Category Archives: Cognition

More Steps to Breaking the Google Habit

First published March 6, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Let’s imagine that my ongoing series about the forming of habits (installment 1, installment 2 and installment 3) has so captured your curiosity that you want to find out more. You’re reading this column from your computer. You make the decision to find more information about breaking a habit. Now, let’s slow down time and look at the steps. There, in the upper left of your browser, is the Google toolbar. Or maybe you have the Google sidebar in the lower right of your window. Perhaps you’ve got Google’s homepage bookmarked. Whatever the shortcut, you don’t suddenly stop and think, “Gee, for this search what would be the optimal search engine to use?” No, without thinking, you go right up to the handiest search box and key in “breaking habits.”

It’s All About the Cues….

In psychological terms, what we’ve just described is a stable environment. The layout of your window is something you’re familiar with. You don’t have to think about it, you just do it. And the vast majority of times, this works for you. You have created an expectation of success. The cues remind you, below the level of rational consciousness, that this course of behavior generally produces the desired outcome. And each successful search reinforces that.

This cueing and reinforcement cycle is a powerful factor. Several academic studies (see Verplanken & Wood for a review of the literature in this area) have shown that habitual use has two important lock-in mechanisms that perpetuate the behavior. First of all, expectations of success curb our desire to search for alternatives. All those millions of advertising dollars from Ask or Microsoft, and the ads they bought are falling on deaf ears.

Secondly, the one type of information we do pay attention to is information that confirms our habitual bias. Because we have an expectation of success, our ears perk up when we hear things that confirm and reinforce that expectation. We are looking to remain consistent with the habit, rather than break it. This is true even with something as insidious as smoking. Imagine how powerful this would be with a benign behavior like using a search engine. Millions of dollars of TV ads can be trumped by one person telling us that Google is also their favorite engine because it always delivers what they’re looking for.

The Forgiving Habitual User

Further, even when we have a less-than-ideal experience, our expectation framework tends to “cut it some slack,” mentally averaging out the experiences and rounding it up in the incumbent’s favor. We become pretty forgiving of our habitual choice and hyper-critical of the alternatives.

So, given the formidable odds against breaking a habit (remember, in most cases, habits are good things that reduce our need to think through everything, so evolution has a vested interest in keeping them in place) there are still circumstances when it can happen.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes…

One of these is when there’s a disruption to the stable environment. When we have to adjust to a new circumstance, we’re also open to new cues that go into the new environment. In the non-virtual world, this would be moving to a new home, especially in a new city or starting a new job. In the virtual world confined to our 21-inch monitor, it would be buying a new computer, upgrading our operating system or switching to a new browser. Any of these events, or a combination of them, offers an opportunity to search providers to make themselves one of the new environment cues. There’s been a disruption in the typical flow that used to lead to acting without thinking, so there’s an opportunity to cause people to think about the alternatives.

One tremendous opportunity to get in on the ground floor of our adaption of a new environment is presented by our increasing use of mobile. The even smaller real estate on the mobile screen represents a tremendous opportunity to put a stake in the ground and start the habit-forming cycle. Google already has a head start in this area, but it’s far less than what they’ve established on the desktop.

Next week, more ways for competitors to disrupt the Google habit, including what it might take to overcome the incumbent’s advantage.

Breaking the Google Habit

First published February 28, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What will it take to beat the Google habit? There’s billions of dollars that hang on the answer to that question. My last two columns looked at the nature of habits and how they can lead to an advantage for incumbents by “locking in” customers or users.

Before we look at some possible answers, it’s important to understand how and why previous attempts at breaking habits have fallen short in an area where far more academic work has been done: health care (Verplanken & Wood, 2006).

Educational campaigns have proven to have little effect on changing habitual behavior. In fact, studies have shown that these campaigns can actually trigger an increase in the unwanted behaviors! Oops, that wasn’t supposed to happen.

The frustration of physicians who are battling unhealthy lifestyle choices in their patients was perfectly summed up in an address given by John McKinley to the American Heart Association over 30 years ago.

“You know,” McKinley said, “sometimes it feels like this. There I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river, and I hear the cry of a drowning man. So I jump into the river, put my arms around him, pull him to shore and apply artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, there is another cry for help. So I jump into the river, reach him, pull him to shore, apply artificial respiration, and then just as he begins to breathe, another cry
for help. So back in the river again, reaching, pulling, applying, breathing and then another yell. Again and again, without end, goes the sequence. You know, I am so busy jumping in, pulling them to shore, applying artificial respiration, that I have no time
to see who the hell is upstream pushing them all in.”

This has led to a reexamination of the “downstream” method of altering behavior; trying to rationally convince people to change their behavior after it’s already become a habit, for example, with education campaigns. The fundamental problem here is, you’re trying to apply a rational solution to an irrational problem. We don’t think about habits, we just do them. That’s the very definition of a habit.

The Strength and Cost of Habits

There are two other components in habitual behavior that have to be understood: the strength of the habit and the cost of executing the habit. Both factor into how hard the habit will be to change. The strength is how closely habits are tied to our personal beliefs, good or bad. If we stop at Starbucks every day because we absolutely love everything about Starbucks, that’s going to be a very hard habit to break. Smoking ups the ante with an actual physical addiction.

Also, how much does it cost us to continue the habit? It I have to go four blocks out of my way to go to Starbucks, that has a personal cost to me. If it’s right on my way to work, that’s different.

Habitual Use of Search

So, let’s wrap up this week’s column with a summary of what we’ve learned about habits, and apply it to search:

·    You typically can’t change habits by a rational appeal after a habit is formed. This explains the failure of every television campaign for search engines looking to grow market share.

·    The strength of habit is a big factor in how likely the habit is to stay in place. So, if you’re looking to steal users from Google by breaking their Google habit, you’re going to be looking to the those folks that use Google because it’s handy, not the ones that have six Google T-shirts hanging in their closet.

·    And finally, you’re going to have to look for a way to catch users before they use Google by intercepting them upstream. The reason Yahoo has been able to maintain its market share over the past few years has a lot more to do with the scope of its presence and the fact that the company can put a Yahoo search box in front of more people before they can get to Google, and a lot less to do with the quality of the search experience. And that’s also why Microsoft’s share has eroded, as more and more default home pages are being switched from MSN.

Next week, in the series that may never end (talk about habit-forming), we look at how challengers to the Google search crown can hope to break the habit. Hint: All the clues point in one direction — upstream!

 

More on Why Google is Habit-Forming

First published February 21, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s Search Insider, I introduced the idea of habits, and why they can be hard things to break. This week, I want to explore how search engines can be habit-forming as well.

Cognitive Lock-In

Habits form and stay formed because there is usually a cost associated with discontinuing the habit. In a commercial interaction, this is referred to as the “cost of switching.” These are the lock-in mechanisms that companies hope will keep you from walking across the street to their competitors. In theory, the cost of switching on the Internet should be negligible, creating a frictionless, “perfect” market. There’s no financial penalty. The Internet erases geographic boundaries. And this should be especially true in search. After all, other search engines are only a click away. But researchers (Johnson, Bellman and Lohse, 2003; Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2000) actually found the opposite to be true. It seemed that customer stickiness can actually be greater online. So, if it’s so easy to switch, why aren’t more people doing it?

It appears, based on research (Zauberman, 2003), that there’s another cost of switching, the cost of learning new interfaces. This has been called “cognitive lock-in.”. As you become comfortable navigating through a site, the cognitive cost of learning new interfaces tends to build your loyalty and keep you “locked in” to the site. This happens in the real world as well, and could explain my wife’s seemingly irrational loyalty to the bad grocery store I described last week. She knows where everything is. She knows where to park. And she knows who to argue with when products don’t meet her standards (as well as how to get her point across — it’s an Italian thing). It may not be great, but it’s familiar!

Will Differentiation Increase the Power of Lock-In?

A recent study (Murray and Haubl, 2007) found that cognitive lock-in comes from habits of use as well as habitual choice. Both are relevant in the search space, but let’s put habitual choice aside for a moment. Habits of use form when we become familiar with using a product, the actual mechanics of how it fits us in realizing our goals. We know how to use Google, for example, and how to refine it to get the results we’re looking for. We know which links take us where, which tabs to hit and even through we never use it, the “Feeling Lucky?” button reminds us we’re on Google. When Google tried to remove it, based on lack of usage, there was a huge user backlash.

This sense of familiarity meant that until recently, all search engines looked the same. The same ten blue links, the same treatment of sponsored ads, the same basic layout. But in a recent set of interviews with all the major engines’ design and usability teams, it was made clear that we can expect more differentiation among the engines. Ask’s departure was just the first step in this movement.

It’s Not Just a Tool, It’s a Badge

But it’s not just the utility of an engine that increases lock-in. There’s also habitual choice. This comes from our lock-in to a brand. We always drink Coke, we always drive a Honda, we always fly Southwest, we always search on Google. Yes, even something as utilitarian as a search engine engenders brand allegiance. We identify with brands because they help define us as individuals. And this has happened to varying extents in the search space.

There Will Never Be Another Google in Search

You might ask, if Google became a habit, what’s to stop another engine from also becoming a habit? Well, first of all, it won’t be nearly as easy for a new player as it was for Google. Think back to when you first used Google. No one engine had established itself as the user’s choice, creating the “lock-in” effect. I used to hop back and forth between four or five engines, depending on my objective and the closest engine at hand. I’d perhaps start at Infoseek or AltaVista, and if I didn’t get a great result (which was pretty much always true) I’d try Excite or HotBot. Then, finally, in desperation, I’d sort through the hierarchal jungle that was Yahoo. No engine had become a habit.

Google’s genius was in providing pretty good results for a wide variety of searchers. Suddenly, I didn’t have to hop from engine to engine, because nine out of 10 times Google provided better results. By the time the rest of the engines had closed the gap, I was already locked in. Now, arguably, other engines provide better results for certain types of searches. But Google is habitual. It’s going to be an uphill battle for the competition. In fact, Google is such a habit; its name has even replaced the word “search.” We now “Google” it.

So, where does that leave the competition? I have some ideas, but they’ll have to wait till next week.

Why Google is Habit Forming

First published February 14, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My wife Jill was the victim of another drive-by “why-ing” — and I, of course, was the perpetrator.

There’s a small specialty grocery store where we live that Jill visits every week or two. And almost every time, she complains about the experience. Outdated stock is repackaged. Food is rancid. The staff is surly. But she keeps buying there. After listening to another long-winded vent, I dared to go where no man should go. I asked her “why?”

There were a number of reasons that she gave. It’s on the way on her daily route. Parking is convenient. Prices are low. But the biggest reason was one she didn’t express, because she didn’t know it. It had become a habit. And habits are tough things to break.

Why We Have Habits

Like almost everything else, habits are a way we cope with the world. They’re cognitive shortcuts so we can save our brains for more appropriate work. And most times, they work pretty well. When things work the same way the majority of times, we don’t have to think about them every single time. We relegate them to habits. It’s why we have such difficult times with doorknobs, even when we’re given instructions (“push” or “pull” –and thanks to SI reader Peter Simmons for the example). Our brain is in short-cut mode, so it’s not taking the time to read signs. Based on the shape of the door handle, the presence or absence of push plates, whether we’re entering or exiting and other cues, the brain makes a decision to push or pull without really consulting our conscious mind. We won’t even see the sign (which would engage our consciousness) unless we don’t get the result we expect.

Habits are grooves worn in the brain, and they tend to be relatively durable because of that. The rule of thumb seems to be about three weeks. So, if you moved a light switch from the right side of the door to the left side, it would take about 21 days before your brain stopped telling your right hand to turn on the switch.

The Hand is Quicker Than the Brain

Here’s the important part of that circuit (the one in the brain, not the one that turns on the light). The loop between the brain and the right hand is an unconscious one. It’s made of synapses firing on autopilot. At a conscious level, you know the switch is on the left side, but the conscious loop is slower than the unconscious one. It’s the laziness of the brain at work. If we don’t have to think about everything, why should we? So your right hand is already patting the wall looking for the switch before your rational, thinking brain catches up and says, “It’s on the other side, idiot.” This has to happen a couple dozen times before the new groove in your brain is established and you can go back to not thinking about turning on the light switch.

Why Incumbents Usually Win

Now, in my typical, roundabout way, I am getting to why this is important in search. If we think about habits, it starts to become clear why Google has such a huge market share advantage. I’d like to introduce another idea called the “incumbency effect.”   When it refers to politics, the incumbency effect means that once you win an election, you have a greater chance of winning subsequent elections for the same office. This is due to several factors that give you the edge in the eyes of voters: familiarity, experience in the role, access to funding and the ability to call in favors racked up during the previous term. All things being equal, incumbents are tough to beat.

But in other arenas outside politics, the incumbency effect can also be driven by the fact that habits are formed. It’s not just the rational reasons why an incumbent can be tough to dethrone; it’s also the irrational ones. The incumbent has worn a groove in our brain. And to knock off an incumbent, with all these things in their favor, you can’t just be a slightly better alternative. You have to be significantly more attractive. Either the incumbent has to screw up badly, or you have to offer a dramatic improvement over them.

As per usual, my weekly allotment of words has run out before my idea, so I’ll pick this up next week, when we look at the incumbency effect and a parallel concept, cognitive lock in, and how they’re playing out in the world of search.

More on Search, Transactive Memory and the Elastic Mind

First published January 31, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Thomas Young was the last person who knew everything. Or, at least, that’s Andrew Robinson’s claim in his book of the same title. Whether you agree or not, the accomplishments of this 19th century Quaker were certainly impressive. In contradiction to Newton, he proposed the wave theory of light, furthered our understanding of the mechanics of the eye, helped invent Egyptology and decipher the Rosetta stone, created a measure of elasticity in engineering, was an accomplished physician, created a technique for tuning keyboard instruments, compared 400 languages, coined the term Indo-European and still had time to pioneer developments in carpentry and life insurance. Thomas Young was the human Google of his age.

Today, our world is much more complex. There’s too much knowledge to store in just one mind. So, we tend to find other places to keep it for when we need it. Hence the concept of transactive memory, which I touched on last week.

Misty, Watercolored Memories

We have different methods for storing different types of memories. The way we remember our 21st birthday (if we still remember it at all) is different than the way we remember our phone number. Then there’s the way we remember how to ride a bike, or what Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” sounds like.

And some people are better at remembering certain types of things than others. That’s why we’ve adapted to extend our memory capabilities by using transactive memory. We rely on others to store memories that we might need at some point. Our wives remember birthdays. Our kids remember how to program our smart phone. Our co-worker remembers how to run the virus scan on our computer. We don’t have to remember all these things; all we have to remember is who does.

The Transactive Web

But what about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? Doesn’t this take transactive memory to a level never thought of before? Even the reduced work load of remembering who remembers what is significantly more trouble than just being able to instantly recall information with a well-placed query. We dump the details of our life on a hard drive somewhere, and search for it when we need it. Even if we’re looking for something we didn’t know we needed, like the recipe for haggis (how many of you celebrated Robbie Burns Day last Friday?) we can find it when we needed it. And we don’t have to remember it, because we know it will be there come next Jan. 25.

The Adaptive Brain

And that brings us to the second point I raised last week, that of neurological plasticity. Our brain prunes itself, getting rid of capacities we really don’t need anymore, and strengthening those that we do. This happens to the greatest extent in the first few decades of our lives, but it is a lifelong process. I am forcibly reminded of this when my 14-year-old daughter asks me for help with her algebra homework. At one point in my life, I knew this stuff. But most of those neurons have long since disappeared. To offer any help at all, I have to relearn what I once knew, building new neural pathways.

So, as we have to worry less about remembering certain things, like facts, dates, phone numbers and addresses, will our semantic memory capabilities, the place we store these things, become less exercised and therefore, pruned out of the way? And in its place, will we develop greater skills in navigating online spaces?

It’s really not a question, it’s already happening. We can see the difference in the generational abilities in the online space, or when our kids kick our virtual butts in a Wii showdown. But we’re still in a place where we’re balanced on the cusp between the pre- and post-digital world. We still have a foot in each realm. Let’s fast-forward a generation or two and see which capabilities that seem so essential to us today have disappeared. And which new talents, unfathomable to us today, have taken their place.

Exponential Technological Advances

Now, obviously, this is nothing new. We don’t need to remember how to shoe a horse, and our great-grandfather would be amazed (and possibly aghast) at a trip on a California freeway. Change has always happened, and humans have always adapted. But there’s something different now. Raymond Kurzweil calls it The Law of Accelerating Returns. The need to adapt to leaping technological advance is getting more and more demanding. Technological growth is exponential. At today’s rate, we experience 20,000 years of progress in a century. In the year 2045, Kurzweil believes we’ll hit a point where machines become smarter than humans. Could the human mind, which is amazing in its adaptability, simply be outstripped by technology?

One last thought. If you believe in evolution (as I do) humans have evolved as the preeminent species through a long line of trial and error, with our environment as the ultimate judge of genetic worthiness. The problem is that evolution is a long, slow process. Our evolutionary environment, the one we’ve adapted to excel in, is a hunter-gatherer society several thousand years past. Evolution never equipped us to function in the world we live in, except in one regard. It equipped us with an adaptable mind that allows self-awareness. And even that is inextricably tied to our human nature. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately, it doesn’t benefit from Moore’s Law.

Search, Transactive Memory and the Plastic Mind

First published January 24, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In 1986, University of Virginia Psychologist Daniel Wegner came up with an interesting theory. He realized that we depend on others to remember some of the things we need to know. This is especially true in couples and families. Some of us are better at remembering phone numbers and birth dates. Some of us are better at remembering how 401Ks and computers work. In couples, the longer we spend together, the more we divvy up the memory workload, depending on our spouse to prop up our spotty memories.

Wegner called this transactive memory. With it, we don’t have to remember everything. We just have to remember who knows what. Wegner found this to be true in any small group who spends a lot of time together. The bigger the group, the larger the extended memory capacity.

That’s the first concept I want you to think about. Now, let me give you another.

It’s the Second Chimp on the Left, the One with the Scar

Babies are born with a capability that you and I don’t have. They can recognize and distinguish between faces of different species. For example, if you introduce a 6-month-old baby to six different chimpanzees, then show them pictures of the chimp faces, they’ll be able to recognize them and tell them apart. But to us, they will all look like chimpanzees. The same is true of sheep, or lemurs. To us, a sheep is a sheep is a sheep. It seems we lose this ability around 9 months of age, according to Olivier Pascalis at the University of Sheffield.

Why can we no longer tell chimpanzees apart? We’re born with this ability because at one point in our evolution it was important. The ability to tell animals apart led to a greater chance of survival. But that’s not really true today. Today, in our complex social world, it’s much more important to be able to tell human faces apart. So at about 9 months of age, the brain starts to concentrate on that. And, in this case, something has to give. Sorry chimps, but after a while, you’ll all look the same to us.

There’s one more point I want to share here. Dr. Pascalis found that if parents continued to develop their babies’ ability to distinguish between non-human faces by repeating the exercise, the babies retained that skill.

The Pruning of the Young Mind

It’s not so much this lost ability I find interesting. It’s the underlying reason, the ability for the brain to change itself from birth to maturity. Humans received another gift in the evolutionary lottery, an adaptable mind. The brain you get at birth is not the brain you’ll end up with. A 2007 study at Oxford University found that newborn brains have almost 50% more neurons than adult brains. Babies have more raw “brain material” to work with. They get shipped with the full menu of evolutionary options, including the ability to tell monkeys apart.

But over time, in a process known as “pruning,” the brain starts to discard options it doesn’t use very often. Weak, underutilized neurons, forming neural pathways we never use, get pruned and, in some cases, reconfigured, to make way for pathways that are more commonly used. To go back to our facial recognition example, being able to keep track of all the faces in one’s ever increasing circle of friends and family is a huge task. And it’s right around 9 months that we start venturing out in the world, meeting more and more people. The timing of this is not coincidental.

Fertilized Neurons

But our brains not only get rid of unused functions. They also nurture commonly used functions. The same Oxford study found that although our neuron inventory decreases, we actually gain significantly in another type of cell — glials. Glials are the most important brain cell you’ve probably never heard of. They act as a support system for our neurons, nurturing them and making them more effective. And adults apparently have three times the number of glial cells found in infants.

So, for the next seven days, until my next column, I want you to think about those two concepts: we rely on external sources to extend our memory, and our brains are adaptable, able to rewire themselves to discard capabilities that are no longer important to us, and build capabilities that are more important.

See where I’m going with this? Until next week…

Ring. Ring. Why We Can’t Ignore the Phone

Back to blogging over the holidays. And to get back in the groove for 2008, an interesting “Whydunnit” that was bouncing around my head and the Enquiro office yesterday.

It started as an example I used in today’s “Just Behave” column on Search Engine Land about how the way we interact with our online world might actually be more native to us and how we evolved than reading a book. Online browsing is actually a return to behavior that we’re pretty familiar with. We were born to multi-task.

Driving and Selective Perception

The example was to show how we use selective perception to decide what needs the full attention of our conscious mind, and it was about driving, daydreaming and cell phone use. Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s another example. Ever drive home on a route you take all the time, either from work or your children’s school, and get home only to realize you didn’t really remember driving there? You’ve driven the route so often that it’s worn a path in your brain and you can do it on autopilot. Meanwhile, your mind wanders in a million different directions, thinking about work, what’s for supper, your next vacation and the marks on your daughter’s report card. But all the time, you’re scanning your environment. If a pedestrian steps in front of you, you slam on the brakes. And you did it faster than you could ever rationally think about it. It’s a hereditary hardwired shortcut, straight to your amygdala, the emergency response center of your brain, bypassing your conscious mind.

By the way, while we’re on the subject of driving, if we’re so good at multitasking, why is talking on a cell phone so dangerous when we’re behind the wheel? It’s not because one of our hands is tied up, as we previously thought. Studies have found that even with hands free devices, we’re four times more likely to be in a car accident when talking on a cell phone. This risk is the same as driving while drunk. And it’s all about reaction time. One study found that if you put a 20 year old behind the wheel talking on a cell phone, their reaction time is the same as a 70 year old not talking on a cell phone.

Here’s the reason. It’s one thing to daydream. That happens in a part of our brain that can be instantaneously turned off, when required, to focus on more urgent matters. Day dreaming is like the brain idling. It doesn’t put too much of a cognitive load on the brain. But a conversation puts a much higher load on the brain. You have to focus your attention on what the other person is saying, and the minute we focus one sense on one stimulus, we lose much of our ability to monitor our environment with that sense.

But it’s more than just the act of listening. Carrying on a conversation requires us to process language, to translate what we’re hearing into concepts, and to take our concepts and translate them back into language. This is one of the most demanding tasks our brain has to do. While carrying on a conversation might not seem like much work, it’s moving our brain from slow idle to 5000 RPMs, firing on all cylinders. Which means there’s less capacity there to process emergency stimuli. In practical terms, we’re talking about a handful of milliseconds, as the brain switches tasks, but that difference can be several car lengths when slamming on the brakes. It’s the difference between a head on collision and a near miss.

Calling on the Phone: Much Worse than Being There

While talking about this with my partner, Bill Barnes, he asked an excellent question. Why does talking on a cell phone while driving seem to be more distracting than talking to someone sitting in the passenger seat? A little sleuthing found a study that seems to indicate this may not be the case. A study done in Spain seems to indicate that the cognitive load is the same. But I think there’s more to it than that. I haven’t been able to track down research proving my hypothesis yet, but I did find some interesting tidbits about our relationship with the phone, and how we’re conditioned to respond to it.

First of all, let’s talk about the “phone coma”. This is the state many of us go into when we’re talking on the phone. We become more oblivious to the outside world. The subconscious scanning of the environment that I was talking about in the Just Behave column seems to drop substantially. When you’re talking on the phone, you seem to gaze blindly into space. Think of the people with the Bluetooth headsets in airports, gazing out across the tarmac, lulled into a translike state by the conversation they’re engaged in. I think Bill’s right. I do think there’s a difference between our awareness when we’re talking on the phone versus talking in person.

You can Talk the Talk, But Can You Walk the Walk?

It even becomes more difficult to walk and talk on the phone at the same time. Again, take a few minutes to check this out the next time you go to the airport and see someone walking and talking on their headset. They’re fine as long as they’re going in a straight line and don’t have to look for directional cues, such as which gate they’re at. But the minute they have to think about where they’re going, they either stop and finish their conversation or ask the person on the phone to wait for a minute. We can’t navigate and talk at the same time. The cognitive load of both tasks is just too much. We have to pick one or the other.

Part of this has to do with how we convey information. Studies have found that in a face to face conversation, a surprisingly small amount of the meaning is derived from the actual words used. In fact, it’s less than 10%. The rest of the message is conveyed through body language and tone of voice. In the case of a phone conversation, at least one of these is missing completely, body language, and even tone of voice is less reliable, because the frequencies of the human voice have been processed and modulated in the transmission over the phone. We’re missing at least half of our communication “bandwidth” so we have to pay more attention to get the meaning.

The Difference between “Being” There and “Hearing” There

But even that wouldn’t completely explain the difference between an in person conversation in the car and talking on a cell phone. Here is where I think the difference comes, and again, it goes back to the difference between “being” there and “hearing” there. If you and I are sitting in the car and having a conversation, we’re both monitoring the same cues, because we’re in the same environment. If I’m in the passenger seat, I can immediately stop the conversation when I see your attention is needed elsewhere. Remember where language comes from. It’s an evolution of the grooming instinct, our need to relate to others of our species. Idle conversation between humans is the same to us as chimpanzees picking lice from each other’s heads. Chimpanzees won’t keep grooming if they’re being threatened by a lion. More important things are at hand. The same is true for humans. Idle chit chat stops immediately when there’s a risk of danger. And we pick up those cues in milliseconds.

But if you’re talking on the cell phone, the other person isn’t aware of your environmental cues. If a child runs in front of your car, the person on the other end of the phone just keeps talking. And you don’t have time to ask them to stop. You have a split second. So your brain is struggling, trying to process the conversation at the same time as your trying to get your brain to turn on the emergency response system. The person on the phone is “cueless”, so the distraction is far greater.

Our Pavlovian Response to Ring Tones

And this brings up another point. We have a conditioned response to phones. A phone ringing kicks in neural hardwiring and triggers a Pavlovian response. This explains a number of oddities about our relationship with the phone.

First of all, Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, (a great book, by the way) talks about the fact that we can’t seem to ignore a phone ringing. The reason is association. We associate phone calls with news, either about something good or something bad. Either way, we need to know what it is. There is an unknown there that we’re programmed to need to solve. A phone ringing takes precedence in our mental queue. It goes to the front of the line by kicking in a number of subconscious neural triggers. Have you every tried to keep doing something while the phone is ringing? It’s almost impossible. Even if you manage to ignore the ringing (as when you forget to turn the cell phone off in a public event) the first thing you do is head out to the hall and check your voice mail. It’s not quite Pavlov’s dog’s salivating, but it’s pretty close. I’m not sure this understanding will help the next time you’re waiting at a counter for service and the person on is tied up on the phone, seemingly ignoring you, but give it a shot.

The persuasive nature of the phone gets even more insidious. Here’s an except from an article in the NY Times:

The ear gives unequal weights to certain frequencies, making it particularly sensitive to sounds in the range of 1,000 to 6,000 hertz, scientists say. Babies cry in this range, for example, and the familiar “brrring, brrring” ringtone hits this sweet spot, too. (Simple ringtones are more likely to produce phantom rings than popular music used as a ringtone.)

“Your brain is conditioned to respond to a phone ring just as it is to a baby crying,” Mr. Nokes said.

So, not only are we conditioned to respond. Phone manufacturers make it even more irrestible by tricking our brain into the same conditioned response we have when we hear our children crying. So, if we hear our cell phone ring in the car, the brain immediately starts anticipating something of import. The circuits that divert attention away from other activities kick into action, shifting it to the phone call. The physical act of answering the call is only one small part of it. It’s all the conditioned responses we have to the phone that are the real culprits in the increase of cell-related car accidents.

Everybody Hates a Telemarketer – even Jerry Seinfeld.

One last riff on the persuasive nature of the phone. One of my favorite moments on Seinfeld was when Jerry got a call from a telemarketer and responded:

““I’m sorry, I’m a little tied up now. Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later. Oh! You don’t like being called at home? Well, now you know how I feel.”

Why do we hate telemarketer’s so much? In fact, we so despise this form of marketing, we’ve actually legislated against it. Perhaps you’ve already guessed the answer, based on what I’ve already talked about. When the “Do Not Call” list was formed, the reasons put forward were, “a waste of our time”, “an invasion of our privacy” and “an interruption of family time”. While all valid, they’re not the real reasons. The same things could be said for almost any form of advertising, including TV ads, and we’re certainly not legislating them out of existence. In fact, the amount of time allowed for TV advertising in a typical half hour has increased dramatically over the last 2 decades. No, the reason we hate telemarketers has a much more human root: we feel duped by them.

Telemarketers take advantage of our conditioned responses. When we hear the phone ring, our brain kicks in to prepare us to pay attention, because we’ve been conditioned to expect it’s important. Then, we hear the subtle click of the telerouter and the scripted speech begins. Suddenly, realizing we’ve been tricked, we’re furious. Almost irrationally so. We treat telemarketers in a way we would never treat anyone else. I’m completely guilty of this. I’ll hang up on a telemarketer without a second thought, but I’ll put up with terrible service at a restaurant and usually not even mention it, even when asked. Why? Because we hate to be made fools of, and subconsciously, when we pick up the phone and hear a telemarketer, our brains are telling us that we’re a fool. Which makes us angry. Which causes us to lash out. Flight or fight has kicked in, and fight has won. Still considering a career as a telemarketer? It’s a toss of the dice with millions of years of evolution, and you’ll come up snake eyes every time.

Oh..and Happy New Year!

The Whys of Buy: Visualizing the Buy

Human brainVisualization risked becoming another one of those clichéd words through the 90’s, because it was used by every self improvement guru as a path to success. Visual success and it will be yours. But the fundamental principles of visualization bear up, in some very practical and surprising examples. And the neurological science behind visualization is sound.

Visualization allows us to sense a scene in our minds when we read a passage. Actually, the word visualization is a little misleading, because it only refers to the sense of sight. Visualizations can engage all the senses. For example, we took our two daughters to Manhattan last summer, landed at 11 pm, and because we weren’t tired, walked through Times Square at midnight. New York was in the middle of a heat wave and the temperature was still 98. The combination of heat and humidity added a particular edge to the smell of garbage in the streets, that sickly sweet/sour odor that punctuates the more appetizing smells wafting from restaurants and street vendors. Times Square was still going at full tilt (this was a Saturday) so the din of taxi horns was deafening. At every corner, we still had to elbow past street vendors and crowds jaywalking through the intersections. For my daughters, it was a rude sensory awakening to the Big Apple.

As I was writing that, feelings, sights, sounds and smells were being activated in my mind. I was recalling the images, and could, in my mind, feel the humid heat, smell the odors, hear the horns and see the crowds. If any of you reading this had been to Times Square on a hot summer night, you probably have your own scenes, from your own experiences, replaying in your mind. But the amazing thing is, if I say falafel stand, you can see, smell and perhaps even hear it. That’s because the same parts of your brain are firing that would actually be activated if you were physically there. Imagination is the next best thing to being there.

Athletes have long known this. Visualization starts building the same neural pathways that actual physical action does. A golfer struggling with his swing can visualize it and improve it, without a club in his hands, because he’s giving his brain a trial run. The same is true with a gymnast learning a new move. Studies have shown that imagining a 5 finger piano exercise results in a significant improvement in performance.

But perhaps the most startling evidence comes from a study done by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. Here, from About.com, is the summary of the study:

They split 30 healthy young adults into 3 groups.

For 15 minutes a day, five days a week for 12 week, Group #1 imagined exercising their little finger muscle. Group #2 imagined exercising their biceps muscle and Group #3 acted as a control group and did no imaginary exercise. Those in the first two groups were asked to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as possible. The researchers measured muscle strength before, during and after the training sessions.

Group #1 (the finger exercisers) increased their strength 53 percent, and Group #2 (the biceps group) increased strength by 13.4 percent.

These results are somewhat unbelievable. Simply imagining exercise can make you stronger! Literally without lifting a finger. That’s the power of visualization.

So what does this mean for marketing? Visualization plays a part here as well. We often visualize our way through a purchase. If we’re looking at buying a car, we visualize ourselves driving it. If my wife is determined to buy a dress, she visualizes herself wearing it. Even if you are suddenly craving something from Starbucks, you can see, smell and taste the coffee before you ever get it in your hands. Visualization is a powerful part of purchasing, and once we build these neural pathways, it takes us much closer to the actual purchase. Smart marketers start building the pathways before you ever set foot in the store. That’s why personalized products can be so powerful. Personalization forces visualization.

Of course, visualization of product usage is nothing cutting edge. Most marketers do this instinctively. But what about visualization of the actual purchase itself? How can you start building the neural pathway required to ensure the transaction is completed? This is particularly important in more involved purchases, such as trips, cars, houses or more involved B2B purchases. In each of these cases, the very act of buying can act as an obstacle to a sale. It requires time, commitment and knowledge. For all these reasons, a little mental practice could improve the odds for success. Let me share another example.

In the 1960’s, social psychologist Howard Leventhal wanted to persuade a group of college seniors at Yale to get a tetanus shot. What he wanted to test was whether fear would be a more powerful influencer. So several information booklets were produced. Some were “high fear” with graphic pictures and descriptions. Some were “low fear”, with a more toned down, informational approach. The booklets were distributed and, somewhat predictably, the high fear booklets seemed to be more persuasive. The groups that received these booklets were more convinced about the importance of shots and more of them indicated that they intended to get inoculated. But one month later, almost none of the participants from any of the groups, high fear or low fear, had actually gone for an inoculation. A mere 3 percent had actually been inoculated. This was an unforeseen glitch in the experiment.

So Leventhal redid the experiment, but this time with one small change. This time, in all the booklets, he included a map showing where the clinic was and the hours it was open. This time, the inoculation rate went up to 28%.

If we look at the power of visualization, the thing that surprised Leventhal really isn’t that surprising at all. The first round of the experiment did a good job of inducing the visualization of consequences, in this case, negative consequences. The high fear booklet let the students visualize what might happen if they didn’t get a tetanus shot, and so it was persuasive. But it didn’t close the loop. It wasn’t that the message wasn’t persuasive. It was just that it left the door open for life to get in the way.

But the second version allowed the student to visualize the path required to actually get the inoculation. I’m sure most of them probably knew where the clinic was, but the inclusion of the map prompted them to visualize actually going there, and the hours allowed them to visualize where in their schedule they could fit in the visit. Once the students went through the mental process of visualizing action, there was a much higher probability that the action would take place.

What are the takeaways? If your purchase process requires a commitment on the part of the buyer, let them visualize the path required to get to the end. Use your website to build the path required to navigate through things like financing, negotiation, customer service, delivery and selection of products and options. Don’t just stop at visualization of ownership. Think about the visualization of the act of buying as well.

The Whys of Buy: Impulse Buying

chickenebayThe other day, we were talking about what makes us buy (an appropriate topic for today, the biggest shopping day in the US) and Barb Newman, our General Manager, wondered what made us impulse buy? She was trying to figure out why she had dropped way more money than she intended on a purse. Being intrigued by the buying mechanism that seems to be locked in our skulls, I decided to do a little digging to find out what’s going on when we just seem to pick up something off the shelf on sheer whim.

Spool’s Impulse Buying Study

On doing some digging, I found a study done by Jared Spool, a usability consultant I have a tremendous amount of respect for. And Jared found that market research, as I posted about a few days ago, has its limits. As Jared’s starting point, he looked at survey’s conducted by The Yankee Group and Ernst and Young. Both surveys asked why respondents would make impulse purchases on the web. With the Yankee Group survey, 75% indicated because of price. Ernst and Young’s survey said that 88% of purchases were made due to price. Again, these were surveys where buyers were asked to rationalize their behavior. And saving money seems like a pretty rational reason.

But Jared wanted to see what real people shopping for real products did. As most usability people do, he wanted to observe real world behavior. So his group got 30 people, who had real things they wanted to buy, gave them some money and sent them on an online shopping trip to a few preselected sites that had what they were looking for.

What they found was significantly different that what the Yankee Group and Ernst and Young surveys showed. While many of the participants bought what they were looking for, a significant number, 34%, also added other items into their shopping cart that weren’t on their original lists. Was it because the prices were irrestible? No, in fact, only 8% of the impulse purchases were because of price.

Jared and his group purposely picked out shopping sites that had promotional offers and seasonal sales in prominent display positions, especially on the home pages. But very few of the purchases were of these sale items. The impulse buys were spread across 41% of the sites in the study, including everything from pet shops to computer accessory stores. Almost none of the items were on sale. They were just things that suddenly tweaked the shopper’s interest.

Here’s the other interesting thing about the study. Most of the impulse items were chosen while browsing through the category pages. They had chosen a category based on what they were shopping for and had found related items that struck their interest and were subsequently added to their cart.

The Nucleus Accumbens Made Me Do It

So, why do we impulse buy? I’m still not sure, but here are some hunches, based on some of the other research I’m doing in the mental mechanics of buying.

A study earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and the MIT Sloan School of Management might be able to shed a little light on Spool’s findings. Using fMRI imaging, they also gave participants money to go shopping. They then monitored activity in various parts of the brain.

They found that when we anticipate buying something, the pleasure center, the nucleus accumbens, is activated. We begin picturing ourselves in possession of a product and visualizing ourselves using it. We start to build neural pathways that reinforce what it would be like to have the product. But, if the price is excessive, the study found that the brain has a shut off mechanism.  A part of the brain known as the insula is activated and the part of the brain we use to balance gains versus losses, in other words, is the product worth the price, the medial prefrontal cortex, begins shutting down. We literally put the purchase out of our mind because the price is more than we’re willing to pay.

So, let’s go back to Jared Spool’s study. I suspect we get into shopping “modes” where the parts of the brain associated with acquisition of a product sustain some activity. We’re prepared to buy, so the nucleus accumbens kicks into gear and keeps firing. We’re in “buy” mode. And we’ve accepted that we have budget available. We start out looking for the product we intended to buy, but, on the way, if we see something we also decide we need, especially in a related category, our “buying” mechanism is already activated. We’re already primed to consider purchase. We’re not looking for a bargain (although finding one certainly wouldn’t hurt), but by the same token, an outrageous price would probably shut down the process by kicking in the insula. Think of the insula as the brain’s sprinkler system, snuffing out any impulsive sparks before we burn ourselves. As long as the price is reasonable, and doesn’t introduce significant “pain” we’re more likely to purchase.

The fMRI study also showed that once we flip into buy mode, we tend to stay in this groove. This is why it’s much more dangerous to shop with credit cards than cash. Credit cards allow us to put off the “pain” that might kick in the insula, letting the nucleus accumbens have its way. When cash runs out, it runs out. It forces us to pay more attention to the “pain”.

In Spool’s study, the pain had been effectively removed by giving the participants money to spend. And by browsing through categories where they already had interest, there was a greater likelihood to pick related products and purchase them through impulse. Bargain basement prices really had nothing to do with the process. It’s just that most of us don’t understand the mechanics of buying that happen at the subconscious level.

Back to Barb’s Purse

So let’s get back to Barb’s purse. Was it really a impulse buy? Well, not really. As I chatted more with Barb, she indicated that she had seen the purse earlier in a magazine, fallen in love with it, but the price was much higher than she wanted to pay. So Barb’s nucleus accumbens had gone into overdrive, but Barb, being a practical shopper, had quickly doused the flames when her insula kicked in. The pain was too great to make a purchase.

But, a few months later, she’s in the mall and sees that the store that carries the purse was having a 25% off everything in the store appreciation sale. Suddenly, the nucleus accumbens is reactivated, primed by all the visualization that Barb had done since first seeing the purse, thinking how great it would be to own it. The 25% off sale lowered the pain threshold enough to keep the insula from kicking in, and the next thing Barb knew, she had put down a deposit and put the purse on layaway. She didn’t know what hit her. Now, she knows it was a little bit of gray matter hiding deep in subcortal brain called the nucleus accumbens that’s to blame. But this wasn’t a true impulse buy. It was more like a delayed buy.

So, if you overspend today, remember, it was the nucleus accumbens that made you do it. Try explaining that one to your significant other.

What’s Wrong with Market Research

sharingbrainWhen we first started doing research at Enquiro into how people used search, we found very quickly that what people say and what people do are very different things. It just happened that we were doing a survey and a focus group at roughly the same time. In the survey, where we got the results first, we asked if things like the position of a listing was important in whether people read it or not. We asked people to rank a number of factors on their relative importance, including position, relevancy and trust in brands and vendors shown. Almost without exception, in the survey, people indicated that relevancy was the key factor. They also indicated that they read listings pretty carefully and gave a fair amount of thought before selecting one. Finally, many said they would never click on a paid listing.

Then, we invited about 30 people into our labs and actually recorded their interactions with the search engines (before our eye tracking studies) and it quickly became obvious that how they said they used a search engine and how they actually did were two different things. The vast majority of clicks happened in the first few listings. Many who indicated they wouldn’t click on paid listings actually did, and perhaps, most interestingly, the average interaction was around 10 seconds or so. Subsequently, we’ve seen this type of behavior repeated in eye tracking after eye tracking study. Of course, the famous golden triangle study we did with Eyetools and Did It, and subsequent ones conducted by Enquiro, have shown over and over how quickly we interact with a search engine and how much of our scanning activity is “top loaded”. Also, we don’t really skip over sponsored listings, but in some circumstances (research based activity) we’re less likely to click on them. We’ve used this body of research to come up with a fairly consistent model of how people interact with search results. The results belie what people indicated in our very first survey. Well over 60% of the clicks happened in the first 4 or 5 listings, including the top sponsored ones. People generally spent just a few seconds on the page (around 10 to 12 seems to be the average) in which they scan (not read) 4 to 5 listings. There was almost no deliberation. People click quickly, and if they don’t like what they see, they click back. It would take the average person about 2 minutes to actually read all the results on the average search results page. Even if we just read the top 4 or 5, we’d be spending about 30 to 40 seconds on the page. It takes about 7 seconds to read one listing. But we don’t spend much longer than this covering 4 to 5 listings, about 2 seconds per listing. Obviously, we don’t give a lot of thought to the credibility of the search listings.

So, were all 1600 of our original survey respondents liars? Were they intentionally misleading us? No, they were just being human.

What we found was the systemic fault with almost all market research. And there’s a very good explanation for it. We’re generally not aware of 95% of what we do or why we do it. That’s because much or what we do is hidden in our subconscious. I’m currently reading How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman and he pinpoints the problem with traditional market research. In almost every case, we ask people to tell us, either verbally or through writing, what they’re thinking. Just by doing this, we kick in the cortex, the rational seat of our intellect. But Zaltman tells us that at least 95% of every decision is made subconsciously. There, in the murky depths of our brains, predating the evolution of our cortex by many millions of years, thoughts are created through tremendously complex connections of memories, beliefs, instincts and intuition. In many cases, our decisions are made long before they bubble up to our conscious minds. The conscious mind exists to put a little polish on them and, in most cases, to rationalize a decision that was largely based on primal instincts. We may have done what we did because our flight or fight mechanism kicked in, or because our need to procreate surfaced. That’s why we chose the minivan, or the red convertible. It really had nothing to do with the Consumer Reports rating. But, being highly evolved humans, we convince ourselves that our choices are much more rational than those of a lizard (our basic brain core, which rules many of our decisions, is basically the same as a reptile’s brain).

In our case, our initial respondents indicated that they deliberated over which search result they chose. In actual fact, there was little risk in choosing a wrong link (it’s not like our lives, our family or our money is at stake), so we cut off the amount of deliberation we did and after a quick scan, picked the result that seemed to be most relevant to our intent. The lack of deliberation wasn’t lack of intelligence, it was a survival instinct bred into us by eons of evolutionary refinement. If there’s no immediate risk to us, why should we kick in our brains and spend unnecessary time and cortex processing power to come to the optimal decision. It’s not required. A simple scan and click will suffice. Our brains are simply doing what they’ve been programmed to do. And it’s not that the decisions are bad. As Malcolm Gladwell shows in Blink, often these decisions prove to be better than the ones that we endlessly deliberate over. Our brains, especially the 95% that remains under the surface, are amazingly adept at making good decisions.

But there’s a more fundamental issue here. If what we experienced in search is typical in all market research (which it is) how do we ever find out how people actually make purchase decisions?

This is a significant challenge, the extent of which might not be obvious at first glance. Let me use an analogy to further illustrate. Remember the tale of the shoemaker and the elves? Let me use that and adapt it slightly for my purposes. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, a poor shoemaker only has enough leather left for one pair of shoes. He cuts the leather and lays it out for stitching the next morning. He awakes, amazed to find the shoes made, and meticulously crafted at that. Elves apparently helped out during the night, soon to bring fame and fortune to the shoemaker.

But what if the elves didn’t exist. What if, instead, the shoemaker was actually making the shoes in his sleep? The idea is not so ridiculous. Rumor has it that Coleridge actually wrote Kubla Khan during a dream, and managed to scribble it down before it faded from his consciousness. As any psychiatrist will tell you, we’re closest to our subsconscious when we’re hovering between sleep and wakefulness. It’s about the only time we get a glimpse into those murky depths.

So let’s say our shoemaker actually makes the shoes in some bizarre bout of sleepwalking. He awakes every morning, to find the shoes nearly perfectly finished. All he needs to do is add the laces and a bit of polish. And the shoes are fair more carefully crafted then he could ever accomplish while awake.

The shoemaker really isn’t aware of where the shoes come from. In fact, as time goes on, and as he receives more and more recognition for the quality of his workmanship, he begins to believe that it’s solely due to the little bit of work he does while he’s awake, threading the laces and adding a little polish. He learns to ignore the 95% of the work that’s done while he’s asleep.

Now, imagine someone comes to ask him why his shoes are so exceptionally crafted. Would he admit the truth and say he doesn’t know? No, pride and genuine lack of knowledge would keep him from saying that. He has no idea what he does while he’s asleep. It’s almost as if someone else did the work for him. His conscious brain would kick in and come up with some perfectly rational but completely untrue explanation. Clotaire Rapaille, in his book The Culture Code, cites an example of this:

In a classic study, the nineteenth-century scientist Jean-Martin Charcot hypnotized a female patient, handed her an umbrella, and asked her to open it. After this, he slowly brought the woman out of her hypnotic state. When she came to, she was surprised by the object she held in her hand. Charcot then asked her why she was carrying an open umbrella indoors. The woman was utterly confused by the question. She of course had no idea of what she had been through and no memories of Charcot’s instructions. Baffled, she looked at the ceiling. Then she looked back at Charcot and said, “It was raining.”

This is what happens in almost every instance of market research. Our buying decisions are like the shoemaker’s shoes. They’re usually quite good, but we have little idea how they came into being.

For most of the history of marketing, we’ve been restrained by the limitations of market research. It’s only recently, through advancements in cognitive psychology and brain scanning technologies that we’re beginning to get a glimpse of what might actually be happening. My next post (tomorrow) why it’s important that we keep trying.