Priming Experiments

In one of my tweets (see here), I referred to 'priming' and used the simpler Wikipedia definition. I had blogged about priming previously too: here.
Here's is another striking experiment I picked from Think Twice by Mauboussin ...

In this test, the researchers placed the French and German wine next to each other, along with small national flags. Over two weeks, the scientists alternated playing French accordion and German Bierkeller pieces and watched the results. When French music played, French wines represented 77 percent of the sales. When German music played, consumers selected German wines 73 percent of the time.

Amazing, isn't it?
I am assuming, the shoppers were able to make out French music from the German music.

If I were to carry out the experiment, I would do this experiment by alternating French, German and some distinctly non-German, non-French music, say Indian music. Just to see the impact on the sales when Indian music played out.

Smiling Girls on Advertisements

Pick up any magazine. I am sure you will come across an a picture of a beautiful woman on an advertisement that has no relation whatsoever with the content of the advertisement, I have come across advertisements of a UPS showing a beautiful girl smiling away to glory. Who buys a diesel generator because of a girl? And who pays these marketing executives for coming up with such trash?

Right?
Just read this.

[I]n South Africa ... a consumer lending bank wanted to push personal loans to fifty thousand of its customers. Working together with a team of economists, the bank crafted several variations on the same basic loan offer letter. The different versions were randomly assigned to recipients and mailed off without any indication that the letters were part of an experiment.

The letters included different interest rates (ranging from 3.25% to 7.75% per month); some featured a comparison to a competitor's rate; others a giveaway ([Win one of] TEN CELL PHONES UP FOR GRABS EACH MONTH!); and still others a photo of either a man's or a woman's pleasant, smiling face.

Now you'd think that the customer would evaluate the offer based purely on interest rate and the specific terms of the loan. Marketing gimmicks such as competitor comparisons, giveaway offers, and fanciful photos shouldn't be part of the calculation. [The results showed that most of these gimmicks] didn't have much of an overall effect. The unexpected effect kicked in with the less relevant variation: the inclusion of a picture of the smiling face in the corner. ... According to the study, the magnitude of [the men receiving pictures of a smiling woman] is "about as much as dropping the interest rate 4.5 percent points."

Well, well, well!
How many of your purchasing decisions are made because of the smiling man or woman in the advertisement?

The above extract is from a wonderful book called Sway: The Irresistible Pull Of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman.

Free Will and external influence

You're the man! (or woman!)
You believe in free will.
You make your own decisions.
What you are today is because of your efforts and because you were ready for the opportunities that presented themselves.

I don't dispute this. But did you know how easy it is to manipulate you.
"Manipulate me?". you say with a scorn.

Okay. Let us touch on another topic.
Have you heard of 'priming'?

Psychologists have conducted experiments that show that it is possible to make you act differently merely by seeding your brain with relevant words, without your knowledge, of course.

You must have experienced this yourself. At the watering hole you talk to a bunch of guys talking negative. Haven't you come away feeling miserable?

An experiment devised by a psychologist John Bargh shows how this works. If you are given a scrambled-sentence test, such as ...

1. him was worried she always
2. shoes give replace old the
3. sky the seamless gray is
4. sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins
etc.

The idea is to form 4 word-sentences.

It turns out that people giving this test walked slowly. Their brain was being primed with words, "worried", "old", gray", "wrinkle". These made the brain think of being old.

To quote further from Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell:

Even more impressive, however, is how mysterious these priming effects are. When you took that sentence completion test, you didn't know that you were being primed to think "old." Why would you? The clues are pretty subtle. What is striking, though, is that even after people walked slowly out of the room and down the hall, they still weren't aware of how their behavior had been affected. ... Aronson and Steele [two psychologists] found the same thing with the black students who did so poorly after they were reminded of their race. ... The results of these experiments are obviously quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on autopilot, and the way we think and act - and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment - are a lot more susceptible to outside influence than we realize.

Hmmmm... So, there is merit in listening to 'positive mental attitude' CDs when you drive to work after all. Imagine your effectiveness improving just be listening to something that seeds your brain with words like "can do", "good", "effective", "smart", "positive", and "tops"

Devil's Workshop

It's amazing the way our mind works ...

There are days when I am bubbling over with a brilliant idea and I think I will set the Internet on fire with this post. But when I sit to frame a post, the whole 'brilliant' idea does not go more than a couple of lines. many a times it does not even make it to the final post.

And there are other days when I think I have nothing to post. I end those days with 3-4 posts to my credit.

And then there are days when I make up multiple posts in my mind the previous night and the next morning ideas flow straight from the mind to the blog.


Seems to me that when the mind gets over excited, it stops thinking. Infatuation sets in and all it does is repeat the same idea over and over again without actually elaborating on it.

When the mind is calmer, it gets the time and space to meditate upon and develop an idea to something that has more form to it.

So it is not the empty mind that is devil's workshop; it the (over)excited mind that is the devil's workshop. You see, a devil's workshop is not that creates evil. A devil's workshop is that which is littered around with undeveloped ideas - ideas that could set Internet on fire.

The 2 personality types

You can dump all psycho-analysis books. There are only two types of people in this world.
One, I call them Accommodators, who give you space before you ask for it.
Second, I call them Space-Hoggers, who will not move unless you ask them to.

You can find these types everywhere.

Go to a library for instance. The Accommodators will move and give you space to go past even when they are busy browsing the book titles on the shelf. The same think happens in the supermarkets. They let you pass. They are concerned as much about others as about self.

And Space-Hoggers? They stand in the middle of the aisle browsing, reading labels, talking to other Space-Hoggers or whatever, but will not move till you reach them and say "excuse me". They would then graciously move aside. Their convenience comes first; Others have to ask for their rights.

The Accommodators dislike Space-Hoggers. The Space-Hoggers could not care less.

All other personality types that you will read in books are variants of these two personality types. Think about it.

Have you observed thee types when you go to shopping or to a library?
Which type are you?

Probing the unknowns

Most best seller non-fiction that deal with management, psychology and self-help have a pattern. All of them help you find your unknown-unknowns. They help you rewrite your future. They promise you leverage that you hadn't thought possible. And with millions of such books dwelling in the unknown-unknowns of our mind and psyche written by experts of their field of so many years of experience, there would be no more unknown-unknown left to discover. Don't you think?

The puzzles, conclusions and an advise

The two puzzles that I gave here and here are identical to each other. The answers are as follows:

Puzzle 1:

You need to check two cards. Card A to verify if the numeral on the reverse of that card is an even number; and Card 3, to check if the alphabet behind the card is not an even number. Cards D and 6 can have any combination and that does not violate the rule.

Puzzle 2:

You need to check if the person aged 16 is not drinking beer and that the person who is drinking beer is at least 21.

Most of you got it right. Which might surprise psychologist Leda Cosmides. I took the puzzles from the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Here's the extract (after jumping over the puzzle parts)

Vervets [a kind of monkey] have been known to waltz into a thicket, ignoring a fresh trail of python tracks and act stunned when they actually come across the snake itself. This doesn't mean that ververts are stupid: they are very sophisticated when it comes to questions that have to do with other vervets. ... A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of ververtish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.

The same is true of humans. ... [A]s psychologist Leda Cosmides (who dreamt up this example) points out, it [puzzle 2] is exactly the same puzzle as the A, D, 3 and 6 puzzle. The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other that we are about the abstract world.

I am not so sure. If I have to go by answers given by you all, I would conclude that humans are equally good or equally bad at both abstract and the real world.

I would actually go further and advise all the psychologists in the world that perhaps it is not correct to conlcude or generalise based on laboratory experiments. The scientists who observe Vervets are doing the correct thing.They are observing the monkeys inthe natural habitat. Please do the same.Observe humans in their natural habitat and draw conclusions. Be sure to note the context too. A change in context may result in an altogether different conclusion.

Picture Courtesy: Steve Woods

Solve This Puzzle - Part 2

I thank all those who participated in part 1 of the psychology experiment. (If you have just chanced upon this blog, please feel free to try out part 1)

This is part 2.

Solve this puzzle now ...

Suppose 4 people are drinking in the bar.
One is drinking coke,
One is sixteen,
One is drinking beer, and
one is twenty-five.

Given the rule that no one under twenty-one is allowed to drink beer, which of the person's ID do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed?

Picture Courtesy: Steve Woods

Solve this puzzle

A psychologist claims that human beings do not handle abstract concepts very well. Which is a bit surprising since the people I interact with deal with abstraction all the time. Show me a good software engineer and I will show you a person who is good at grasping abstract concepts. (Note the other way round is not true. One may be great at grasping abstract concepts but may choose not to be a software engineer.) In fact, I think people are incredibly good at abstract concepts.

On the other hand, to draw conclusion based on a homogeneous group of people is totally incorrect.

So, I reproduce here the test. I hope this will reach a more diverse group of people and we will be able to draw a conclusion.

I intend to handle this in three parts:

This post will contain the first puzzle. Once I adequate response (we all live in hope) I will post the next part of the test and finally the third post I will reveal the name of the psychologist, the book from which I took this test and the conclusions drawn by the psychologist and whether we reach the same conclusions. In the third post I will also explain why I think people are good at abstracting.

To minimize influencing each other, I would request you not to explain the answer. Just the answer will suffice.

Alternatively, if you feel the urge to explain your answer, you may send in your answer to my e-mail id amitabh1702@yahoo.co.in

Ready? Ok here goes ...

There are four cards on the table, each with an alphabet on one side and a number on the other.

The side that is visible to you shows the following:

A       D       3      6

The rule is as follows: The card with a vowel on one side will always have an even number on the other side.

Q1. What is the minimum number of cards that you will pick up to verify that the rule has been applied to the cards on the table?

 
1 card
2 cards
3 cards
all the 4 cards

Q2. Which one(s) will you pick up?

Meanwhile I will administer this test on the people I know and report results to check my hypothesis (good software engineer = good abstraction power)

Picture Courtesy: Steve Woods

Internal Dynamics Of Criticising

How often do we question ourselves?
We go by impressions.
We judge others.

Just this after noon someone told me that a person was corrupt. Why? Because he is rich? Because he is an aggressive sales person? Because he is in the real estate business?  

Want to know how our mind works? I quote from my favourite book The Black Swan.

We use reference points in our heads ... and start building beliefs around them because less mental effort is required to compare an idea to a reference point than to evaluate it in absolute.

So when we judge others, what is the reference point?
Ourselves?
Be very careful when criticizing others. You might well be projecting yourself on to that person.