Archive for the 'psychology' Category

Make fewer products, but make them great

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on January 23, 2009
in Business, Economics and psychology
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Matt Burns writes a great piece over at CrunchGear on how Apple’s success is tied to the fact that it doesn’t confuse customers with too many choices.

There really aren’t that many products: One cellphone, four iPods, three notebooks, and three desktop computers. Now look at HP’s, Dell’s, or even Garmin and TomTom’s product lines. Apple does something different and hopefully others are taking notes.

Apple’s secret sauce: A simple product line.

This reminds me of a section in Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. Here is Christopher Caldwell writing about it in The New Yorker:

Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be “de-motivating.” In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational—surely you’re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large—but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts. Students who are offered six topics they can write about for extra credit, for instance, are more likely to write a paper than students who are offered thirty.

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Pay More Attention to Your Food

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 22, 2008
in psychology
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Foods from plant sources

A famous editor I used to work with once told me that he didn’t like going to a certain well-known restaurant in Toronto, because it felt too much like going to church. It was too much of a burden to have to revere each bite, rather than simply eating it and enjoying it on a more superficial level. The dishes at this restaurant were so complex and the presentation so fussy that they demanded that you dissect and discuss them, and this made it just too much work to get through a meal.

Certainly, there is something to be said for a meal that challenges your palate and your mind, but sometimes you just want to fill your belly, satisfy your hunger, and experience the pleasure of eating. However, new research seems to indicate that exactly the kind of “mindful eating” demanded by haute cuisine might be a key to helping us maintain healthier weights.

A fascinating new study out of the Oregon Research Institute indicates that there is a real difference between the way obese people and slimmer folks experience the pleasure of food. The study measured the brain’s response to consuming a chocolate milkshake and found that the response in obese people was greatly diminished. The study also followed the weights of subjects for a year after the test and found that the lower the brain’s response to the milkshake, the greater the risk that these same people would experience unhealthy weight gain during the subsequent year.

Eric Stice, who lead the study, told Reuters in an interview “It’s much the same way that people who smoke regulate cigarettes. If you give them the low-tar cigarettes, they make up for the lost tar by smoking more efficiently, and get more of it.” The study also found that those subjects with a variant of gene TaqlA1 were more likely to have this diminished response to food.

At Psychology Today, Jay Winner responds to this study by suggesting that we can train ourselves to get more pleasure out of food by becoming more reverential about it. He’s an advocate of mindful eating, the practice of paying careful attention to the aromas, textures and flavours of what we eat. There’s even a Center for Mindful Eating that advocates a whole set of principles for improving the relationship between what we eat and how we think about it.

It sounds like the best advice for losing weight I’ve ever heard. I’m going to do my best to try it out.

Either that, or I’m going to devote myself to The Banana Diet.

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In the Future, Dreams Will Be in High-Definition

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 21, 2008
in Culture and psychology
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Image by aye_shamus via Flickr: i sleep in black and white, but i dream in color

I’ve often wondered exactly how films and television affect the way we dream. Growing up, I remember hearing that most people dreamed in black and white. This was something that made no sense to me. My dreams were in colour. All of my friends dreams were in colour. It was only adults who claimed to have dreams in black and white, and there was something very sad about the idea that as we aged it was possible that the colour would be drained out of even our dreams.

As I got older, though, and continued to dream in colour, I suspected that people who dreamed in black and white did so because they were used to black and white television and films. Dreams, after all, are like movies in our heads. This has always been the case for me, at least. Dreams even tend to use devices like close-up, slow motion, and change of perspective that are common in film, but totally foreign to our everyday experience with vision. It seemed reasonable to me that the brain was borrowing from these media to make our dreams, so if someone thought of films as being in black and white, they would dream in black and white, but if they thought of films as being in colour, their dreams would be in colour as well.

A new study from Ewa Murzyn, a post-grad student at the University of Dundee seems to have verified exactly that. People who grew up with black and white television dream in black and white, those who didn’t mostly don’t. Now I want more in-depth studies about how the media primes our dreams. Do people who never watch scary movies have scary dreams? What about the correlation between pornography viewing and sex dreams? Do people who play a lot first-person shooters have murderous dreams? Is there any way we can find out what dreams were like in the golden age of radio?

One thing I’m fairly certain of is that my son will grow up having dreams in beautiful colour and high-definition. That’s a lovely thought.

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Apple & Creativity: the Sympathetic Magic of Brands

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 7, 2008
in Business, Culture and psychology
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Image representing Apple Inc. as depicted in C...

One of the most widely discussed studies of the last year was a paper that claimed that people who were exposed to the Apple logo displayed more creativity than people who were exposed to the IBM logo. The study, which came out of the University of Waterloo and Duke University, also reported that people who were exposed to the Disney logo behaved more honesty than people who were exposed to E!.

The idea behind all of this is a psychological phenomenon known as “priming.” There have been a number of interesting studies in this field. People who have been exposed to words associated with rudeness have been observed to behave more rudely than those who were not, and people exposed to the elderly have shown a tendency to move slower and display poorer memory. Essentially, if we have a strong enough association between a symbol and a particular behaviour, it seems that we are more likely to display that behaviour ourselves. So, because the idea that Apple is associated with creativity has been so efficiently drilled into us, our brains are now primed for creative work when we see that logo.

Makes sense. This is, after all, how marketers hope branding works. By associating themselves with particular traits or activities they build a connection between their symbol and the things that activity represents. Apple products don’t actually have to do anything with their design or function that helps us be creative, all Apple has to do is associate the notions of “creativity” and “Apple” enough times and our brains take care of the rest. This is the essence of their branding strategy. I suspect the same is true of “Axe Body Spray” and “sex” or “Budweiser” and “sex” or “Porsche” and “sex”.

The real goal for marketers, however, is build a connection between their product and the behaviour of “buy this,” and I’m not certain that goal is being achieved by any of these branding efforts. If having an Apple poster on my wall while using a Windows machine has the same effect on my creativity as using an Apple product, then why bother laying out the extra cost of buying Apple? In fact, if priming is so effective, why not just put up posters of our creative heroes, images we associate even more deeply with the sort of work we want to produce, than some corporate logo? Perhaps the notion of filling our rooms with the icons we adore, as so many of us did when we were in high school, is a brilliant way of influencing our behaviour.

The idea of sympathetic magic is deeply ingrained in cultures throughout the world. From lucky talismans to superstitious rituals, to the habit of collecting items that were once possessed by famous people, or eating the hearts of our enemies to absorb their life force, humans have long history of connecting symbols with outcomes. We can scoff at the idea of prehistoric man throwing spears at cave paintings of deer in the hopes that it would magically provide them with a more successful hunt, but as an early form of priming this makes perfect sense. By associating the ritual and the image with the actual hunt, perhaps the brains of our ancestors were better prepared for action when they saw deer on the plains.

So, thanks Apple for creating a symbol we can associate with creative work. It reminds me that I should get a picture of Don Delillo to put above my desk.

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