operation, why should I believe these analyses of adverts are any more than psychoanalytic-spook stories?

So, while I’m alive to the use of decoding adverts using semiotics, the first stops on my investigation into adverts will be

the experimental evidence which shows that adverts do have an effect

and

the experimental evidence on what sorts of things affect behaviours

By ‘sorts of things’ I mean general categories like ‘new information’, ‘social influence’, ‘status’, ‘sex appeal’, ‘positive emotions’ – all things that at first glance seem more likely to be factors in adverts’ success. I’ll leave the fine, critical-theory, detail for later, and until I can be persuaded that, in an advert, a jetty is more than just a jetty.

Ref:

Williamson, Judith. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars. You can get a flavour for the book from this discussion, which includes examples. Judith Williamson is a flag on the fantastic semiotics black run.

Is there a science of advertising?

Does advertising work? If it does work, how does it work? And given this, should we be worried about what advertisers do? These are, broadly, the questions I’m interested in and the topics I am going to be posting about for the next month. Aside from sheer curiousity, I’m chairing a discussion on the topic of advertising and psychology on March 6th at Cafe Scientifique, Sheffield.

Here’s the blurb:

Do adverts work? How do they work? And is it a problem?

Most of us don’t think we’re particularly affected by adverts, but it can’t be for nothing that the advertising industry in the UK spent ¬£13 billion last year trying to change our buying habits, and another couple of billion pounds researching in which are the most effective ways of doing this. Psychologists have spent years trying to predict what makes people behave in certain ways and we’re not that close to an answer – perhaps the advertisers, with their massive budget, have cracked it? And if they have, should we be worried?

This talk will invite the audience to consider what kind of effect advertising has, and how most adverts work. Although ‘subliminal advertising’ is a myth, some recent research does suggests that there are ways our behaviour can be influenced without our full awarenessus of it. What these experiments mean for the freedom of the individual is an open question which hopefully we can consider together.

I genuinely haven’t reached any conclusions on this yet, so I’m looking forward to the discussion, especially as it touches on such tangled issues as freewill and experimental evidence on how our behaviour can be unconsciously affected (Hacks #98, #99 and #100 for those of you with copies of Mind Hacks). And hopefully too, there’ll be an opportunity for some blog-discussion as well. I’m going to cross-post things at both mindhacks.com and at idiolect, although I’ll reserve the more speculative and/or sociological stuff for idiolect. If you’ve anything to say, please chip in, and if you’ve got anything you think I should know about, read or listen to please email me tom [at] mindhacks [dot] com

Polish Mind Hacks – 100 sposob√≥w na zg≈Çƒôbienie tajemnic umys≈Çu

Mind Hacks has been published in Polish as 100 sposob√≥w na zg≈Çƒôbienie tajemnic umys≈Çu. You can order it here, and at kognitywistyka.net, the polish cognitive science website, you can read an interview Matt and I did. The interview is available in English and in Polish and is part of a series of three (the next two will shortly be available in the same place).

And so, to any polish readers – welcome to mindhacks.com!

The details of the new translation, in Polish, below the fold

Continue reading “Polish Mind Hacks – 100 sposob√≥w na zg≈Çƒôbienie tajemnic umys≈Çu”

neuroscience & the media

The recent column from Ben Bad Science Goldacre is on the widely reported, and improbable, neuroscience of why the novels of Agatha Christie are so successful (column here). The neurobabble used to obfuscate the fact that she wrote quite well is astounding. No, her books did not directly alter your brain chemistry to make the novels ‘literally unputdownable’ – except in the boring everyday sense that everything you do and think alters your brain chemisty. The best bit is the man who originated the misleading reports claims that it was all some sort of post-modern in-joke with readers and viewers (who were supposed to know they were being lied to). Goldacre’s strongly worded conclusion:

So I‚Äôve said it before, and I‚Äôll say it again: the public are confused about science, for the simple reason that the media is full of grandiose humanities graduates, acting as self-appointed experts and science communicators, who construct their own parody of what they think science is: and then, to compound their crime, they go on to critique science, as if their parody was the reality
… Can we have some science on telly, please.

And on that note, I’ve heard good reports for this programme, on BBC2; a short series looking at claims for alternative medicine like acupuncture and faith healing. Any science broadcast that takes in the need for experimental trials, control groups, placebo effects (Hack #73 incidentally) and the dangers of overgeneralising findings is good by me. Although the BBC News report is disappointingly titled Acupuncture ‘deactivates brain’ and subtitled ‘Acupuncture works by deactivating the area of the brain governing pain, a TV show will claim’. Oh well, at least they used the scare quotes.

start the week with neuroscience

Today’s ‘Start the Week’ on BBC Radio 4 features Steve Rose discussing advances in neuroscience, in drug treatments (for illnesses or mind-enhancement) and the ethical issues that the public will have to increasingly deal with.

Andrew Marr, the presenter, uses this lovely metaphor for brain scanning. It is like, he said (i paraphrase), looking at the outside of a darkened house at night, a house which contains someone moving from room to room turning on and off lights as they do. So when we look at an fMRI scan we might know which neural and/or mental ‘room’ they are in, but we’ve no idea what they’re doing there. Steve Rose agreed: “I don’t believe we’ll ever be able to tell what a person is thinking from a brain scan” (although he added that some of his colleagues would disagree with him).

If you’d like to hear the show, you can listen again here

neurovalentines

February the 14th is fast approaching, St. Valentines day. What can the considerate neuroscientist get his or her loved one?

I think I’ve just had a brilliant idea, and it shouldn’t be too hard to sort out. All you need is a few well-connected neuroimaging buddies and probably four or five hundred pounds to afford the scanning time. Sit yourself in the scanner looking at picures of your beloved, or maybe listening to the song that was playing when you first met. Some quick image analysis later, and a trip to the printers, and – viola! – you have a customised Valentines Day card showing your brain and the activity of your brain as you contemplate the love of your life. The inscription? “Thinking of you” should do it!

Mente Locale (Italian Mind Hacks)

Mente locale: Esperimenti, giochi, consigli per conoscere il proprio cervello e usarlo meglio di Tom Stafford, Matt Webb has been available since November 2005, it turns out. That’s the Italian translation of Mind Hacks, in case you didn’t guess. It has been translated by Anna Airoldi (who spotten an appropriate error in the English translation). Welcome Italian readers!

You can buy Mente Locale here, and I’ve put the Italian blurb for the book below the fold

Continue reading “Mente Locale (Italian Mind Hacks)”

an appropriate error

Anna Airoldi, the translator of Mind Hacks into Italian has noticed a fantastic error in the published book. She writes

(170) 1st paragraph of “How it works”;
I’m not entirely sure this is a real typo, considering the topic discussed in the paragraph, but “conservations” shouldn’t just be “conversations”?

She’s absolutely right – it should be ‘conversations’ not ‘conservations’. But although it is an error, in this case it is an appropriate error, because it appears in Hack #52 ‘Robust Processing Using Parallelism’ which discusses how we can read errorful or ambiguous sentences using multiple interacting levels of information to construct meaning. Normally this is a good thing, but it appears that in this particular instance the meaning was so obvious that our normally diligent editing process didn’t spot the mistake (my mistake in origin, incidentally)!

The Distorted Tune Test

Ever wondered if you are tone-deaf? The Distorted Tune Test page can help. You listen to 25 simple tunes and judge whether they are played correctly or not (it takes about five or six minutes). Based on your responses, you’ll be told how well you can judge pitch. If the results suggest you are tone-deaf then you are eligable to take part in a US National Institute of Health study into the conditions, so that’s some compensation.