Showing only Notes + Links tagged psychologyon creativity, art, & design

by Casey A. Gollan

The way [Pandora] hooked me in with the free hours made me feel like this is something I should probably pay for because I clearly value the service they are providing. Thinking about it more, this perhaps might be an interesting model for publishers. Not sure how it would work or if tracking time spent on a website is the way to go or not, but it would be interesting if content producers could come up with easily digestible measurements to show consumers how much they value the service or content that’s being provided. This would weed out the fickle viewers and for the power users it would make them realize how much they actually value the content they are consuming. The goal is always to hook your dedicated power users.

There are clearly some challenges to something like this, but from a psychological point of view Pandora has put me in a position where I understand how much I value their service and the great benefits I will receive if I subscribe. Regardless if I end up paying a subscription fee or not, they have made a compelling offer, and no matter what, that’s what content producers and service providers need to do. Make compelling offers and show consumers how much they value the content or service that’s being provided.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

Vimeo has done a great job cul­ti­vat­ing qual­ity of a dif­fer­ent sort. It’s full of music, art and won­der­ful stuff like this. Really, the “fea­tures” that Vimeo offers are social and psy­cho­log­i­cal, not tech­ni­cal. That’s the right move, because they can’t keep up with YouTube on video qual­ity. No one can.

Any­way, this isn’t a huge insight—just another exam­ple of the weird physics of dig­i­tal media.

Lock­ing the front door is a rit­ual we all per­form which pro­vides a gen­eral assump­tion of front-door-locked-ness. Almost like vac­ci­na­tion. One per­son does it, it’s mean­ing­less; every­body does it, it’s a big deal. And also like vac­ci­na­tion because, once every­body does it, you largely get the ben­e­fits even if you don’t!

Lock­ing the front door as col­lec­tive action. Hmm. I still don’t think it makes any sense. I still do it.

You have to get bad in order to get good.

Anderson describes an experiment conducted by the M.I.T. behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of “Predictably Irrational.” Ariely offered a group of subjects a choice between two kinds of chocolate—Hershey’s Kisses, for one cent, and Lindt truffles, for fifteen cents. Three-quarters of the subjects chose the truffles. Then he redid the experiment, reducing the price of both chocolates by one cent. The Kisses were now free. What happened? The order of preference was reversed. Sixty-nine per cent of the subjects chose the Kisses. The price difference between the two chocolates was exactly the same, but that magic word “free” has the power to create a consumer stampede.

Once I tried on the pants, I became an implicit owner of them. I stared at myself in the mirror and admired the fit, the wash, etc. I thought about how good they would look with my shoes. I contemplated wearing them to various upcoming events and all the strangers who would look at my pants and think “Those are nice pants!” In other words, I spent a few minutes imagining my life with these new jeans and, once that happened, the pants suddenly became much more valuable. I mentally endowed myself with the object and didn’t want to lose something that I didn’t even own. As a result, the ridiculous price tag ($170 for Levis!) no longer seemed so ridiculous. The lesson? Don’t try something on that you don’t want to buy.

The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn’t “give rise” to driving; driving isn’t something that happens inside the engine. The engine contributes to the car’s ability to drive. Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect. To be conscious is to have a world. The fact is, you and I don’t have what it takes to make a world on our own. We find the world, we don’t make it in our brains.

The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It’s a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world.