Transcript
Greg Stielstra:
Hello, and welcome to the Behavior Change Podcast by Lirio, the program where we explore the marvels of behavioral science and ways of applying it to make a better world. I’m your host, Greg Stielstra. For today’s program, we have a special treat, not one, but two guests. Matt Johnson.
Matt Johnson:
Professor of marketing at Hult International Business School.
GS:
And Prince Ghuman.
Prince Ghuman:
Also a professor of neuro marketing at Hult International Business School.
GS:
Matt is a neuroscientist.
MJ:
Yeah. I came to it from being academic neuroscientists. That’s why I did my PhD. It was neuroscience. For me, I was purely driven by curiosity with no hint of application in sight at all.
GS:
Prince is a marketer.
PG:
I’ve always been on the pop side crowd. Marketer by trade, not a psychologist or researcher by trade.
GS:
Together, they’re coauthors of the new book, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains. They’ve known each other for a while, but only recently reunited to write this book.
PG:
Funny story, we actually went to undergrad together. Didn’t talk to each other for over 10 years. We met at Hult. I was teaching a summer class and he was the assistant dean there. Then it just evolved into four year, five years later, here we are, finished writing a book together.
GS:
They wrote it because they had to.
PG:
We started to teach neuro marketing and couldn’t find a book off the shelf to assign, so we decided to write one ourselves.
GS:
We’ll explore it because we want to. In a moment, we’ll talk with Matt and Prince about human memory, how to make memories, how to shape them and how our memories shaped the decisions that chart our future. But as always, we’ll begin with the Bias Brief.
Lirio Bias Brief Number Eight: In-Group Bias
In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a third grade teacher named Jane Elliott in Riceville, Iowa taught her students a lesson the whole world would remember. She divided her class by the color of their eyes, separating the blue-eyed children from the brown-eyed kids. Then she informed everyone that blue-eyed children were superior. They were smarter, cleaner and more capable, she said, better in every way. Their superiority entitled the blue-eyed kids to special privileges, including a second helping at lunch and five more minutes at recess. The brown-eyed kids weren’t so lucky. Ms. Elliott informed the class that brown-eyed children were dirty, dumb, and were not allowed the same privileges afforded to the blue-eyed children.
The effects were immediate and terrifying. Within minutes, blue-eyed children mercilessly ridiculed their brown-eyed classmates calling them stupid, shunning them on the playground, and treating them with contempt. Neighbors grew distant, friends became enemies. The next day, Ms. Elliott threw them a curve ball. She informed her class, she had made a mistake. It was actually the brown-eyed children who were superior. Emboldened by their newfound superiority, brown-eyed kids began subjecting their blue-eyed classmates to the same abuse they themselves had endured the day before. Ms. Elliot’s students were exhibiting in-group bias, the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those of another group.
We should expect in-group bias to occur, wrote behavioral researcher Henri Tajfel, whenever the world of an individual is clearly dichotomized into us and them. Interestingly, Tajfel also found that people with the same object of differences do not exhibit discriminatory intergroup behavior if they don’t have a clear cut classification, super imposed on them. The student’s eyes, for example, had always been blue or brown. It wasn’t until their teacher drew their attention to eye color and its supposed influence that it mattered. In other words, our differences don’t divide us, but focusing on our differences as defining characteristics does. According to Dr. Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at the university of Arizona, not only do we assign elevated importance to factors that have our attention, but we also assign them causality.
“Because we typically a lot special attention to the true causes around us. If we see ourselves giving such attention to some factor, we become more likely to think of it as the cause.” Because students focused on each other’s eye color, they assumed eye color was responsible for an individual’s negative attributes. Social identity theory posits that in group bias comes from our need to improve self-esteem. We draw a measure of our self identity from social groups. We transfer the desire to see ourselves positively onto those groups. Consequently, we tend to view our own group in a positive light while viewing other groups negatively. Social groups have unwritten rules about how their members should behave. These are called group norms, and represent the accepted standards of behavior for members of the group.
Since people derive a portion of their self identity from their membership in social groups, group norms exert significant influence over member behavior, creating a strong desire to conform. In-group, out-group bias can contribute to positive behavior change when leveraged appropriately. It can also interfere with those efforts if ignored or misunderstood. I worked for a company called Healthways that wanted its employees to participate in a wellness program called Be Well. Participants would complete an online assessment and an annual health screening. For several years, the company promoted be well as a way to “improve your wellbeing,” and enjoyed modest results. Asking employees to join a wellbeing improvement program, it turns out, causes them to ask themselves, does my wellbeing need improving?
Since employees rightly or wrongly that they were in relatively good health, most answered no. To improve participation, we needed to ask them a different question. One for which their answer would be yes. In-group bias provided the solution. First, we changed the name of the program from Be Well to be Healthways. The new name emphasized belonging instead of improved wellbeing. Next, we changed the promotional messaging to reinforce membership in the group, defined by employment at Healthways. Once people felt a strong association with the group, we began introducing norms, the things that that group should do. Healthways employees call each other colleagues, Healthways colleagues contribute to their 401k, and eventually Healthways colleagues take the wellbeing assessment and get an annual health screening.
By appealing to people’s identity as Healthways employees rather than their desire for improved wellbeing, the new approach doubled participation in the first month. By directing people’s attention and associations, you have the power to influence their perception of the social groups to which they belong, and either encourage cooperation or amplify antagonism as a result. I’m sure you’ll do the right thing. You seem like one of us, and people like us use our powers for good.
Greg Stielstra:
A reminder that we’re talking about the book Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains by Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman. The book covers a wide range of topics, too many for us to explore here today. I thought we could focus on one that I found, especially interesting. You must’ve found it interesting too, because you devoted two chapters to it.
PG:
It’s the only one.
GS:
Talking about memory. Let’s begin with a question that seems easy, but isn’t. What is memory?
PG:
I love that you started with that. I’ll do the lay person response. Literally, just so give you a behind the scenes. When Matt and I were writing this, to defined memory is deceptively easy, but it’s to be accurate as a neuroscientist, Matt and I spent two days coming up with one sentence. I’ll say it. Memory is our brain’s way of connecting us to our past. Just how deep that goes, Matt will tell you, but it’s not hit record and then hit replay.
MJ:
Yeah, this was definitely a really fun few chapters for Prince and I to write, because our ideas as humans navigating the world, our ideas about memory and experience are very different from what the science tells us memory actually is. This one distillation, memory is our brain’s attempt at connecting us to the past, I think is telling here, and attempt is really the key word. This is an attempt to connecting us, making us a coherent being. We are technically different from one day to the next, but we have memory to make us a consistent entity. These mechanisms, which hold us together, these memory mechanisms are incredibly fallible. We feel as if, when we’re having an experience, we have the record button on.
You feel as if we are just taking in this experience, we’re taking all these senses and happenings and information. Then when we’re recalling something, you feel like we have the rewind. We’re just pressing play on the rewind button, and we’re just conjuring up this rich experience back into mind, and really no matter where you’re looking at it from the standpoint of experience in coding or memory, neither of these are true. That’s why we devoted two distinct chapters to really unpacking this and exploring just how deeply the science of memory goes and really how much it violates our general intuition about what memory is and how it operates.
GS:
We often talk about memory as if it’s a single thing, but you read about many different kinds of memory and the role each of them plays.
MJ:
Absolutely. Yeah. That was one of the main discoveries with memory in the 1950s. We used to think that, whatever this memory system is, we just have this one system, we have experiences, then when you … recall it. But then as we began to be exposed to different types of neuro-psychological population, so clinical individuals who had suffered some sort of brain damage and then had a different behavioral and cognitive profile afterwards, we discovered that memory really isn’t this monolithic entity, it bifurcates into these different paths and are supported by completely different neural systems. The biggest division is really between explicit memory. This is the type of memory which we are consciously aware of as we’re actually creating experience. If we’re going to consciously study for our final exam where we’re focusing our conscious attention, we’re trying to put that information memory, that’s our explicit system.
And then we have our implicit system, which is all of the information, which is coming into our senses and coming into our memory system and incorporating, which can affect our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors at a later time. But we’re not consciously aware of this information coming in. We have our explicit system, which seems to be mediated mostly by the hippocampus and medial temporal regions, and then we have the implicit system, which bifurcates, and that’s a separate conversation, but primarily subserved by basal ganglia and more subcortical structures.
GS:
You write about this information coming in and the process of encoding, which most of us are aware of. We think of trying to remember something and different mnemonic devices we might apply, but you also talk about things that can boost the encoding process, encoding boosters, you called them.
MJ:
Not all aspects of our experience are weighted the same when it comes to its effect on memory. We’re not equally likely to remember everything that happens to us. For one, emotion seems to play a very strong role. One emotion across the board, so if we have an emotional experience, it gets us excited or to gets us angry or something, which colors our emotional experience. We remember that much more readily than something which was blunt emotionally. That makes sense from a [crosstalk].
GS:
We remember our first kiss, but not the second.
MJ:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That’s a great example. Yeah, we have an emotional association with that event. That makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you have an emotional experience, it’s likely to be a very, very important experience that got your physiological response going and it colored your psychologic experience. Probably an important thing to remember, both in terms of positive experiences, like a first kiss or a negative experience, if it’s something really, really fearful and something made us angry and that’s something we want to avoid in the future. Emotion plays a really strong role in boosting this encoding process.
GS:
You called attention to some others, attention, music.
PG:
I’ll jump in here. The one that I really like that’s a little more, I guess we conceptualize it a bit more is friction. I like that in particular because it has a very cool marketing application to it. It’s a little bit more of a craft than a science, meaning with the right amount of friction, you’re going to encode a memory more. The cheesy example is this, instead of putting a billboard of your product on a subway hoping people will remember it and it gets coded better, create something on the stairs that get people to interact with your ad, and immediately the memory is going to be higher, even if it’s literally just pretend piano keys, for instance.
I really do like that example for a simple fact that, hey, create a little bit of friction. Really, it’s getting some sort of a response from the people you’re targeting and immediate leading the memory of your ad better than a billboard.
GS:
It’s a little counter intuitive. I see many marketers and people trying to affect behavior change in the marketplace, working to make everything easier, seamless frictionless. But what you’re saying is there are moments when friction makes sense.
MJ:
Absolutely. Yeah. There’s a really interesting nuance when it comes to this idea of friction. Generally speaking, we tend to like things which are easier to bring to mind, the fluency bias, this leads to be availability bias, things which are easier to bring to mind and sort of weigh more heavily in our decision making. In terms of liking things, we’d like it when it’s easier to bring to mind, but in terms of having a stronger memory of that experience, this is where friction comes in to play it. If you can introduce just a little bit of difficulty into the processing, that strains our attention and that leads us to encode this more strongly and we have a stronger memory. There’s this a little bit of antagonism between what we’d like, and then what we’re able to remember later. One really interesting example, which we researched for the book is this font, and the font is called Sans forgetica, and this is a font which, when you look at it, it’s a little bit difficult to read.
They made it deliberately difficult to read. So you have to really strain. It’s not illegible, but they tweak things. You have to really strain and focus and concentrate while you’re reading it. Studies have shown that when you put texts in Sans forgetica, you actually remember the content of that better than if it’s written in Times or a much more fluent text. That’s a really interesting dynamic when it comes to friction.
GS:
Listeners to this podcast would be familiar with dual process theory systems one and two. You write about that in the book. What I hear you saying is if you can put just a little bit of cognitive disfluency in your message, you can bring system to online and with greater number of systems in the brain activated create a more enduring memory.
MJ:
Yeah. We see that in a few examples of advertisements, which are trying to spell out a word, but deliberately leave a letter off, and you can put it together if you just use your imagination and strain, and it catches your attention. These are the ads that are going to lead to all things being equal, a stronger memory for the content there. As you were describing, really leads you to a much more deliberative system too oriented type of processing.
PG:
One thing from a marketing end, I’m sure like a lot of us here, Daniel Kahneman was the hook that got us into a lot of the BE life and all the other places that evolves too. One thing that I always see marketers under utilize is applying the dual process theory to the customer journey. We can talk about the classic customer journey and we can talk about little more, the growth hacky customer journey. Nonetheless, it’s a similar process, awareness consideration purchase. The classic marketing one. Well, what we don’t do as marketers is we don’t pin at which stage should we be hitting the customer with system one or system two. Obviously you would have data that could inform, because the answer isn’t consideration is always system on our system too, but nonetheless, if you have data that would inform that that would be great, and if you don’t, then you should test.
You should test a call to action or whatever it may be, whether it’s an email campaign or an ad that is system one ad at the awareness phase or at the conversion phase. It’s like a small little hack, but it could make a massive difference, from anything from web optimization to whatever eBooks you might write or the stories you tell about your customers. There’s so many ways to hash it once you start pinning the dual process theory to awareness, consideration, and conversion.
GS:
Architecting the customer journeys psychologically, so that you’re leveraging those systems appropriately at each step along the path. Our listeners may be familiar with this, but you guys spent some time on it in the book talking about peak end effect. I thought that has interesting applications for, not just how you make a memory, but the kind of memory you make and our opportunity to influence that a little bit.
MJ:
Yeah. This is, again, going back to this idea that not all aspects of the experience are weighted equally when it comes to creating this memory. This was a really stellar finding from … early Kahneman diversity finding for the 1980s where they did the famous or infamous, if you were a participant in this, the colonoscopy studies. Here you’re getting a colonoscopy and everybody knows what that is. I don’t have to go into detail there, but you’re having this relatively uncomfortable procedure having been done. What Kahneman did is, in addition to this procedure, now you have to hold this dial and rate how your experience is at any given moment of this procedure. Then he asked people two weeks after this procedure, well, how painful do you remember this entire operation? Then he correlated that with different time periods within the operation itself.
What he found is, it wasn’t the overall average pain, which was correlated with a painful memory. It was two things. This gives rise to this general phenomenon of the peak end effect. It was the peak. So, if something happened, the doctor’s hand slips and it’s just a really, really, really painful experience, even for a millisecond, if you have a really, really, really brief painful experience, that’s weighted very heavily in the pain memory later on, and then the end. If the end was okay, then the overall memory was okay, the overall average, the aggregate pain, the experience actually didn’t matter that much.
Thankfully, it’s not just true of our painful experiences, but also in terms of our joyous and pleasureful experiences as well. Shakespeare, he really had it right when he said all’s well that ends well. If you have a great last experience, then the overall memory is colored in a very nice light, and same with the peak as well.
GS:
Somewhat ironic that the peak end rule or effect would be discovered, confirmed through colonoscopy experiments.
PG:
Greg, if I could add to that, I just want to say that is also something that is under utilized by marketers. I’ve been on both ends of the PR teams, prepping myself, a PR team prepping me, me prepping the CEO with the PR team, and never once was the peak end effect ever brought up. Think about the communications where you have a big speech to give. Complete transparency, I did a Ted Talk recently, and I 100% tested what would be the peak in my talk and exactly how I can end it in a memorable way, because I know the end is heavily weighed, and there’s got to be a peak in there, whatever that peak is. Unfortunately, you can’t test it with a Ted talk, but you certainly can when you’re writing speeches. Of course, it goes beyond that too.
GS:
Very good that you were thinking about that. Ironically, one of the chief complaints I have of behavioral science presentations that I have witnessed in the past, is that the behavioral scientists spent very little time applying behavioral science to their presentation. You’re talking about behavioral science, but they’re not delivering it in a way that indicates they understood it and were leveraging it to give their audience a particular experience.
PG:
No, thank you for, I hate to say call out, but just putting that out there. There’s a reason why it took two of us to write this book. If I wrote this book, there’s no way that I would know neuroscience like the back of my hand. It doesn’t matter how many pieces of research I read on the outside. I needed Matt to tie it in together. But my applications don’t mean a whole lot if the science doesn’t check and clear them. If it wasn’t for Matt, this book would have never been written, but if it wasn’t for me, we would never have the application, have the aspect of behavior science because a lot of behavioral scientists are exactly what? Scientists. They’re not behavior applicators. That’s why we wrote this damn book. We wanted to hit both sides. We want to show application, but we also want to show 300 references of scientific studies that show you why it works this way.
GS:
Now, you also write about why our memory of why we undertook a particular behavior is often inaccurate. Talk about that a little bit, why the reason we did something is often not the reason we attribute to taking a particular behavior.
MJ:
Yeah. This is another layer of the mystery memories. Oftentimes, we make a decision really based on motives, which we don’t know about. We like to think of ourselves as rational actors, and we’d like to think of ourselves as having all of the variables consciously that inform these decisions, but the truth is this is just not the case. Then once we make a decision, memory serves as the PR team. It sort of covers up this decision and make sense of this decision, and explains our decision to us. One of my favorite examples of this is the famous Nussbaum and Wilson study, where they brought participants into the lab and they showed them this array of stockings. They chose stockings because this is an area of high uncertainty. Nobody really has any expertise about stockings.
They just have the people choose, which stockings do you like the best? And are like, well, I don’t know. They selected some. Then after they selected them, they ask, “Well, why did you pick the stockings that you did?” Of course, everybody had a different explanation. It was the color or this one reminded me of somebody. This one, the fabric is really nice. They just have reasons for them. You make sense of this decision, but it turns out that the most consistent motivation, which led to this decision was people just selected the stocking on the right. Humans, for whatever reason, we have this very strange right side bias where if we don’t have a direction to go, right as just our default, and with the stockings, people just chose the ones on the right.
But the interesting thing is, is nobody in their explanation said, I picked the one because it was on the right. Nobody has that motivation in their conscious awareness, and so they draw all of these strange confabulatory reasons to make sense of this decision once it’s already made. Oftentimes, our memory, it really doesn’t strive for accuracy, it strives for consistency. It’s making sense of our behavior and making sense of our “decisions.”
GS:
Yeah. Very few people say the reason I signed up for the 401(k) program is because it was the default, but that’s often the reason why. Prince, what does that mean for marketers who are relying on surveys and focus groups?
PG:
Oh man, surveys and focus groups. Look, I wish we were at a point where we could have an fMRI machine in every market or an EEG machine because the surveys and focus groups have been around since the days of mad men and they do serve their purpose. I think that we are more aware of the possible biases that they might entail. One of the things, this is a slightly beyond memory, but I think it goes to show the value and the difference between surveys and neuro marketing approach, is the Cheetos story, the Cheetos underground, where they did focus groups on these groups of ads that they had. Unanimously, everyone in the focus group said, “No, to mean. I don’t like this ad.” Then to found a new group of people and made them watch the same ad, same thing. But the second group of people, they also put them in an fMRI machine to see what’s happening in their brain while they’re watching these ads.
Turns out, verbally, they were saying, I don’t like them, too mean, but the nucleus accumbens, little pleasure center in your brain was lit up. What would have been killed as an ad campaign was actually launched. Of course, Cheetos got lot of lift, and this is before the days of going viral. An ad like that today would reach amplification, and that’s an example of the limitations of focus groups and how neuroscience can actually illuminate that a bit. That’s my bid on that. I wish we all had fMRI machines in our offices so we can … but I think we’re far from it.
GS:
I wish the same thing because once I discovered behavioral science as a marketer and began applying it, what I would counter is, sometimes people who had to approve copy would be made mildly uncomfortable by something that was in it. They would try to eliminate that. But what they were trying to eliminate was the active ingredient. That mild discomfort you felt was actually the motive force that would have made it work.
PG:
No, I’m with you. One of the things that I like to test was what Matt and I call pain frame. It’s really loss of version applied to a call to action. It won’t always work, but there are certain times where it does work. Sometimes it’s in a sales email and not like a Google ad, but nonetheless, yeah, it might make you feel uncomfortable that you’re using a pain frame, but then you look at the data and see if it actually resonates or not. I felt like marketing was pretty scientific. After meeting Matt, I realized how vain or how skin level … We think as marketers, A/B testing, which look, it does help us get a lot of insights, right? It is scientific if you’re not a scientist, but A/B testing, like Matt would say, is only skin deep. It’s part of what we’ve been able to get as men.
A/B testing does not tell you why people do what they do. A green versus a blue add to cart button does not give you any insight about why this person’s buying this vodka on the internet. Are they happy? Are they sad? I think that’s sort of the next frontier of this is truly understanding, not just A/B testing, but going beyond A/B testing.
GS:
Yeah. I agree. Lirio, my company, is doing that. We deliver messages that are assembled by artificial intelligence and then optimized matched to the individual recipient through AI. If you think about it, it’s tens of thousands of different message variations, continually tested and optimized all the time. It’s A/B testing on steroids. People may be wondering why we’re talking about memory on a behavior change podcast, but you write that memory is more than a record of yesterday’s news. It also influences how we behave in the future. In fact, I want to expand on your definition of memory that you gave earlier. You said memory is our brains attempt at connecting us to our past, but then you go on to say, to optimize our future.
You also write, “To make decisions and move forward, the brain has to generate and maintain a consistent sense of self. If we’re going to make predictions about what is going to be good or bad for us, we have to understand who we are.” Talk about the role of memory on influencing future behavior, if you would.
MJ:
Yeah, absolutely. This is directly related to one of the most robust findings in cognitive psychology, which is cognitive dissonance, is this general idea that we have to see ourselves as consistent beings. We have to see ourselves as having a consistent set of beliefs. When things are inconsistent, when there’s some sort of dissonance there, we have to act in a way which resolves this conflict. If you are a vegetarian, you’ve been a vegetarian your whole life, and then whatever happens, you just dab along some delicious Tennessee barbecue. You were tempted into that, which seems perfectly understandable. You have to explain this to yourself. If you say, well, I’m just not a vegetarian anymore, or are you saying, “Well, I didn’t really eat it. I just nibbled around the edges.” You have to do something to explain this away or else you literally have psychic psychological discomfort there.
This is something which is oftentimes used in the marketing field because they’ll set things up in a way where they pin different beliefs that the consumer has about themselves against each other. Then one way of resolving that conflict is to of course, buy the product. If the advertisement is compelling enough, you say, you’re only cool hip, whenever you buy an iPhone, if that advertisement is compelling enough, you’d have to say to yourself, “Well, that’s true,” because I’m accepting this advertisement at face value, the only way I can either call myself a loser and I’m not cool, or I can be cool and buy an iPhone and I’ve resolved the conflict that way, which of course is the way the company would like you to resolve these things.
PG:
Yeah. You see this a lot in lifestyle brands. I’m sure some of the bigger lifestyle brands know about the cognitive dissonance this is creating, but I’m also sure some of them don’t realize because they think we’re selling a lifestyle that happens to be attached to said product. But ultimately look, if you’re cool, if you are active, if you are the kind of person who is more aggressive than assertive, you drink a Red Bull. Whatever that means. Look, there’s a group of people that go, “I don’t care what you think about me, Red Bull. I don’t buy into that.” It doesn’t matter what you say. There’s no cognitive dissonance. These people are congruent, but then if you’re on the fence, yeah. I’m either going to buy a Red Bull or this crazy SUV and do back flips off of a mountain, even though I don’t even live near a mountain or I’m not cool.
It happens below the surface. I’m not quite sure Nissan or Red Bull know this for sure. Those who have behavior scientists on staff, they’ve got to know this. When I think the most perverse example of this is beauty because I think they do know this. I think what they call their beauty products and just how they pitch it, it’s getting better because now we have this theme of do good now throughout products, and consumers are slowly waking up to this. They’re not buying it. The beauty industry, especially it used to be all these punchlines kind of like a pharmacy commercial, but for beauty. At the end of it, it said, if you want to be beautiful, this was a subtext, they never said directly, buy a set product. Shampoos with everything.
Now, companies like Suave were 20 years ahead of this, but now a lot of companies are not using that type of messaging anymore because consumers are waking up to just how perverse that might be, but it’s creating cognitive dissonance in a lot of people, especially products targeted at teens.
GS:
Our memory influences how we see ourselves. How we see ourselves influences the decisions we make about how to move forward into the future. Then in chapter four, you drop something super scary, which is it’s possible to implant memories, which means someone could affect how I see and thereby change the choices I make going forward.
MJ:
Absolutely. This is work pioneered by Elizabeth Loftus down at UC Irvine. She was really the first pioneers of this idea that memory is just incredibly suggestible. Just like our perceptual systems where we’re using heuristics, and this is a very creative process. If you sort of paint a general picture, the memory system will actually recreate this as an actual memory. She would bring people into the lab and she’s like, “Well, I just heard from your mom and your mom told me about this amazing trip you guys did to an amusement park. Don’t you remember? And you wanted the cotton candy and it was such a beautiful day outside. There was clown.” All these things that you have in your visual lexicon, and you know what a clown looks like, you know what this looks like, you know what a cotton candy looks like. You’ve probably been somewhere like that.
It seems feasible, and you’ll actually misremember this entire experience. Look, the interesting thing is here, she’ll do these studies longitudinally, and to bring people back into the lab. It turns out these falsely implanted memories are actually just as strong and just as robust as actual memories that are verified and actually happened. Just a really sort of extreme example of just how fallible our memory system is.
GS:
Matt, is that because we don’t process them differently? That information that’s being fed to us is processed the same way as the information we gain through experience?
MJ:
Yeah. All we really have are these nodes in our semantic system. When these nodes connect and these nodes coalesce in a certain way, we have confidence that this is a durable memory and that’ll factor into our semantic knowledge and our episodic knowledge, and we’ll put it into our coherent sense of self. But these things are just constellations of neural activity. You can just as easily put those in through suggestion as you can through actual experience. There’s actually some research done at Stanford a few years ago, showing that you could do this with virtual reality and on a much shorter timescale. They brought younger children to lab, and they had them use a virtual reality headset to go swimming with dolphins.
Then they had a great experience, had a good time. It’s virtual reality, it’s cool. These are 10 year old kids, they brought them back into the lab two weeks later, and a significant portion of them actually thought that they had gone to Sea World that weekend and actually swam with dolphins. As these technologies become to proliferate a bit more AR and BR, yeah, I think we haven’t really looked at the memory effects of these things as much as we should have, especially with children.
GS:
A reminder that we’re talking with Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman, authors of the new book, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brain. Not a lot of time left, but a question I did want to ask is, what do you think people will remember about our COVID-19 experience? What are your predictions about how those memories are likely to shape future behavior? I’m going to ask you to speculate wildly here.
PG:
Yeah. I’ll take a crack at it. I’ll take a crack at the second half. I’ll let Matt take both. You take a look at product adoption cycle, and you take a look at … a lot of this work has been done, and you see the early adopters and the early middle adopters, the fare adopters and the late adopters. Well, one thing COVID has done is it has pushed and expedited the adoption curve. I think one industry in particular will be changed, and it’s telehealth. It’s telehealth. There are some really fascinating stuff coming out of telehealth. We were seeing adoption of telehealth actually be higher amongst 55 and older, typically late adopter of technologies than we have seen with millennials and gen Z.
Obviously, it is based on need because 20-year olds don’t go to the doctor as much as 55 and over, but nonetheless, telehealth, which we were eventually going to get there is now at the forefront of medical care. I think it’s forcing us as consumers to consider the fact that we don’t really need to go see our doctor in person for everything we do, maybe for 50%, whatever that percentage is for you and your health. I think because of that, telehealth is now … that is the only healthcare we can get at the moment. That’s one. I think telehealth is going to be expediting, is going to be supercharging through the adoption cycle.
GS:
COVID-19 creates an inflection point that creates an opportunity for people to consider telehealth who maybe haven’t before, and probably opportunities to create behavioral nudges that hasten that transition.
PG:
Yes. You did a much better job of articulating than I did. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, Greg. Thank you for summarizing. 100%.
GS:
Matt, what’s your take on that question?
MJ:
It’s a really good question. I think it’s a crazy event in people’s lives and we do have a strong need to make sense of these things retrospectively. I think this is really where the narrative bias will take place. It’s really up to us to sort of reconstruct the past as we see fit. I think what’s really interesting thing here is, is these framing of facts when it comes to memory. If we come to think of this, and everyone will have their own frame, everyone’s narrative bias will take them on a different direction here, but if we’re able to frame this as a challenge, this is a challenge that ultimately pushed us and we got through it and we’re better because of it. It led us to become closer in our relationships, become more resilient, whatever the case may be. We’re going to look on this back on this experience pretty fondly.
This is an experience in which, yeah, it was tough, it was difficult, but it was part of this greater process. Imagine you’re climbing a mountain in minutes. It’s physically painful to climb this mountain if you’re sore and you got broken … whatever the case may be. You get to the top, and you’re looking back on all of those, that physical strain in that pain in a positive light, because that was part of the challenge that brought you to the stomach. For me, if we’re able to frame this in terms of a challenge and we’re able to see the positives which will come of it, and hopefully there are positives, then I think we’ll look back on this. We can look back on this with relative fondness.
GS:
The book is called Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brain. We have touched ever so, briefly on two of 12 chapters. I encourage you to get the book and dig deeper into all of them because it is well worth it. Thank you, Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman for being guests on the Behavior Change Podcast by Lirio today.
MJ:
Thank you so much.
PG:
Thank you … Yeah, it was a pleasure.
GS:
You’ve been listening to the Behavior Change Podcast by Lirio. Lirio provides an email-based behavioral engagement solution that uses machine learning, persona-based messaging, and behavioral science to help organizations motivate the people they serve to achieve better outcomes, on the web at lirio.co, or follow us on Twitter @lirio_llc.