The Blog

Much has been written in recent times about the so-called wisdom of crowds.  This is the theory that aggregating the information in groups from individuals will result in decisions that are better than would have been arrived at by any individual member of that group.  Some claim that such decisions will also be better than those from experts or expert committees. The difficulty with all of these theories is priming. The information that is imparted to extract the view of the crowd has the capacity to influence the outcome.  If this ‘prime’ information is wrong the ‘wise crowd’ won’t correct this bias. It’s one thing when the answer being solicited is basic and straightforward: for example, “How much does this ox weigh?” It’s quite another when the question is more subjective and complex: “Is this the right political party to reverse the country’s economic troubles?” In the case of more […]

I have believed for a long time that asking people what they think is a desperately unreliable way to go about understanding what they really think. Jessica Rabbit, the main love interest in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit famously complained, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”. I feel very similarly about people’s capacity for inaccurate portrayals of themselves, “They’re not bad, their brains are just designed that way”. Of course, accepting that people are poor witnesses to their own thoughts is problematic: It requires us to accept we might be similarly afflicted. It means a lot of what passes for good judgment in terms of understanding consumers is not very good at all. Once you start accepting the role of the unconscious mind in your own behaviour it can be very helpful. There are ways of guarding against making bad decisions (such as by making checklists) and when you’re […]

The effect of advertising is starting to rumble in my house. My children, now aged 9 and 7, have finally been allowed to watch commercial television. It is illuminating to track the “I really want…” in light of this additional influence, the school playground having already nurtured desires of its own. Recently my daughter explained that she ‘really wanted’ to buy some kind of squirting dinosaur toy. They sounded dreadful and I questioned whether they would really live up to her expectations: I also asked whether or not she might have been unduly influenced by the excited children that I assumed had been depicted in the advert. To her credit she took little convincing that she might be wasting her money. Such marketing influences aren’t always bad. Recently a group visited my children’s school to do a demonstration of skipping (or, as I believe American’s call it, jumping rope, which […]

In the past week there has been a fuel shortage in the UK. This wasn’t the result of any change to the supply of fuel, but by dramatically increased demand. That demand was triggered by government advice that people should fill up their cars because a strike by petrol tanker drivers was quite likely. The media, who were of course the ones who were so quick to pass on the views of government ministers and report the threat of strike action from the drivers’ union, were then surprised when consumers started queuing for fuel and stations ran dry. Why, they wondered, were people queuing for fuel when there was no confirmed strike? The answer, from a psychological standpoint, is very simple: loss aversion…. … with a bit of social proof, some availability bias and the influence of authority. But not necessarily in that order. First was the availability bias and influence […]