Monthly Archives: August 2013

Choice is nice, but also confusing. Research about choice is nice, but also sometimes confusing. The classic psychological experiment on choice is probably the one involving jams in a supermarket. A choice of six was found to lead to substantially more jam being sold than a choice of 24. You may attract people to your abundant display, but they get confused and end up not buying. Other studies on choice have found that when people do choose from a large range they end up feeling less good about their decision: with the gap between good and bad inevitably condensed, unconscious nagging doubts remain about the option selected. However, the situation isn’t as simple as to say that reducing choice will lead to higher sales and happier customers. Customers may reject you for having too little choice. Alternatively, range rationalisation may remove a specific product that someone wants, leading them to […]

If there was to be one consistent theme that runs through all the studies about consumers that I find really interesting, it would be the way in which people allow something that shouldn’t make any difference to what their thinking change their actions or attitudes. There’s no escaping the fact that this is something all of us are capable at one time or another and, the truth is, we do it far more than we would ever be happy admitting to ourselves. Whether it’s people finding a female researcher more attractive because they happen to be standing on a wobbly bridge, or consumers thinking that the same product is more desirable because of the music playing in the room, there are a host of studies that show that we’re routinely influenced outside of conscious awareness. Of course, the fact that such influences are so easily demonstrated in properly controlled experiments […]

Meet Willow, she’s going to be helping me with various psychological projects over the coming months. You may recall a previous article where I reviewed a study that looked at how the hormone released when we see an image like that of a puppy (oxytocin) had been shown to increase donations in response to adverts for good causes (here’s a link), and people reported empathising more with the focus of the ad they had seen. This is a case of misattribution: we experience an ‘instinctive’ reaction in our unconscious mind, and misdirect the resulting feeling to something else we encounter around the same time. Of course, you can’t go around squirting hormones up people’s noses, but you can surround your product with oxytocin-inducing imagery (Willow is available for photo shoots, but growing very quickly). Whipping out a picture of a puppy isn’t necessarily that easy either. But there are lots […]

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right way of phrasing something, but for the most part our flow feels natural. We learn the rules of grammar from an early age. And we learn them implicitly for the most part. Certainly, when I was at school, no one explained grammar formally. What little I was taught explicitly about tenses and adverbs and the like, was gleaned in a couple of years of studying French. The challenge of which might have been slightly easier if, prior to that, I’d had a clue what, say, a past participle was: quel fromage, or do I mean dommage, or should I say il est dommage? Even without realising it we are often making a choice to express ourselves in one particular way when another might apply equally well. But here’s the question: do such choices matter? If the meaning is essentially the same should be […]