Category Archives: User Behavior

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: How American Idol, Survivor and Dallas Hooked Us

In this series of posts, I’ve covered off at some length why we find some things inherently funny. We’ve also talked about the importance of connecting with characters in developing a long term loyalty to the show that separates the long running hits from the one season wonders. But obviously, there is more than just comedy on TV. There’s drama, Reality TV and Action Thrillers, all dealing with the same basic elements of characterization and narrative (even Reality TV, which is really unscripted drama). With this, let’s look at how some different shows have approached the challenge of long term loyalty.

What Made Some Show Hits?

Survivor

survivor logoSurvivor was the most successful summer replacement in history. It rocketed to popularity in 2000 and was responsible for the flood of reality TV we’re still saddled with. The popularity of Survivor, however, has dropped dramatically over the past few years. One possible reason is that Survivor forces you to reestablish connections every single season. The situation is more important than the characters in Survivor. Just as we start to care about a character, they get voted off the island. We watch Survivor like an anthropologist would, intrigued by the challenge and how the human cast reacts to it, but unable to form connections that endure from season to season. The producers realized this and started to bring back past favourites for an “All Star” survivor, hoping to re-establish past connections, but by then it was too late. Our interests had moved on. The connections had been discarded. Survivor had “jumped the shark.” Other reality shows, such as Big Brother and the Apprentice have faced this same inherent “shelf life” problem. In terms of gaining long term loyalty, characters we connect with will always trump intriguing situations, for reasons I explored a few posts back.

West Wing

WestwingMy personal favorite. But as I said in an earlier post, even my degree of connection with West Wing suffered after the third season. Writer Aaron Sorkin’s scripts demanded a high degree of investment on the part of the viewer. The byzantine tangle of situations, delivered through machine gun quick, impossibly clever dialogues, was more like intellectual gymnastics than a relaxing hour in front of the tube. Earlier this week, I talked about the psychological attraction of wit. We all wish we were wittier and the characters on West Wing, thanks to Sorkin, were impossibly clever and witty. It left you breathless just trying to keep up. However, Sorkin continually delivered huge returns on that investment. For me at least, West Wing hit highs I haven’t seen since. After four seasons, Sorkin moved on. Also, the inevitable cast churn started. Perhaps we were just worn out from trying to keep up, but in it’s last 3 seasons, West Wing continually lost steam.

Other long running dramas, including ER and Dallas (technically the most successful show in history, if you look at global syndication as a measure), relied on various formulas of social connectedness. ER wrapped in our preoccupation with health (another inherently wired hot button in humans) with rich characterizations. Dallas took the soap opera primetime, offering a shallower but undeniably fascinating tangle of greed, betrayal, sex, love and occasional redemption through the actions of more sympathetic characters. Dallas was like junk food for our brains, playing to our lowest psychological denominators. It’s a path many shows have followed.

American Idol

AmericanIdolSo, in the examples above, it appears we need an ongoing narrative to keep us engaged, right? Then how do I explain the success of American Idol? There is no narrative. And just like Survivor, the cast of characters changes each season. So why is American Idol the most popular TV show in recent memory? Well, it turns out that American Idol does rely on a narrative. It relies on our narrative.

If our connection with characters provides the glue that keeps us tuning in week after week, how would I explain the success of American Idol? While we might start identifying with one particular contestant, there is no real narrative that drives American Idol. It’s a talent show. And it’s not the only online success. America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, the Susan Boyle phenomenon. What is the mechanism at play here that entertains us? Again, it seems to come down to narrative, but in this case, it’s our narrative, not the characters, that proves to be the glue.

TV Provides a Reference Point for Ourselves

Our connectedness to characters seems to rely not so much on their situations, but on our own. Somewhere deep inside, we project their fantasy on our reality. The narrative of our favorite characters have to have some hooks or bearing points that we can anchor in on. There has to be some degree of affinity. We can relate to the situation (med students watching Grey’s Anatomy) or we can relate to a character’s qualities (I’d like to be Chandler Bing’s friend). We can fantasize about being in a character’s shoes (being Jack Bauer in 24) and we can care about a character’s well being (Will Schuester has to dump his wife and hook up with Emma Pillsbury). A TV show has to give us a reason to want to live our lives vicariously through it’s characters and situations. The formula for American Idol relies on the same hooks. We want to be on stage too. It’s the same hook that made Rock Band and Guitar Hero massive best sellers amongst video games.

What connection do we have with the contestants on these massively popular talent shows? Why are talent shows inherently appealing to us? Let’s return to Susan Boyle and Britain’s Got Talent. Why did we get a chill down our spine when this frumpy Scottish spinster suddenly opened her mouth and belted it out? Why was it so deliciously satisfying when the smirk was wiped from Simon Cowell’s face? Well, it’s because we humans travel in herds. Seriously.

Monkey See, Monkey Aspire to Do

Television Britain's Got TalentWe admired Susan Boyle. We admire talent when we see it. And we especially admire talent when it’s undiscovered. Why?

Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White have a theory about that. They believe admiration is like a short cut to success. And unlike other species, where social prestige comes primarily through physical aggression, humans can take many paths up the social ladder. The examples of humans achieving social status through talent or intellectual ability far outnumber those succeed through physical domination. Our brain is our greatest asset and human society has evolved to recognize our unique advantage.

When we see someone suddenly winning a crowd over, we can’t help but feel chills of admiration going down our spine. (Here’s a link to the video on YouTube, just in case you’ve forgotten the sensation. It’s been viewed almost 90 million times) Their success could be our success. They provide a new potential path in our own personal narrative, a road to prestige that we to could go down. And the appeal of the talent show format is that these are undiscovered talents. Their current social status is not so different from our own. In fact, as in Susan Boyle’s case, based on appearance alone, we initially put ourselves several rungs up the social ladder. So, if Susan could suddenly soar up in social value, our odds must be even better (ignoring for the moment that we can’t sing like her). We measure our chances against the yardstick provided by Ms. Boyle. We can readily imagine ourselves in her no-nonsense leather shoes. It’s why we are predisposed to root for the underdog. And the more “under” the dog, the bigger the cheers.

What is the Darwinian logic to this behavior? It’s not so difficult to understand. The path to social success, and all the evolutionary advantages that accrue to one who attains it, is easier if you follow in someone else’s footsteps. We are a social animal and one of the advantages of that is that we can advance faster if we learn from other’s failures and triumphs. We are hardwired to both admire, criticize and topple fallen idols (a la Tiger Woods). Reality talent shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent take full advantage of these behavioral traits.

So, we’ve covered the required elements of the drama, the comedy and Reality TV. But so far, I still haven’t touched one genre of TV entertainment, the action show. More on that next week.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Men, Women and How We Process Humor

Yesterday, I talked about context and it’s impact on comedy. What makes something funny in Scotland wouldn’t necessarily be as funny in Switzerland or South Africa. If different nationalities process jokes differently, there must be other dividing lines as well, right? Yes, and the biggest one is the line that segments the sexes. Men and women have significantly different humor processing hardware. Women tend to think before laughing, monitoring the social temperature before making a judgement about what’s funny. A man’s response tends to be less deliberate, a more direct connection to our primal “humor” centres.

And it’s this divide in the senses that provides some clues on the mechanisms used to process humor. Studies have found that unless both the right and left hemispheres of the brain are fully engaged in the task of processing humor, we won’t find a joke funny. This is why you never find a joke funny if it has to be explained to you. If we use the left hemisphere (the logical side) of our brain to analyze a joke too extensively, it ceases to be humorous. The suddenness of the gap closing, the elimination of incongruity and the feeling of mastery is no longer there. You’ve taken too long a road to the punchline and the humor got lost on the way.

In humans, humor seems to be a balancing act between the left and right hemisphere. The left gets the facts in order, and the right seems to provide the synthesis that produces the humor. Neurologists have found that patients with lesions to their right hemisphere can understand the “logic” of a joke but simply won’t find any humor in it. Knowing that an interplay between the hemispheres is required to produce humor explains the differing responses from men and women when it comes to what’s funny. Women have more robust wiring between the right and left hemispheres.  The important thing, however, is that we process humor subconsciously. As I said yesterday, if we stop to think too long about a joke, it ceases to be funny.

The Difference between Slapstick and Wit

three_stoogesYesterday, I talked about what makes a baby laugh. In effect, I stripped humor down to it’s essential building blocks. But, as we get older, we get more sophisticated. We move beyond the universal foundations of humor and start to develop tastes. Some of us love Oscar Wilde. Some of us love Tyler Perry. So, what is the difference between high brow and low brow humor?

Why do we laugh when other people hurt themselves? Why was it funny when Larry slapped Moe, or poked Curly in the eyes? What kind of sick, sadistic bastards are we? The Germans even coined a word for it: Schadenfreude – which translates literally as “joy from adversity”.

There is a double punch-line to slapstick comedy. The first comes from the fact that laughter and danger live in the same parts of our brain, as I explained in yesterday’s post. We have an immediate and complex reaction to physical calamity. It surprises us, which triggers the appropriate part of the brain, which in turn responds with a double hit of fear and laughter. Which side of the dividing line we end up depends on the seriousness of the calamity. Minor bumps on the head (when they happen to others), slips, falls, knocks and bumps can all trigger laughter as an immediate response. If the damage is more seriousness, our laughter quickly turns to concern. Remember yesterday when we looked at how a 5 month old’s laughter is triggered by conquerable danger, in a playful setting? These same mechanisms stay in place throughout our lives and partially explain our response to other’s physical misfortunes. In comedy, Slapstick is stylized so that we can be certain nobody is getting hurt too badly. Facial expressions, sound effects and mock moans all signal that this is just good fun. Look at the picture of the Three Stooges I included with this post. No one could look at the expressions on those faces and make the mistake of thinking that there’s anything remotely serious about the ear twisting that’s going on. We distance the physical violence from the result of that violence. It’s the entire premise of the game show Wipeout, as well  as 85% of the clips on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

The Social Side of Humor

But there’s more to it than just a mixed up fear/laughter response. Humor depends on our social radar. It depends on how we position ourselves in our social network. This is where the Schadenfreude part of the equation plays out. We find it funny when  Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff but we don’t when the same fate befalls the Road Runner. Why? Because Wile is the bad guy and the Road Runner is the good guy. Archetypes are important in comedy. This goes back to Aristotle’s rules for drama: bad things can happen to bad people, good things are supposed to happen to good people, but when those two get mixed up, it’s a lot less satisfying to us. Schadenfreude works best when the good/bad roles are clearly defined.

So, how do we define Schadenfreude for men vs women? This is another place where males and females diverge in their opinions of what we find funny. In men, it typically plays out in terms of physical violence. We men laugh when others get hurt. With women, it’s more often defined as a social comeuppance. Women laugh at social ostracization.

Tom Green vs Kate Hudson: Guy’s Movies & Chick Flicks

Let’s visit the 6th grade school yard at lunch time. Over in this corner we have a group of guys laughing. What are they laughing about? Chances are, it’s something to do with some type of bodily emission or various parts of the male and female anatomy and how they might interact. Guys are, on the average, predictably base about what we find funny. And much as I wish we outgrew this, a quick glance down what’s currently playing at the local Cineplex will probably prove me right.

But there, over in the other corner, is a group of girls laughing. What are they laughing about? Chances are it’s not about farting or doody. It’s more likely laughter at the expense of some poor unfortunate distant member of their social circle. Social status is a key ingredient in comedies aimed at women, usually with a romantic twist thrown in.

High Brow Humor

Do we ever rise above the limitations of our base instincts when it comes to humor? Thankfully, yes. Many of us appreciate wit for it’s own sake. So, what is it about the witty remark that we find so appealing?

Perhaps the answer can be found in how we respond to wit. A witty remark almost never elicits a belly laugh. Witty remarks cause us to smile. A chuckle is usually the most we can hope for. Belly laughs are usually reserved for more physical types of comedy. Why the difference? Let’s return to our 5 month old. Babies both smile and laugh. They laugh during rough housing and more robust play sessions. They smile when they recognize the face of their mother or a grandparent. Laughter seems to come from our danger/humor circuit. Smiling comes from a more social place in our brain. In chimpanzees, a smile signals social submission. So, what does this have to do with wit?

We admire wit. We aspire to be witty. We identify with the mental acuity that typifies a witty person. We all want to be Chandler Bing, Conan O’Brien or, in an earlier age, Dorothy Parker. Wit is a signal of social station. Again, we find that what we find funny and what we find socially desirably are inextricably linked.

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. – Dorothy Parker

Now that we’ve looked at what we find funny, on the next post I’ll return to a question I started to ask: what separates a TV hit from a miss?

The Psychology of Entertainment: What We Find Funny

Did you hear the one about….

A rabbi, a priest and a prostitute walk into a bar….

Knock Knock….

A lot of decidedly unfunny academic papers have been written about what makes us laugh (the one I referred to for this post was  Robert Storey, “Comedy, Its Theorists and the Evolutionary Perspective,” Criticism 38.3 (1996), Questia – what a hoot!). Freud has his own ideas that involved a sudden release of psychic energy, sort of like a mental steam release valve. It’s a sign of the dryness of the academic world to note that there is vigorous academic debate about what we find funny.

At the risk of examining an inherent human trait that’s probably better left alone, if we’re going to look at the psychology of entertainment, we have to look at what we find funny. And to begin, let’s look at what makes a baby laugh.

Getting a Baby to Laugh

babylaughBabies get humor at a pretty early age. Most babies start laughing in their first half year of life. So, obviously, there must be some fundamental qualities of humor. In understanding what we find funny, it’s helpful to look at what makes a 5 month old baby laugh.

Think about how you get a baby to laugh. A game of Peekaboo is usually effective. Tickling and gentle rough housing can usually elicit a chuckle. A adult face zooming into close proximity while babbling verbal nonsense also seems to do the trick.

Now, if we look closely at each of these activities, we start to realize there’s a macabre and twisted underbelly to humor.

Peekaboo generally works best with the primary care givers, the parents. The closer the adult is to the baby, the more likely you’ll get  a smile or laugh. But the game basically mimics the disappearance of the person closest to the baby and then brings them back. Now you see me, now you don’t, and now you see me again.

Tickling and rough housing is a toned down mock attack. The same is true when we jam our faces into that of an infant and spout baby talk. We get them to laugh by scaring the bejesus out of them. Is it any wonder that babies seem to be balanced on the fine line between laughing and crying during most of these activities? It doesn’t take much to slip from humor to fear. As the baby gets tired or if a stranger tries the same game as the parent, you’re more likely to get tears than laughter.

The Primal Building Blocks of Humor

This starts to tell us what the primal elements of humor might be. For a baby, we take a threatening situation and down play it dramatically, letting the baby feel that it’s just play. The baby picks up signals from us that there is no real threat, leaving them free to enjoy the game.  In this benign version of toned down danger, the baby builds coping skills for the world around them. This mastery of our environments, our ability to align things with a sense what’s right and achieve congruity, continues to play a critical role in what we find humorous as we get older.

By the way, humans aren’t the only animals that laugh. Other primates, such as chimpanzees, also laugh, and there the dividing line between hostility and humor is almost non existent. The toothy grin in a primate is not too many steps removed from baring your teeth in preparation for battle. And a smile is the primates sign for submission to a superior.

This line between danger and pain is one that humans continue to ride through our lives, and some enjoy the journey more than others. Some smile and laugh like idiots on a roller coaster (myself included), others are paralyzed in fear. But the difference between the two extremes is not as far as you might think. Research seems to show that both feelings originate from the same centres of the brain and it’s our threshold for sensation stimulation that separates laughter from screaming.

The Psychology of a Joke

The jokes we find funny can tell much about us as individuals. Again, jokes rely on closing gaps of incongruity, a sudden revelation that suddenly allows a situation that highlights a discrepancy to make sense. We master the situation when we “get” the punchline, the source of the humor.

But the funniness of a joke depends on our frame of mind. What we find incongruous and the things that offer a pleasing solution to that incongruity differ from person to person. A highly religious person may be offended by a dirty joke that would be gang busters amongst a bunch of guys having a drink after work. The different view of context and competing emotions of disgust render the joke unfunny to more “upright” recipients.

This dependency on cultural context can help explain why jokes seldom translate well from culture to culture. The more the joke relies on a frame of reference steeped in the uniqueness of a culture, the less likely it will be to successfully cross borders. In 2002 a study was done to find the funniest joke in the world. The winner was:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm, soothing voice, says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: “Okay, now what?”

The classic elements of humor are all here. The initial situation, the set up, the twist and the sudden understanding of the twist, resulting in, apparently, universal laughter. Notice that the context is so broad and independent of a cultural context that anyone, anywhere, should “get it”. There is nothing culturally specific about this joke.

But now let’s look at what the winner in the US was:

A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man.” The man then replies: “Yeah, well we were married 35 years.”

The humor in this joke depends on understanding how fanatical some males are about golf, a context familiar in the US, not as familiar in Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

The funniest joke in Canada revealed a nastier side of our culture:

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C. The Russians used a pencil.

Much as we Canadians love our neighbors to the south, we also love to see the U.S. get it’s comeuppance. The humor of this joke depends on a shared cultural perception of Americans “overdoing” it on the world stage. Canada’s reputation as a source of world class comedians and satirists has been honed by this love/hate relationship with the U.S. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that this same tendency has produced some of the world’s best known observers of human behavior and social peculiarities, including Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker and Marshall McLuhan.

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll talk about how we process humor and why we can laugh at both Oscar Wilde and Three’s Company.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Our Connection with TV

TV viewing, like everything else, has changed drastically in the last few decades. America used to have fairly homogenous tastes in TV. Any given night, it was a safe bet that a significant portion of America was sitting down to watch Happy Days, or All in the Family or, in an early generation, I Love Lucy.

But, with the explosion of the multi-channel universe, our TV tastes have fragmented along several lines. The result? It’s difficult for an advertiser to gain critical mass with an audience by advertising on any one show. America now watches TV in thousands of small splinter segments. And, as we consume more video online, we can pick and choose not just from a broad swath of programming, we can also shift consumption to match out schedule.

This post, however, is not about the challenges of time shifting, market fragmentation or digital consumption. This posts asks a more basic question: what is it about TV that we find entertaining? Why are some shows hits for several seasons, some for a single season, and others complete misses out of the gate? Why do we love the boob tube?

Why We Love TV

Well, the answer, in part, explains the fragmentation of the TV universe. There doesn’t seem to be any universal answer. Humans are too unpredictable to allow Hollywood to forecast with any great accuracy the success of a TV show. There are several different levels on which we can connect with a TV show and the success of any show depends on it’s unique mix of factors that lead to it’s connectability.

TV shows somehow have to weave themselves into the fabric of our society. It becomes a resonating soundboard for our popular culture. This means that the popularly of TV has to not only successfully navigate the churning waters of the diversity of human behaviour but also has to do so against the ever changing snapshot of our cultural context. Obviously, in the 1960’s, the Beverly Hillbillies struck a chord with a significant number of people. It’s unlikely that it would survive today.

In The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2004. Page Number: 275) Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman and Susan Heckler explore the various dimensions of TV “connectedness” and identify just some of the variables at play here. I’ll touch on the more interesting ones.

There are some fundamental truths here when it comes to why we watch TV. At the highest possible levels, there is commonality across all of us. We watch TV to improve our moods, learn something, aspire to a higher place in our society and give us something in common to talk about with our friends and co-workers. But each of those things are much too general to give us much insight into why one show succeeds while another might fail. For example, most sitcoms are funny enough to lift our mood, but some last for 10 seasons and others die shortly after the pilot airs. Simple mood improvement is obviously not enough to explain TV success.

Connecting through the Tube

We start to gain more insight when we look at the level of connection people have with one particular show. The depth of that connection determines loyalty, the degree of social “grease” (how much you talk about a show within your social circle) and, ultimately, the longevity of a show. What is that distinct “something” that causes us to connect with a TV show? On the basis of connectedness, one could argue that, although it only lasted 10 short episodes, Star Trek might be one of the most successful TV shows of all time. It engendered a level of connectiveness that was almost obsessive (remember the backlash when William Shatner told a bunch of Trekkies on Saturday Night Live to “get a life?”). That connectedness created a franchise that spawned 11 movies, 6 TV series and a lifetime slate of speaking gigs (if they want them) for the original cast.

So, what is connectedness? It’s that quality of a TV show that goes beyond simple watching to directly influence the personal and social aspects of our lives. When we connect with a TV show, we seek to jump over the gap that separates us from the show. Russell, Norman and Heckler show that this can happen in three ways:

The Vertical Connection: Viewer to Program

The connection between a viewer and a program is very similar to a brand connection. We become fans of the “brand” of the show. We watch every episode, we feel anxious when we miss an episode, We admire the quality of the production (i.e. the writing) and we may extend our loyalty to the purchase of the show on DVD  or perhaps books, soundtracks or other spin offs from the show.

The Horizontal Connection: Viewer to Viewer

Here, shared appreciation for a TV show acts as sort of a “social lubricant.” It gives us common ground for discussion within our social circles. This level of connectedness leads to group watching of a TV show. Often, there are real or aspirational similarities between the cast of the show and these groups of fans. For example, med students love to watch Grey’s Anatomy (and ER before that, and St. Elsewhere before that).

The Vertizontal Connection: Viewer to Character

Here’s where the line between reality and fantasy starts to get disturbingly blurred. Often, fans begin to identify with the cast members in a show, seemingly forgetting that they’re fictional. This combines aspects of the two previous connections. The connection is between the viewer and the show, but it’s a social relationship that goes beyond simple brand-like loyalty. We want to be friends with Ross and Rachel. We want to have Ray Romano as our next door neighbour (preferably without his parents). We want to join the Glee Club at William McKinley High School. We begin to adjust our reality to incorporate the characters fictional reality. This level of connection leads fans to begin adopting gestures, facial expression and vocal characteristics. They want to wear the same clothes, eat the same food and experience the same things.

It’s these three levels of connectedness that account for loyalty to, and through that, the success of a TV show. What leads to these connections?

Growing a Relationship over Time

If you look at the great TV series that have endured over time, they often have one thing in common – few were hits right out of the gate. Cheers, All in the Family, M*A*S*H and many others all took some time to find their audience. And, if we look at our connection to a TV show as a type of relationship, this is not surprising. Relationships don’t suddenly blossom overnight. They take time to develop.

The most successful TV series rely heavily on strong characters. And the series with longevity seem to have characters with some depth and complexity. It takes time to get to know a Hawkeye Pierce, a Sam Malone or even an Archie Bunker. What at first seems to be a one dimensional character reveals more of themselves over time, in a multitude of situations. Strong writing drives this character development.  Just like in real life, our strongest TV relationships tend to be with people we’ve known for awhile. Their initial appeal first catches our interest, but there better be some depth there to maintain our interest.

A Continuing Storyline

Just like relationships, a narrative that bridges the gaps from episode to episode seems to lead to greater loyalty. The price of entry is higher (you need to invest in watching a few episodes to pick up the threads that carry from show to show) but once you make the investment, it’s much easier to get hooked.

A personal example shows how powerful this loyalty can be. One of my favorite shows on TV was West Wing. My level of connectedness was primarily between viewer and show – I was awestruck by Aaron Sorkin’s writing. But if ever a TV show required a substantial investment on the part of the viewer, West Wing was it. If you missed an episode or two, the rapid fire dialogue between Toby, C.J. and Josh might has well have been in Mandarin. You had no idea what the hell was going on. I managed to make this investment for the first 3 seasons of West Wing but then lost the storylines somewhere in season 4 and, despite trying a few times, never managed to pick them up again for the rest of the show’s primetime run. Last year, I bought the show in a box set and I’m now working my way through it. The advantage of watching on DVD is that you can always go back to listen to a particular piece of dialogue again.

The Human Connection to the Narrative

A continuing storyline gives us a narrative to follow. And we are huge fans of narratives. We tend to see the world, and even ourselves, through the narrative lens. As I said in a previous post, our brains have a inherent connection to stories. Our brain is built to process a story.

Narratives give us a self view that we use to make sense of the world and our place in it. It provides a frame of reference for the very tricky question of consciousness: Why do we exist? How do we exist? What causes us to act? What causes others to act? Good, evil, God, the Devil, nature, catastrophe, our place in the world – all these questions that we have relentlessly pondered since we were first able to, all have been woven into narratives that form our common mythology. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.” Shakespeare was on to something, but he had it backwards. The stage is in our minds, a construct of our brain. The script is written by us, and we assign the roles as we see fit, including our own.

If we constantly participate in this ongoing narrative we write of our own lives, deciphering the motivations of others from our vantage point in our own life stories, is it any wonder that we find  continuing story lines particularly appealing in our favorite TV shows? This is, as we see it, life. And these story lines bring the characters alive (sometimes too alive) for us.

Why We Love Happy Endings

If we see life as a story, it makes sense that we’re suckers for a happy ending. Aristotle figured this out about humans 2000 years ago. ” A good man must not be seen passing from happiness to misery,” and “a bad man from misery to happiness.” Narratives have to make sense to us, based on our understanding of what is right or wrong. In other words, shit happens, but don’t let it happen in my favorite TV show. Of course, script writers use our inherent dislike of this moral unfairness to tweak us on a regular basis. But in doing so, they run the risk of losing us. After getting hooked on an entire season of 24, I was so upset at the resolution of season 1 that I never watched it again. I had the same reaction when Mark Green died in ER. There are consequences if you decide to break Aristotle’s laws of narrative.

Tomorrow, I’ll further explore how we connect with TV. For example, I’ll look at why women tend to accept fictional characters at face value, while men remain more detached, treating characters as a literary device to be manipulated by the author. Why teenagers in particular are susceptible to being influenced by characters in TV shows. Why some of us go “over the edge” in our degree of “fan-ship”. And why some of us love action packed shows and others like to relax with more sedate shows.

The Psychology of Entertainment: A Nation of Watchers

In Brock and Livingston’s investigations of our need for entertainment, they ran up against a problem: how do you define entertainment? In attempting to answer that question (at least for the purpose of their study), they uncovered an interesting finding that provides some troubling commentary for our society.

Watching vs. Doing: The Evolution of Entertainment

Brock and Livingston were seeking to separate passive entertainment (watching TV) from active entertainment (playing a sport). They asked study participants to further define what they meant when they used the word entertainment. In two separate groups, 3 out of 4 participants defined entertainment in it’s passive sense – sitting down to watch a TV show or movie. Now, perhaps this is just a question of semantics – the word “entertainment” and the word “activity” may seem to have different meanings for us. But there are reams of social data to show that as we have adopted more forms of passive entertainment, the most ubiquitous being television, our level of activity has steadily dropped. This, however, is not the only fall out of our addiction to TV.

Watching vs Belonging: The Erosion of Social Capital

s-curve-real-lifeI’ve talked before about Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, the Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam investigated a dramatic reversal in our desire to engage in community minded activities that occurred in the mid-60’s. These activities ran the gamut from voting and being active in PTA’s to having friends over for a card game and joining a bowling league. In chart after chart, Putnam showed how this community-mindedness peaked in the late 50’s and early 60’s and then went into a long and steady decline over the last half century. As TV invaded our front rooms, we abandoned the community hall, the voting booth and the local chapter of The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (one of the biggest fraternal organizations in the world). We stopped spending time with each other. Our definition of entertainment moved from the active to the passive.

This expectation to be passively entertained has spilled into other areas of our society as well. How we perceive our world may have changed from an environment we interact with to a parade that we simply sit back and watch go by. Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, speculates that as America turned from a culture revolving around the printed word to one revolving around images (especially images that jump cut from one to the other, set to a pounding aural beat, saturated with high impact stimuli like violence and sex) we have become a society of attention deficit watchers that have high expectations of being passively entertained, no matter where we are:

What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. … The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

This trend shows up in our consumption of news, political issues and education. Classrooms now are not the Socratic arena of debate so much as they are a theatre, where the professor or lecturer is expected to entertain with a bag of tricks including animated Powerpoint presentations and multimedia content. Consider the difference in the campaigns of two politicians from Illinois. In 1858, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglass took 7 hours and the entire audience stayed put in the hall, their butts glued to hard wooden chairs for the entire time (the bladder control alone boggles the mind). 151 years later, we had trouble making it all the way through a 37 minute YouTube video of a Barack Obama speech.

A Different Definition of Thrill Seeking

SnvOn Monday, I talked about the normal distribution of variance in any human characteristic, typically plotted on a bell curve. Our need to seek sensation is just such a trait. Some of us are quite content to keep our pulse ticking away at a rate barely above comatose. Some of us constantly seek a massive jolt of adrenaline, always riding the ragged edge of disaster. Most of us fall somewhere in between. Marvin Zuckerman created a scale that measured our need for sensation back in 1971.

This need for sensation has an impact on the type of entertainment we seek. Historically, one would expect a strong correlation between our need for sensation and our level of activity. Traditionally, the need for sensational thrills was satisfied through participation in high adrenaline sports and activities such as rock climbing, various forms of racing and other “extreme” pursuits. The neurological loop here is fairly easy to understand. By pushing our bodies to the point where our brain decided we were in danger, our neurological defence mechanisms were duped into taking the appropriate response: a massive release of neuro-chemicals, including adrenaline, that jolted our body into a higher state of awareness and readiness. The seeking of sensation provided a natural high. On the upper end of Zuckerman’s scale, extreme sensation seeking can be clinically addictive.

But technology has thrown us a psychological curve ball when it comes to sensation seeking. There used to be a fairly well defined divide between most forms of passive entertainment and sensation seeking. The exceptions were gory spectacles such as the gladiators of ancient Rome and, in more recent times, wrestling and boxing. However, the line between the two has become more and more blurred in the 20th century. Passive entertainment now regularly relies on unabashed tweaking of our inherent subliminal defense, retaliation and sexual modules. Modern entertainment plays directly to our animal instincts.

This is where we get an especially grim view of our future. Yesterday, I mentioned that Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found evidence that TV was addictive, in the true biological sense of addiction. Sensation seeking also has found to be physically addictive. Are we becoming a nation of passive voyeurs that only truly become alive when we’re plugged into the entertainment grid? Suddenly, the premise of The Matrix doesn’t seem that far fetched (ironic, considering the movie series was a perfect example of sensation seeking through passive entertainment).

The modern video game raises this ambiguity between sensation seeking and passive entertainment to a new high (or low, depending on your perspective). Through lifelike graphics and the game producer’s mastery of what appeals to our baser instincts, video games now efficiently deliver high octane jolts that we used to have to get by actually doing something. What does this mash up of passive entertainment and sensation seeking mean for marketers in the future?

That, alas, is a topic for a future post.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Our Need for Entertainment

Anytime we talk about human behavior thats triggered by the equipment we all ship with – namely our brains-we have to account for variations in how that equipment operates. We are not turned out by assembly line, with quality control measures insuring that all brains are identical. Each brain is distinct, formed both by our own genetic signature and by our environment. While variation across the human genome is remarkably minor, we are all products of bespoke design – handcrafted to make us uniquely us.

Distribution of Our Uniqueness

SnvThis variation typically plays out in a normal distribution curve, more commonly known as a bell curve. Most of us cluster towards the center – the norm. And as we move out from the center, venturing one or two standard deviations from the norm into outlier territory, our numbers drop dramatically.

If we talk about the phenomenon of entertainment, we are definitely talking about how our brains operate. This means that we could expect to find a normal distribution in attitudes towards entertainment, with a peak in the middle and rapidly descending slopes on both sides. For example, one would expect such a distribution in the types of entertainment we prefer: the books we read, the shows we watch, the music we listen to. in fact, with a little statistical origami, we can do a quick check on this. Take a standard distribution curve and fold it in half along the “norm” line (shown as 0). The shape should look familiar. We have Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. The similarity of tastes close to the norm accounts for blockbusters and best sellers. These are the forms of entertainment that appeal to the greatest number of individuals. More esoteric entertainment tastes live well down the curve, in outlier territory.

Long_Tail

The Need for Entertainment Scale

I’ll come back to the types of entertainment we prefer and why in a later post. Today, I want to concentrate on another variable in the human psyche that also can impact our engagement with entertainment: how much do we need to be entertained? Why are some of us drawn more to fiction and others to non-fiction. Why do some of us like the escapism of a TV sitcom and others prefer to watch the news? Why do some of us have 5 TV’s in our house, with hundreds of digital channels, and others have none? What does the normal distribution curve of our need for entertainment look like. That was exactly the question that Timothy Brock and Stephen Livingston from Ohio State University tackled (The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Publication Year: 2004. p 255-268).

The need for entertainment seems to be almost addictive in some cases. In the study, Brock and Livingston restrict their definition of entertainment to passive consumption of some form of entertainment, either TV, radio, film, print, theatre or sport spectacles. Of these, television is the most common, so many of the measures revolved around our relationship with that specific entertainment medium. I’ve talked before about the impact of TV on society, but some of the empirical research on our reliance on the tube is astounding. In 2002, Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found troubling evidence of a true biological addiction to TV:

“To track behavior and emotion in the normal course of life, as opposed to the artificial conditions of the lab, we have used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Participants carried a beeper, and we signaled them six to eight times a day, at random, over the period of a week; whenever they heard the beep, they wrote down what they were doing and how they were feeling using a standardized scorecard.

“As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive.

“What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflect that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted. They say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before. In contrast, they rarely indicate such difficulty after reading. After playing sports or engaging in hobbies, people report improvements in mood. After watching TV, people’s moods are about the same or worse than before.

“Thus, the irony of TV: people watch a great deal longer than they plan to, even though prolonged viewing is less rewarding. In our ESM studies the longer people sat in front of the set, the less satisfaction they said they derived from it. When signaled, heavy viewers (those who consistently watch more than four hours a day) tended to report on their ESM sheets that they enjoy TV less than light viewers did (less than two hours a day).

What value do we place on the ability to watch TV? Brock and Livingston gave 115 undergrads two scenarios. In the first, they could correct a hypothetical mix up in their official state citizenship in return for a one time cash gift. The undergrads were asked to put a value on changing their official allegiance from one state to another. 15% would do it for free and another 40% would do it for under $1000.

The next scenario asked the students what compensation they would require to give up TV for the rest of their lives. A permanent tracking implant in their ear would notify a monitoring service if they cheated and the entire gift would be forfeited. 8% were willing to do it for free, but over 60% would need at least a million dollars to give up TV forever.

Findings: Men Need More Entertainment & The More You Think , The Less You Need to Be Entertained

In their scale of the need for entertainment, Brock and Livingston assessed three factors: Drive (how actively do you pursue passive entertainment?), Utility (how useful is passive entertainment, both to you specifically and in general?) and Passivity (how active do you like your entertainment to be?).

So, how do we fare on our need to be entertained, based on Brock and Livingston’s scale? First of all, men seem to have a stronger drive to be entertained than women. Males scored higher on the amount they spend on entertainment, the daily need for entertainment and the inability to function without entertainment. One would assume that the “couch potato curve” would skew to the male side of the demographic split.

Also interestingly, Brock and Livingston found an inverse relationship between the need to be entertained and the “need for cognition” – a measure of how much people like active problem solving and critical thinking. Again, the more you think, the less reliant you are on TV.

In a follow up study, Brock and Livingston tried to draw a defining line between entertainment (in their definition, passive consumption) and sensation seeking. I’ll touch on this in tomorrow’s post.

How Our Brain Decides How Long We Look at Something

In this week, I’ve talked about how our attention focusing mechanism moves the spotlight of foveal attention around different environments: a Where’s Waldo picture, a webpage, a website with advertising and a search engine results page. I want to wrap up the week by looking at another study that looked at the role of brain waves in regulating how we shift the spotlight of attention from one subject to another.

Eye Spy

eyetrackingsaccadesIf you do eye tracking research, you soon learn to distinguish fixations and saccades. Fixations occur when we let our foveal attention linger on an element, even for a fraction of a second. Saccades are the movements our eyes make from one fixation to the next. These movements take mere milliseconds. Below I show an example of a single session “gaze plot” – the recording of how one individual’s eyes took in an ad (the image is from Tobii, the maker of the eye tracking equipment we use). The dots represent fixations, as measured in milliseconds. The bigger the dot the longer the eye stayed here. The lines connecting the dots are saccades.

When you look at a scene like the one shown here, the question becomes, how do you consciously move from one element to another. It’s not like you think “okay, I’ve spent enough time looking at the logo, perhaps it’s time to move to the headline of the ad, or the rather attractive bosom in the upper right corner (I suspect the participant was male)” The movements happen subconsciously. Your eyes move to digest the content of the picture on their own accord, based on what appears to be interesting based on your overall scan of the picture and your attention focusing mechanisms.

Keeping Our Eyes Running on Time

Knowing that the eye tends to move from spot to spot subconsciously, Dr. Earl Miller at MIT decided to look closer at the timing of these shifts of attention and what might cause them. He found that our brains appear to have a built in timer that moves our eyes around a scene. Our foveal focus shifts about 25 times a second and this shift seems to be regulated by our brain waves. Our brain cycles between high activity phases and low activity phases, the activity recorded through EEG scanning. Neurologists have known that these waves seem to be involved in the focusing of attention and the functions of working memory, but Miller’s study showed a conclusive link between these wave cycles and the refocusing of visual attention. It appears our brains have a built in metronome that dictates how we engage with visual stimuli. The faster the cycles, the faster we “think.”

But, it’s not as if we let our eyes dash around the page every 1/25 of a second. Our eyes linger in certain spots and jump quickly over others. Somewhere, something is dictating how long the eye stays in one spot. As our brain waves tick out the measures of attention, something in our brains decide where to invest those measures and how many should be invested.

The Information Scent Clock is Ticking

Here, I take a huge philosophical leap and tie together two empirical bodies of knowledge with nothing scientifically concrete to connect them that I’m aware of. Let’s imagine for a second that Miller’s timing of eye movements might play some role in Eric Charnov’s Marginal Value Theorem, which in turn plays a part in Peter Pirolli’s Information Foraging Theory.

Eric Charnov discovered that animals seem to have an innate and highly accurate sense of when to leave one source of food and move on to another, based on a calculation of the energy that would have to be expended versus the calories that would be gained in return. Obviously, organisms that are highly efficient at surviving would flourish in nature, passing on their genes and less efficient candidates would die out. Charnov’s marginal value calculation would be a relatively complex one if we sat down to work it out on paper (Charnov did exactly that, with some impressive charts and formulas) but I’m guessing the birds Charnov was studying didn’t take this approach. The calculations required are done by instinct, not differential calculus.

So, if birds can do it, how do humans fare? Well, we do pretty well when it comes to food. In fact, we’re so good at seeking high calorie foods, it’s coming back to bite us. We have highly evolved tastes for high fat, high sugar calorie rich foods. In the 20th Century, this built in market preference caused food manufacturers to pump out these foods by the truck load. Now, well over 1/3 of the population is considered obese. Evolution sometimes plays nasty tricks on us, but I digress.

Pirolli took Charnov’s marginal value theorem and applied it to how we gather information in an online environment. Do we use the same instinctive calculations to determine how long to spend on a website looking for the information we’re seeking? Is our brain doing subconscious calculations the entire time we’re browsing online, telling us to either click deeper on a site or give up and go back to Google? I suspect the answer is yes. And, if that’s the case, are our brain waves that dictate how and where we spend our attention part of this calculation, a mental hourglass that somehow factors into Charnov’s theorem? If so, it behooves us to ensure our websites instill a sense of information scent as soon as possible. The second someone lands on our site, the clock is already ticking. Each tick that goes by without them finding something relevant devalues our patch according to Charnov’s theorem.

How Our Brains “Google”

So far this week, I’ve covered how our brains find Waldo, scan a webpage and engage with online advertising. Today, I’m looking at how our brains help find the best result on a search engine.

Searching by Habit

First, let’s accept the fact that most of us have now had a fair amount of experience searching for things on the internet, to the point that we’ve now made Google a verb. What’s more important, from a neural perspective, is that searching is now driven by habit. And that has some significant implications for how our brain works.

Habits form when we do the same thing over and over again. In order for that to happen, we need what’s called a stable environment. Whatever we’re doing, habits only form when the path each time is similar enough that we don’t have to think about each individual junction and intersection. If you drive the same way home from work each day, your brain will start navigating by habit. If you take a different route every single day, you’ll be required to think through each and every trip. Parts of the brain called the basal ganglia seem to be essential in recording these habitual scripts, acting as sort of a control mechanism telling the brain when it’s okay to run on autopilot and when it needs to wake up and pay attention. Ann Graybiel from MIT has done extensive work exploring habitual behaviors and the role of the basal ganglia.

The Stability of the Search Page

A search results page, at least for now, provides such a stable environment. Earlier this week, I looked at how our brain navigates webpages. Even though each website is unique, there are some elements that are stable enough to allow for habitual conditioned routines to form. The main logo or brand identifier is usually in the upper left. The navigation bar typically runs horizontally below the logo. A secondary navigation bar is typically found running down the left side. The right side is usually reserved for a feature sidebar or, in the case of a portal, advertising. Given these commonalities, there is enough stability in most website’s designs that we navigate for the first few seconds on autopilot.

Compared to a website, a search engine results page is rigidly structured, providing the ideal stable environment for habits to form. This has meant a surprising degree of uniformity in people’s search behaviors. My company, Enquiro, has been looking at search behavior for almost a decade now and we’ve found that it’s remained remarkably consistent. We start in the upper left, break off a “chunk” of 3 to 5 results and scan it in an “F” shaped pattern. The following excerpts from The BuyerSphere Project give a more detailed walk through of the process.

searchheatmap11 – First, we orient ourselves to the page. This is something we do by habit, based on where we expect to see the most relevant result. We use a visual anchor point, typically the blue border that runs above the search results, and use this to start our scanning in the upper left, a conditioned response we’ve called the Google Effect. Google has taught us that the highest relevance is in the upper left corner

Searchheatmap22 – Then, we begin searching for information scent. This is a term from information foraging theory, which we’ve covered in our eye tracking white papers. In this particular case, we’ve asked our participants to look for thin, light laptops for their sales team. Notice how the eye tracking hot spots are over the words that offer the greatest “scent”, based on the intention of the user. Typically, this search for scent is a scanning of the first few words of the title of the top 3 or 4 listings.

Searchheatmap33 – Now the evaluation begins. Based on the initial scan of the beginnings of titles from the top 3 or 4 listings, users begin to compare the degree of relevance of some alternatives, typically by comparing two at a time. We tend to “chunk” the results page into sections of 3 or 4 listings at a time to compare, as this has been shown to be a typical limit of working memory9 when considering search listing alternatives

searchheatmap44 -It’s this scanning pattern, roughly in the shape of an “F”, that creates the distinct scan pattern that we first called the “Golden Triangle” in our first eye tracking study. Users generally scan vertically first, creating the upright of the “F”, then horizontally when they pick up a relevant visual cue, creating the arms of the F. Scanning tends to be top heavy, with more horizontal scanning on top entries, which over time creates the triangle shape.

 

searchheatmap5(2)5 – Often, especially if the results are relevant, this initial scan of the first 3 or 4 listings will result in a click. If two listings or more listings in the initial set look to be relevant, the user will click through to both and compare the information scent on the landing page. This back and forth clicking is referred to as “pogo sticking”. It’s this initial set of results that represents the prime real estate on the page.

searchheatmap66 – If the initial set doesn’t result in a successful click through, the user continues to “chunk” the page for future consideration. The next chunk could be the next set of organic results, or the ads on the right hand side of the page. There, the same F Shaped Scan patterns will be repeated. By the way, there’s one thing to note about the right hand ads. Users tend to glance at the first ad and make a quick evaluation of the relevance. If the first ad doesn’t appear relevant, the user will often not scan any further, passing judgement on the usefulness and relevance of all the ads on the right side based on their impression of the ad on top.

So, that explains how habits dictate our scanning pattern. What I want to talk more about today is how our attention focusing mechanism might impact our search for information scent on the page.

The Role of the Query in Information Scent

Remember the role of our neuronal chorus, firing in unison, in drawing our attention to potential targets in our total field of vision. Now, text based web pages don’t exactly offer a varied buffet of stimuli, but I suspect the role of key words in the text of listings might serve to help focus our attention.

In a previous post, I mentioned that words are basically abstract visual representations of ideas or concepts. The shape of the letters in a familiar word can draw our attention. It tends to “pop out” at us from the rest of the words on the page. I suspect this “pop out” effect could be the result of Dr. Desimone’s neural synchrony patterns. We may have groups of neurons tuned to pick certain words out of the sea of text we see on a search page.

The Query as a Picture

This treating of a word as a picture rather than text has interesting implications for the work our brain has to do. The interpretation of text actually calls a significant number of neural mechanisms into play. It’s fairly intensive processing. We have to visually intrepret the letters, run it through the language centres of our brain, translate into a concept and only then can we capture the meaning of the word. It happens quickly, but not nearly as quickly as the brain can absorb a picture. Pictures don’t have to be interpreted. Our understanding of a picture requires fewer mental “middle men” in our brain, so it takes a shorter path. Perhaps that’s why one picture is worth a thousand words.

But in the case of logos and very well known words, we may be able to skip some of the language processing we would normally have to do. The shape of the word might be so familiar, we treat it more like an icon or picture than a word. For example, if you see your name in print, it tends to immediately jump out at you. I suspect the shape of the word might be so familiar that our brain processes it through a quicker path than a typical word. We process it as a picture rather than language.

Now, if this is the case, the most obvious candidate for this “express processing” behavior would be the actual query we use. And we have a “picture” of what the word looks like already in our minds, because we just typed it into the query box. This would mean that this word would pop out of the rest of the text quicker than other text. And, through eye tracking, there are very strong indications that this is exactly what’s happening. The query used almost inevitably attracts foveal attention quicker than anything else. The search engines have learned to reinforce this “pop out” effect by using hit bolding to put the query words in bold type when ever they appear in the results set.

Do Other Words Act as Scent Pictures?

If this is true of the query, are there other words that trigger the same pop out effect? I suspect this to also be true. We’ve seen that certain word attract more than their fair share of attention, depending on the intent of the user. Well know brands typically attract foveal attention. So do prices and salient product features. Remember, we don’t read search listings, we scan them. We focus on a few key words and if there is a strong enough match of information scent to our intent, we click on the listing.

The Intrusion of Graphics

Until recently, the average search page was devoid of graphics. But all the engines are now introducing richer visuals into many results sets. A few years ago we did some eye tracking to see what the impact might be. The impact, as we found out, was that the introduction of a graphic significantly changed the conditioned scan patterns I described earlier in the post.

eshapedpatternThis seems to be a perfect illustration of Desimone’s attention focusing mechanism at work. If we’re searching for Harry Potter, or in the case of the example heat map shown below, an iPhone, we likely have a visual image already in mind. If a relevant image appears on the page, it hits our attention alarms with full force. First of all, it stands out from the text that surrounds it. Secondly, our pre-tuned neurons immediately pick it out in our peripheral vision as something worthy of foveal focus because it matches the picture we have in our mind. And thirdly, our brain interprets the relevancy of the image much faster than it can the surrounding text. It’s an easier path for the attention mechanisms of our brain to go down and our brains follow the same rules as my sister-in-law: no unnecessary trips.

The result? The F Shaped Scan pattern, which is the most efficient scan pattern for an ordered set of text results, suddenly becomes an E shaped pattern. The center of the E is on the image, which immediately draws our attention. We scan the title beside it to confirm relevancy, and then we have a choice to make. Do we scan the section above or below. Again, our peripheral vision helps make this decision by scanning for information scent above and below the image. Words that “pop out” could lure us up or down. Typically, we expect greater relevancy higher in the page, so we would move up more often than down.

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up my series of posts on how our brains control what grabs our attention by looking at another study that indicates we might have a built in timer that governs our attention span and we’ll revisit the concept of the information patch, looking at how long we decide to spend “in the patch.”