Five Psychological Traps

This article was originally written as a guest post for Mental Reshape. 

When author David Foster Wallace made a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he talked about the dangers of operating on what he termed: “our natural default setting”.

Wallace argued that through conscious choice, people have the power to interpret and respond to the frustrating, mundane realities of everyday life in a manner that is healthy and satisfying. The title of the speech: This is Water, refers to an allegory about fish not being conscious that the water around them is, actually, water.

By ‘natural default setting’, Wallace is referring to the unconscious: evolution’s way of filtering the huge amount of sensory information we are exposed to each and every day. But the unconscious has its drawbacks. Decades of psychological research have uncovered from it a number of cognitive biases that affect the way we think and behave.

We’re going to look at five of these biases. All five occur when we operate on our natural default setting, and all can be protected against when we consciously choose how to respond to our environment. Through in-depth examination we can learn to break free from harmful behavioural patterns, taking control of our life and, ultimately, our happiness.

12 Reasons Why You Share Too Much

It’s 7:30am.

You’re sitting down at your table with a cup of instant and half a pomegranate thumbing your way down your Facebook feed trying to coax yourself into a semi-wakened state. You glimpse an article with the words ‘Trump’, ‘evolution’ and ‘Mexicans’ in the headline and before your brain has caught up you find yourself in a comments-war with racists and climate change-deniers.

Social Cognition: Part 3

Every day, you are persuaded by those around you. Whether it is to make a quick decision, buy a product, or read an article with an evocative headline like this…

…We are likely to be open to suggestion during critical moments of non-thinking; what Kahneman famously refers to as System 1 processing. This is when our emotions take precedence over rational strategies while making decisions.

Social Cognition: Part 2

To most people, being part of a large group grants a sense of autonomy, relatedness, and power. When we are tied to something greater than our individual selves – be it a social cause, ideology, or cultural attribute – it can help shape our identity.

But being a member of a large group significantly changes the way we behave. We may gain some identity through shared group attributes, but those attributes make us feel less responsible for individual actions.

Changing Minds

When it comes to influencing people to pick up a habit or start a new behaviour, it helps to consider how they think about existing habits. The best framework for exploring this is Sherif’s Social Judgment Theory.

An important component of this model is the Latitudes of Acceptance; a theory of how people respond to information that either confirms or denies long-held beliefs.

Profit and Purpose

Marketers use an odd language when they talk to one another. Words like ‘positioning’ and ‘values’ and ‘authenticity’ pop up, which, to the rest of us, are close to meaningless when related to how we perceive brands.

A particularly strong word that marketers throw around is purpose. Supposedly, purpose is a brands reason for existing beyond making money (ironically structured in such a way as to make more money). 

'Purpose' means little to consumers for a number of reasons. One reason is because the strategies marketers use to create a sense of purpose are invisible to consumers (as they should be). But mostly, it is because most brands aren’t bought because of a strong sense of purpose.

Mental Visibility

Getting noticed. It is the single most important strategy in advertising as all notions of consideration and purchase behaviour follow from it. So would deliberately being invisible be even a remotely effective idea?

As it turns out, it can be, as this campaign from Don Giulio Salumeria, an Italian delicatessen in Moscow, demonstrates:

The Psychology of Emotion

Emotion is one of the most powerful tools a marketer can wield, and it is well known that the environment we find ourselves in can spark an unlimited number of emotional responses that influences how we behave in future.

But why? Are emotions rational or irrational? Do they have a strong biological basis? And why do we cluster emotions and behaviours together to explain the culture surrounding us?

Signalling Virtue

This week has been marred by controversy surrounding a campaign by Protein World, in which posters of a thin, fit woman with the tagline: “Are You Beach Body Ready?” were used to advertise weight loss formula in London.

Unsurprisingly, the posters received backlash from those who believed they glorified an unhealthy perception of what a ‘beach body’ should look like. However, this perception has been around for decades, so why is this comparatively tame iteration receiving so much negative attention?

Validation | Social Proof

Everything we do is driven by the need to accomplish goals. These drivers can be hardwired, internally motivated, or socially derived, but what they all have in common is that they trigger certain behaviours.

Many theorists argue that certain drivers take precedence over others. Gad Saad argues in favour of four evolved instincts that drive our need to consume. Maslow’s well-known Hierarchy of Needs demonstrates that certain needs must be fulfilled before other, ‘higher order’, needs are considered.

Social drivers, too, have been scientifically studied. Social proof is a phenomenon often used by marketers to drive conformity to a particular behaviour, but can be difficult to leverage. This is because social proof is a complicated pattern of behaviours influenced by the need for validation.