In this episode of the Human Tech podcast we talk about how changes in the workplace during the pandemic have affected user experience work within organizations.
The Effect of Remote Work on User Experience Work
10 Best Psychology Books
Every few years I update my list of favorite psychology books, and it’s that time again. It turns out that this is my most popular blog post. So here’s my latest list. Let me know if you have some favorites that you think should have made it on my list but didn’t.
(These are in no particular order, i.e., #1 doesn’t mean it’s my favorite.)
I do have an Amazon affiliate account, so I’ve included a link to each book after the description if you are interested in purchasing or just getting more info.
And you may want to check out the post on the 7 Best User Experience Books.
1. Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, 2011 – If you want to understand how people think and how and why they react, then this is a must read. Daniel Kahneman is a Psychologist and a Nobel prize winner in Economics, but this book is all about how people think and react. It’s very well written, but I will warn you, it’s not an easy read. Plan to spend time reading this one. But it will be worth it for the understanding you get into why we do the things we do.
2. Redirect, by Timothy Wilson, 2011 – This is one of two books on my list by Timothy Wilson. If you want to know how to make permanent and lasting change in your behavior, or the behavior of someone you know, then this is the book to read. Wilson covers the recent and often very surprising research on interventions and therapies that result in people actually changing. Permanent behavior change is hard to come by. This book tells you what does and doesn’t work based on research.
3. Strangers to Ourselves: The Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson, 2004 – This is the book that actually got me started seriously on the topic of the unconscious. I had read Blink (Malcolm Gladwell) and although that was an interesting book, I wanted more depth and detail. Gladwell referenced Wilson’s book so I started reading it and light bulbs went off for me. This one is a bit more academic and psychological, especially the first few chapters, but all in all, a great book with lots of interesting insights and strong research.
4. The Power of Habit , by Charles Duhigg, 2014. The science of habits — how we form them, change them, and why they are so powerful. Actually the information in one of the Appendices is, I think, the most powerful part of the book.
5. The Art of Choosing , by Sheena Iyengar, 2011. This is a thick book and research oriented, but it’s the best book out there for a survey of decision-making. Why do people make certain decisions? Why do they choose one thing over another? What makes them take action?
6. The Paradox of Choice , by Barry Schwartz, 2005. The premise of this book is that we all want lots of choices, but lots of choices don’t help us to choose. It’s easy to read and has lots of great research in it too.https://ws-na.a
7. The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, 2017. This book shows Sloman’s and Fernbach’s research on how our social networks frame what we think we know.
8. Drive, by Daniel Pink, 2011 – What really motivates people? This book covers the research on human motivation in the last few years. It’s well written, and an easy read, and will explode some long-standing beliefs.
9. How To Get People To Do Stuff by Susan Weinschenk, 2013. My book on the 7 drivers of motivation.
10. I Love You, Now Read This Book (It’s About Human Decision Making and Behavioral Economics) by Guthrie Weinschenk, 2019
We talked to some of these authors on our podcast Human Tech, so check those episodes out if you want to hear the authors discuss their ideas.
7 Best UX (User Experience) Design Books
Every few years I update my list of favorite UX (user experience) design books, and it’s that time again. So here’s my latest list. Let me know if you have some favorites that you think should have made it on my list but didn’t.
(These are in no particular order, i.e., #1 doesn’t mean it’s my favorite.)
I do have an Amazon affiliate account, so I’ve included a link to each book after the description if you are interested in purchasing or just getting more info.
Also, you may want to check out the 10 Best Psychology Books article.
1. The User Experience of One by Leah Buley, 2013. Whether you are a team of one or a team of many this is a good book on user-centered design and how to do it.
2. Gamestorming by Dave Gray, 2010. If you have meetings with other people and you need to collaborate and solve problems this book is full of different and fun and useful techniques for getting people to work productively together.
3. Writing is Designing by Metts and Welfle, 2020. A great book on how to write for digital products.
4. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug . A must read for anyone that designs stuff.
5. Surveys That Work by Caroline Jarrett. If you design surveys this is a must read. Don’t create a survey without it.
6. Forms That Work by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. Another book by Jarrett. If you are designing an online form read this first.
7. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk. I hope you will forgive me for putting one of my books on the list too. Make sure you get the 2nd edition which we updated in 2020.
We talked to some of these authors on our podcast Human Tech, so check those episodes out if you want to hear the authors discuss their ideas.
The User Experience of Surveys
In this episode of the Human Tech podcast we talk with Caroline Jarrett about the user experience of surveys. Besides being an expert on forms design, Caroline has recently written a book on survey design.
You can reach Caroline at her company website:
or by email: caroline.jarrett@effortmark.co.uk
Check out her new book:
Also, here is where you can access a transcript of our interview from the podcast:
https://humantech.theteamw.com/transcripts/113%20transcript.docx
What Research Tells Us About the Power of the Tribe
Below is a guest post from Steven Sloman and Mugur Geana
“…human beings are tribal all the way down, all the way to the processes that govern thought. In other words, we let others think for us.”
We thought we had a solution. After a year of cowering in our homes, science had come to the rescue in a way that sounded like science fiction. We had not one but two vaccines based on what seemed fantasmagorical methods from the cutting edge of molecular biology. They had greater efficacy than anyone had dreamed, upwards of 90% ability to prevent infection. Yet, as we write this, the US is experiencing a 4th Covid-19 surge. To those of us who raced to get vaccinated as soon as we could, something has gone terribly wrong.
We knew that a coronavirus variant might evolve that could wriggle its way around the vaccine’s defenses. Most experts believe that, to some extent, that is what the Delta variant is doing. It is almost surely more transmissible than previous variants, and therefore has become a dominant strain globally. But we don’t really know how transmissible this latest and greatest contender is because it isn’t facing the same obstacles that its immediate predecessors faced. Many Americans have decided that the pandemic is over. So it is hard for epidemiologists to measure the transmissibility of the Delta variant, because they have to do it in a society with full restaurants and bars, and with thousands of fans screaming their approval and disapproval at sports venues. Some of those patrons have been vaccinated. Some have not. The surge is occurring not just because of the new variant but because so many people have entirely given up on wearing masks and social distancing, never mind their unwillingness to vaccinate.
There are other reasons people may have given up, including the inconsistency of the messages put forward by public health authorities. The CDC did issue guidance that vaccinated people need not wear masks indoors when they are with other vaccinated people. But recent studies show that vaccinated people can become carriers (although substantially less often than unvaccinated people). Furthermore, people get their information about Covid from a multitude of sources, and misinformation abounds. Nevertheless, the vaccines have lowered the risk of getting and certainly of dying from Covid-19. So, are people just making rational risk assessments to decide whether or not the discomfort of masks and the isolation of social distancing is worth it? Alternatively, people might be ignoring scientific advice because they lack trust. Some come from racial minority groups that have historically been poorly served by the medical community, or their behavior is driven by information from sources that do not share the medical establishment’s views.
The word on the street, and on many newscasts, is that the issue is ideological. Is it? Ideology seems to pervade so much these days. There is clearly a split in Americans’ confidence in experts; Democrats show more than Republicans (Pew Research, 7/21/19). Experts themselves are speaking pretty much with a single voice: With only a few eccentric exceptions, medical experts recommend avoiding close proximity to strangers, wearing masks in public, certainly indoors and outdoors if you have to be close to people you don’t know (or don’t trust), and get vaccinated. Who is following the advice, and who isn’t, and why?
In two surveys involving almost 1700 US adults, we asked people whether they take preventive behaviors (mask-wearing and social distancing) and whether they support policies that encourage such behavior. We also asked respondents several questions about their political attitudes (conservative versus liberal), about their own risk from the coronavirus, their understanding of the transmission of the virus, how well they perceive their own understanding of the virus, and some other facts about themselves. We found that the best predictor of their behavior and their attitudes was their political leanings. Suppose you want to know whether an American is likely to wear a mask or practice social distancing. In that case, the single best question to ask them turns out to be what party they vote for.
This finding is consistent with a plethora of research. We looked for published and unpublished manuscripts made available by early 2021 that included measures of Covid-mitigation attitudes and also measured political ideology. Forty-four papers provided data that allowed us to evaluate which variables predicted those attitudes. Out of 141 observations from the 44 papers, political ideology was a significant predictor of responses in 112 (79%). Moreover, ideology was by far the best predictor of COVID-19-related attitudes overall. Other factors did surpass ideology’s predictive value in a few cases: age (8 cases), gender (8 cases), education (14 cases), and race/ethnicity (7 cases), along with various measures of news consumption (10 cases). Ideology did best 62 times.
In another study of over 1100 Americans led by Mae Fullerton, we found that not only did people’s risk profiles fail to predict their mask-wearing and social distancing, but even their perception of their own risk failed to predict them. As usual, partisanship turned out to be a better predictor, along with being an essential worker. Not surprisingly, another good predictor was believing compliance was important.
These studies are, of course, correlational. We have no direct evidence that one’s partisanship causes one’s willingness to take mitigating or preventive behaviors against Covid. It could be, for instance, that Republicans tend to live in Republican communities or regions of the country and Democrats in Democratic communities, and that people behave in line with their community, as opposed to their ideology. But alternative explanations like this just emphasize our bottom line: In the case of Covid, health-related behavior is not governed by a rational assessment of risk but by the attitudes of the people who surround us. Our data suggest that it is not primarily a function of race, age, or any of the other variables that have been offered as big players, but rather variables related to ideology.
In a recent book, one of us argued that human beings are tribal all the way down, all the way to the processes that govern thought. In other words, we let others think for us. We keep expecting to find exceptions to this rule. When it comes to matters of life and limb, for instance, or when behavior is obviously foolish or capricious, we would expect people to rely on their ability to reason, not to simply channel the people around them. Yet we keep being surprised. Covid is a matter of life and death and the strong consensus among experts means that deciding what to do is not very complicated, and yet people seem to be as influenced by social processes and pressures as they are in cases that seem much more benign (like how much respect one should have for economists) and topics that do not lend themselves to such easy conclusions (like how we should handle immigration).
Everyone makes mistakes. But when it comes to freeing the country from the bonds of a tiresome pandemic, some of us keep making the same mistake over and over.
You can reach Steven at: Steven_Sloman@Brown.edu. His website is: https://sites.google.com/site/slomanlab/
You can reach Mugur at geanam@ku.edu
Design is evolving—and designers need to evolve with it.
Below is a guest post from Nathan Shedroff
‘While designers have evolved over the last 25 years to be advocates for the audience/customer, we now need to be advocates for the rest of everyone else, democracy, society, and the planet, itself.“
I was taught design in a world and a time where the word primarily referred to things you could see, touch, and maybe hear. Design craft is often focused singularly on pleasing our senses. Fair enough, but design has changed a lot since my undergrad days. It wasn’t OK to ignore the impacts and outcomes of our work then, and it’s much, much less now.
It’s Not About You
The kind of design I was taught essentially told us designers to “go out into the world and redesign it in your vision!” If we did that, we were told, we would be rewarded—with money, with recognition, with awards, etc. Mostly, that isn’t what happens. It’s been very recently that popular appreciation for the kind of design that wins awards has emerged. For most of the past, the “design aesthetic” of the moment did not align with what most people appreciated or wanted. One of the biggest achievements of companies like Appen and Nike has been the promotion of design qualities that design industries mostly emphasize. Never before have non-designers cared about, let alone sought-out, design that the “experts” agree are well-designed. This is particularly true in UX/UI design though there are disagreements, often.
Happily, the majority of how design is taught today has changed drastically, partly because many more people have entered the field but, mostly, because the design industry has steadily leveled-up its process, aims, cares, and context. Sure, there’s a few programs and faculty who only care about appearance and the plastic parts of “craft.” But, most reputable programs teach the process of design research, which extols the virtues of understanding our audiences/customers/etc. before we begin making things for them. This is a huge advancement! While some industries still reward and recognize only the starchitects of their worlds, most design organizations have started to refocus themselves around impact.
The famous Frog Design, under its original founders, thought their incredible innovation was to put the client CEO at the center of the design process. Today, even Frog Design puts the customer at the center now. Progress.
UX/UI/interaction/interface/etc. design has led much of this progress. It’s now no longer acceptable to jump straight into screen design without first investigating customers—well, unless it’s an agile project. It’s still the case that much of that customer research is really, really, poorly done, but at least the step is there in the process chart and, sometimes, there’s someone designated as the researcher.
It’s Not About Us, Either
But, designing for others isn’t enough. Therefore, design research isn’t enough, either. There are still too many steps in the process and people in the system who don’t understand, care about, or want to create designs that work for others, instead of merely for themselves. Even when designers know and do better, everyone else in an organization, from CEO or client to layers of managers, to peers in other divisions, can foul this process and prevent better design responses. This is simply the reality of systems made from real people, instead of idealized ones. It’s not a reason not to design, but it complicates our efforts and stifles progress. It requires us to not only better understand the context of our own work but levels of context above, below, and to the side that impact our work and, more importantly, are impacted by it.
This is why designers need to be taught so much more than traditional design. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t understand the basics of form, shape, color, light, seeing, composition, etc. By all means, these are probably more important than ever. But, we need to find ways to add in much more about the impacts of our work, which I’ll admit, isn’t easy.
It’s About Everything, Now
I know this sounds daunting, and we’re definitely adding levels of complexity and context, but these levels are necessary, not only for ethical and just work but also for financially successful work, too. Today, in order to be a successful designer (or, rather a designer creating work successfully), we also need to understand (in no particular order):
• The social contexts of our work (including impact, issues, and meaning)
• The ecological impacts and consequences of our work (and ALL of it has some impact)
• How value is created and flows between people, organizations, and stakeholders
• How to better communicate with all of these people
• How to lead and manage people (I, know, ugh, right?)
• How to respect (and transcend) the quantitative data available to us (and sometimes foisted upon us)
All of the above helps us be more ic in our work (which is another, critical issue, entirely)
That’s a tall order, I know, but necessary if you want to practice design successfully now and in the future. For sure, you’ll be able to inquire with and be joined by others. You won’t be alone (though it may often feel that way).
I’ll try to make it simple. I’ve been working on these issues for quite a while now. You don’t even need to go get another degree to know the above. There are even tools in existence for these (and several more on the way). There aren’t a lot of books that describe the list above, but there are many videos.
The first context for design is the environment around us. Nature supports everything else on this planet. If it falters, changes, or ceases to support us as we’ve become accustomed, everything else changes—sometimes radically. You don’t have to spend the rest of your life, or even the rest of the year, reading about this. I wrote the book, Design is the Solution, to cover it all, in fact (though others have, too). But, you need to know the basics because nothing else works otherwise. It’s your duty as a designer to know these things. No, scratch that. It’s your duty as a human on this planet to know these things. Period.
The second realization is that while society is supported by Nature, society supports (or suppresses) everything else. You can’t have an economic system without a social system. The main context you will design around will be the social ones (there are many). You don’t get to skirt this one either. It permeates everything. It governs what is considered good or bad, successful, or frivolous, important or not. And, there are more social impacts and issues than I can list. But the most important are going to be: equity, justice, respect, desire, need, privacy, and safety. If all you do is investigate how your audience understands and relates to these, you’re doing better than 90% of the rest of people you work with.
The only thing I’ll say about the economic context is this: markets are incredible optimizers. They really are. However, they only optimize what you put into the equation and the things we care about most have been left out of the economic equation by economists and “businesspeople” for far too long. And, optimization may not be called for at all. Just know that that uneasy feeling you have that business is missing some important things is absolutely true. I won’t get into the entire argument (you can read an intro here) but know that:
- People are NOT rational actors
- People don’t only optimize for money (they absolutely WILL pay more for some things)
- Rich people do NOT create jobs
That will keep you busy for a while.
Next, the same way we can measure the ecological impacts of a product, service, or other experience, we can also measure social impacts of what we create. We probably can’t measure everything (there are so many) but we can measure enough—if we care to. Someday, we may even be able to put these into business terms.
This isn’t a case of garbage-in/garbage-out. Instead, it’s about what we don’t put into the process—we can still get garbage out. Remember those Segways? They aren’t even mostly Segways anymore. But, a LOT of money was wasted to get there. That’s what you’re trying to prevent for your companies and clients.
We should have to perform all of these roles. It should be standard operating procedure for all of this to be covered in the process—even for start-ups. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet. While designers have evolved over the last 25 years to be advocates for the audience/customer, we now need to be advocates for the rest of everyone else, democracy, society, and the planet, itself. That’s the design job ahead of us. Sorry, but it is—because few others in organizations will rise to the challenge (and the challenge doesn’t go away).
Or, you know, we can evangelize and recruit others, too. There’s plenty of work to go around and we don’t have to go it alone. But, we’ll have to leave the safety of our design ghetto studios to do it.
Check out the conversation we had with Nathan at our Human Tech podcast.
You can reach Nathan at www.nathan.com
On the Human Tech podcast: A conversation with Nathan Shedroff
In this episode we talk to Nathan Shedroff about the culture of user experience, sustainable design, and more. Nathan is an interaction designer, and a teacher at the California College of the Arts.
You can reach Nathan by going to his website: https://nathan.com/
And check out the guest article by Nathan on how design is evolving at our blog .
Episode 23: The Best (And Only?) Way To Change Group Behavior With Ideas
There are lots of ways to change behavior (again read Dr. Susan Weinschenk’s book “How To Get People To Do Stuff”). But let’s talk specifically about a war of ideas. Information, such as a news report, can change your opinion on a topic, or at least in theory it’s supposed to.
As long as humans have been around there have been wars of ideas between us. Think of Communist propaganda, or wars of religion. Turning people to your side using words alone has been one of humanities earliest mind weapons.
I want to focus on saving electricity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Behavior change is hard. You can tell people all day long that climate change is real, give them facts, but it’s very, very hard to turn that into using less electricity. Is it even possible to achieve behavior change with pure information? What information could you give that would turn into behavior change?
There’s a nice study by Nolan, Schulz, Cialdini, Goldstein, and Griskevicius that set out to study that question. They attempted to answer two questions. First, are people self-aware enough to know what sort of information can change their behavior? And second, what information actually works? The paper is called (spoiler alert) “Normative Social Influence is Underdetected”. I kinda wish they would have buried the lead, or at least made it so convoluted that you, the reader, wouldn’t understand it.
Nolan, et.al created 5 experimental messages (check out Study 2 for more information). The first was environmental protection, the second was social responsibility, the third self-interest, the fourth social norms, and the fifth was an information-only control.
Each had a different way of trying to convince people to save electricity. The researchers had research helpers go out door to door and give doorhangers with information, conduct interviews, read electrical meters, and more; it was a well-funded study.
After providing the information, the researchers then measured the subjects’ electrical consumption over the short term and over the long term.
The results were interesting.
Take a look at this graph. In the left column are the different conditions. The middle two columns show the short term effect in daily kilowatt hours (kWh, a measure of electricity usage). M stands for the median which is what we are interested in, and SE stands for standard error, which you can ignore. The right two columns show the long term effect median.
Notice that the ONLY condition that seems to have any major effect is social norms.
I’ll quote from the paper:
“Despite the fact that participants believed that the behavior of their neighbors – the [social] norm – had the least impact on their own energy conservation, results showed that the [social] norm actually had the strongest effect on participants’ energy conservation behaviors.”
All the arguments for social responsibility, save the planet, or self-interest (save money), etc… none of them really worked. Maybe a tiny little sliver of something. But telling people how much electricity their neighbors used, and showing them that they, themselves were using more? That had a large and lasting impact.
The best and perhaps only way to change behavior when your only tool available to you is information, is to give people information demonstrating how “bad” a job they are doing in relationship to other people.
People just want to be cool. They want to fit in. Social pressure is much, much stronger of a motivator than any sort of love for the environment.
If you’re designing a campaign to change minds; use social pressure. Turn it into a “club” a “group”, a tribe. Setting out what a tribe is and saying what it takes to be “in” the tribe is the best way to get people to do stuff. Us humans will do almost anything (*ahem cough* Nazi’s *cough*) to be part of the group or a group society thinks is important.
Give it a try. It’s also cheaper than rewards so that’s a plus 😊.
Nolan, J. M., Schultz, P. W., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). Normative Social Influence is Underdetected. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(7), 913-923. doi:10.1177/0146167208316691
Episode 22: Affect, Cognition, and Awareness
Quick post to talk about affect. Affect is primarily a verb meaning make a difference. This is different from effect which essentially means result (the effect of the great pitching was a win).
Affective primacy hypothesis asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing.
It’s mind control okay? It’s evil subliminal messaging and imposing bursts to your brain so fast it doesn’t have time to adequately process them. Let’s get into the details with an oldie but a famous paper by Murphy and Zajonc called “Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.”
They set out to see if they could change people’s mood without them really being aware of what was happening.
Study 1 had two conditions. Half of the subjects were exposed to the optimal exposure condition, and half to the suboptimal exposure condition.
The “cover” of the study was that the subjects would be presented with an assortment of Chinese characters to rate. But there was a secret the subjects didn’t know. Right before they were to rate the Chinese characters, a slide of a face would be flashed. The faces were either male or female faces expressing happiness or anger.
In the optimal condition the faces were show for 1000ms (1 second). People were able to clearly see the primes but were told to ignore them. In the super-secret suboptimal condition, the faces were flashed for only 4ms.
The theory is that because the faces were flashed so fast in the suboptimal condition, only 4 ms, that the processing happens entirely unconsciously. Your brain has synapses that need to fire before you recognize something. And by the time you can react it’s already gone so the image stays in your unconscious processing.
Here’s the results:
These bars in the chart are how highly the Chinese characters were rated. The black bar is when a negative face (mad) was shown right before the ranking. When a positive face (smiling) was shown right before is the white bar.
In the optimal conditions (1000 ms) we have fairly close parity. However, in the suboptimal where the faces were only flashed for 4ms, we have a noticeable reaction. There’s quite a large difference where the mean rating for faces shown after a negative face was only 2.75, where as if a positive face was shown before the rating was almost 3.50.
What an interesting result. The researchers dove deeper.
Maybe it’s a fluke? Maybe people just didn’t like faces lording over them.
So in Study 2 they re-did Study 1, but this time people rated only if they thought the object was “good” or “bad”. Now these are random Chinese characters. There should be no association one way or the other. Results? Same as Study 1.
We see a little movement in the optimal (1000 ms), but a huge difference in the suboptimal (4 ms). When people were flashed with a little something and are not able to process it fully, it makes a difference somehow.
Does this work with other primes besides happy or sad?
In Study 3 subjects were asked to rate the size of an object, where 1 was small like a mouse, and 5 was big like a tree.
However, instead of being primed with a face, subjects were primed with either a large shape or a small shape. Again, the optimal condition got the picture for 1000 ms, and the suboptimal only got the shape for 4ms.
The results were very significant (with an F value of over 20 for you econ kids out there). But different than what the researchers were expecting:
Again, small primes lead to smaller overall ratings, BUT ONLY FOR THE OPTIMAL CASE (1000 ms). There was no change for the suboptimal (4 ms).
It is this author’s opinion that this is because of the fusiform facial area, or FFA. What we now know is that there’s a small little part of your brain whose job is to identify faces incredibly fast, and “feel” what that face is feeling (it’s located in the mid brain near other emotional processing).
When you see a face you instantly process if the expression shows that the person is happy, sad, worried, etc… From an evolutionary perspective the FFA may be incredibly important to our social skills. There’s a theory that the reason people with autism have trouble identifying the moods of others is that their FFA is not connected in the same way to the amygdala where emotions are processed.
People with autism can “see” the face, but not “feel” the emotion. Our FFA is so good it can instantly see a face even when the image is not actually a face. Cloud in the sky? Stain on some bricks? Smiley face? Frowny face hand drawing? Emoticon? Front of a car? Dogs. Cats. Cartoons. Our FFA lights up and fires insanely fast.
Sorry for the tangent but that’s the important part here. The FFA is designed to basically be a fast pre-processing area. It fires very quickly.
To process other attributes in a picture other than a face with emotion it takes more time. The image has to be rolled around through the visual cortex and then to somewhere else, then something else etc… It takes more than 4ms. So it “doesn’t register” with the brain.
One quick note to point out is that I am not saying that the FFA is done firing in 4 ms, rather that the FFA only needs 4 ms exposure time to fire and process, whereas other areas of the brain may require more exposure time. It is also possible that it’s the amygdala that is working super quickly with short exposure time as well.
When an image is around longer, as in the 1000 ms optimal condition, it mucks around with the framing parts of our brain. We are susceptible to framing. And if you show something that’s large, and then ask me is this squiggle large, I’ll lean towards yes? So you see quite a large jump in the optimal case from about 3.1 size rating when prompted with the small image, up to 4.0 size rating when prompted with the large.
Study 4 also followed Study 3, but this time were asked to judge the symmetry of objects, so 1 would be not symmetrical, 5 would be a circle.
Again, there was no difference in the suboptimal (4 ms), but a significant different in the optimal (1000 ms).
From this the researchers guess that geometric shapes also require a longer exposure time to have an emotional stimulus.
Study 5 tested masculine vs. feminine, and again, there was no change in the suboptimal which was primed for only 4ms, but a shift in rating something masculine vs. feminine in the optimal.
So general conclusions then. I quote form the paper:
“Primes shown as briefly as 4ms can allow subjects to discriminate between faces that differ in emotional polarity. Distinct faces that do not differ in affective polarity, even if they differ in such obvious ways as gender, cannot be accurately discriminated from one another if they are exposed for only 4 ms.”
What can this tell us? If you want to use evil subliminal messaging, use faces with expressions. This is why faces are so powerful because they are processed so quickly. They are “lower down the brainstem” (I didn’t invent that phrase, I borrowed it). Faces are more primal, and we have less control over our reaction to them.
If you want to use other pictures to help frame emotions you need to have their attention for at least 1 second. And I know that sounds short but in a world of advertising, a “one-mississippi” can be quite a while.
We are social creatures and our brains are evolved to put an emphasis on social cues, food, danger, and sex. Don’t underestimate how strongly they get our attention.
Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(5), 723-739. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.64.5.723
Episode 21: Monkey (Unconsciously) See, Monkey (Unconsciously) Do
Have you ever seen a chameleon? They instantly change color to adapt to whatever their background is.
There’s a theory that humans can do this too. Of course, we can’t change our skin color to match our environment but the theory is that if you see someone behave in a certain way, you’ll follow that behavior. Public myths including yawning being contagious, or sneezing. Indifference to suffering. There’s lots of myths floating around.
Well for each myth there has been a study and since we’re romping around in behavioral economics land I wanted to look at a paper by Chartland and Bargh entitled aptly “The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction.”
Their experiments require a “primer”. Usually they used what in psychology they call a confederate; which is someone who appears to be part of the study along with everyone else… but is actually an inside imposter, planted by the researchers to get interesting results.
In Experiment 1 subjects participated in two consecutive sessions. Both had a 10-minute interaction with a confederate. They were told to describe photos in the sessions but of course the photos were simply a distraction from the real study.
The confederates, who were trained actors, varied their mannerisms throughout the interactions. During Session 1, the confederate either rubbed his or her face, or shook his or her foot. During Session 2, the confederate did the inverse of Session 1; so if Session 1 was a foot shake, Session 2 would be a face rub.
Afterwards they did a post-experiment interview and only 1 person guessed the other person was a confederate, and no one guessed what the confederate was up to.
Here are the results:
Even though no one noticed the confederates doing face rubs or foot shakes, when the confederate rubbed their face, participant face rubbing increased about 25%. And when the confederate instead shook their foot, participant foot shaking more than doubled (108%).
So clearly there is some sort of monkey see monkey do unconscious thought going on. I’ll discuss why after we go through the other Experiments. One more interesting data point for Experiment 1 involved smiling. Participants smiled more times per minute when with the active confederate (median smiles per minute of 1.03), than with a neutral confederate (median smiles per minute .36). I should also note that the confederates were instructed not to make friends; only to smile.
Further, participants performed the intended action more times with the nonsmiling confederate than with the smiling confederate (median .56 vs median .40). Very interesting indeed…. Put a pin in this and let’s move on to Experiment 2.
Experiment 2 (electric boogaloo) was all about the “need to belong”. Now Dr. Susan Weinschenk has written extensively about this in her book “How To Get People To Do Stuff” as it is one of the 7 drivers of motivation.
The goal of this experiment was to see if they could unconsciously manipulate people into enjoying their interaction with a confederate. After a 15-minute session with a confederate people were asked to report how much they liked the confederate and how smoothly the session went on a 9-point scale, with 1 being extremely awkward or unlikeable, and 9 being extremely smooth or likeable.
The confederates either engaged in neutral nondescript mannerisms, which acted as the control, or the confederate mirrored the mannerisms of the participant.
I think this is a brilliant evil theory that people like people who are like them. If a participant folded their hands, the confederate would fold theirs, etc…
The confederates, being talented actors, played their part beautifully. Only 1 person “figured out” that they were being mimicked, and an outside panel of judges was used to rank the openness and friendliness to the participants.
This is very important to point out; there was NO difference in scores between the neutral control, and the mimicking. It is not the case that the mimickers were being more friendly, making more eye contact, smiling, or were judged to like the participant more. This was controlled for. So the results are not simply friendly vs. not-friendly.
The results are fun. Participants in the experimental condition reported liking the confederates more (M=6.62) than the control (M=5.91), and also reported a smoother interaction (M=6.76) than the control (M=6.02).
Now there are certainly potential large implications in this study; from politics to sales to friendship. Let’s again put a pin in this and talk about the last Experiment before we sum everything up. The thing to take away from Experiment 2 is that human interactions go smoother and are more positive if you just mimic the movements and actions of the other person.
Experiment 3 was the same as Experiments 1 and 2, except that subjects were also given an empathy questionnaire (a perspective-taking subscale). For example, “when I’m upset with someone I try to put myself in their perspective”, sort of thing.
What they found was that people who were high perspectivers (highly empathetic) joined in with the face rubbing and foot shaking more times per minute than low perspectivers (M=1.30 vs M=.85 and M=.40 vs M=.29).
This makes sense. People who are highly empathetic find it easier to feel what you’re feeling. When you feel empathetic the same parts of your brain light up that are lighting up in the brain of the person you’re observing.
If you see someone hurt their leg, a small ghost reflection of mirror neurons in the leg area of your brain will also light up. It’s why stories are so powerful. It happens completely unconsciously. And if you’re the type of person who can more easily slip into that state, then you are more prone to have an unconscious reaction to the external stimuli of others.
Okay so our first pin was that people in Experiment 1 performed the action more when the Confederate was NOT smiling. My theory is that we are always looking for a way to bond unconsciously. We as humans want to relate, we want to connect on whatever level we can. Obviously smiling and laughing together is our natural go-to. But when that’s not available our brains may slide into other ways to bond, such as face rubbing and foot tapping. BECAUSE as we find out in Experiment 2, our second Pin, people like interactions more with people who are mimicking them.
Maybe we know and understand this innately so our brains are one step ahead of the research. Perhaps Experiment 1’s outcome occurred exactly BECAUSE of the results in Experiment 2. We like people more who mimic us. We crave people to like us (unconsciously), and so we (unconsciously) mimic others to the extent we can to get them to like us. It’s an empathy circle.
And those who are the most empathetic also reach out the most to connect, so they mimic unconsciously the most.
There is a long list of practical applications. Sorority bonding, concerts or sporting events in unison, people in fields with lots of human interaction being more animated and reactionary (HR, sales, customer service). If you want people to like you and try to bond with you; try mimicking their energy, behaviors, and mannerisms.
Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893-910. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.76.6.893