Letters Remain

  • The Cognitive Importance of Good Sleep

    After a week of surviving on minimal sleep you may assume that a lazy weekend will allow you to recover in time for the coming days. Not so: research has shown that not even a full week of quality sleep can reverse the cognitive and physiological ‘damage’ just five days of poor sleep can inflict on us.

    Jonah Lehrer notes that it’s not just our cognitive functions that become impaired by a lack of sleep–it’s our immune system, too:

    In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • (Insincere) Flattery Works

    Flattery–even exaggerated, insincere and obvious flattery–works. That’s the conclusion from a study looking at whether compliments initially dismissed as “meaningless flattery” in advertising copy work on an implicit, unconscious level. They do.

    What this research suggests […] is that the implicit positivity we experience as a result of viewing [positive advertising] images could play an important role in what we reach for when standing in the liquor store staring at a freezer full of cheap beer. You may not know why, but you’d feel pretty good about a Bud right now. And while you feel certain to you that your preference is not due to those silly ads (just like it might seem obvious to a manager that they didn’t promote a candidate because he brings her donuts every morning), perhaps it is the certainty with which we dismiss these kinds of manipulative and deceptive appeals that allows them to hold such sway.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Framing Financial Loses to Conservatives

    In a series of novel framing experiments, researchers have shown that our self-identified political leanings correlate with how we perceive financial losses.

    Hundreds of online participants chose between various flights, computers and so on. In each case they could plump for a cheaper option or a more expensive, greener option, the latter including either a ‘tax’ to help reduce carbon emissions, or an ‘offset’ to do the same – depending on how the choice was framed. Whether the expensive option was framed as a tax or offset made no difference to Democrat (left-wing) participants. By contrast, Republicans (right-wing) and Independents were much less likely to choose the more expensive option when it was labelled as a tax.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Selling Premium Goods

    In a short profile of ‘luxury sales consultant’ Jean-Marie Brücker, we discover a few psychological techniques he teaches to his clients on how to sell high-end luxury goods:

    • Describe an item in terms of its ‘value’ rather than it’s ‘price’ or ‘cost’.
    • Sell a story (‘romance’ and ’emotions’) rather than ‘products’.
    • The macaroon technique: sandwiching the price “between the product’s more romantic benefits”.
    • Harbour and elicit positive emotions–they sell (e.g. compliment your customer on their existing items, even if they’re from your competitors.
    • Don’t discount. Gift instead (discounts get forgotten, free gifts don’t).
    • Create contrast between old, existing items and new ones.
    • Suggest ‘sorry-gifts’ for those who may lay guilt on the purchasing party (e.g. their partner)

    As ever with these things, I believe you could summarise it as: play on and exploit a customer’s emotions (happiness, guilt, etc.) while using subtle linguistic tricks to disguise the price.

    These happen to be key tenets of casino marketing, which revolves around flattering men, distracting their wives, and keeping them around as long as possible; the longer they stay, the more likely they are to spend money. But Mr. Brücker was never disdainful of customers—in fact, he championed the need for better, more thoughtful service that makes the customer sense caring and quality —the stuff of luxury.

    “You’re selling pure emotion,” he said. “That’s why I love this job.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Anti-Vaccine Movement and the Rejection of Science

    Already covered to death, it’s been on my bookmarks list since I read the following from Wired editor Mark Horowitz on it’s day of publication:

    Best/worst day. Story I am proudest of assigning and editing at Wired goes live today. […] But I also lose job. Bummer!

    That story is a fantastically well written and researched article looking at the snake oil peddled by the anti-vaccine crowd and why people listen to, and fall for, their pseudo-science (i.e. perceived risk and irrationality).

    The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

    Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

    I post this now as in recent days Andrew Wakefield—the physician who linked the three-in-one MMR vaccine to autism—has had his original article fully retracted by the medical journal The Lancet after the General Medical Council found he acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” with “callous disregard” and had a conflict of interest in his study.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Fostering Innovative Thinking

    By interviewing and surveying 3,500 visionary entrepreneurs over a six-year period, a pair of professors believe they have identified the five habits and skills common to ‘creative executives’ that distinguish them from the rest:

    • Associating: the skill of connecting seemingly unrelated questions, problems and ideas.
    • Questioning, especially “questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture”.
    • Close observation of details, particularly of people’s behaviour.
    • Experimentation.
    • “Networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn”.

    In this Harvard Business Review article the two researches go on to talk of the key role inquisitiveness plays in creativity–that same curiosity one of the researchers found throughout a similar 20-year study looking at “great global leaders” and that you find in children.

    We […] believe that the most innovative entrepreneurs were very lucky to have been raised in an atmosphere where inquisitiveness was encouraged. We were stuck by the stories they told about being sustained by people who cared about experimentation and exploration. Sometimes these people were relatives, but sometimes they were neighbors, teachers or other influential adults. A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity.

    via Ben Casnocha

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Systems for Innovation and Microsoft

    Microsoft is a hugely innovative company, but the culture that has developed there has stunted or even thwarted its innovations, suggests former Microsoft Vice President Dick Brass. The ingredients of this culture are numerous, but it has flourished largely because of the company’s structure preventing the development of “a true system for innovation”.

    Not everything that has gone wrong at Microsoft is due to internecine warfare. Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware. This made economic sense when the company was founded in 1975, but now makes it far more difficult to create tightly integrated, beautifully designed products like an iPhone or TiVo. And, yes, part of the problem has been an understandable caution in the wake of the antitrust settlement. Timing has also been poor — too soon on Web TV, too late on iPods.

    Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive.

    via @JohnGreenaway

    Microsoft has responded officially.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The ‘Solution Looking for a Problem’ Syndrome

    In characteristically colourful style, Dave McClure admonishes the entrepreneurial community for pitching their products solution-first. This isn’t how you should pitch and it isn’t how you should position your product, suggests McClure. Problem-first pitching is how one should engage an audience and is how to create a product that has a use.

    Pitch the PROBLEM first, connect with your audience emotionally around the problem, and then — and ONLY then — offer your solution as the remedy to that problem.

    There are many insightful comments, discussing how problem-first thought is useful for entrepreneurs. Chris Yeh’s comment summarises it all quite well:

    The “Solution looking for a Problem” issue is part of a larger entrepreneur syndrome, which is to focus WAAAY too much on his or her own point of view, rather than on the user’s (or better yet, the customer’s).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Entrepreneur’s Ignored Demographic

    Andrew Warner of Mixergy recently interviewed Alex Algard: the entrepreneur who founded the $57m a year (revenue) business WhitePages.

    One exchange in the interview I particularly enjoyed is when Warner ponders WhitePages’ target demographic. Realising that he, his colleagues and his friends don’t use the site, don’t talk about the site or even hear about the site he asks who are the people that bring in this revenue: who are the users?

    Algard’s answer touches on something I discussed with a friend recently: that many (most?) entrepreneurs and software developers produce products and systems targeted at people like them: computer-literate, progressive power users. The huge market of barely-computer literate casual users who are enthusiastic about the Internet (yet need help for basic tasks) is largely ignored.

    Andrew Warner: Well tell me about it, because you know that all I hear about everyday is Twitter and Facebook and some of the hotter sites, some of the sexier sites. I don’t hear people talk about WhitePages. I don’t remember when I went on WhitePages, or referred WhitePages to somebody else, but obviously a lot of people are on the site. What am I missing here?

    Alex Algard: For one thing I think we do a good job in catering to what the typical American needs, as far as content information goes. A lot of our friends, I think, tend to be a little bit more focused on, you know, what’s hot in the Bay area and so forth. So I think it’s very important that we, every once in awhile, pinch ourselves and remind ourselves that not everyone in the world, or in the US, is necessarily living on Twitter, or quite yet on the social network. Certainly that’s the way things are moving, but I think we’re doing a good job on addressing Americans’ needs as of the here and now. Like I said, I’m a here and now kind of guy. I think that’s also how our company thinks.

    When asked if anything in particular sticks out that helped him separate himself from the competition, Alex replied:

    I think in retrospect, it was just being really, really focused around what users are looking for; providing a relevant service; really trying to put myself in the users’ shoes. In the WhitePages scenario it’s finding contact information, so doing a better job than anybody else: being singularly-focused on helping our users find the contact information that they’re looking for. That more than anything has helped our success.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Typography, Pronunciation and Cognitive Fluency

    How easy something is to read and understand significantly affects how we perceive it in terms of its risk, beauty, difficulty, credibility and truthfulness. Factors that influence this cognitive fluency include typography (typeface choice, contrast, etc.), ease of pronunciation, familiarity and how much the words rhyme.

    The cover story of this month’s The Psychologist is an extensive study of this phenomenon, looking at how cognitive fluency affects our judgements and perceptions.

    This excerpt illustrates the effect, whereby a set of physical exercises designed to be incorporated in your daily routine were described (emphasis mine):

    When they were presented in an easy-to-read print font (Arial), readers assumed that the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete; but when they were presented in a difficult-to-read print font, readers assumed it would take nearly twice as long, a full 15.1 minutes. They also thought that the exercise would flow quite naturally when the font was easy to read, but feared that it would drag on when it was difficult to read. Given these impressions, they were more willing to incorporate the exercise into their daily routine when it was presented in an easy-to-read font. Quite clearly, people misread the difficulty of reading the exercise instructions as indicative of the difficulty involved in doing the exercise. If we want people to adopt a new behaviour, it is therefore important that instructions are not only semantically clear and easy to follow, but also visually easy to read – or else the behaviour may seem unduly demanding.

    Other findings from the various studies mentioned in the article:

    • When a recipe is presented in an elegant but difficult-to-read font, it is assumed that it requires more time and more skill than when presented in an easy-to-read font. (The authors conclude that restaurants should describe dishes in difficult-to-read fonts. They do.)
    • Print fonts influence whether people make decisions or defer them to a later time.
    • Food additives with complex, difficult-to-pronounce names are perceived as more risky.
    • Amusement park rides were classed as more dangerous if they had complex, difficult-to-pronounce names.
    • A statistically significant number of stocks with easy-to-pronounce tickers symbols had higher yields than those with difficult-to-pronounce ticker symbols.
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    Lloyd Morgan