Cognitive Biases and You: Confirmation Bias

This is one in a series of posts on cognitive biases and how they apply to digital content and strategy. If you'd like to learn more about the thinking and experimental work behind these theories, I highly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. 

Confirmation bias is one of the most common and pervasive cognitive biases you're likely to see. It is the human tendency to preferentially accept information that appears to confirm already-held beliefs, and question evidence that calls those beliefs into question. Confirmation bias is particularly evident in the context of controversy. If you believe that something is true, and I appear with evidence that you're wrong, you're much more likely to question my evidence (or my motives in presenting it) than you are to change your mind.

For an extended (and passionate) presentation on confirmation bias and its effect on American history and politics, see The Political Brain, by Drew Westen. As Westen documents, confirmation bias played a significant role in presidential politics over the past 30 years. Westen also draws on behavioral research to provide the solution: confirmation bias is evoked when you confront a difference of opinion with evidence. The way past it is first to establish an emotional connection with your audience.

For example: let's say that you're developing content for an environmental activist organization. You have a set of content on global warming, and you're not interested in preaching to the choir. You want to convince global warming skeptics, but how do you go about that? If you present facts and figures, Westen argues, you will get nowhere. Your skeptical readers will believe that you're cherry-picking your data, or even that you're quoting from studies that were drawn up in service of a conspiracy.

Instead, you need to begin by connecting with your readers. Think emotional themes: the welfare of our children, our shared hope for the future, the beauty of growing things. Open with this content to establish a set of values you share with your readers, the skeptics included. Then, from there, you move on to aspects of your argument. Westen argues that you can make an evidence-based argument, but not right away. Opening with inspiration and closing with evidence gives you the best chance of success.

One last thing about confirmation bias: it applies to everyone, you and me included, but it's far easier to spot in others than it is in ourselves. It might be worth asking where your own confirmation biases lie—those are the places where your own thinking breaks down.

Cognitive Biases and You: The Bandwagon Effect

This is one in a series of posts on cognitive biases and how they apply to digital content and strategy. If you'd like to learn more about the thinking and experimental work behind these theories, I highly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. 

The bandwagon effect is a mental heuristic with an unusually self-explanatory name: it refers to the common human tendency to go along with the judgment of the people around us.

The general rule is that conduct or beliefs spread among people, as fads and trends clearly do, with the probability of any individual adopting it increasing with the proportion who have already done so. As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence.

An excellent example of the bandwagon effect is the iPhone app store, where the vast majority of the money is earned by a very small fraction of available apps. We like the songs that other people like, we go to the restaurants that are already popular, and we buy products that we've seen other people using.

Heuristics exist for a reason: they're convenient rules of thumb that allow us to make quick decisions when it will take too much time or effort to reach a more well-considered decision. The modern world presents us with a bewildering array of choices, and in most circumstances there's not enough information ready at hand to decide which of our choices are best. When you go to the store and are confronted with 15 varieties of peanut butter, you're probably not going to set time aside to research your options. You'll buy a brand that you recognize because the fact that it's already popular insulates you against the possibility that it's a really terrible brand of peanut butter. It might not be excellent, but it will probably be OK, and sometimes that's all we need.

The implications of the bandwagon effect on digital strategy are profound. First, be aware that, in the presence of multiple options, your customers or readers will look for social indicators about which choice to make. If you have a "most popular" list on your site, that will strongly affect user behavior.

When you're selling a product online, the bandwagon effect shows up in user ratings. Whether or not you list ratings of the product you sell, you can expect customers to find ratings somewhere and rely on them in making the choice of which product to buy. If there are no ratings, your customer will feel vulnerable in making the choice to purchase your product and you must make some effort to reassure them.

In short, there's safety in numbers, and danger in their lack. Create confidence by letting your customers know that there's a large and happy community around the product that you're selling.

Cognitive Biases and You: The Anchoring Effect

This is one in a series of posts on cognitive biases and how they apply to digital content and strategy. If you'd like to learn more about the thinking and experimental work behind these theories, I highly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. 

The anchoring effect should be familiar to anyone who's been on the wrong side of a low-ball offer. This cognitive bias refers to the terrible, irresistible effects of the opening bid (or offer, or estimate) on subsequent attempts to find the correct value of something.

Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments. Once an anchor is set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor. For example, the initial price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that prices lower than the initial price seem more reasonable even if they are still higher than what the car is really worth.

You may have run into this when negotiating the salary for your current job. If you allowed your employer to make the opening offer, and if that offer was quite a bit too low, there's an excellent chance that you settled for too little money even if you were happy with the ultimate offer. In one famous study, participants were asked to estimate a number they had no reason to know off-hand: the percentage of countries in the U.N. that are African. Before they submitted their guess, they watched a roulette wheel stop at a number; the wheel was set to stop on either 10 or 65. Participants who saw the wheel stop on 10 submitted estimates that were, on average, 25% lower than participants who saw the wheel stop on 65.

The anchoring effect is powerful and unavoidable. Even if the participants are experts in the field they're quizzed on, they are affected by anchoring. Even if you tell participants about the anchoring effect, instruct them to correct for it, and offer a monetary reward if they succeed in doing so, they are still influenced by it.

In brief: numbers have a context. When we see a number, our first reaction is to compare it to another number, and the number we use for the comparison is whatever we already have in mind.

This has tremendous implications for your communications. If you are trying to communicate that a number is small (for instance, the price of your product), you need to be very careful not to introduce that number immediately after another number that is smaller. If you are trying to communicate that a number is large (for instance, the number of deaths from something that your non-profit is targeting), you cannot introduce that number after another that is larger.

It's easy to look at the anchoring effect and think that using it to your advantage is unethical. It smacks of the used car salesman or the hard-nosed negotiator who refuses to pay a fair price. That would be a mistake, though, because the anchoring effect is unavoidable. The anchoring effect is not a technique, it's a description of what will happen whether or not you choose to engage with it. If you're not consciously thinking about this effect, you're leaving things to chance, and your business/campaign/cause deserves better than that.

A Social Marketing Plan Starts With "Social"

I came across an interesting post this morning: "How To Build a Social Marketing Plan."

It didn't get off to a great start. The following are the first six steps:

1. Start small
2. Define your market objective
3. Select your target market
4. Assess your current web capability
5. Set a strategy
6. Measure your engagement

In short, this advice comes straight from the desk of Captain Obvious. What professional marketing plan wouldn't include these elements?

It gets better, though. The following are included under the header "Important advice" (and is good enough to quote in full):

• Pay attention to your customers -- don't just sell. Traditional marketing has all been one way. A company decides what messages it wants to project on its market and it broadcasts those messages out via an ad or press release. But new word-of-mouth tools are two-way media and they offer the remarkable advantage of a real conversation. Listen to your market, take into account what they have to say, and you will have a very loyal set of customers.
• Content is king. Content is critical with any of the new word-of-mouth tools. What you offer must be relevant, interesting, and authentic and designed to bring readers back. Add new content often. Remember that when content is not updated, readership will drop off, often rather precipitously. Make certain that your content (or comments) add value and aren’t just to self promote. If they are, they will stand out as such and you may regret it.
• Give to get, but mostly give. If there is one truism in using any of the new word-of-mouth tools, it is that you must give to get – and give generously. On a group at Facebook, be the one who answers the question or provides the help and advice. Your generosity will earn you visibility in the group and give you credibility.

These three points are critical, and they're usually the elements that marketers forget. When you attempt to market through social networks, you are crashing a party. The people at that party were already having a good time when you showed up, uninvited. They're not going to take kindly to you blasting them with a self-interested, top-down message that reeks of insincerity.

Social networking is a conversation. If you market through these channels, you need to join the conversation and respect your customers as equals within the relationship. More than that, you can't ask them to give you something (their money, their attention, their regard) until you've offered them something equal or greater in value in return.

As Microsoft would say, welcome to the social. Social marketing is a conversation and a transaction. The prospect is challenging, a little frightening, and (if you're in the right line of work) deeply exhilarating.

Baby, You're a Star!

I've been working my way through the Razorfish vision document that I referenced in a previous post. At 84 pages, it's a weighty PDF download and not something that you really want to force your way through in one go. There are some good ideas scattered amongst those pages, though, and I'll be blogging on a few of them here. The first comes as a useful insight into building a site around individual experience:

"People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it's no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives. The same desires extend to companies, products and even TV networks. The lesson here is that socially-aware companies put customers and audiences at the center of their world, or at least make them a part-owner in it. The New York Times and most newspapers do this by simply highlighting the "most popular" articles other site visitors have read, searched or shared. CNN goes a step further and gives broadcast and digital airtime to user-generated, citizen journalist iReports. Nike does it too, by centering its Nike+ site on the user's profiles and the community's interactions, instead of its shoes. And Yahoo!, Google, and Coca-Cola go full bore--giving their entire home pages over to each user to "trick out" with their own MyYahoo! and iGoogle controls or Coke bottle designs. In all cases, the key is they make sure the spotlight is on the customers and not on themselves."

This is a critical insight, and one which I wish I had kept in mind when helping build video game websites over the past two years. On some level I think I already knew this, but it's easy to forget in a corporate environment where everyone knows the company's goals going in, and the developers come to the table with a list of features they're eager/willing to build, and the designers come with a vision for how the site should look and behave, and the marketing and product people have clear expectations of what messages should be pushed and where. The result is you end up with a site that's built to please developers, designers, product managers, and marketers. Is it really all that surprising, then, that customers find the results considerably less appealing?

But now imagine that you do the whole thing over, this time starting with a very simple premise: the site should make each visitor feel like a star. What does that mean in practical terms? Right off the bat, it means that when a visitor comes to the site for the first time, s/he should be asked to sign in, and every time after that the first thing s/he sees should be a personalized home page full of content that s/he has chosen. In my previous position we suggested that sites should include personalized home pages, but we never got anywhere because that was never a high enough priority. In the world where every visitor is a star, though, it's the highest priority of all.

Second, we should have been thinking of every visitor as the star of their own life. That means designing the site in such a way that they can bring aspects of their life onto the site, starting with a friends list that is platform-agnostic. We never discussed implementing OpenSocial or Facebook Connect, but we should have. Sure, not all of a visitor's friends are video game players, but it's his friends list, not ours. The universe revolves around the user, and the list of friends should not have been limited to the ones we were willing to display.

The third way we missed the boat was in displaying stats and leaderboards on our gaming sites that weren't focused on individual experience. We put up leaderboards that displayed the top-ranked players without really thinking about how that diminishes a person who is and never will be good enough at the game to be displayed there. On a site where you're the star, stats and leaderboards should tell your story; they should focus on what you're good at and highlight the areas where you have excelled. So you just completed your first online match and you finished fourth? That's great. You rock. Here's what you'll want to do next, and when you do, we'll help you brag about it, feel good about it, and have fun with it. Because it's all about you.

You begin to think completely differently about marketing when you imagine a site this way. In the old way of thinking, marketing was a general-purpose club used to bash every visitor over the head. The home page crawls with it: "Buy Now!" links, branded images, trademark bugs, and "news stories" that are actually warmed-over press releases. But a truly user-centered design might dispense with that home page altogether and redefine marketing as moments that occur within a customer's personal narrative:

"Don't have the game yet? When you're done viewing the trailer, we can introduce you to other people like you who are really enjoying it. If it sounds like fun, you can buy the game directly from this website."

"Just getting started? Struggling a bit? There are how-to videos in the media section, or you can buy this official strategy guide. Click here to download a free preview."

"Welcome back -- you originally signed up months ago, but you haven't visited in a while (and our records show that you haven't played online in nearly as long). Here's another game in the same genre that might prove more of a challenge, but don't forget that the sequel to this game is coming out in ten months -- click here to add that event to your personal calendar, and we'll send you an email when the demo is available for download."

I'm not a marketer, but I bet that would work pretty well. A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy never fits anyone for long, and in using it we train our visitors to ignore what we're saying. Marketing messages that address specific moments within a customer's personal narrative, though, are an actual value: they offer products to a visitor at a moment when s/he might really want those things. That's an effective strategy, and it starts with treating every user as a star.