Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Psychology of Entertainment: Does Entertainment have an Evolutionary Purpose?

One of the interesting things we found about the 20th century was that humans are not really built to deal with abundance. Anytime we have too much of anything, our evolutionary guidance control systems seem to go awry. The human survival mechanisms were designed in an environment of scarcity. In the words of John Locke:

The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

We were built to rise above the odds, to survive in spite of adversity and hardship. In that scenario, the resiliency of humans is astonishing. But once the fight is over, we tend to languish and drift. History has repeated the story over and over again. The first well documented case was the fall of the Roman Empire:

“But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight…. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.”
– Gibbon – Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Getting Soft Does Not Equal Survival

The Inevitable Effect of Immoderate Greatness….a cautionary tale if ever there was one. What does that have to do with the psychology of entertainment? Well, everything. With abundance comes leisure time. With leisure time comes a desire to seek entertainment. And when we seek entertainment to excess, we tend to get mired down as a society. As Edward Gibbon documented, the Roman Empire fell because of many factors – a wide spread empire that overcame its notion of centralized government, the rise of Christianity, economic reasons, but most of all, Rome fell because most Romans found themselves in the leisure class and didn’t know what to do with themselves. They got soft.

We’re A Modern Rome, and that’s not a Good Thing

8293_psychology_cartoon_DKMy personal feeling is that we’re currently following in Rome’s footsteps. The 20th Century was one of extreme excess. The richest parts of the world got fat and lazy. No, not everyone. But on the average, the facts speak for themselves. Over 70% of Americans are fat or obese. If we look at the last 50 years, the percentage of US adults who are obese or extremely obese has gone from under 15% (in 1960) to 41.3% (2006) according to the National Health Examination Survey. And the latest AC Neilsen numbers indicate that the average American spends over 5 hours a day watching TV. That’s 153 hours of TV every single month. Of course, TV’s not the only passive form of entertainment we consume, but it’s by far the most measurable and easiest to identify. Using the internet is rapidly catching up, with Forrester reporting we spend about 12 hours a week, or 50 hours a month, online. Of course, one of the challenges we’ll identify with online time is that it’s difficult to categorize it as entertainment. But let’s say that at least 25% of our time online is spent being entertained in some way (consumption of online video is a popular activity). That brings the grand total to about 165 hours a month being passively entertained, about the same time we spend at our jobs and almost as much time as we spend sleeping. We spend almost a third of our lives being entertained, in one way or the other. This is not active entertainment, this is not social entertainment, and in most cases, this is not intellectually stimulating entertainment. This is sitting in front of a screen consuming mindless entertainment. Humans were not built to do that.

If one were a Darwinist (which I am) one would have to ask – what is the evolutionary point of entertainment? With the single minded view of Richard Dawkin’s selfish gene, how does our creation of and need for entertainment increase the odds of our genes propagating? It’s not an unusual question. The same question has been asked about art, for example. Here, I think it’s important to explore the difference between a genotype and a phenotype, as the two often get confused when evolutionary questions arise.

Genotypes and Phenotypes

The genotype (courtesy of Professor John Blamire) is “the “internally coded, inheritable information” carried by all living organisms. This stored information is used as a “blueprint” or set of instructions for building and maintaining a living creature. These instructions are found within almost all cells (the “internal” part), they are written in a coded language (the genetic code), they are copied at the time of cell division or reproduction and are passed from one generation to the next (“inheritable”). These instructions are intimately involved with all aspects of the life of a cell or an organism. They control everything from the formation of protein macromolecules, to the regulation of metabolism and synthesis.”

The phenotype is “the “outward, physical manifestation” of the organism. These are the physical parts, the sum of the atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, structures, metabolism, energy utilization, tissues, organs, reflexes and behaviors; anything that is part of the observable structure, function or behavior of a living organism.”

The difference between a genotype and a phenotype is where many nature/nurture debates get hung up on the rocks. It might be helpful to use an analogy, going back to the concept of a “blueprint”

The Genetics of Urban Renewal

Imagine you’re the architect of a new building that is to be built in the downtown core. You design the building to be the best possible fit for the location where it’s to be built. You put together a highly detailed plan for the building, down to where each outlet is to be placed and the finish of each door knob. Then, you pass the plan over to the construction crew. This is the building’s “genome”.

The building gets built according to your plan, but then your influence over the building is finished. The building becomes a physical object within an environment, and as such, it has many interactions with that environment. These interactions can alter the nature of the building (especially if you’ve built flexibility into your initial design, which is certainly the case in the human genotype) and also, the building will alter the nature of the environment. For example, let’s say this new building was meant as a showpiece for renewal in an older and more run down part of the downtown core. If the building was successful in this goal, one might see it’s spark further development around it, literally changing the face of the environment.

Here’s another example. Let’s say the building was a 32 storey office tower that replaced a 2 storey run down apartment block. Obviously, that’s going to significantly increase the number of people who occupy the “footprint” of the building. In the old building, we might have had 20 lower income families. Suddenly, we have almost 5000 office workers who come to the building between the hours of 8 and 5, then go home. Any urban planner is going to see the dramatic impact that is going to have one the surrounding area. Parking, services, recreational areas, traffic routes…all these things will have to change to accommodate your design.

None of these environment changes were captured in your original blueprint, but they all resulted directly because of your plan. These changes, the interplay between the building and it’s environment, is a rough analogy for a phenotype. The phenotype is the “long shadow” of the genotype.

Evolution is a Harsh Critic of Phenotypes

Here’s another important fact to consider about phenotypes and genotypes. Evolution is relatively ambivalent about phenotypes. While they’re important to the organism, they serve a perfunctory role in natural adaption. Phenotypes are the acid test that determines whether or not genes get passed on. If the genotype leads to a phenotypical environment that results in higher reproductive success, it will get passed on. It if doesn’t, it dies out. This is the sole driver behind Dawkin’s selfish gene.

To go back to our building analogy, it’s as if the sole success of the building was determined by how much lease revenue it generated over a 50 year period. If it generated more than all the other buildings in a 5 block radius, your design would be used again and again. Using this one measure of success, all the phenotypical impact of the building – the rerouting of streets, the sparking of new construction, the addition of parking facilities, the very change in this section of the downtown core – only matter if these led to more lease revenue. If not, all these outcomes of your design are irrelevant.

If we talk about entertainment, I suspect we’re talking about phenotypes, not genotypes. In the next post, I’ll pick up this thought and explore further.

The Psychology of Entertainment: a Recap

psychThus far in this series, we’ve covered a lot of territory in looking at the psychology of entertainment. If you remember, when I initially started, my premise was that an audience had to stabilize before it provided a reliable market for advertisers. Unless you knew who you were talking to, you were relegated to conducting “drive-by” marketing, presenting your message to a transient set of eyeballs rather than a real live person you knew something about.

In looking for this loyalty online, we have to move beyond the “bright shiny object” syndrome that typifies much of our digital behavior. There seems to be a segment of our society that flits from trend to trend, creating enticing hockey stick growth curves that both VCs and marketers chase. But in the vast majority of cases, this attention deficit segment eventually moves on to the newest, greatest thing and the jilted online love implodes. For example, along the social network path there are any number of used and tossed aside past favourites. Remember Six Degrees, Friendster or Orkut? Even MySpace has largely given way to Facebook.

My original premise was that we have to find usefulness in an online destination before we’ll give it our loyalty. And we have to be loyal to a destination long enough for marketers to be able to identify a stable audience that they can know something about. Lance Loveday countered by saying that entertainment could also be a factor, along with utility, that leads to loyalty. That’s when I started to look at the psychological underpinnings of entertainment. Up to this point, I have spent much of the time looking at television, simply because it’s our most common form of entertainment. This week, I’ll be going back online to find entertainment, but before that, I should recap the basics of what we’ve learned, because we’ll be applying the same loyalty acid test to online entertainment.

We Love a Story

The most common and consistent element in the history of entertainment is the story. There is something inherently appealing about a narrative. In this post, we discovered that our brains respond well to stories. It’s easier for us to keep details in mind when they come wrapped in a story. Stories give us a rich context to project ourselves into, engaging the brain more fully. Stories are “software” that runs natively on our “hardware.” I gave memory champ Andi Bell and best selling author Malcolm Gladwell as examples.

Some of Us are Addicted to Entertainment

In most human characteristics determined by our genome (weight, height, intelligence, etc) the population plays out on a normal distribution curve, with the majority of us clustered around a central norm. Researchers Timothy Brock and Stephen Livingston found the same is true for our need for entertainment. In this case, they defined entertainment as passive entertainment, such as watching TV, rather than active entertainment like participating in sports. They found there is an unusually high need for entertainment amongst a significant segment of our population. While the norm seems to indicate that we’re very attached to our TV set, in extreme cases, researchers have found that TV consumption borders on true biological addiction.

Our Entertainment is Making Us More Passive

Researchers have found another troubling trend emerging through the 20th century. We appear to be turning into a nation of watchers. We sit back, waiting to be entertained. In many areas of our society, including education and politics, the tradition of Socratic debate has given way to passive consumption of information and, in the case of the later at least, propaganda. Neil Postman, for one, feels we’re “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. Robert Putnam found a strong correlation between TV watching and withdrawal from community participation.

How We Connect to TV

So, how did this strong (and in some cases, addictive) bonds to TV form? Our psychological bonds to TV shows parallel our need as social animals to connect with people, to identify our place in our social networks and to share common interests. Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman and Susan Heckler explored how we connected to TV shows and found 3 common bonds: viewer to program, viewer to viewer and viewer to character. The viewer to program bond comes from an aesthetic or artistic appreciation of the show. You applaud it’s production values, or the script. This is probably the most detached bond, and interestingly, is more common in men than women. The next bond is viewer to viewer. Here, a TV show becomes a social lubricant. If gives you something in common to talk about with your friends. The final bond is viewer to character. Here, the veil between reality and fantasy starts to slip a little. At it’s most benign, it’s just an identification with a character in a show. Like tends to bond with like. Grey’s Anatomy if a favourite amongst those that work in the medical profession, for example. And I know at least a few Democratic party faithful who are lifelong West Wing fans. Sometimes viewer-character bonds become less grounded in the real world and turn into delusional obsessions.

Because these bonds to TV are often grounded on social connections, whether real or imagined, it’s not surprising that they are nurtured in the same way face-to-face relationships are. These relationships grow over time, as we learn more about the characters we’re watching. They seem to grow strongest when there is a continuing storyline and character developments we can become engaged in. And finally, this ongoing narrative comes in a language our brains were built to process. We get stories. And we particularly like stories that play out the way we think they should. We like happy endings.

What Makes a Hit Show?

Now that we know the nature of our connections with a TV show, we should be able to predict what would make a successful TV show. What shows cause these bonds to flourish.

If we look at the hits over time, certain themes emerge. In Situation Comedies, characters are more important than the situation. While a novel situation is intriguing in the short term, it’s our connection with the characters that will build long term loyalty. It wasn’t the fact that M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War that made it interesting, it was that the complex environment provided so many opportunities for rich character developments within the show. There can be no situation less interesting than the premise behind Friends – 6 20 somethings living their lives in lower Manhattan. Friends hooked us because we cared about Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Phoebe.

The Thin Line Between Humor and Fear

What makes us laugh? At the most basic level, we laugh when we know something that appears threatening turns out to be harmless. Babies laugh when we make light of potentially stressful situations (a primary care giver momentarily disappearing during a game of peekaboo, an adult staging a mock “tickle” attack). This tendency sticks with us throughout our lives. It’s why we laugh at slapstick. Laughter shows that we’ve mastered some small part of our environment. In the case of a joke, it’s the “click” that happens when we solve an incongruity – we “get” the punchline. However, the satisfaction we get from this depend on our social context. Not all jokes are equally satisfying to everyone.

How We Process Humor

Men and women process humor differently. “Getting” humor appears to depend on a delicate balance between right brain and left brain processing. The left brain (the logical side) tends to assemble the required information, but it’s the right brain that comprehends the situation and, at a subconscious level, finds the humor in it. The “click” of getting a joke happens on the right side. That’s why jokes cease to be funny when we overanalyze them (which happens on the left side). It’s also why an academic paper on humor is probably the least funny thing you’ll ever read. As we start to look at the different types of humor, we start to see some divisions in what we find funny. Women, for example, are drawn to humor that involves social situations. Men tend to laugh more at jokes that involve sex and scatological references. And while slapstick can elicit belly laughs, wit tends to draw a smile. Slapstick taps into the fear/humor circuit, where wit is more of a social aspiration.

The Hooks of Our Favorite Shows

In this post, I took a look at some of the success factors of past TV hits.

Survivor – The situation of Survivor, the idea of competition, was the hook here. Unfortunately, by it’s very nature, Survivor found it difficult to carry loyalty from season to season. We had to get to know a whole new cast of characters each time.

West Wing – Witty dialogue and impossibly clever characters set up perhaps the most socially aspirational show in history (at least for Democratically inclined intellectual elitists) but it was overly dependent on creator Aaron Sorkin’s scripts. When Sorkin moved on, so did our interest.

American Idol – The mega talent show seems to be the exception to the continuing narrative rule. Why is this show not suffering the same fate of other season-by-season reality premises? It turns out that American Idol and other shows like it do tap into a narrative – our own. We have a built in need to admire talent, especially undiscovered talent. Where they go, so could we. It’s another cue that comes from our highly social evolutionary past.

Why We Love Violence 

Our taste for violent entertainment actually has a physiological basis. Violence taps into a basic good vs evil archetype, but this alone doesn’t explain it’s appeal. We love violence because it tweaks the danger detection circuits of our brain, releasing neuro-chemicals that give us a natural high. Our bodies become primed for action through the images and sounds we see, and this makes us feel more confident, ready for action and hyper-alert. Violent entertainment tricks our bodies into believing that we’re in danger, so the body responds appropriately. Not all people are alike in this regard. Some of us have a higher need for this type of sensation than others. This trait was quantified in the 70’s by Marvin Zuckerman and his sensation seeking scale. It has been found since that those with the greatest taste for sensation also tend to exhibit other addictive tendencies.

Are Video Games too Real?

If violent entertainment fools our brain into delivering an artificial high by getting us ready for a fight, how can we manage to stay in our seats through a 2 hour movie. As I explained in this post, the danger alert circuit is modulated by our cortex, which dampens down the impact of the alert. Essentially, our brain keeps telling itself that it’s not real, so just calm down. But the new technology being incorporated into video games is making it more and more difficult for our brains to determine what’s real. As games become more sophisticated, with photo-realistic graphics (even in 3d), more interactive and controlled by real body motions and not just a control pad, our brains could be forgiven for forgetting it’s all a game. We already know violent games are mildly addictive as we become dependent on the potent chemical cocktail that gets released as the brain is partially fooled into thinking the danger is real. So what happens, we have to wonder, when these games get even more realistic?

Why We Love being Entertained in Crowds

Why do we enjoy being entertained more when we’re in a crowd? The answer could come from our evolutionary past. The survival success of a herding animal comes from it’s ability to communicate potential danger quickly through the group. So, for humans, emotions are highly contagious. We pick up on the mood of the crowd around us and eventually synchronize our own mood to it. The loops the brain uses to do this are fascinating and are covered off in much more depth in this post.

The purpose of these 11 posts was to explore how we’re entertained. With that in mind, we can then look at our online alternatives and make some guesses about how entertaining we’ll find them. Remember, we’re looking for long term loyalty here, an audience that stays consistent enough that we can start to effectively target marketing messages to them with some understanding of who they are. So, here are the bullet points:

– We engage with narratives
– We connect with characters we care about
– Interactivity can’t get in the way of the narrative.
– Primitive humor and fear share the same basic roots
– Humor is in the eye of the beholder
– We love to admire talent, especially underdogs
– Violence and sensation deliver a natural high
– We are social animals and emotions are contagious

Tomorrow, we’ll start to explore how these foundations of entertainment translate to the online environment. And we’ll begin with an important question: Do we have too much entertainment?

My Interview with Jeremy Victor at B2B Bloggers

Last week, I had the opportunity to have my first “Twitter-view” with Jeremy Victor at B2B bloggers. Jeremy and I took a very quick tour through some of the territory I explored in my book, The BuyerSphere Project (free pdf available on our site, print version available at Amazon). Jeremy has edited the Tweets into a cohesive transcript.

Some of the areas we covered:

  • What is the BuyerSphere and Why Should We Map It?
  • Where are B2B Marketers on the Digital Marketing Adoption Curve?
  • What are the main challenges facing B2B buyers?
  • The irrationality of B2B purchasing
  • What is the Risk Gap?
  • The Need for Face-to-Face
  • The importance of a website as a Digital Asset
  • Are blogs more important that websites?

The Psychology of Entertainment: Why We Love Watching in Crowds

3d-audienceWe laugh more at movies when we watch them with others. We get bigger thrills from action thrillers. We’re more likely to cry during a tear jerker. When we’re with a bunch of other people, it’s as if our emotions are turbocharged. Why?

One could say it’s our environment. Sitting in a darkened theater we focus more attention on whatever we’re watching. There are fewer distractions. We become more fully engaged with the experience. This provides part of the answer, but it’s certainly not the entire answer.

One could also say it’s the technology. It would be hard to argue that a billboard sized image that fills our entire field of vision (especially one that gives us a 3D experience) is more powerful than the typical home screen. Back that up with a full theater sound system and you have a powerfully engaging experience. Certainly that might explain the higher octane thrills we would get in an action movie, but it doesn’t seem as applicable in a tear jerker or a comedy. Is a 40 foot high Rachel McAdams more emotionally compelling than a 2 foot high one? Possibly, but the explanation still seems to fall short.

We know that we behave differently in groups than we do as individuals. At its most benign, it’s the shared experience of an entertainment event. At its most sinister, it’s the so called “mob mind,” a crowd induced mentality that through history is responsible for millions of lost lives. The power of synchronized emotion is immense.

The Psycho-Analytic Explanation

But where does this shared experience, this synchronization of emotions, come from? According to Carl Jung, we synchronize our emotions and thoughts when we come together in a group because we all share an identical “collective unconscious“, a universal framework of archetypes and motifs. It’s as if, when we get together, we all have the same subconscious script we’re reading from, written by our collective culture. Freud felt that we act differently towards people when we’re in a group than we do as individuals. The minds “merge” together into one way of thinking and enthusiasm for this view becomes increased as a result. And Le Bon believed it was the relative anonymity of the crowd that allows us to generate collective emotions that we might not have as individuals. All of these speak to a collective “meta” motivation, a common will that lives apart from the individuals who make up the group. Do mobs have a mind of their own? Most of the research done in this area has been around questions that have a much greater social implication than whether we laugh or not at the movie. But perhaps the answer comes from the same place. And perhaps it’s not as complex as Jung, Freud or Le Bon would have us believe. Is there a collective consciousness that takes over, or is it instead some fairly simple inherent mechanisms that come as standard equipment with we humans.

The Evolutionary Explanation

So, to go back to the question, are we more likely to laugh at Jennifer Aniston in a theater rather than at home because we have a shared collective archetype-driven subconscious script that indicates we should laugh at her? Do we laugh because we feel anonymous in a crowded theater and so let our inhibitions slip? Or do we laugh because we have given ourselves over to the collective thinking of the group? Maybe, just maybe, we laugh because the person beside us is laughing. Maybe it’s that simple.

We know that emotion is contagious. “Smile and the world smiles with you.” Cliche? Perhaps, but scientifically true. If we see someone smile, we’re more likely to smile ourselves. This is especially true if we like the person who is smiling. This is Bargh and Chartrand’s “Chameleon Effect.” We mimic others, especially those that we feel emotionally connected to. Emotional contagion is strongest between people who are close: family and best friends. In their book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives“, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler cite studies that show when a normal individual is paired with a mildly depressed roommate in college, soon the normal individual also becomes depressed.

Bio Feedback

The amazing thing about emotions are that they don’t always travel from the brain outwards. Our body feeds back signals to the brain that can change our mood. If you smile, you suddenly start feeling better. If you laugh, your outlook on life picks up. Telephone operators are told to smile when they’re on the phone, even though the person on the other end of the line can’t hear them. And there are documented cases of widespread contagious laughter. Dr. Madan and Madhuri Kataria have started Laughter Yoga, a “global movement for Health, Joy and World Peace” based simply on spontaneous laughing, practiced in laughing clubs around the world.

Why do these outward signals of our emotions spread through a group like wildfire, even as they change the very mood of the group? The answer, evolutionary biologists suspect, may lie in the fact that laughter and smiling almost certainly predate language amongst humans. Humans travelled in groups for their own protection. The reason groups are safer than traveling as an individual lies in the fact that groups have many sets of eyes and ears, where a lone human has only one set of each. Groups work as early warning systems. But these systems only work if the word spreads quickly. And that presents a problem. What happens before there were words? This is where our facial expressions and emotions come in.

Our Facial Recognition Hardware

The human brain has a dedicated mechanism solely for reading facial expressions, the fusiform gyrus, which then feeds these signals to the amygdala. The amygdala, as I’ve mentioned before, is the early warning detection system of the brain. And this mechanism makes a very important determination. It either switches on or off our defence mechanisms and it does so subconsciously, in about 1/10 of a second (the same timing, interestingly, that we use to recognize favored brands). So, a look of fear, terror or alarm can alert others around you in a fraction of a second. Language, which uses more recently evolved portions of our brain, can’t respond nearly as quickly. This alarm system alerts those around us by making our emotions their emotions. But it’s not just terror that spreads quickly. We are tuned to pick up any strong emotion and pass it along. Groups that feel the same way about things tend to be a better survival unit than those that don’t. When you think about this, it makes perfect evolutionary sense. It’s not enough to simply make people aware. If you want to survive, you have to ready them for action. And the fastest way to do this is to have the ability to quickly spread the same emotion through a crowd. The human brain is superbly tuned to pull this off. The fairly recent discovery of mirror neurons are responsible for our mimicry and seem to be an integral part of emotional contagion and synchronization. Below, VS Ramachandran provides some amazing examples of how humans lose core abilities when specific parts of the brain have been damaged.

But what happens as we leave the African savannah behind and start hanging out in movie theaters and community playhouses? The same mechanisms come with us, and we use them in the same way. We pick up emotions from those around us. And we do so because we’re wired to do so. It’s not a conscious decision. It’s just a very old part of our brain doing it’s job. And the entertainment industry is starting to incorporate this understanding of human nature into how it builds our entertainment experiences. At the recent TEDActive conference, sheer chance put me beside a psychologist and an amusement park owner during one lunch break. Soon, they were talking about the role of mirror neurons in the design of thrill rides – how closely do you have to sit together and what visual vantage point do you need to let the thrill of a roller coaster spread from one person to the next?

To Laugh, Or Not to Laugh

Perhaps the most interesting example was when Shakespeare’s Globe theater was rebuilt in London. In Shakespeare’s day, plays were performed in broad daylight, people stood together in crowds and they could easily see each other. The plays were raucous affairs filled with laughter, jeers, taunts and strongly expressed emotions. But over time, theaters became darkened and isolated cocoons that started to separate people from each other. When the Globe was resurrected, it was built to be historically accurate. This meant that for the first time in 400 years, people were seeing plays in the same environment they were originally performed in. The result? The crowds seemed to enjoy the plays more. They were noisier, stamped their feet, cheered louder and laughed more. They had more fun. Shakespeare, it appears, knew a thing or two about the power of a crowd.

This all brings up an interesting question for us to consider. In the last few posts I talked about how technology might be turning us into a nation of addicted watchers. Video games may significantly up the bar in false manipulation of the brains circuits. But increasingly, we’re also consuming those entertainment experiences by ourselves. If we’re built to enjoy things more when we’re in a group, what is the long term impact of being entertained alone, in the dark? Will technology start to simulate the effect of a crowd? Will we be put in virtual communities when we watch something? In fact, we’ve already started down this path. TV directors found out very early in the history of the new medium that audiences were much more likely to laugh if they were cued by a laugh track.

In the next posts, I’ll start to bring us back to the original question, which was does entertainment build loyalty online? We’ll look at what we find entertaining online. For example, is a social network useful or entertaining? Do we consume video differently online? Will we build the same loyal viewing habits now that we can timeshift our viewing schedule to our convenience, not the networks? How will an increasingly interactive experience impact our entertainment tastes?

Maximizers vs. Satisficers: Why It’s Tough to Decide

First published February 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I introduced the study from Wesleyan University about how decisiveness played out for a group of 54 university students as they chose their courses.  The student’s eye movements were tracked as they looked at a course comparison matrix.

Weighing all the Options vs Saying No

In the previous column, I talked about two different strategies: the compensatory one, where we weigh all the options, and the non-compensatory one, where we start eliminating candidates based on the criterion most important to us. Indecisive people tend to start with the compensatory strategy and decisive people go right for the linear approach.  I also talked about Barry Schwartz’s theory (in his book “The Paradox of Choice”) that indecisiveness can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress.

The biggest factor for indecisive people seems to be a fear of lost opportunity. They hate to turn away from any option for fear that something truly valuable lies down that path. Again, this is territory well explored in Tversky and Kahnemann’s famous Prospect Theory.

The Curse of the Maximizer

Part of the problem is perfectionism, identified by Schwartz as a strong corollary to anxiety caused by impending decisions. The Wesleyan research cites previous work that shows indecisive people tend to want a lot more information at hand before making any decisions. And, once they’ve gone to the trouble to gather that information, they feel compelled to use it. Not only do they use it, they try to use it all at once.

The Wesleyan eye tracking showed that the more indecisive participants went back and forth between the five different course attributes fairly evenly, apparently trying to weigh them all at the same time.  Not only that, they spent more time staring at the blank parts of the page. This indicated that they were trying to crunch the data, literally staring into space.  The maximizing approach to decision-making places a high cognitive load on the brain. The brain has to juggle a lot more information to try to come to an optimal decision.

Decisive people embrace the promise of “good enough,” known as satisficing. They are less afraid to eliminate options for consideration because the remaining choices are adequate (the word satisficing is a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”) to meet their requirements. They are quicker to turn away from lost opportunity. For them, decision-making is much easier. Rather than trying to juggle multiple attributes, they go sequentially down the list, starting with the attribute that is most important to them.

In the case of this study, this became clear in looking at the spread of fixations spread amongst the five attributes: time of the class, the instructor, the work load, the person’s own goals and the level of interest. For decisive people, the most important thing was the time of class. This makes sense. If you don’t have the time available, why even consider what the course has to offer? If the time didn’t work, the decisive group eliminated it from consideration. They then moved onto the instructor, the next most important criterion. And so on down the list.

Tick…Tick…Tick…

Another interesting finding was that even though indecisive people start by trying to weigh all the options to look for the optimal solution, if the clock is ticking, they often become overwhelmed by the decision and shift to a non-compensatory strategy by starting to eliminate candidates for consideration. The difference is that for the indecisive maximizers, this feels like surrender, or, at best, a compromise. For the decisive satisficers, it’s simply the way they operate. If the indecisive people are given the choice between delaying the decision and being forced to eliminate promising alternatives, they’ll choose to delay.

This sets up a fascinating question for search engine behavior: do satisficers search differently than maximizers? I suspect so. We’ll dive deeper into this question next week.

A Farewell to SEMPO

Today, the election for the new board of SEMPO is open. It’s a little bitter sweet for me. For the first time in 7 years, you won’t find my name on the ballot. I’ll be stepping down from the board and letting new blood take over.

I’ve been privileged to serve on the SEMPO board since 2003. Only Dana Todd and Kevin Lee, both founding members, have put in a longer tour of duty. In that time I’ve served as Chair of SEMPO for two years and have been the Research Chair, along with Kevin, for almost the entire time. I’ve seen SEMPO grow along with the industry to the point today where it has hundreds of members around the world. Not bad for an organization that started with a handful of search marketers meeting after the sessions had ended at an industry conference, looking to create a shared voice and gain a little more respect. I would say – mission accomplished!

But there is still so much more to do! I’ve had the opportunity to help the current executive start to define what SEMPO’s role could be in the future. The challenge, as it is with anything involving search, is trying to define the scope of what constitutes our reach. Search in the last decade has morphed and seeped into every aspect of our lives. Defining the role of an organization that tries to wrap it’s arms around that has been an ongoing challenge. And this is a challenge that isn’t going to get any easier.

SEMPO has never had a dearth of aspiration. We have dreamed big! We have consistently punched above our weight. We have ridden over rough patches of controversy and dissension. SEM’s are an outspoken lot. Most have us have heard first hand the uproar that ensues when you get a bunch of search marketers in the same room. Imagine, then, the challenge of trying to be the global voice for those loud, passionate, stubborn and thoroughly glorious marketers. Passion has infused SEMPO from day one, from the drive of Barbara Coll to the amazing and ongoing dedication of SEMPO leaders including Dana Todd, Kevin Lee, Jeff Pruitt, Massimo Burgio, Chris Boggs, Bill Hunt, Sara Houlobek and many others. I have been privileged and humbled to serve on the board with all of them. They will always be my mentors and friends. We have been on an amazing journey.

This is not the place for a list of the accomplishments of SEMPO. This is just a place for me to say thank you for the opportunity. And in offering thank yous, I would be remiss if I did not include some of SEMPO’s amazing administrative support team at Virtual, Inc, especially Amanda Pierce, Paula Hunter and a man I hope I can always call friend, Andy Freed. There are others, but those are the ones that I have spent the most time with.

In an industry that’s a fractious and quick to criticize as this one is, it’s always easy to point blame. It’s much harder to stop bitching long enough to dig in and and do something about it. I can tell you from experience, SEMPO boards have always had the interest of the industry firmly at the core of what they do. Not one member I have ever served with has been in it for their own glorification or interests. Not one. Because after 7 years on the board, I can tell you there are much easier ways to grab the spotlight than to serve on SEMPO’s board. The amount of dedication and commitment required is substantial, and, at the executive level, nothing short of monumental. We, each one of us, love this industry and are here to push it forward. We have struggled with the best way to do that, given that our dreams are consistently much bigger than our resources, but our motivations have never been in question.

I have my own goals and plans for the coming few years and knew it was time to step down, both for my sake and for the sake of the organization. As tough as it is for me to personally turn this corner, I know it’s the right path to take. When you cast your vote, I ask you to do so with careful consideration. We need a strong and healthy SEMPO, because the organization has provided a respected voice for this industry. Search marketing now has a global footprint and that voice has to continue to be heard. It has to be heard from Beijing and Oslo, from Milan and Buenos Aires, from Osaka and Sydney. And it has to be heard from Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver and Seattle

I like the saying Farewell, as it really embodies my wish for SEMPO. Fare well in the future. Continue to Dream and Do. Continue to be passionate. Continue to talk, connect and be heard.

I’ll miss you.

What I Learned at TED: What It Means to be Human

It was 5 amazing days in Palm Springs. It was my first TED conference, TEDActive. And, as one would expect, it was a revelation. You leave TED with a cranium crammed with disparate ideas, all jockeying for position. On Saturday, at the poolside farewell party, we were all intellectually shell shocked, either sitting numbly in the Palm Spring sun or grabbing a watergun and reverting to childhood. I started talking to one Bing engineer and soon we were sucked back into a conversation that was much too intellectual for either of our idea-soaked brains to contend with. As he said – “I thought I had had my last TED-conversation. I gotta go veg somewhere!”

So, what exactly did I learn at TED? Well, it’s hard to pack over 50 minor and major explosions of revelation into one blog post, but there were some highlights and from them, one major theme. That I can share.

Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover

If one went by appearances alone, one would walk away from a TED conference horribly impoverished. The riches here are found in the most unlikely places. Take Temple Grandin. I grew up in a cow town in Alberta called Sundre. Sweats and rubber boots are perfectly acceptable on the main street of Sundre and jeans, a baseball cap and cowboy boots are considered formal wear (if the jeans are clean). Temple would be right at home. She came on stage, no nonsense cow girl that she is, looking every bit the part. Temple was terribly out of place, but Temple has been out of place her whole life. She is, as she explained, an anthropologist on Mars.

grandinTemple is a high functioning autistic, with Asperger’s. She has a PhD and is possibly the best known autistic in the world. She is THE leading expert in livestock handling and has written over 100 academic papers, both on her chosen area of expertise and on autism. Temple has given the world a great gift, a glimpse inside the fascinating and baffling mind of autism. The problem with autism is that it often comes with a highly developed skill in one area, in Grandin’s case, empathizing with animals, but little skill in communicating that to others. Temple Grandin has been our guide and interpreter into autism. And on the TED stage, she was amazing. We soon forgot her outside appearance and gave ourselves wholly over to her message.

RaghavaAnother was Raghava KK – a young Indian artist. Raghava first appears to be an immature, giggling and slightly nervous teenager that is about a deep as a wading pool. But that impression lasts about 25 seconds. Then you dive into a bottomless ocean of passion, insight, emotion and, above all, compassion. Raghava held us spellbound for 18 minutes as he led us through his short but amazing life, including no less than 4 phoenix like artistic deaths and rebirths, each precipitated by a major life event.

These were just two examples. There were many more: Dan Barber, a chef, who is one of the best communicators I have ever had the pleasure of seeing on stage,  and Adora Svitak, a 12 year old from Tacoma who caused us to completely rethink our notion of “childishness.”

The Dualism of Humans

So, those were some of the highlights. There were many. I particularly liked Robert Scoble’s recap. He was, of course, at TED in Long Beach and I was in Palm Springs, but the content was the same (by the way, don’t feel that TEDActive is a step down from TED, it’s a step in a different direction, more informal, more casual and, according to many, more fun).

But what was the overall theme of TED? For me, it brought to light an idea I’ve been wrestling with for some time – the dualism of human nature.

When I say dualism, you may think of a Cartesian sort of dualism, a divide between the physical and the spiritual, between mind and matter. But my dualism is more rooted in evolutionary psychology and brain function. This dualism splits the nature of humans into two levels of neural function, cortical and sub-cortical. It’s the difference between “Blink” and “Think”. And that dualism was the thread that run through almost every session at TED 2010.

It started right from the opening talk, given by one of the iconic figures in helping uncover this human dualism – Daniel Kahnemann, the inventor of behavioral economics. Kahnemann explored the difference between experiential happiness and remembered happiness. You see, our happiness is usually based not on what we did, but what we remembered doing. And that is altered by our subconscious biases. For example, the end of our experience often determines how we feel about the whole thing. Hence the logic of the big finale. And remembered happiness doesn’t account for duration. Now, rationally this makes no sense. That’s one half of the dualism. But ration doesn’t live in the other half. That is ruled by emotion. So, our happiness is whittled out somewhat arbitrarily by our emotional biases.

I suppose if we accept that, we could go on accepting our rational short comings. But here’s the other part about dualism. Our irrationality is hidden from us. In fact, we take our irrationality and thinly disguise it with a layer of supposed rationality. Again, let’s return to our happiness. Our future decisions are dictated not by what we actually experienced as happiness, but by what we remember as happiness, which is filtered through our irrational emotions. This means that all this irrationality is baked right into what we believe is ration without our being any the wiser. We build our houses of logic on the shaky ground of emotional bias. This is the essence of behavioral economics.

This is essential to understand in looking at this dualism. It’s not two separate halves, it’s more like two different strings tied into a complex Gordian knot. Logic and emotion are intertwined and interlinked. Even when we think we’re standing on the purely rational side, every decision we make is being influenced by emotion, lurking just below the cortical surface.

Sarah SilvermanThe yin and yang of emotion and logic is not a bad thing. In this union lies love, idealism, art and the essence of our humanity. But we also have to accept that in it lies hate, fear, prejudice and the essence of our animalism. We have to accept and understand who we are and, more importantly, the limitations of our logic. We have to call a spade a spade. And this, to me, what the theme that ran through TED. It started with Kahnemann, but it tied Michael Specter’s talk about how fear and irrationality can bring science to a standstill, Michael Shermer’s presentation about how we are biased towards decisions that minimize risk but also minimize opportunity, Sam Harris’s view that morality can no longer be artificially divorced from the rigors of the scientific method and even chef Jamie Oliver’s plea for us to stop eating ourselves into oblivion. But our duality came into it’s sharpest focus during the controversial presentation by comedian Sarah Silverman. Here, in the most intellectual of arenas, Silverman tested our ability to divorce our minds from our emotions by delivering a gut punch to our sense of propriety. It was impossible to remain intellectually detached from Silverman’s satirical attack on taste and political correctness. Even TED curator Chris Anderson couldn’t help himself, twittering that Silverman was “god-awful” and afterwards realizing he too had been caught in a visceral trap, forcing him to offer the most passive aggressive apology I have ever heard the next morning. The collective intellect of TED struggled with our reaction, which could find no redemption in logic. Some laughed (I did), some were disgusted (I had twinges of this). But it was what it was. We are human, as Silverman brilliantly revealed, and we reacted in a human way. Let’s accept that. Let’s embrace that.It is time to uncover the irrational roots of our logic and make decisions with a full and complete understanding of what really drives us.

For me, after all the talks and presentations, that was what stuck. The question posed by Chris Anderson at the beginning of TED was, what does the world need now? For me, the answer was – The world needs a better understanding of what it means to be human, to be gloriously imperfect and irrational. The world needs us to not be hindered by our irrationality but be driven by our passion. The same things that can hold us back, if we choose not to understand them, can drive us forward, if we accept and accelerate them.

Decisiveness and Search: Two Different Strategies

First published February 11, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In “The Paradox of Choice,” author Barry Schwartz speculates that we all might be happier if we had fewer options in life. Our consumer-based society continually pumps out more and more options, forcing us into making more and more decisions. Schwartz convincingly draws a parallel between decisiveness and happiness. The less time we spend making decisions, the more we’ll be satisfied with our lives, he says.

A new study out of Wesleyan University explores the actual cognitive mechanisms of decisiveness. This has direct implications for search marketers, because every time we use a search engine, we’re forced to make decisions. In fact, every online interaction is a branching tree of decisions. The study provides new insight into the decision-making process we use as we guide ourselves through the online landscape.

Study Set-Up

The researchers at Wesleyan used a scenario familiar to their sample of 54 students: they had to pick courses for the upcoming semester. Course options were set up on a matrix that allowed students to evaluate their options on a few different criteria: time of the course, instructor quality, relevance, amount of work required and interest in topic. There were no “no-brainer” options. In each alternative, trade-offs were required.

The researchers also introduced a variable into the mix: the opportunity to delay final course selection.

Finally, they asked the students to use the course grid to help make their selections while using an eye-tracker to capture exactly what they looked at on the grid. After the task was completed, participants were asked to grade themselves on a standard decisiveness scale.

Decisive vs. Indecisive Strategies

Building on previous academic work on decisiveness, the researchers found that individuals tend to use two different strategies when making decisions.  The compensatory strategy tries to weigh all the decision attributes together, literally creating an evaluation formula in the decision-maker’s mind.  If there are five different decision criteria, all are considered at the same time and are weighted by the importance of each to the individual.

In a purely rational world, this would seem to be the optimal strategy, but as Schwartz pointed out, we are not rational decision-making machines. In their Nobel prize-winning work on Prospect Theory, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann  (and more recently, Dan Ariely) showed that we use irrational risk-triggered biases in our decision-making. These throw some significant wrenches into the workings of our decisiveness. Emotions get involved and we start feeling anxious. Decisions, even about things that will bring eventual rewards, start to cause us stress.

The other decision strategy is a non-compensatory, linear strategy. This is the foundation of Herbert Simon’s famous “satisficing” approach. Here, alternatives are quickly cut down by a sequential consideration of criteria, beginning with the one most important to the decision-maker. In the study scenario of picking courses, many looked first at the time the class would be taught, reasoning that if the time didn’t work for them, there was little point in considering the other things the course might offer. This quickly narrowed the consideration set. From there, they moved on to the next most important criterion. This sequential approach is relatively ruthless in eliminating candidates for consideration.

This study, along with others, found that indecisive decision-makers tend to start with a compensatory strategy, while decisive people start short-listing immediately with a non-compensatory strategy. In the next column, we’ll see how this difference in strategies was clearly shown in the eye tracking results. I’ll also explore how indecisive individuals are often forced to abandon one strategy for the other, which can cause significant stress.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Will Video Games Become Too Real for Us to Handle?

Man_Playing_A_Video_Game_1575481-310x416In yesterday’s post, I explored our psychological attraction to violent action thrillers. Today, let’s go one step further. What is the attraction of violent video games? And how might this attraction deepen and even become pathologically dangerous as the technology behind the games improves? It’s a question we’re speeding towards, so we should stop to consider it.

In TV and film, violent action triggers a chemical reaction in the brain that we find stimulating and pleasing. As cortisol and dopamine get released, we experience a natural high. Strong evidence points to a connection between sensation seeking (triggering the high) and addictive tendencies.

The Veil of Non Reality

There is a “veil of non-reality” that moderates this reaction however. The high we get from violent entertainment comes from the limbic structures of the brain, triggered by the amygdala and other sub-cortical neural modules. This is the primal part of the brain that ensures survival in threatening situations, which means that responses are fast but not deliberate. The higher, cortical parts of the brain ride overtop of these responses like a governor, toning down the responses and modulating the overactive danger response mechanisms. It our brains didn’t do this, we’d quickly burn ourselves out. Cortisol is a great stimulant when it’s needed, but a steady diet of it turns us into a quivering pile of anxiety-ridden stress.

When we watch entertainment, this modulating part of the brain quickly realizes that what we’re watching isn’t real and puts its foot on the brake of the brain’s natural desire to pump out Cortisol, dopamine and other neuro-chemicals. It’s the “voice of reason” that spoils the fun of the limbic brain. Despite the fact that there’s car’s exploding left and right and people are dropping like flies, the fact that we’re watching all this on a 2 dimensional screen helps us keep everything in perspective, preventing our brain from running away with itself. This is the veil of “non-reality” that keeps us from be fooled that this is all real.

The Imagined Reality of Entertainment

But let’s stop for a moment and think about how we’re consuming entertainment. In the past decade, screens have got bigger and bigger. It’s no coincidence that we get a bigger high from watching violence on the big screen than from watching it on a 20 inch home TV. The “veil of non-reality” starts to slip a little bit. It seems more real to us. Also, we feed off the responses of others in the theater. We are social animals and this is especially true in threatening situations, even if they are simulations in the name of entertainment. We pick up our social cues from the herd.

It’s not just the size of the screen that’s changing, however. Technology is continually trying to make our entertainment experiences more real. Recent advances in 3D technology have not only made James Cameron even wealthier, they also deliver a stronger sensory jolt. Watching Avatar in 3D is a sensory explosion. The veil of “non-reality” slips a little further.

But improvements in graphic technology can only go so far in fooling the brain. Much as our eyes might be deceived, we’re still sitting passively in a chair. Our interpretation of the world not only relies on input from the senses, it also relies on our own sense of “body” – Antonio Damasio’s somatic markers.

The Satisfaction of Control

This is where video games are quickly approaching a potential crisis point in sensory overload. Even the best Hollywood thriller requires us to sit passively and consume the experience. We have no control over plot, dialogue or the character actions. We can only engage in the experience to a certain level. In fact, much of the appeal of a Hollywood thriller comes from this gap between what’s happening on the screen and what’s happening in our own minds. We can imagine possible outcomes or perhaps the director gives us knowledge the protagonist doesn’t have. We experience suspense as we see if the protagonist takes the same actions we would. We silently scream “Get out of the house!” to the teenage babysitter when we know the psychopathic killer is upstairs.

But video games erase this limitation. With a video game, we’re suddenly in control. Control is a powerfully seductive condition for humans. We naturally try to control as many elements of our environment as possible. And when we can exert control over something, we’re rewarded by our brains and a natural hit of dopamine. That’s why completing a puzzle or solving a riddle is so inherently satisfying. These are tiny exertions of control. In a video game, we are the authors of the script. It is we who decide how we react to dangerous situations. Suddenly we are not a passive audience. we are the actors. This is cognitive engagement at a whole different level. Suddenly the appeal of sensory stimulation is combined with the rewards we get from exercising control over novel situations. That’s a powerful one-two punch for our brains. And the veil of “non-reality” slips a little further.

Virtual Reality

The negative impacts of video games have been studied, but again, like TV, studies have been largely centred around one question: does the playing of video games lead to increased aggression and violence in children? And, like TV, the answer seems to be a qualified yes. For those already prone to violence, the playing of video games seems to reinforce these attitudes. But it’s also been argued that the playing of video games provides a cathartic release for violent tendencies.

Less research has been conducted on the cognitive impact of video games, and it’s here where the bigger problem might lie. A few studies have shown the playing of video games could be addictive. A Japanese study found that excessive video game playing during adolescence seems to alter the way brains develop, impairing the ability to focus attention for long periods of time. In fact, a number of studies have shown links between exposure to excessive sensory stimulation through electronic media and the incidence of ADHD and other attention deficit disorders. It’s this longer term altering of how our brains work that may represent the bigger danger in video games.

Video games combined violent scenarios, which we know to provide sensory jolts to the brain, with the seduction of control. What has limited the addictive appeal of video games to this point are two things: how realistic the scenarios are perceived to be and the way we interact with the games. And, in both these areas, technology is moving forward very quickly.

Video game graphics have come a long way, but they still lack the photo realism of a typical Hollywood movie. However, the distance between the two is lessening every day. How far away are we from a video game experience that matches the realism of Hollywood? Huge advances in computer graphics and sheer processing power are bringing the two closer and closer together. The day is not far away where our experience in a video game will feel like we’ve been dropped in the middle of a movie. And, with 3D and virtual reality technology, even the physical separation of a screen will soon disappear. The imaginary world will surround us in a highly realistic way. What will that do for the “veil of non-reality?”

The other area where video games have improved dramatically is in the way we control them. The control pad with various triggers and buttons was a artificial way to interact with the video game world. A spin-jump-kick combination was triggered by pushing down a few buttons while we sat in a chair. This helped our brain maintain it’s distance from the imagined reality. But Nintendo’s Wii changed how we interact with video games. Sophisticated sensors now translate our own body motions into corresponding digital commands for the game. Even our bodies are fooled into believing we’re actually playing golf or participating in a boxing match. Interestingly, Nintendo made the choice to make the graphics on the Wii less realistic, perhaps trying to maintain a “veil of non-reality.”

The Wii opens the door to a much more realistic way of controlling video games. Now our own body movements control the virtual character. Suddenly, our body is providing reinforcing feedback to our brain that this might just be real. When you combine this with photo-realistic visual input and audio input, one could forgive our brains for not being able to determine what is real and what isn’t.

Entertainment Overload?

If technology continues down the path it’s own, the virtual reality of a video game may be indistinguishable from the true reality of our lives. If the “veil of non-reality” permanently slips, we have a huge potential problem: our lives pale in comparison to the sensory possibilities of a virtual world. That’s why our brains may not be equipped to handle the overload. We may get addicted to sensation as the brain is fooled into giving us stronger and stronger hits of cortisol, dopamine, adrenaline and other natural narcotics. When the “veil of non-reality” slips away forever, our brains may not be equipped to handle the new virtual reality.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Why We’re Hooked on Violent Action Thrillers

In previous posts, I explored what encourages long term loyalty to a TV show. All of this entertainment psychological navel gazing was prompted by the original question: how does entertainment “hook” us and how can marketers use that to effectively connect with potential customers, especially online?

The Intrigue of Violence

heath32201_468x312Before we move on from TV, there is one genre we have yet to explore: the action thriller. Why does violence intrigue us? If you think about it, there is nothing rational about this proclivity we have towards violence. In our society, our own bodies are considered taboo. The female breast, the source of sustenance for all of us when we’re born, cannot be seen on TV. Yet we regularly watch, even expect, primetime shows where humans lives are snuffed out without a second thought. If you stop to seriously contemplate this cultural paradox, there can be no logical answer. Why would we possibly be entertained by watching others of our species be subjected to harm? Yet the draw of violent action is undeniably human.

By the time the average American child is 18 they will have watched 200,000 acts of violence on TV. And we, as parents, rarely question this form of entertainment. On any given night, on one channel alone, you’re likely to see a least a dozen murders. In 8 seasons of 24, Jack Bauer has personally dispatched over 200 people (according to http://www.jackbauerkillcount.com). There are no fewer than 5 websites that keep tally of Bauer’s body count. Season 4 was the bloodiest, with Jack adding 44 souls to the death toll. Now, if you consider that each episode of 24 represents a single day in Bauer’s life, that means he’s a pretty busy killing machine. Even allowing for the fact that Bauer doesn’t seem to sleep (or urinate, for that matter), that’s still a murder every 32.7 minutes. Now..that’s entertainment!

But why is violence entertaining? It’s not as difficult to understand why sex sells. After all, it’s tied into our need to procreate, so the evolutionary linkages are pretty easy to understand. But our love of violence presents more of a mystery.

It’s More than Good vs Bad

As I wrote before in a previous post, we have pretty simply formulas for a successful narrative – the good guys are supposed to triumph and the bad guys are supposed to be defeated. Action thrillers wrap themselves around this central truth, with the good guys routinely dispatching the bad guys (The Bauer/Bad Guy Kill Ratio certainly reinforces this psychological truth). Every so often, just to keep things interesting, someone close to Bauer meets an untimely end. Those thinking Jack Bauer in romantic terms would do well to reconsider. Bauer’s wives and love interests also have a habit of dying. Losing a sympathetic character hieightens the dramatic impact of the narrative. But if we have this inherent connection with stories, why do we need violence? Would we be just as satisfied if Jack Bauer soundly trounced his enemies in a good game of backgammon? I suspect not.

So it’s not just the good against evil archetype that we look for in an action thriller – it’s the violence itself. And this comes from the same mental circuit that we explored when we looked at why we laugh, our danger detection circuit.

The Sensational High

The human body responds in a unique way to signals of danger. The brain readies the body for fleeing or fighting. And it does so by a sudden release of neuro-chemicals, including the hormone cortisol and both adrenaline and noradrenaline. These chemicals not only ready us for action, they also cause us to believe that we can overcome opposition. Confidence in threatening situations provides an evolutionary advantage, as long as it leave the door open to a rapid exit of the odds are too heavily stacked against us.  Fear, danger and violence all provide us with a natural high that makes us feel more powerful, more positive and more confident. Also, dopamine, the fuel of our reward center, is released as we encounter novel situations. These chemicals, acting together, create a feeling of satisfaction for us.

Psychologists call this need for stimulation sensation seeking. Like most human traits, it’s not universally present or consistent. We have a normal distribution curve of sensation seeking throughout the human population. Marvin Zuckerman created the sensation seeking scale in the 70s. Some of us have an addictive need for sensational stimulation. Some of us avoid it at all costs. Most of us lie somewhere in between. And, not surprisingly, males are more likely to seek sensation through aggressive physical activity and by watching on-screen violence. Televised sports, especially high contact sports like boxing, wrestling, football and hockey all cater to the male need for physical, often violent stimulation.

Studies have found strong links between sensation seeking and addictive personalities. Those that constantly seek sensation are most likely to become addicted to cocaine (which provides a similar high by fooling the same circuits of the brain), alcohol and even gambling. In one interesting twist, some Parkinson’s patients who receive L-dopa, a therapy to replace dopamine, typically lacking in Parkinson’s, suddenly developed a powerful appetite for gambling. By altering the brain chemistry to lessen the adverse affects of their patient’s condition, the doctors unwittingly upped their need to seek sensation.

Hollywood as the Pusher

If danger provides us with a natural high, Hollywood has learned to push this hardwired hot button repeatedly and often. The action thriller is a distillation of sensation. In 60 to 120 minutes, we are treated to a buffet of sensation, all signaling our brain that it should deliver another hit. In our normal lives, few of us are in situations that necessitate the release of these neuro-chemicals more than a few times each year. There is more danger packed into a half hour of primetime TV than most of us encounter in our entire lives.

Given the condensed nature of these threatening stimuli, the brain can’t respond as fully as it would in real life situations. Because our cortex is running governor on all this, continually letting us know that this is all make-believe, the hits are dramatically modulated, providing a minor buzz of stimulation. Still, those with a need for stimulation get what they’re looking for from the average thriller. At the end of the show they feel entertained.

There is increasing concern over the long term effects of this constant stimulation. Does the violence we see of TV lead to increased violence in real life? Academic opinion is divided on this, but the balance seems to be tilted to the “yes” side. If we take a normal distribution of violent, anti-social tendencies amongst the human population (typically, these studies look at the effect of televised violence amongst children) we would have the typical bell curve, with some decidedly anti-violent and pacific, some pathologically violent and the most of us somewhere in the middle. There is mounting evidence that the flood of violent stimuli delivered through the TV set and other entertainment mediums shifts this curve to the violent side. TV violence won’t make a peaceful child suddenly violent, but it can make the child prone to violence more apt to play out their tendencies. TV seems to shift the odds in favour of violence. There is also a self-reinforcing loop here. Violent people seek out violent entertainment. Peaceful people tend to avoid it. Our choice of entertainment reinforces our natural tendencies.

Pure Violence is Not Enough for Long Term Connections

Now, if the action thriller is literally delivering a chemical high to our brain, this would seem to indicate that they would be almost irresistible entertainment choices. Fortunately, it seems that humans have slightly more complex needs than just a never ending high. If we look at thrillers in terms of long term viewer loyalty, violence alone is not enough. While a action block buster might be enough to keep us enthralled for the short term, we need more from our shows to keep us coming back season after season. Mere sensory stimulation catches our attention, but deeper connections with characters are required for emotional bonding over longer periods of time.

The entertainment industry has a long and dubious history of gratifying our sensation seeking needs. But recently, an even more potent sensation “fix” has been discovered. In a violent TV action show, we can watch but we can’t participate. This helps the brain maintain it’s cognitive balance, understanding that this is all a show, that it doesn’t represent reality. This allows us to modify the release of natural hormones and neuro-transmitters. But what happens when we have the ability to interact with these violent, imaginary scenarios? Video games up the ante by adding the very powerful element of control. I’ll explore that in the next post.