Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Zajonc Effect

Zajonc effect: The tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time. Also called the Mere Exposure effect or the Mere Zajonc effect.

The Zajonc effect is named for Robert Boleslaw Zajonc (1923-2008), a Polish-born American social psychologist who taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. (His last name rhymes with “science.”) His obituary in the New York Times singled out his work with “mere exposure”:

In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

The Zajonc effect has implications for branding and naming. Bruce Tait of the Minneapolis brand consultancy Tait Subler wrote about the connection in a 2012 blog post:

Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating  fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure.

(Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

See also  “Forget About Love,” my 2010 post comparing a successful corporate name to an arranged marriage.

Other eponymous effects discussed here in previous posts: Dunning-Kruger, Streisand, Bradley, Coolidge, Martha Mitchell, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, McGurk, Meisner.

Word of the Week: Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity: “The whole of human mental or psychological neurological structures or behaviors, seen as not necessarily problematic, but as alternate, acceptable forms of human biology.” – Double-Tongued Dictionary

Neurodiversity was coined in the late 1990s by journalist Harvey Blume and autism advocate Judy Singer, possibly independently. In a short article published in the September 1998 issue of The Atlantic, Blume wrote: “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?” Singer, an Australian who is the self-described parent of an “aspie” (person with Aspberger’s syndrome), contributed a chapter (“Why Can’t You Be Normal for Once in Your Life?”) to a 1999 book, Disability Discourse, in which she wrote:

For me, the key significance of the “Autistic Spectrum” lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or what I want to call “Neurodiversity.” The “Neurologically Different” represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.

Growing interest in the autism spectrum has given rise to a spate of articles, blogs, and books about neurodiversity. In his 20101 book Neurodiversity, educational consultant Thomas Armstrong argues that:

[P]eople with mental health labels (including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other brain differences), are “differently wired” than so-called normal (or “neurotypical”) individuals, and that their differences should be accommodated by society rather than being regarded as a “disease” that must be cured. 

Armstrong also calls neurodiversity “a civil rights movement proposing that individuals with mental health labels be protected against discrimination and prejudice in the same way that people of color, women, and other minorities are protected.”

A new documentary, Loving Lamposts, looks at the ways in which the autism spectrum is being redefined. In a review and Q&A with filmmaker Todd Drezner, science journalist Steve Silberman writes:

One widespread misconception about the neurodiversity movement is that it is universally opposed to all treatments for medical problems associated with these conditions, such as the development of drugs for disabling anxiety or gastrointestinal issues. But the neurodiversity community is itself diverse. Most of the advocates I know are on the spectrum themselves, and emphasize the importance of taking a variety of approaches — including making changes to public policy and the accelerated development of assistive technology such as apps for the iPad — to improve the lives of people who think differently.

Word of the Week: Dark Patterns

Dark patterns: User interfaces designed to trick people into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience (UX) consultant who has a PhD in cognitive science, coined dark patterns for a presentation he gave earlier this month at the UX Brighton Conference. Brignull explained the concept on his blog, 90 Percent of Everything:

Normally we think of bad design as consisting of laziness, mistakes, or school-boy errors. We refer to these sorts of design patterns as Antipatterns. However, there’s another kind of bad design pattern, one that’s been crafted with great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of human psychology, to trick users into do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. This is the dark side of design, and since these kind of design patterns don’t have a name, I’m proposing we start calling them Dark Patterns.

Brignull’s examples include low-cost airlines that put insurance in your basket without asking; social-networking sites that “purposefully make it hard for you to shrink your social graph or move your content into private realms (I’m looking at you, Facebook)”; and systems that require you to log in “using a long-forgotten password” in order to unsubscribe.

Dark patterns are not the same as “outright scams,” Brignull writes. The latter are “clumsy and easy to identify.” Rather, dark patterns are “techniques used by above-board products and services that trick users into doing things.”

Brignull’s slide presentation for the UX conference can be viewed on his blog and also here. You can follow Brignull on Twitter at @harrybr.

In the three-dimensional world, slanty design—a term coined by British interactivity researcher Russell Beale—is somewhat analogous to dark patterns. Slanty design is “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”; however, its objectives don’t necessarily include siphoning cash from the user. For example, a cone-shaped disposable cup that discourages the user from leaving it on a table is a slanty design that promotes a social good.

UPDATE: In comments, Nancy Frishberg links to two related publications, Chris Nodder's blog, Evil by Design, and Nodder's article for the MIT Sloan Management Review, "Usability for Evil."

Word of the Week: Subitize

Subitize: To immediately apprehend, without counting, the number of items in a small sample. Pronounced with a short u; stress on the first syllable. From Latin subito, sudden.

<<< Do not attempt to subitize the candy corn.

Subitize was coined in 1949 by E. L. Kaufman, et al., in "The Discrimination of Visual Number," published in the American Journal of Psychology. Later research found that babies can subitize quantities up to three. Adults don't do significantly better: most can subitize only four or five items. Chimpanzees can subitize up to six.

Can you subitize faster than a chimp? Take the test.

Word of the Week: Extimacy

Extimacy: The sharing of experiences or thoughts usually considered private. Coined to suggest an opposition to "intimacy."

Extimacy is the ambient mood of the website Vie de Merde ("Shitty Life"), which has become the ninth-most-popular search on Google's French search engine. Vie de Merde started as a personal journal a couple of years ago by Maxime Valette, now 20; last year the most popular posts were published in book form.

A March 21 article about VDM in the online Wall Street Journal quotes Swiss psychologist and author Yves-Alexandre Thalmann, who says the site's popularity stems from people's desire for recognition:

"In the past, people used to keep this kind of story to just a small group of intimates," says Mr. Thalmann. "Now they want to share this with as many people as possible" in hopes of winning approval from someone. He calls the phenomenon "extimacy."

Thalmann didn't invent the term; it was coined the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who called it extimité. For Lacan and his followers, extimacy expressed "the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained." Lacan died before the birth of the World Wide Web, but seemed to anticipate it, at least according to one observer:

We could look at the interface of the Web and, moreover, Web 2.0 as a mode of exercising extimacy with other people. A social networking profile is created and within that profile is a blending of various symbols from film, TV, art, others’ photography and so on. Contacting others and “friending” others based on similar web-surfing habits expands one’s online self and entwines within one, the interests and symbolization of another person. Moreover, when looking at the interface of the computer screen, one experiences the decentering of one’s self-image, a fragmented mirroring back of oneself occurs. Desires that are posted by other people, become one’s own desires, desires that one did not even know existed. By expanding one’s network, one comes to see oneself as projected by these other people. Again, there is an intertwining, a conjoining of self and other and in this conjoining, an extimate self is realized.

The meaning of "extimacy" is, contradictorily, contained within the root of "intimate": the Latin intimare, which means "to make known, announce, impress."

The founders of Vie de Merde have also launched an American version of the site, F My Life ("Everyday Life Stories"). A similar concept underlies the longer-running Post Secret and the newer Twitter counterpart, Secret Tweet.

See also: Overshare.

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Image: Möbius strip, from Instructables. A Möbius strip is a geometric paradox: a surface with only one side. It's a physical representation of the psychological concept of extimacy.

Word of the Week: Liminal

Liminal: Related to a threshold. Used especially in relation to a psychological state between existential planes (a liminal state between life and death). From Latin limin or limen, "threshold."

Liminal is also occasionally used in architecture to refer to a physical threshold. In physics, liminal refers to the least amount (of energy, for example) required to produce an effect.

A legal term, in limine, is linguistically related. A motion in limine ("at the threshold") is a request submitted to the court in an attempt to exclude evidence during trial, usually to shield the jury from possibly prejudicial evidence.

Hat tip to trademark lawyer Ron Coleman, who casually dropped in limine into a tweet and sent me to The Google.

UPDATE: I wrote this post over the weekend. This morning my A Word a Day subscription brought me--yep, you guessed it, "liminal." Coincidence? Maybe we're all feeling as though we're on the threshold of something.

Stones

So you think your employment outlook is iffy? Spare a tear, if you will, for the folks who fabricate desire and demand for diamonds in these parlous times. It's a tough job, yet they persist. Like a rock, you might say.

From a trade publication, National Jeweler:

Stressing the appeal of owning "fewer, better things," De Beers' newly intensified holiday marketing campaign will promote the diamond jewelry gift as a rock-solid "icon of enduring value" in rickety economic times.

With a marketing budget that is double last year's (precise figures are not disclosed), the campaign will encompass television, print and online advertising, Diamond Promotion Service (DPS) executives said during a breakfast presentation for the trade and the press at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City ...

The ad blitz is expected to reach 97 million U.S. consumers, or nearly half the adult population, at least six times over the holiday season.

One of the print ads currently in circulation reads:

Perhaps now is an opportunity to reassess what really matters. After all, if everything you ever bought her disappeared overnight, what would she truly miss?

The dramatically lit photo depicts, of course, a stonking pair of diamond earrings.

There are multiple ways of reading this campaign. Passage des Perles is peeved by the tacit sexism of the message:

You've gotta hand it to the present day Don Draper who cast this lifeline toward a gutted industry. Don did his research well. I do want fewer things of higher quality, and carats trump costume. But I rankled at the patronizing "everything you ever bought her". Isn't this the same industry who in boom times encouraged women to buy their own stones? What happened? Suddenly we're all retro and it's over to the guy, who hardly needs the pressure now.

Sexism—or chutzpah? Here's another way of cracking the nut. Faced with the same challenge—getting a guy to buy more bling when he may be having trouble making the car payments—JCPenney takes a humorous tack, with overtones of public shaming. The subtext: No little box with sparkly stuff inside? Dude, you are SO BUSTED.

Here's the problem with diamonds: They can't feed you or keep you warm; they can't transport you to work; they're easy to lose and notoriously poor investments, as this still-relevant 1982 Atlantic article, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" attests. And that's what makes diamond marketing so fascinating. Paradoxically, diamond sellers have relied more and more on the trumped-up scarcity pitch as the world supply of diamonds has increased. Indeed, if there weren't such a glut of diamonds the De Beers cartel wouldn't be so frantic to unload them. (The market is even more competitive now that cheap laboratory diamonds, which mostly didn't exist in 1982, are virtually indistinguishable from the slave-labor-mined variety.) But instead of slashing prices, like other desperate, overstocked retailers, De Beers is doing what it's done for nearly a century: brazenly burnishing the myth that diamonds are not a frivolous luxury but rather the hard currency of the romantic enterprise. Even in bleak economic times. Especially in bleak economic times.

A little historical background. From the Atlantic article:

In their subsequent investigation of the American diamond market, the staff of [ad agency] N. W. Ayer found that since the end of World War I, in 1919, the total amount of diamonds sold in America, measured in carats, had declined by 50 percent; at the same time, the quality of the diamonds, measured in dollar value, had declined by nearly 100 percent. An Ayer memo concluded that the depressed state of the market for diamonds was "the result of the economy, changes in social attitudes and the promotion of competitive luxuries."

Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries." Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public's mind of diamonds with romance. Since "young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings" it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

And today? Janus Thinking, a research and consulting firm that specializes in the diamond industry, has this to say (again, hat tip to Passage des Perles):

The diamond industry is de facto, bankrupt.  But the answer to its future is not to be found in economics, but in psychology.  Psychological forces are more important than economic ones.  While economic forces keep on changing over time, psychological forces are stable; what we see today could be identified yesterday and will still true be tomorrow.

More importantly, as the recent economic events taught us, there are economic factors that we do not have control of or cannot change. Psychological factors are within our reach and once we understand them we can certainly try to cope with them.

My advice? Skip the diamonds. (Skip the vacuum cleaner, too.) Give books! I'll have some gift recommendations in a few days.

Photo: Two-carat "Forever Studs" ($20,300) by De Beers.

Word of the Week: Co-Rumination

Co-rumination: Frequent or obsessive discussion of a problem, usually among girls or women. The term was coined in 2002 by Dr. Amanda J. Rose, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, in a paper she wrote for the journal Child Development.

According to a recent article in the New York Times:

The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say. 

Dr. Rose told the Times that "for boys, such intense emotional conversations, which tend to occur less often, did not contribute to heightened anxiety or depressive moods."

“When girls are talking about these problems, it probably feels good to get that level of support and validation,” said Dr. Rose, whose latest study on co-rumination was published in the journal Developmental Psychology last year. “But they are not putting two and two together, that actually this excessive talking can make them feel worse.”

Ruminate—to turn a matter over and over in the mind—has a second meaning of "to chew cud." A ruminant is any hoofed mammal with a rumen, a specialized portion of the stomach that returns the cud to the mouth.

Word of the Week: Oniomania

Oniomania: Compulsive shopping; the excessive desire to buy things. From Greek onos (price) and mania (madness). The disorder is recognized by the American Psychological Association; get tips on how to control it here.