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Persuasion June 4, 2008

Posted by Mark T. Market in The List.
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Marketing gurus know there a number of psychologically based marketing tricks guaranteed to make consumers buy things that they don’t need. Buy why leave these secrets to corporations? Translate the following golden rules of persuation into every part of your life, and watch you influence soar.

CREATE AN ILLUSION OF SCARCITY

This encourages a sense of urgency prompting people to act quicker–and therefore more impulsively–than they usually would. It also creates an impresion of exclusivity since the snob-factor adds instant value.

APPRECIATE THE POWER OF RECIPROCITY

The theory here is that when someone gives you somthing of perceived value, you immediately want to give something back, however subconscious that feeling may be. For instance, a shampoo sample free with a magazine will incite a customer to pick that new shampoo when next faced with a  pharmacist shelf.

DEMONSTRATE AUTHORITY

People want the best and the ultimate, so create the impression that what you are pushing is just that. The authority can be an illusion. Studies show shops that play classical music find it easier to sell more expensive items than ones playing pop music; customers automatically feel more refined. Consider commitment and consistency. Stability and reliability may not be the sexiest of qualities, but since both generate trust, they are ultimately invaluable.

Source The Book of Secrets

Weight Of A Human Soul April 26, 2008

Posted by Mark T. Market in True Stories.
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If you’ve seen this pretty depressing movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, you might be interested to know that the significance of its title (apart from the fictional story), has to do with an old scientific experiment that took place in 1907.

Duncan MacDougall was a doctor in Haverhill, Massachusetts who had an interesting query about the human soul. At that time, and up to the present, the very existence of the soul was a largely debated idea, but MacDougall sought to avoid the philosophical and metaphysical debate and instead chose to stick to empirical phenomena and observation.

Actually the accounts of the actual experiment are pretty sketchy depending on the source, but what is generally agreed was that MacDougall attempted to quantify the weight of a human soul by observing dying patients. He was said to have taken observations of the weights of six dying patients as they were in their death throes. The more elaborate accounts say that he placed the patients on special beds equipped with sensitive springs and scales, and took observations of the patients’ weights as they finally died.

It’s a morbid idea, not to mention probably unethical medical practice, but from this macabre set-up, Duncan MacDougall was said to have come up with the average drop in weight of the patients after death, which is, as you may already be expecting: 21 Grams.

These observations have stirred many a debate in the scientific community on various angles, for example: can we equate weight loss to the departure of the soul, etc. Other scientists have criticized the procedure as being taken on too small a sample to have any statistical signficance. Although the thought of scientists weighing hundreds if not thousands of dying people to achieve significance is a chilling one, MacDougall himself was not known to have attempted to replicate or validate the data.

However, since the publication of MacDougall’s findings, the term 21 Grams has attained an urban legend status of its own. More than tackling the fault in the method, MacDougall’s experiment actually says more about fault in reasoning or perception: since the body lost weight, and no observable phenomena (e.g. bowel movement, expectoration, vomiting) seems to have contributed to the weight loss, therefore the loss could only be due to the departure of the soul.

It’s an easily ascribed (although illogical) link, although it can be a complex one, since it deals with people’s biases. For one thing, to fully appreciate MacDougall’s work in the way he intended, one should probably be already predisposed to the notion of a soul’s existence. Otherwise, the experiment can’t really hit two birds with one stone, namely the existence of a soul, and its weight.

Biases in perception can be of a shallower sort: like first impressions, usually of the visual sort. I’ve alluded to optical illusions in a previous post to illustrate not only the eye’s tendency to be fooled, but to also lead to a question of our intentions. Our notion of people is probably 80% influenced by how we appreciate their appearance before anything else.

For example, what are your initial impressions of this guy.

Nice guy? Good with the chicks? You think he’d be a good campfire mate during an outing? Or does he have issues?

Click this link for the answer.

To further test your visual perception bias, I found an online quiz you can take to differentiate the bad guys from the good guys.

Meanwhile, you can read more about MacDougall’s experiment and other people’s thoughts on it in the following sites:

 

We See What We Want April 15, 2008

Posted by Mark T. Market in Reflections.
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I’m a fan of optical illusions. Not only do they illustrate the limitations of human perception, but they’re quite a lot of fun in the process.

Consider the following picture (apologies in advance to the color-blind). Also hopefully your browser can view animated gifs (nowadays any decent PC would).

Photobucket

Now I’ll tell you what you can see:

  • If you want to see pink dots, just follow the rotating missing dot.
  • If you want to see pink dots and a green dot, just look at the “+” in the center.
  • If you want to see the green dot more clearly, focus and concentrate on the “+”.

The thing is, there really is no green dot. There’s always just eleven pink dots present. The appearance of a green dot is a color perception driven by the pink dots disappearing against the grey background. Distract your eyes on the “+” and you reinforce the false color perception by making your eyes focus on a different area.

If our sight, being a major part of our five senses, can be easily fooled, our perception is faulty at best.

Add emotion into the mix, and you start to wonder why human beings aren’t quite the rational individuals you were introduced in school philosophy or economics.

Another point: Let’s go back to the list I mentioned above. What I phrased as:

If you want to see the green dot more clearly, focus and concentrate on the “+”.

could have been easily phrased as:

If you focus and concentrate on the “+”, you will see the green dot more clearly.

What’s the difference? The first (and more correct) phrase is driven by intentions. The second (and more commonly understood) phrase, is an action and outcome driven statement.

It’s a fine point, but bear with me for a second. Most of the time, we view our world and our goals as action and outcome-driven statements:

  • If I study, I will pass.
  • If I work, I will make money.
  • If I leave, I will be free.

Notice the presence of the word “will” in those statements, which also implies a time-driven outcome. (click that link to read what I have to say about time). Let rephrase the three statements above into intention-driven statements:

  • If I want to pass, I study.
  • If I want to make money, I work.
  • If I want to be free, I leave.

Although the former and latter group of statements are similar, you know deep inside that they are not. The first group of statements are conditional–but they do not imply any direct knowledge of the results. The second group meanwhile is more affirmative, being driven by desires and intentions. Invoking the first group of statements implies a person making an action, then hoping the result will follow. The second group of statements implies a person who already KNOWS the result.

Big difference.

Notice also that the time element disappears from the second group. This is intentional, because if we still included it, say:

  • If I want to be free, I will leave.

It isn’t quite as effective, isn’t it? By putting a time element into the intention, you effectively nullify it (i.e. you will NEVER leave).

From all the above, the following should be apparent, if not obvious to you by now:

The lies we were raised to believe:

  • We see and perceive things as they are.
  • We do actions which lead to a result.

The truths that eventually emerge:

  • We see and perceive things the way we want to see them.
  • We do actions because we want to achieve a result.

Intention is the missing truth. What we see and what we achieve are a direct result of our intentions. If we have no intentions, we see nothing, we achieve nothing.

The question is: what are our true intentions? What do we really want?