Results tagged “research”
Some interesting research on the value of near-misses in gambling:
Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an improvement in performance and spur the player to try again. But gambling is a game of chance, which distorts gamblers' thought processes - near misses cause them gambler to overestimate both the level of skill involved and their chances of winning. This spurs them to continue gambling.
Interesting to think about the implications of this sort of stuff on the "gamification" movement currently going on. The article also highlights that manufacturers of gambling machines have been smart to this effect for awhile: "Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves."
[Via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]
Tags: gambling, games, psychology, research
Good article from the Economist about the realities of TV consumption:
In surveys [people] almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form. In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson's subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time. He was probably not so much fibbing as misinterpreting the question. When asked how he watched television, he gave an answer that described his behaviour when he was alone, and thus did not have to compromise. But most of the time he watched with other people.
The article also points out how many "disruptive" TV ideas have missed a basic premise of how we consume: With other people. I can't help but feel like the current wave of "social TV" applications that aim to allow me to connect with my friends while watching shows will suffer the same fate. The reality of the situation is that the vast majority of my TV time is already spent consuming it socially with the person sitting next to me on the couch.
Tags: culture, research, television
Joel Rubinson, chief research officer for The ARF (advertising research foundation) has an interesting post up about the value of path to purchase research and recency in marketing. First off, two points of background: One, at Naked we spent a lot of time thinking about consumer journeys and that has definitely shaped my thinking on the subject and two, if you're unfamiliar with path to purchase and why it's valuable you need to look no further than Google. Basically the money machine that is Google Adwords is one of the best purchase path targeting devices the marketing world has ever known. Think about it this way, when you're thinking about buying a TV you type in some vague keywords to aid your research, advertisers looking to reach you spend less, because they know you're not as far along on your path. Later on, as you zero in on the make and model, keyword price goes up, as they know you're close to purchase and they can extract some dough from you.
Anyway, Joel suggests that more brands should pay attention to their consumer's purchase paths as it will help them prioritize their marketing. If you know that people tend to make a decision before they walk into the store, then you want to be at that last place where they made that decision. Joel acknowledges that this needs to be balanced with brand goals, a point he illustrates nicely with cinema advertising: "Hypothetically, cinema advertising might have the highest LTS of all touchpoints (you're sitting in the theatre waiting for the movie to start) but a really low recency factor. However, the recency factor itself might be less important when marketing's main objective is "imparting brand meaning" (say during the launch of a brand)."
Tags: marketing, media, research
The ultimatum games feels like the most overused example of behavioral economics at this point, but it's nonetheless interesting. (Basically it's a game where people are asked to split some monetary amount, say $10, between two parties. The first party makes an offer and the second either accepts, taking their share and giving the offerer theirs, or declines, in which case neither party gets any money. Though rational economic theory would predict a person offers the smallest non-zero amount -- $1 if we're going with offers of whole numbers -- and that the person on the other end would accept any non-zero amount. The thing is, it doesn't work that way and most people won't accept an offer they don't deem to be fair.)
Okay, so with that out of the way, it turns out that in this case chimps are actually more rational than we are:
Chimpanzees, however, go about the ultimatum game (which involves divisions of raisins in their case) without giving fairness any thought. In this experiment, the researchers found that the chimp responders tended to accept any nonzero offer, however unfair. And conversely, the chimp proposers rarely suggested a fair division, choosing instead to maximize their own share.
Tags: chimps, economics, research
Which is more motivating, a financial incentive or a tangible one? Over at Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely points to an experiment by Goodyear tires to find the answer. The company divided its sales team into two groups, giving one financial incentives and the other tangible incentives of equal value. I'll let Ariely (at least I assume it's Ariely writing) take it from here:
The results were very interesting; it turned out that the tangible-reward group increased sales by 46% more than the monetary-reward group. They also improved in terms of the mix of products sold by 37%. One explanation, and it seems to me a fairly good one, is that we can visualize tangible rewards (imagine yourself on a Hawaiian beach), which creates an emotional response. Money, on the other hand, is not accompanied by images as often (aside from maybe Scrooge McDuck swimming in piles of it), and lacks the emotional pull that tangible rewards have, so they're less effective in motivating employees. I guess it's called "cold, hard cash" rather than "future beach vacation cash" for a reason.
Tags: behavioraleconomics, economics, research
An interesting link from Enjoymentland, Track Your Happiness is part of a doctoral project out of Daniel Gilbert's lab. Essentially you give the site a bunch of demographic data and then you recieve a few iPhone formatted surveys everyday asking you how you're feeling about life, etc.
I'm super curious how this will work out as it's the sort of thing I've had on my mind lately. As part of GE Adventure I've had a lot of conversations about how bad a game health is currently and while this isn't quite a game, it does encourage you to track your healthiness/happiness and then provides shows you your answers in the form of charts and graphs (check out some screenshots).
Will let you know how things progress, just took my first survey. (There are definitely some potential privacy issues with this thing ... but hey, what are you going to do?)
Tags: happiness, health, research, visualization
I posted this story about unfounded medical truths over at GE Adventure, but it's too good not to post here as well. Taken from How Doctors Think
.
One of the most common congenital abnormalities of the heart is a hole between the two upper chambers, between the right atrium and the left atrium. Since the pressure in the left side of the heart is higher than in the right, blood will flow from the left atrium through the hole into the right atrium. This aberrant blood flow is called a shunt and can overload the right side of the heart, leading to heart failure and other complications. Lock told me that doctors send children for surgery to close these holes if there is a two-to-one shunt, meaning that twice as much blood flows through the right side of the heart than the left.
"Do you know where that two-to-one number came from?" [Dr. James] Lock [chief of cardiology at Boston's Children's Hospital] asked. I imagined it was from careful clinical studies of children with the hold. "You would think so. But you'd be wrong. At a medical meeting in the 1960s, a pediatrician presented the question 'When should the hold be closed?' to a group of cardiologists. There was a heated debate about how much shunting required a surgical fix. So the meeting organizers, out of desperation, took a vote. Some voted for a lower number, some for a higher number. The median ended up being two-to-one. This was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. So now all textbooks have as the truth that you should close a hole when the shunt is two-to-one.
Tags: health, research
Last week Fast Company did a little event to celebrate their 100 Most Creative People in Business issue. As part of it, Ed Ulbrich of Digital Domain spoke of his company's work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I knew none of this, but apparently Benjamin's face is all computer animation, a serious triumph and something many in film thought couldn't be done. The way Digital Domain accomplished this was by mapping Brad Pitt's face using something called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS): "The most widely used and versatile method for measuring and describing facial behaviors. Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen developed the original FACS in the 1970s by determining how the contraction of each facial muscle (singly and in combination with other muscles) changes the appearance of the face."
In case your curious, here is a list of facial behaviors and some corresponding photos. Also, if you care to sift through a heavy-duty flash site, here is some more info on how they made Benjamin Button.
Tags: movies, research, science, specialeffects
Mark offers up some good advice on when market research is appropriate:
It's only if - as classical economics and many of our 'commonsense' rule of thumb "I'm-just-a-practical-fella" kinds of models assume - individuals are actually choosing independently of each other that you might find asking them what they like about the thing or what they feel etc of some use.
This is something I've tried to explain often to folks in reference to brand tags. I won't add brands that no one knows about because the data you get back will be useless: If people don't yet have a perception of your brand than asking them will only force a false response.
Tags: marketing, research
File this under, "I'm not quite sure why this is interesting but I know it is."
A few days ago Hunch, Caterina Fake's new startup that tries to help you make better decisions by showing you data from others trying to decide the same thing, launched an "academic version" of their API. As you can see in their example, this version allows you to search their database of more than 4 million answered questions and not only see the answer, but also see the answers that most highly correlate with the answer you chose. (Users who prefer laptops are most closely correlated with users used a Polaroid camera and users who would cook burgers on the grill are most closely correlated with users that think casual Fridays are awesome.)
Not sure what to do or think about it, but seems kind of awesome. Also kind of reminds me of some of what I've been doing with Brand Tags (and Battle Mode). The idea of making research fun and using the data it spits out to better understand how the world works makes me happy.
Oh, and if you want a Hunch invite, I have a few. Just leave a comment. First left, first served. Unfortunately have none left, you can still leave a comment if you'd like and I'll hook it up when/if my invites get replenished. I'm also pretty sure you can just leave your email on their homepage and you'll get one soon.
Tags: api, research
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