gwendolyn faith is not a crayon.

What, then, pushes people toward greater honesty? While ethics lectures and training seem to have little to no effect on people, reminders of morality—right at the point where people are making a decision—appear to have an outsize effect on behavior.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely in the Wall Street Journal essay “Why We Lie”

What motivates people to lie? What holds them back or drives them forward as they make a decision, however suddenly, to lie? It’s like a consumer journey!

social-sight:

Can Singles Live Happily Ever After?

http://www.elle.com/Life-Love/Sex-Relationships/Can-Singles-Live-Happily-Ever-After

The SocialSight team stumbled upon this great read in this month’s Elle. Author Daphne Merkin calls out a powerful tension: our society’s glamorization of the idea of “singlism” is counter intuitive to our primitive roots. We’re social animals and without social interaction, we run the risk of losing our identity as individuals:

“I’ve discovered that there is another kind of claustrophobia that comes with being in too unmediated a relation to one’s own hermetic self. For one thing, there is no one to put on your “best” self for, so you’re more likely to skip brushing your teeth before bed, say, or forgo a shower. It’s nothing radical, but the subtle softening of grooming standards comes to reflect a deeper laxity of self-care. For another, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of inertia, of not making the effort to see the movie or exhibition everyone’s talking about.”

*Photo courtesy of Elle Article

I’m fascinated by the link between identity and living alone. From a dramaturgical perspective, an individual’s identity comes from his or her audience; although I can control my self-presentation, I’m ultimately defined by my audience’s interpretation of my self-presentation. How does an individual living with someone else — a spouse, a friend, a roommate, whomever — identify his or her audience? What about an individual living alone? How does our performance of self vary based on our living situation?

So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate. Because you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind—you’re trying to prop up your own.

David McRaney on brand loyalty in You Are Not So Smart (via jumbodumbothoughts)

On That Moment of Choice.

jumbodumbothoughts:

I was reading this great book, and I found out something which may be useful for economists: that moment when you make a decision among close alternatives, is purely emotional. This is what the book has to say:

It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy. They stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision—the calories, the shapes, the net weight—everything. They can’t pick because they have no emotional connection to anything.

This is why companies are now starting to limit the variety in their product lines (the consummate example being Apple, of course), because it makes it easier to make an emotional connection and create post-hoc rationalizations about your choice. It may seem a little manipulative but this decision-making heuristic makes our lives easier; one just has to realize their cognitive biases.

It’s quite in line with the bounded rationality of behavioral economics; that people make choices rationally but only up to the extent of what they know and how they think. If this interests you, Predictably Irrational and other books by Ariely are great reads.

I read Predictably Irrational a few years ago, but three years into my advertising coursework, the book would be worth another read through a more critical eye!

Research on the so-called Zero Moment of Truth — the moment when a shopper goes online to research a product and decides whether to make a purchase — suggests consumers often make purchase decisions in-store, as they read peer-to-peer reviews on their smartphones. I wonder if emotional consumer reviews are more emotional than more matter-of-fact or features-driven reviews. How do reviews, which so many shoppers rely on, facilitate an emotional connection, anyway, if they can at all?

Developing a communications plan for a class project with Billiards on Broadway, a local three-in-one restaurant, bar and pool hall.

Micro is the New Macro →

cjlee37:

In the past year or so, we’ve been witnessing the convergence of several trends – a shift in online behavior, where users of social media tend to be gravitating toward micro-social networks and smaller, more socially curated sites; the rise of micro-lending, micro-giving, and localism; the growth and innovation occurring in qualitative market research; the higher levels of participation and quality in smaller-scale forms of research; the pruning of “friends” in social networks and tightening of privacy controls, and other phenomena. While disparate in their form, they are all manifestations of a few basic principles:

People want to feel that they are having an impact.

People want smaller, more intimate, more meaningful social circles.

People want brand relationships with a human face.

Companies need to better understand their customers, in a human and not purely data-driven way.

Privacy is starting to matter again.

It was about persuasion, but now it is about conversation—and it makes sense, of course. No one wants to just be talked at.

Don’t forget the miniaturizing of other things as well, like desserts and packaging :D ~ cake pop, anyone?

If you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We’re raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it’s your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook…we’re losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.

From Fast Company’s interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book Alone Together

(via modernandmaterialthings)

Digitally enabled by easily accessible evocations of their past, consumers’ very memories are now being relentlessly commoditized. Images of our weddings and graduations, memories of kids’ births and grandparents’ faces now get snugly wrapped by ads for automobiles and toothpaste. The commercialization of our personal and collective pasts has significant cultural and marketing implications. As a matter of fact, it’s now doing what was heretofore unthinkable: It’s killing nostalgia dead.

Josh Kimball in the Iconoculture post “The Future Is Coming: How advertising and the digital data trail will purify us of our love for the past and kill off nostalgia”

Categories are interesting to anthropologists. They are the “buckets” into which we organize the world. More exactly, they are the buckets with which we read the world. We have a bucket called “bird.” Inside that is a bucket called “Robin.” As spring approaches, we see winged creatures on our lawn and the buckets leap to the ready. Robin! Bird! Spring! This is culture in action.

From this point of view, Pinterest is a treasure. It’s a chance to see American culture as if from a glass-bottom boat. Yes, some of it is a little reductive. But sometimes what people stuff into the categories is a chance for us to see exactly what they mean. Pinterest is a little Rosetta Stone, a table of equivalencies. Oh, so that’s what YOU mean by home. Here’s what I mean. In a culture that flowers with an increasingly diverse variety, this is useful.

Grant McCracken in the Harvard Business Review post “Pinterest as Free Market Research”

I should probably write my own commentary instead of posting quotes all the time, but hel-lo, I have a research proposal to write! Actually, I have two research proposals to write. Ouch.