Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

If you’re interested in establishing and maintaining your brand as your targeted customers’ preferred choice (and why wouldn’t you be?), understanding and applying Predecisional Distortion – a behavioral economics irrationality – could be your answer.  In this article, we define Predecisional Distortion and describe how you can apply it to establish and maintain your brand’s preference and choice.

There is so much that we can see in this world, yet did you know what we can’t see can in fact be perceived by the brain? It sounds pretty scary when our behavior is influenced by factors that we can’t see or explain, but it is so true. This actually happened at the 23rd Annual Convention of Association of Psychological Science where a group of psychologists sitting in the same room were presented an invisible target prime by a French psychologist named Stanislas Dehaene. Dr. Dehaene has dedicated most of his research career to the study of consciousness using priming methods.

Before we get into the “business” of this article, if you have 3 minutes and 33 seconds to spare, we invite you to listen to Amy Winehouse’s version of the classic song Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? It’s a great track and we think you’ll enjoy it.  Just click on the picture below.  When you’re finished, return to the article and we’ll explain how it applies.

One of the Sentient Applied Choice Architecture principles is anchoring and adjustment –defined as the influence of an arbitrary number on subsequent judgments of quantity or value (Chapman & Johnson, 2002). In this principle, the value (or “anchor”) serves as a reference point for consumers, and they form their subsequent judgments on value based on this anchor. For example, research from Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) showed that participants who were asked to recall the last two digits of their social security number whose digits were high (e.g., 76) were willing to pay more for a bottle of wine than participants who recalled the last two digits of their social security number whose digits were low (e.g., 12).

Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of people who drink impulsively? Most recently, research on its neural mechanism presented preliminary evidence of how such behavior is governed by the dynamic interplay between the automatic and the consciously controlled systems. In a study conducted at Claremont Graduate University, researchers including Dr. Susan Ames studied brain responses of heavy drinkers (those who consumed over 15 drinks a week and demonstrated binge drinking) and those of light drinkers, when these drinkers completed an Implicit Association Task involving alcohol related words paired with positive or neutral words.

Philosophers have long been interested in how and why people make judgments in moral dilemmas. Imagine the following scenario (let’s call it the “switch scenario”): a trolley is heading down the tracks toward five people. The only way to save those five lives is to hit a switch that diverts the track down a different track which will kill one person. During this scenario, most people would agree that it’s morally OK to kill the one person to save five others. This is referred to as a utilitarian judgment.

Take a look at this image. What do you see? You might be saying: “This is a smiling car.” Is this car really smiling?  I don’t think so.  People smile, and maybe animals, but not cars. But if you see a smiling car, you’re not crazy.  You’ve just “anthropomorphized” it. This means that you’ve imagined it as a person.

In our recent paper on Hot State Decision-Making we discussed the perfect storm of providing consumers with immediate visceral delight while simultaneously providing emotional benefits relevant to long-term goals. This formula provides both short-term and long term benefit thereby maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for your customer base. A recent article by Khan & Dhar (2010) in the Journal of Marketing Research shows an innovative method of delivering this perfect storm for your customers through careful framing of the discount on your bundled offerings (a bundle is an offer of a second item with the purchase of first item; usually a discount is offered when purchased together – think Amazon’s “better together” discounts).

The Garden Variety... How do we know what others are feeling? How do we gauge our audience in social interactions? Paul Ekman, a prominent psychological researcher, suggests that it’s all in our facial expressions. Even if you’re the type of person who keeps your emotions to yourself, Ekman’s research shows that humans are psychologically disposed to show our emotions on our faces.  Analyzing facial expressions in others, thus, is one way in which we empathize with other’s emotions. And it’s not always something you’re conscious of. Consequently, we don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves; we display them right on our faces!

Let’s play a game: There are ten coins on the table. The rules of the game are simple. I propose a way we should split the coins; you can either accept or reject my proposal. If you accept my terms, we get the coins according to my proposed split. If you reject them, we both get nothing. That’s it, and no second chances for positive reciprocity. Sound easy? Well, it’s more complicated than you might think.  Let’s play anyway: