The “Brain Glitches” Advertisers Use to Manipulate You Every Day
A Marketer’s Guide to Cognitive Biases
“If your brain can be manipulated like this and you don’t understand it, you’re like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. I mean you are really giving a lot of corner to the external world that you can not afford to give.”
— Charlie Munger
One of the most common accepted truths in persuasion is that if you want to influence someone, don’t appeal to their reason.
On the surface level there is nothing wrong with that, but I have noticed that this truism has seemed to morph from “Don’t appeal to reason” into you should appeal to emotion to persuade instead.
Is it better to appeal to emotions instead of reason though?
I think the answer to that question depends on why we make irrational decisions in the first place.
If we all made purchasing decisions based off of emotion, selling anything to anyone would be a VERY complicated process that includes an incredible degree of customization per individual…
Obviously people can have a wide variety of attitudes towards even one topic, so what would advertising based off of emotion even be created by? Guessing?
The Huettel Lab at Duke did an experiment around the use of emotions in decision making in the March 29th edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. (The experiment was specifically geared towards exploring something called the “Framing effect”, which we’ll talk about later, but for now apply the following information to “irrational decisions” and not only “framing effect decisions”).
In this experiment, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure the brain activity in 143 participants as they made decisions between whether they wanted to select Option A or Option B.
“One theory is that framing is caused by emotion, perhaps because the prospect of accepting a guaranteed win feels good while accepting a guaranteed loss feels scary or bad. Another theory is that the Framing Effect results from a decision-making shortcut. It may be that a strategy of accepting sure gains and avoiding sure losses tends to work well, and adopting this blanket strategy saves us from having to spend time and mental effort fully reasoning through every single decision and all of its possibilities.”
These fMRI images were then compared to over 8,000 other fMRI images (from other experiments) that specifically showed “emotional” brain patterns.
Shockingly though, when these participants made decisions, their brains did not look like the patterns for “emotion” at all! Instead, they looked like this…
“As a group, when our participants made choices consistent with the Framing Effect (for our purposes an ‘irrational decision’), their average brain activity was most similar to the brain maps representing mental disengagement (i.e. ‘resting’ or ‘default’). When they made choices inconsistent with the Framing Effect (for our purposes a ‘rational decision’, eg being ‘inconsistent with the framing effect’ means the participant chose something that IS in their best interest), their average brain activity was most similar to the brain maps representing mental engagement (i.e. ‘working’ or ‘task’).”
The most important point, however, is this:
“The degree to which each trial’s brain activity resembled brain maps associated with emotion, however, was NOT predictive of choices… These findings point to a role for neuroscience in shaping long-standing psychological theories in decision science.”
These findings support the theory that decision making, especially irrational decision making, may not be explained by “emotion” but instead by a “lack of mental effort”.
Let’s jump back to this “framing effect” — what is it? Basically, it is a way of presenting information that researchers have used to reliably get people to make choices not in their best interest.
It’s one of many techniques that can be used to create this “lack of mental effort”, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today: the repeatable, predictable ways that advertisers create this “lack of mental effort” in you every day.
There are plenty of cognitive biases to explore, but in this article we’re going to focus specifically on the most common cognitive biases advertising exploits. I hope that you will find this information beneficial to crafting your own persuasive advertising, but you may walk away from this saying to yourself “Wait a second, I’M the one being manipulated here!” 😉
You’re Dumber Than a Dog
Inhis Personal Power II CD set, Tony Robbins tells a story about one of his workshops. During one of his Date With Destiny seminars he was on stage doing his thing, jumping around and telling his stories enthusiastically.
The way that the stage was set up for this segment, they brought out a suit of armor — like a knight’s armor — and plopped it on one side of the stage.
So while he’s walking around stage doing his thing, sometimes there is some feedback in the microphone.
At first he ignored it, but it happened a few times and people in the audience started to notice it…
When your brain notices something out of the ordinary, like feedback from a microphone that was previously not giving feedback, it tries to link this occurrence to some type of stimulus.
Usually, your brain will link out of the ordinary occurrences to the newest stimulus…
So soon enough the audience started to shout at him “It’s the armor! Tony stop walking by the suit!”
And Tony said “So you think it’s the suit huh?” and proceeded to stand RIGHT next to the armor for the rest of the segment. Until the feedback went away.
And guess what?
When he stepped away from the armor, the feedback started again!
It turns out that the audience was wrong, and the interference was actually coming from a nearby fire where the emergency services’ communications were interfering with their on-stage PA system.
Why was everybody in the room falsely convinced it was the suit of armor through?
Because Tony’s audience just got Pavloved.
“¾ of advertising works on pure association.”
— Charlie Munger
Coke is the classic example of a successful Pavlovian classical conditioning strategy.
I have written in the past about how Coke has skillfully attached its product to “everything American”, and then transitioned to associating Coke to “everything happy”.
Coke has known the power of classical conditioning since the early 1900’s when they moved away from marketing coke as “A high quality, refreshing soda”, to “The soda that makes you American” and now “The soda that makes you happy”.
When this conditioning is successful, it has the effect that every time you experience the feeling “happiness”, it triggers “Coke” in your brain.
Nir Eyal writes about this in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir writes A LOT on how today’s most popular digital apps like Facebook and Instagram use triggers, and have designed their products around those triggers, to keep you coming back for more.
Nir says that the more frequently the user experiences the trigger, the more powerful the association is for the product.
Facebook and Instagram hook onto the trigger “boredom”. How many times per day do you experience boredom? Probably a lot. How powerful of an emotion is it? Extremely powerful, boredom has the effect of creating an “itch” in your brain that you want to scratch — much like hunger.
Apps like Facebook and Instagram are designed to make scratching the “boredom” itch as easy as possible.
So when you’re bored, what’s naturally the easiest thing to do?
Are you going to go to your bookshelf, glance at all the titles, consider alllllll the options, then pick one?
Or will you unlock your phone, click, and scroll?
Think about Coke. How often do you get a craving for soda? Probably not as often as you experience “being happy”.
In this way Coke basically gets “free advertising”, by causing you to recall their product even when unprompted every time you experience an everyday emotion.
I couldn’t explain how to incorporate classical conditioning into your marketing any better than Nir himself. I highly recommend checking out this bomb interview he did with Pat Flynn where he goes in depth on how you can create habits around your business:
You’re Also Dumber Than A Mouse
Ifyou came into this article expecting to feel better about yourself afterwards you were DEAD WRONG!
Not only can you be tricked in the same way as dogs, but you can also be tricked the same way as mice and even pigeons…
You may have heard of the psychologist BF Skinner, who while unpopular with animal rights activists (I mean the man did dedicate most of his life to giving animals nervous breakdowns) also directed some ingenious experiments that lead to the discovery of many of the foundational truths in decision science.
Did you know that you can make pigeons superstitious?
Hungry pigeons were placed into experiment cages which only fed them pellets based off a timed interval, the dispensing of the food had no correlation to their behavior whatsoever and they developed some interesting behaviors to “explain” why they were getting this food:
“One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. The body generally followed the movement and a few steps might be taken when it was extensive. Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor. None of these responses appeared in any noticeable strength during adaptation to the cage or until the food hopper was periodically presented.”
How can you use this in your marketing?
The important takeaway from this psychological bias is that random, frequent rewards are powerful.
You can take this into your own marketing by incorporating it into your very own drip email campaign.
Create 5 or 6 pieces of valuable information (PDFs, videos, or even a longer email with the value detailed in the body text).
You don’t want to distribute these daily at the same time each day. You don’t want a predictable, automated seeming time (avoid sending at :00, :15, :30.. Instead send emails at odd times like :17 or :23).
Then have some fun with it! Keep the supply of information to your readers random, but constant. The first 5 days in which they join, overload them.
It might seem like “overloading” to you, but you would be surprised how frequently you can actually email your list without seeing a decrease in revenue.
Send them at least one communication per day, but feel free to surprise them with 2 emails on the same day during this period (I would say on Day 2 or 3, but you can experiment).
By “rushing” the subscribers with high value emails at random intervals, close together intervals you will facilitate them forming a powerful connection with you.
Why does this technique work? When somebody gives you something, it triggers something in the human brain that says “Okay, I am in debt to this person.” for the gift.
It sounds a little weird, but it happens at a subconscious level.
That’s not even the weirdest part though. The weirdest part is that the “debt” doesn’t seem to translate in your brain that “Okay Billy gave me a helpful guide, now I owe him a helpful guide”. Your brain doesn’t sense it as you needed to help the person in the same way.
The feeling of indebtedness “transfers” basically to other interactions you have with that person in the future.
So you and your friend Billy are at the bar grabbing a beer. You tell him that your business is struggling to get leads, and you’re not sure where to start looking for answers. He gives you a book and says it’s the best marketing book he’s ever read, and tells you how much it helped him change his business.
After taking that book, say Billy sends you an email a few days later and says that his son’s soccer team is doing a fundraiser and he asks you to buy some candy to support the team. You would feel obligated from the previous help from Billy to donate money to his son’s fundraiser. Even though the help that Billy gave you didn’t involve giving you money, and in fact his favor may not have even involved any economic loss for him at all — if he already owned the book he gave you.
Here’s one way that Mailchimp used this little random incentive trick on me:
After having been a Mailchimp subscriber for a few months, with no warning Mailchimp sent me some awesome socks out of the blue!
There is a great power in random rewards, even when the rewards are not spaced close together.
This had such a powerful effect on me that I actually have not left Mailchimp, despite the fact that I am unhappy with the automation options and I have already selected my competitor that I want to switch to. I just haven’t found the time to go through with switching, for some reason 😉
Photo of the Mailchimp socks 🙂
You’re a Sucker for a Good Story
Humans have been storytellers since the beginning of time. Whether it was cave painting, or good old fashioned verbal stories there is something about narrative in our DNA.
Sometimes, this is a problem.
A Stanford experiment from the 1980’s took a more in-depth look at this cognitive bias.
Say that you are good friends with a guy named John.
One day an adoption agency calls you up and explains that John has applied to adopt a child, and they want to know if you think he would make a good father.
“You may search your historical knowledge of John for evidence both consistent and inconsistent with our conception of a good father.”
Does John like kids? Has John interacted well with kids before?
We make judgements this way all the time. We search our brains for relevant information, and based off of what we can recall we will “perhaps in some Bayesian weighting scheme” use the information most easily available to us to make our judgement. (Another cognitive bias by the way.)
What Stanford found out is that what information you recall largely depends on how the information was presented to you.
Uh-oh…
Here’s how the experiment worked:
Each participant is going to render a legal verdict on a person charged allegedly with driving drunk, either guilty or not guilty.
To make these judgements, the participants read a series of legal arguments from a jury trial (note: they were not simulating the process of a real trial closely). They will read 2 sets of legal arguments, one from the prosecution and one from the defense.
The evidence was written either vividly, or nonvividly.
So half of the participants read a combination of a vivid prosecution argument, and a nonvivid defense argument. The other half of the participants had the reverse, a nonvivid prosecution and a vivid defense argument. (You can read some of the text of these arguments on page 3 of the literature.)
They were asked to make a judgement on this man a few times. Once immediately after consuming all of the information, and several times later — after having made the initial verdict.
What’s a little bit weird is that at first there is low correlation to the vividness of the information to a guilty/not guilty verdict.
48.8% of the vivid prosecution subjects declared the defendant guilty, while only 43.4% of the vivid defense subjects rendered a guilty verdict. So they are both almost as likely to decide guilty.
Something interesting happens the further away from the initial exposure to information you go though.
When asked again on their opinions later, the vivid prosecution group was a WHOPPING 52.4% more likely to judge the defendant as guilty.
Similarly, the vivid defense subjects DROPPED to only 39.5% of the subjects declaring the defendant guilty!
“In short, arguments that were disproportionately recallable in memory had a correspondingly disproportionate impact on judgments of apparent guilt.”
Or as Charlie Munger calls it, the “bias from misweighing over-vivid evidence”.
So why is some information “disproportionately recallable in memory”?
Because your brain is seduced by stories.
Here is the biological problem: Our brains are bombarded day in and day out with SO much sensory information there is literally no way to process it all. To try to process every single sound, every touch, every sight, every single day would be incredibly painful for your brain. It would take so much time to do this, you would not have any mental resources for output — for thinking.
So our brains handle this huge mass of data, everything that your senses pick up every day, by putting things in order to comprehend them.
“First this happened. Then that. Afterwards, this happened next…”
That’s the reason why human brains are so infatuated with stories, because our brains are literally structured to process information as a narrative (a narrative is just a sequence of events in its most basic form).
Another way this “narrative infatuation” can glitch your brain out is something Charlie Munger calls the Reason-Respecting Tendency.
Dr. Robert Cialdini details the perfect example of this Reason-Respecting Tendency in his book Influence. In the book he details an experiment done by psychologist Ellen Langer and her team at Harvard.
Do you remember the pain of trying to use your college’s library during finals week?
The whole building is overflowing with students, full of nervous chatter, and those LINES for the printer…
Enter Ellen Langer.
In her Harvard experiment, Ellen Langer had researchers approach Harvard students who were in line for the copier. She wanted the researcher to try to convince people to let them cut in line, basically.
There were 3 versions of an “excuse” that the researcher would give to try to get the subject to agree to let them skip in front of the line:
Version 1 (Request only): “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”
Version 2 (Request + Reason): “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”
Version 3 (Request + Silly Reason): “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”
Which one of these do you think was the most successful in convincing subjects to let the researcher cut them in line? The results may surprise you…
This beautiful picture comes from James Clear, see the post here: http://jamesclear.com/copy-machine-study
The real excuse AND the silly excuse were almost equally successful in convincing the subjects.
That’s the power narrative has over your brain.
How can you use this in your marketing?
You can use your newfound understanding of the Narrative Fallacy to improve your marketing very quickly! Something that most businesses struggle with is understanding the difference between a feature of their product and a benefit of their product.
Why is the distinction important? Because when people make a purchasing decision, they want to know “What’s in it for me?”.
How you answer “What’s in it for me?” is by spelling out the benefits.
You can use your knowledge of the narrative fallacy to easily turn any product feature into a benefit!
Here’s what you should do:
Take out a pen and a paper and list out all of the features of your product.
Let’s use a Swiss Army knife as a quick example.
What are the features of a Swiss Army knife?
It has a screwdriver, scissors, pliers, maybe a bottle opener, it’s small, it doesn’t break easily, it doesn’t rust (I think).
Now take each individual product feature that you have listed out, and for each single line item write out a story about how that feature helped someone.
“Bob was on a camping trip with his children one day. Just him, and his two sons Luke and Trey enjoying some crisp clear water and the great outdoors. After not too long, they got their first carp on the line! It was the BIGGEST carp that Luke had ever caught, and that beast really put up a fight. It took all 3 of them to reel that bad boy in! Luke and Trey get a hold on the wriggling monster, and are trying to hold it still while their dad searches for something to pull the hook out. While Bob is frantically searching their car and their gear bags for the pliers, he has the sinking feeling in his stomach that he must have forgot them at home…. Right as he’s fretting he’ll have to tell his sons that they won’t be able to eat the carp just yet, Bob REMEMBERS something… He threw his Swiss Army knife in his pocket on the way out the door! Because it was so easy to grab his Swiss Army knife without a second thought, Bob’s fishing day with his sons was saved! And they had a happy time for the rest of the day.”
For some of the product features, you may have feedback from customers or know their stories of what their favorite features are.
If you don’t have a ton of feedback for a particular line item, you’re the business owner! Your product is lightweight. Great. Why is that a desirable design feature? Do people struggle with competitors products who are too heavy? What was the functional reason behind the feature, and create a story around that.
In your sales pages, product descriptions (on-site), or emails you should never list another feature again.
Instead, use your knowledge of the Narrative Fallacy and tell stories of how your product will help your customer.
If you want to see more examples of turning a feature into a story, look no further than the master pitchman Billy Mays.
You will learn a treasure trove of information on storytelling by watching how Billy weaves stories through the tapestry of his pitch (stories about both himself, and other product customers) and creates concrete, vivid examples of the product’s benefits.
It’s not the Question, it’s How You Ask
Back to the framing effect from the Duke study.
The framing effect is a cognitive bias that simply says you will make a different choice to the same question depending on how it’s worded.
It incorporates a few different concepts from psychology and economics that are key to understanding how our brains evaluate decisions.
Prospect theory is a concept from behavioral economics. It states that people make decisions based off of the ultimate potential gains and losses to them, and not based on the intended end result.
What that means to you is when you’re pitching a client, your end goal is to initiate a transaction for your product. Their end goal is to avoid a loss first, and to make a slam dunk second.
Be aware of how those goals are at odds.
Prospect theory also has some insights into how people make their decisions based off of their “common sense”, following rules called heuristics.
According to prospect theory, people make decisions in two phases:
- After having all of the options presented to them, they have an “editing” period where they will try to eliminate options. When you present a prospect with 3 different packages, the first thing they do is try to decide is how the options relate to one another. Are any of the options equivalent ($120 for one year or $10 per month)? This is the stage where some of the framing effects can trip decisions up — more on that in a moment…
- Then they have an “evaluation” phase where they essentially try to decide how “useful” the remaining options are, assign the “usefulness” (called utility in economics) a number value, and ultimately rank them and make their selection.
So the framing effect is the cognitive bias at play here.
It says that people will make a different choice, to the same question depending on if the outcome is written as a gain or as a loss.
This should be ringing bells for you! That means that in your own writing, you need to be paying attention to whether or not you’re describing the product as giving the client something or helping the client avoid something. You want to do the second. (According to the framing effect.)
To explain in further detail what a gain or a loss look like, let’s go to another experiment:
This experiment (study here) comes to us from Harvard, by a researcher named Roland Fryer. (Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame was also a co-author of the study!)
The researchers were trying to study the framing effect in how teachers received merit pay, and its relationship to the outcomes in student’s academic performance.
The study included 150 teachers, and over 3,200 students across 9 schools. It looked at the student’s Iowa Test of Basic Skills results to measure “academic performance”.
Group A: Teachers in the control group got the “standard” process of receiving merit pay. You get your normal salary, teach your classes, the school tallies your class’s scores up at the end and if you meet the mark you get the bonus pay (~$8,000).
Group B: Teachers in this experimental group got a $8,000 lump sum upfront, that they would have to pay back at the end of the year if they did not meet their goals.
According to the authors, reframing the rewards in this way…
“Suggests that there may be significant potential for exploiting loss aversion in the pursuit of both optimal public policy and the pursuit of profits”
How can you use this in your marketing?
Well, the most obvious is by incorporating a risk reversal in your website copy, offer, and other marketing communications.
You probably already have some type of “Satisfaction or your money back!” guarantee for your business…
You can easily turn that into a full risk reversal by taking it from “or your money back” to “Or I’ll pay YOU!”
Prospect theory is also an interesting lense to view your copywriting through.
We talked about incorporating stories earlier.
You may even incorporate some element of story into your existing marketing.
But what story are you telling?
Instead of telling the “Your profits are going to blow through the roof, this is the best damn product you’ve ever used in your life, you DEFINITELY WON’T BE SORRY so please pay attention to meeee” story, flip the script.
Think about what your target market is trying to avoid. Think about their annoyances with your competitors products (hint: Look up your competitor’s reviews on sites like Yelp and Google Reviews, or search “COMPETITOR NAME” + 🙁 on Twitter).
Instead of telling them how great you’ll make their life, tell them how terrible their life is without you.
I hope you enjoyed my guide to cognitive biases 🙂 Leave a response and let me know if you want more articles like this!
If you want to learn more about these topics, here are some next steps:
- Poor Charlie’s Almanac
- Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products
- Influence
- You Are Not So Smart
- Predictably Irrational
- Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being
Also check out these free resources: