Social Engineering Blogs

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Contrast – Protect Our Coral Sea

In previous posts I have highlighted the sophisticated use of persuasion in advertising – sophisticated because it seems so simple.  In a current television ad being run by Protect Our Coral Sea they use a giant humphead wrasse named Barry as their spokes-fish.

Watch the advertisement and look for the use of Contrast and Liking.

The reference to the Amazon and the Serengeti take world-renowned environmental flagships and connects them to “our” Coral Sea thereby answering the Contrast Phenomenon question “Compared to what?”

Barry says that as Australian’s only we can protect it (nice bit of Liking).  There is a drop in by another fish saying ‘hello Barry‘ – pointing toward Consensus, more than just Barry and I involved; before delivering the call to action of contacting the Prime Minister.

When you go the website you have the video, a list of other reef supports (Consensus), keep scrolling down and you find all of the major world environmental foundations and societies (Authority) and on the right there is a sign-up box asking you to act now:

Protect our reef

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This then takes you to a page that asks you send a letter to your local member.  Based on the Commitment you have made to click on the ‘Send Letter’ button on the first page – you are most likely to send the email – nailing Consistency.

They have even gone to the effort of typing out an example letter for you to send to your local member – what a gift (Reciprocity).

In the body of the example email they highlight all that will be lost if the Federal Government suspends protection of the Coral Sea (the loss of many marine hotspots, endangered species, marine businesses, the overall health of our oceans, and Australia’s reputation as a world leader in marine conservation).  And there my friend is Scarcity!

In a 27 second advertisement and two webpages Protect Our Coral Sea have nailed all of Cialdini’s principles in record time.

Not that it matters, but I sent the letter to my local member.  Great campaign!

 

Let me know what you think.

 

The post Contrast – Protect Our Coral Sea appeared first on Social Influence Consulting Group.

Manipulation Techniques: Using Anchors to Influence Decisions

Throughout the course of the day, you’re constantly making decisions. Everything from what you’ll have for dinner, to whether or not you punch someone for making you mad. What you might not realize, is how many of these decisions are made using anchors.

Anchors are anything that we consciously or subconsciously use to guide our decisions. For instance, if I were to ask you if you think the average U.S. income was more or less than $35,000,000/yr, what would you say. Okay, now if you were to guess what the exact amount actually is, what would you say? Chances are, if you ask someone else to guess the exact amount without having them tell you whether they think it’s above or below $35,000,000/yr, they would most likely come up with a number lower than yours.

The reason yours would be higher is because you were exposed to the amount of $35,000,000 and they were not. Now obviously you know the average income is far less than $35,000,000, but even though you are aware of this, your mind will still use $35,000,000 as an anchor for coming up with an exact estimate of what the actual amount really is. Lets say you think it’s between $35,000 and $60,000. Since your mind is using a larger number as an anchor, you’ll tend to go from that number down to figure out your answer. So, the first number that you will run into that’s within your range is $60,000. Because of this, your answer will lie in the latter part of your range (around $60,000).

The most interesting part about psychological anchors, is that even if you were aware of this concept and it’s ability to influence your decisions, that knowledge wouldn’t keep the anchor from having an effect on your decision making. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool of persuasion.

One persuasion technique that i’ve mentioned before, where you ask someone a large favor to which they reject and follow it with smaller request that they usually end up accepting, is done using anchors. This works because their mind uses the larger request (that you really don’t care if they accept or not) as an anchor when deciding whether or not they’ll accept the second, much smaller request. Since their mind is in a sense comparing the smaller favor to the larger one, they’re much more likely to say yes because it’s the better option and it seems easy, when in reality it’s just easier than the large request.

When people make decisions, they’re going to use some type of anchor whether they’re aware of it or not. If you want to increase the likelihood of that decision being made in your favor, give them an anchor their mind can work with that favors the decision you want them to come to. Trust me, this technique can make your life a whole lot easier. Just make sure you use it in a responsible manner.

Reading Our Brain’s Emotional Code

w-liedectector   “We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual’s subjective feeling,”

purported Adam Anderson, associate professor of human development in Cornell University’s  College of Human Ecology and senior author of the study, “Population coding of affect across stimuli, modalities and individuals,” which was  published online June 22 in Nature Neuroscience.

This STUDY noted that even though feelings are subjective, our brains turn our emotions into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people

Researchers presented 16 participants with a series of images and tastes and analyzed their brains responses to these subjective experiences via functional neuroimaging.  This specialized neuroimaging technology, representational similarity analysis, is able to analyze a the spatial patterns of a person’s brain activity across populations of neurons rather than the traditional approach of assessing activation magnitude in specialized regions.

“It appears that the human brain generates a special code for the entire valence spectrum of pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, which can be read like a ‘neural valence meter’ in which the leaning of a population of neurons in one direction equals positive feeling and the leaning in the other direction equals negative feeling,” Anderson explains.

The study was atypically small, but the authors noted that the representation of our internal subjective experience is not confined to specialized emotional centers.

The findings showed that similar subjective feelings – whether evoked from the eye or tongue – resulted in a similar pattern of activity in the OFC, suggesting the brain contains an emotion code common across distinct experiences of pleasure (or displeasure), they say. Furthermore, these OFC activity patterns of positive and negative experiences were partly shared across people.

“Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language,” Anderson concluded.