Category Archives: Psychology

Don’t mess with the script!

Our lives aren’t run as a stream of unconnected events, where we are constantly surprised, and often confused. In most cases, anyway…

Actually each event in our lives runs against a cognitive script - a set of expectations we’ve built up from experience.  For instance, think about walking into a new shop you’ve never been in.  You don’t immediately panic, because the script stored in your head maps out into how the store works…

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Why Do You Click?

Everyone who deals with online marketing spends time thinking about “Attribution Analysis” – who actually gets the credit for a sale?  Was it PPC, was it a display ad, was is search?  Affiliates?  The position of Jupiter and Venus?

Actually, in addition to a bunch of online-marketing related drivers (and planetary positioning), there’s a huge list of factors about us as human beings that’s often missed.

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Don’t make my brain hurt!

I challenge you to look at the girl on the left for more than 10 seconds.  Difficult, right?  That’s the brain being confronted with something so fundamentally wrong, it actually feels like it hurts to look at it.

[And by the way I screen-captured this from a display ad for an online intelligence quiz / aka information-capture site]

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Do music and smells REALLY make you shop more?

In a recent study, fashion shoppers in an (offline) retail setting were observed while music was played (or not), and the scent of vanilla was wafted into the shop (or not).  When both were present, the amount of time and money the young shoppers spent increased significantly.

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Consumers prefer 1% interest to 0% interest

1%  <  0%  ?

In the list of strange ways that our minds work, this has earned a ranking place.  Research by Mauricio M. Palmeira, and published in the Journal of Consumer Research has found that consumers more readily “get” the value of a low interest rate, than none at all.

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