CXL Institute — Digital Psychology & Persuasion [Week 10]

I’ve been enjoying learning through the CXL Institute.

As adults, we make about 35,000 decisions per day, adding up to about 1M decisions a month. A Cornell study found that we make 226 decisions each day solely about food!

You choose what to have for lunch, which shirt to wear, and maybe even where to take your next vacation. But how much of this decision-making process is rational and how fueled by emotions? Behavioral science suggests it’s a lot more of the latter.

Psychologists understand four chief mental processes that influence decisions:

1. Cognitive Biases — are a systematic error in thinking that effect the decision and judgments people make. Sometimes these biases are related to memory. Some of these include belief biases (the over dependence on prior knowledge in arriving at decisions), omission biases (people tend to omit information that’s perceive as risky), and confirmation bias (people observe what they expect in observations). We’ll cover biases in depth later in the program.
2. Memories — Past experiences can impact future decision making.
   Studies have shown that when something positive results from a decision, people are more likely to decide in a similar way, given a similar situation. In contrast, people tend to avoid repeating past mistakes.
3. Reason — abductive reasoning is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available. This kind of reasoning produces the kind of daily decision-making that works best with the information present, which often is incomplete
4. Emotions — Decisions are emotional. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a discovery when he studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions were generated. He found that they seemed normal, with the exception of not being able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decision. They could explain logic, but struggled when asked to make simple decisions, like what to eat. This is because decisions are based on emotion.

You’re largely exploiting your testing bandwidth? Cool! You probably run more experiments than an average professor at university! But what do your results mean? What are you truly learning? And how do you keep track of and combine all those granular insights?

In his mindblowing talk Bart will take you on a ride along valuable psychological insights. He will show why these are your solutions for accelerating your knowledge growth and even provide you with a psychology based optimisation framework to acquire a truly deep understanding of what drives your customers buying journeys.

Learn how accurately measuring attention, emotion & memory can help you discover new ways to optimise your website, landing pages and campaigns.

At the end of the day, whether a campaign, website or landing page is successful or not comes down to one thing — A human making a decision. The science behind decision making has been researched by psychologists and neuroscientists for a decade, but only in the recent years has technology, science and business merged interest in validating methods and metrics. With the rise of wearables the foundation for a scalable way to gather valid data on decision making emerged.

Learn how accurately measuring attention, emotion & memory can help you discover new ways to optimise your website, landing pages and campaigns.

At the end of the day, whether a campaign, website or landing page is successful or not comes down to one thing — A human making a decision. The science behind decision making has been researched by psychologists and neuroscientists for a decade, but only in the recent years has technology, science and business merged interest in validating methods and metrics. With the rise of wearables the foundation for a scalable way to gather valid data on decision making emerged.

Learning and memory are adjacent processes. So definition-wise, what’s the difference? Learning is the acquisition of a skill or knowledge, while memory is the record of past experiences and learning processes (source).

Imagine you try a new food and have an allergic reaction: In the future, you’ll have learned not to eat that same food due to the memory of experiencing the allergic reaction.

These lessons explore three different methods of learning, as well as the key mechanisms involved in memory. You’ll also learn some tricks to boost memory retention and get a glimpse of research on encoding.

In this lesson you’ll learn three unique learning processes, and see how each one applies to online persuasion and marketing.

Classical conditioning
This is a process in which an association is formed between a previously neutral stimulus and a stimulus that naturally evokes a response.

The classic example would be Pavlov’s Classic Experiment, in which Pavlov would routinely ring a bell before feeding his dogs. The smell of food was the naturally occurring stimulus that was paired with the previously neutral ringing of the bell.

Many countries have passed legislation mandating tobacco products to be sold with dissuasive images on the box, warning of the dangers of smoking. In this case, the neutral stimulus (NS) is the cigarettes. In order to condition feelings of repulsion, the NS is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US) — the dissuasive images. These images elicit feelings of fear and/or disgust from the exposed individual, aka the unconditioned response (UR).

The cigarettes, after conditioning through repeated exposure to these ads, will evoke a conditioned response: feelings of fear/disgust which should occur without the unconditioned stimulus (the images).

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning is a process that most parents and teachers will be familiar with. This process attempts to modify behavior through the use of positive and negative reinforcement. Through operant conditioning, an individual draws a correlation between a particular behavior and a consequence. The term “operant conditioning” originated by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, who believed that one should focus on the external, observable causes of behavior (rather than try to unpack the internal thoughts and motivations)

Example: Rewarding a child’s excellent grades with candy. The students eventually realize if they want more candy, they need to keep studying.

One example of a product that incorporates operant conditioning would be a dating app like Tinder that incorporates associative learning through gamification. A certain behavior (spend time swiping on their app) is rewarded with a prize (get a date).

Booking.com uses operant conditioning through positive reinforcement by rewarding repeated usage with discounts and deals.

Observational Learning
In observational learning, learning occurs through observing and imitating others. Psychologist Albert Bandura’s social learning theory suggests that in addition to learning through conditioning, people also learn through observing and imitating the actions of others.

As demonstrated in his classic “Bobo Doll” experiments, people will imitate the actions of others without direct reinforcement. In this study Bandura observed children learning modeled aggression towards an inflatable doll resembling a punching bag. The children watched adult models pummel the doll, and not only would they imitate this behavior, but it increased seemingly unrelated violent behavior, such as attraction to guns.

Bandura describes four processes that are critical for observational learning to work effectively:

1. Attention — the degree to which the observer notices the imitated behavior.
2. Retention — the ability for of the imitator to form a memory of the imitated behavior.
3. Reproduction — the observer must have the motor skills and physical ability required to imitate the behavior.
4. Motivation — for the observer, perceived rewards must outweigh perceived costs.