Persuasion: Affect, decisions and Neuromarketing

MS3305

Persuasion

1. Recapping Affect (MS2306)2. The Techniques of

Neuromarketing3. Independent Reading: Notes on

Gabriel Tarde’s Society of Imitation

Affect and Deciding

Recap from MS2306

To Influence?

To Affect?

• What was affected?

• What was influenced?

• Scores go down with sound turned off

The Atmosphere of Affect

Insubstantiality of affect makes it

difficult to touch. It has no

substance, but it does have an influence… a

force…

Affect, Communication and the Senses

Pheromones affect behavior or physiology

Regarded as top of the hierarchy of the senses

Pheromones and Decisions

Firm adds smell to video gamesSee also Jussi Parikka: Insect Theory of Media: An Archaeology of Animals, Technology and Cultural Theory.

To be published by Minnesota University Press - Posthumanities Series

HCI

• The focusing of– Attention– Understanding – Memory

• Cognitive framework to understand decision making processes

Emotional Design

• Still focusing on decision-making processes

• But moving increasingly towards emotional experiences

• Subconscious, beneath conscious awareness

• Affect = (visceral)– Rapid judgments,

determined by environmental pressures

– Safety– Danger

• Gut Feelings• Queasy, uneasy, tense,

edgy, shocked, jolted, – Muscles tighten – Digestive system upset

• Jump out your skin = affect

• Cognitive

• Consciousness, arrives late, after affect

• Info processing • Interpretation • Making sense of the

world

• Decision-making?

MS3305

Need to consider emotional design in terms of the module debate

As part of consumer economy

The essays

Emotional Design & Brands

• Norman’s Emotional Design occurs ‘in the world of products…’

• ‘Brands are all about emotions’

– They ‘draw the consumer towards the product’

– Emotional branding is about building relationships with users…

(Norman pp. 59-60)

New Media Producer/Consumer Relation Nigel Thrift (2008)

• Producers of commodities and brands establish passionate, affective relationship with consumers (p. 245).

• The corporate exploitation of noncognitive and pre-discursive realm of the user

Thrift

Corporations are in the business of making

‘hormonal splashes through increasing contact with consumers'

Attempts to manipulate the emotional mood of consumers

Consumer arousal

The ‘generation of passions’

The added value of emotions and affects

Sensory design of commodities

Sensory Design

Scented laptops

Norman’s claim“You cannot escape affect”

1. All three levels interact with each other

2. Bottom up driven by perception and gut feelings/reactions

3. Top down driven by thought

4. Everything has a cognitive and affective component

“You cannot escape affect”

• Cognitive assigns “meaning” – culturally learned responses

• Affective assigns “value” – changes how we think

Persuasion and the New Media

Techniques of neuromarketing – Shifts in cognitive

science/neuroscience

Watch this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBDvj2L7eb4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBLb3NZu1_4Damasio speaks at the Neuromarketing World Forum 2014http://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/damasio-does-neuromarketing/Nielson Neurofocus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_74vS5Zsis

White Paper on Persuasionposition paper for neuromarketing

– Persuasion and Engagement

• Watchwords of advertising

1. Consumers spend less time in captive environments

2. Focus on grabbing the ever-thinning slice of consumer attention

3. Understanding the level to which consumers are engaged and persuaded in the brief moments they interact with the brand, product, service, or show

– • TV advertising – • Radio advertising – • Print advertising – • Billboards– • Live event advertising – • Internet banners and text

advertising – • Interactive content – • Product placement

Eye-Mind Hypothesisvision, attention, conscious

thought• Just & Carpenter’s “Eye-

mind” hypothesis (1976)

• ‘What a person is looking at is assumed to indicate the thought “on top of the stack” of cognitive processes’

• ‘Eye-movement recordings can provide a dynamic trace of where a person’s attention is being directed in relation to a visual display'[i] Poole, A. & Ball, L. J. (2005). Eye Tracking in Human-Computer Interaction and. Usability Research: Current Status and Future Prospects. In Ghaoui, Claude (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction. Idea Group, pp. 211-219

Traces pathway between what enters the eye and the

mind• Follows a glint in the eye of the

consumer… emits an infrared light which reflects onto the eye (a corneal reflection)

• Fixations records duration of attention

• Saccades measures movement from one fixation to another

• Scanpaths fixations + saccadic movements

• Heat Map

• most attention = ‘hot’ • less attention = ‘cold’

Feature of usability testing and interface design

Heat Maps

Cognitive approach in HCI

• ‘If we know that people are distracted, often involuntarily, how is it possible to get their attention again without allowing them to miss the “window of opportunity”’

(Preece et al p. 101)

Blending techniques like EEG and Eye-Tracking

• However, since mid-1990s, measuring what is being attended to has extended beyond reasoned consciousness

• Tapping into unconscious responses

• Eye tracking +EEG =

• Attention +spontaneous and unconscious – attraction– affective engagement– emotional responses

Blending EEG with other Physiological Measures

– Skin temperature– Facial movement– Eye-tracking

– all measure the effects of the brain response or the consumer’s expression of that response

MethodsThe preferred method

EEG (Electroencephalogra

m - (l k tr - n-s f -l -gr m)

Measures electrical voltage in brain activity directly linked to the activity of neurons

\

• A system developed around emerging ideas within neurophysiology, neuroscience and cognitive science in recent decades concerning the relation between

cognition and emotion Watch James Bond Test

EEG + Eye Tracking Output.mov

Automatic emotion recognition software

Demo download

http://www.visual-recognition.nl/

"If It Feels Good Do It" : Using Neuromarketing to Go Beyond

Gabriel Tarde

Why Tarde?

Provides a persuasion theory of affect, suggestibility and imitation

Two Sociologies (in a nutshell)

Durkheim

Functionalism

• Collective conscious determines the individual conscious

• How the macro (society as a “whole”) determines the micro (micro-level)

• Social facts exert influence on individuals

Tarde

Microsociology

• Collective unconscious • How point-to-point micro-level

relations or encounters produce “social wholes”

• The whole as a manifestation of the micro

Durkheim grasps the social as distinct from psychology &

biology

• “… every time a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may rest assured that the explanation

is false.” [Durkheim,

RMS, 1894: 129]

Microsociology

• Tarde provides an… ‘understanding of social ‘associations’, of co-operation, with no distinction made between Nature and Society’ (See Lazzarato, 2005 p. 17)

Tarde the Neuroscientist?

• “Nothing, however, is less scientific than the establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost mechanical habit?”

Preface to the Second Edition of The Laws of Imitation xi

Tardean Persuasion Theory

• The magnetic pull of points of fascination, intoxicating glories and celebrity narratives

Tardean Persuasion Theory

Imitation-suggestibility

• Passions transmitted through media, mostly unawares

• Occurs at intersection between– Culture of attraction – Biologically hardwired

inclination

– Both of which can be manipulated

[i] Thrift, Nigel “Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of Propensity”. A conference paper delivered at the Social Science and Innovation Conference Royal Society of the Arts (RSA), London. Paper archived on the conference website at http://www.aimresearch.org/uploads/File/Presentations/2009/FEB/NIGEL%20THRIFT%20PAPER.pdf (accessed August 2009). p. 2

Mirror neuron hypothesis

We are connected by brain circuitry that ‘fire[s] when we either perform a given action or see someone else perform the same action’ (Lakeoff p. 39) Tina Gonsalves

Mirror Neurons = Empathy

• The mirror neuron hypothesis

• Adds theoretical support to explanations of how empathy might work, particularly in terms of the sharing of feelings, compassion, admiration and even mind reading.

Lakeoff p. 39.

[

• ‘…a plausible neurophysiological explanation for the means by which the existence of the other is etched into the brain so that we are able to intuit what the other is thinking – we are able to ‘mindread’ - not only because we see others’ emotions but because we share them’

Thrift Pass it On p. 8.

Stanley Milgram on obedience, authority and imitation

Further readingpersuasion profiling

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/st_essay_persuasion_profiling/

TRYING (week six)

• ‘Create simulations and prototypes to help empathize with people and to evaluate proposed designs.’

Modes of users trying out

1. EMPATHY TOOLS2. SCENARIOS3. NEXT YEAR’S HEADLINES4. INFORMANCE

EMPATHY TOOLS

EMPATHY TOOLS

• Use tools like clouded glasses and weighted gloves to experience processes as though you yourself have the abilities of different users.

• This is an easy way to prompt an empathic understanding for users with disabilities or special conditions.

Uses?

• Example Designers wore gloves to help them evaluate the suitability of cords and buttons for a home health monitor designed for people with reduced dexterity and tactile sensation.

SCENARIOS

http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/scenarios.htm

SCENARIOS

• Illustrate a character-rich storyline describing the context of use for a product or service.

• This process helps to communicate and test the essence of a design idea within its probable context of use. It is especially useful for the evaluation of service concepts

Uses?

• Example Designing a community Web site, the team drew up scenarios to highlight the ways particular design ideas served different user needs.

NEXT YEAR’S HEADLINES

NEXT YEAR’S HEADLINES

• Invite employees to project their company into the future, identifying how they want to develop and sustain customer relations.

• Based on customer-focused research, these predictions can help to define which design issues to pursue for development.

Uses?

• Example While designing an Intranet site for information technologists, the team prompted the client to define and clarify their business targets for immediate and future launches.

INFORMANCE

INFORMANCE

• Act out an “informative performance” scenario by role-playing insights or behaviours that you have witnessed or researched.

• This is a good way to communicate an insight and build a shared understanding of a concept and its implications.

Uses?

• Example A performance about a story of mobile communications shows the distress of a frustrated user.

Task

• Comparing self reporting with biometric output (EEG and GSR)

• http://static.guim.co.uk/interactivestore/2013/3/26/1364311758117/422623/bin-tmp/index.html