There are two other papers from the symposium that I’ll mention before returning to the question of dual process theories as a universal model. One is by Buchsbaum , Bridgers, Weisberg, and Gopnik (2012) and examines play inter alia and the other is by Frith (2012). Buchsbaum et al. (op. cit.) makes a convincing case that play in general and pretend play in particular provides a platform in young preschool children (2–3 years) for various way of learning that involve really rather sophisticated ways of establishing causality. Children occupy a world of pretend play from an early age where props are used and the symbols of language and gesture as well as the rules of ‘let’s pretend…’ where objects representing castles and dungeons provide that unique blend of entertainment and cognitive learning. But this takes time and children have that time. No other species has such a long period of immaturity (see Bjorklund , 2007).
Frith (2012) is interested in metacognition which is being able to think about thinking. This skill of self-monitoring is surely similar to System 2 or the central route of ELM . Both assume a conscious thoughtful perspective. However it’s not as simple as it seems. There is plenty of evidence of what is called in the literature implicit processes, processes that must be occurring in our minds but of which we are not consciously aware. An example of this was the famous Zajonc experiments reported in this chapter where participants were completely unable to identify the figures they had seen very briefly on a screen but showed a preference for them when asked to select the one out of two they liked better. Some representation was accessible in their minds implicitly but not available explicitly. Metacognition is not all conscious and there is plenty of evidence in the literature that our metacognitive processes can be influenced by implicit processes. Indeed there is a review by Nisbett and Wilson (1977) (cited by Frith, 2012) that concludes we have little or no direct conscious access to higher order cognitive processes. Introspection (you are thinking about your thinking) can access the outcome of these processes but doesn’t give much away about how these outcomes came about.
So here is this rather gloomy picture of human minds infected, affected, influenced by thoughts, feelings and intentions that we are not aware of. Is that the end of the story? Well, we are left with explicit metacognition at the top control level of all the cognitive processes. It’s much slower than its implicit cousin and deals with thinking about thinking like the other one. But metacognition can deal with our thoughts freed from the actual world and conceive of stimuli that are not there and actions that have yet to happen. These are often called ‘counterfactuals ’ because they deal with mental states that either don’t exist yet or are possibilities we never chose. They are answers to ‘what if…?’ and ‘If only I had…’ You can create imaginary worlds, infinite possibilities and open up your imagination by daring to think that way. In consumer psychology the phenomenon of ‘anticipated regret ’ can be a powerful determiner of consumption . ‘If I choose this university to go to then the consequences are likely to be like this so I’ll choose the other one’. Another example is found in McConnell et al. (2000) who found consumers operated with anticipated regret of the type: If I buy it today and find it for less next week, I’ll regret my purchase. The promise of a price guarantee reduced this. However a meta-analysis of anticipated regret’s role in health-related behaviours found that anticipated regret from not engaging in a behavior (i.e. inaction regret ) predicted stronger health-related intentions and behaviour (Brewer , DeFrank, & Gilkey, 2016). These wonderings, anticipations and acting out possible scenarios are all too human and are certainly one of the roots of narratives we get in imaginative fiction and novels as well as enabling us to go about our daily lives as consumers. Frith (2012) however claims that there is one identifiable characteristic that is unique to humankind which was collective intentionality and we were different from primates because of that (op. cit., p. 2220). What does this mean? Collective intentionality means that we can share knowledge and intentions and he cites evidence that very young children but not chimpanzees can do this. Collective intentionality means that with the benefit of language and the emergence of culture we can improve as individuals and in turn make our own cultural contributions from understandings and visions of the world we live in that are shared by others.
Implicit and Explicit Memory
I hope that I have managed to persuade you that perception without awareness occurs, whether that is because the stimulus is in an ill-defined zone between above threshold/below threshold, or whether attentional resources have been deployed to some other perceptual system or some other. The evidence is there that we claim not to have seen anything of X and yet we behave, or respond under experimental conditions in such a way that we must have perceived X.
So maybe our memories are to blame? We need to take a closer look at what’s involved in human memory and remembering. For many people we can say that memory is a record of their past experiences. A lot of it is recorded and diaries or journals consist of personal records people have kept of their past, usually written at the time. The late Tony Benn, a British politician, kept such a record assiduously over a period of 70 years, and published it. However ‘keeping a diary’ is a private activity for many people. On the other hand collective remembering is a public activity where groups share knowledge and the social dynamics of this should interest psychologists. Although sociologists and historians wrote extensively on the subject it’s only recently 10 that psychologists have contributed. My own view on the mutual antipathy between some sociologists and psychologists about an area that interests both, and I have been a member of both these academic departments in my career, is that we have a clash of epistemological principles. Whereas psychologists ask irritating question about for example false memories and how collective forgetting might work at the level of individual persons, 11 sociologists would regard that as missing the point which is that collective remembering about, for example 9-11 is more to do with the memorials as reflected in both material and subjective culture.
Suppose you are a market researcher and your client has just spent lots of money advertising a brand of washing powder called BioFrooshX. 12 She wants to find out if the brand name has ‘gone into the minds of customers out there’ (her words). You go to your toolbox and there is a technique called ‘Day After Recall’ (of course it’s called DAR) which involves asking people questions. Let’s suppose you are a market researcher. The commercial spot has been on prime-time TV and your interviewers make thousands of random phone calls. They have been able to interview about 200 people who were watching the program when the spot commercial was on. Interviewers ask the subjects if they remembered any commercials for washing powder. If they remember the category but do not identify the brand in question, the interviewers ask if they remember seeing a commercial for that brand. Then questions are asked like what the commercial said about the brand, what it showed, what it looked like and what the main ideas were (based on AdAge Encyclopedia, 2003).
In my opinion, the prevailing metaphor suggested here is of long term memory as a vast store with the brand nested in a TV commercial, which is found in the context of advertising a particular product, which is part of media watched. We can call this the Russian doll approach and the goal is to identify those people who were able to not only find the smallest doll but to describe the narrative context as well. ‘Aided recall ’ is when help is given at some point to get them to the next ‘stage’. In addition we have recognition which doesn’t require retrieval of content and is correspondingly easier but also can be faked. 13 However the reality of the mind is not that it’s like a warehouse of ideas. It’s more like the weather where clouds appear and reappear and occasionally it rains, hopefully at some point in the consumption cycle. Certainly we now know that information is getting in although it’s not been attended to and certainly nor rehearsed. How can we tap into this implicit memory for brands ?
One would be word completion , a technique which every crossword aficionado will recognise. In
the unlikely circumstances (so far) of me forgetting my first name the following framework might provide it: B_I_N. Or the brand of lemonade which used to be sold when I was a child in Edinburgh was _U_BA_S. 14 One explanation would be increased word fluency caused by the exposure to the word in the past although that’s not enough to reconstruct the word without help which is provided with the three letters in both cases. Can you recall the name of the hypothetical brand? It’s to do with washing (prompt). Here are some letters to help you B_O_R_O_HX (implicit memory access ).
Total Involvement
At my university we still manage to run what are called tutorials where small(ish) groups of students discuss topics and the role of the teacher is more facilitator than lecturer. So I try and shut up and encourage discussion and debate. We were talking about dual systems and how they might work in real life and I was trying to put forward the idea that diagrams with boxes and arrows are just visual aids to help our understanding of how the mind works. Students like diagrams with boxes and arrows because they are easy to memorise and they can be reproduced in papers and exams. My own ulterior motive was to get the idea across that we need to wean ourselves off boxes ‘n’ arrows and think continuous process. In the particular case of dual systems can we use a spectrum with total engagement at one end and complete lack of interest at the other? One student suggested the ultimate involvement would be when playing a MMORPG 15 totally engaged and how would advertising be processed under these conditions if it came with the game? That then gave me an opportunity to mention someone whose writing captivated me when I first read his work. He’s the man with the unpronounceable name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Playgraph, 2004, May 10). Csikszentmihalyi popularised the idea of flow in human experience . He argued that this can occur when certain conditions are fulfilled such as a balance between the challenges of the task, the skills that are involved in the task, goals are clear and explicit, and feedback is provided immediately (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p. 32). Focussed concentration and a blending together of activity and awareness can then follow. We see here in game playing and also in other activities, the emergence of a flow experience . It can be sustained more in some circumstances than in others. Csikszentmihalyi has identified flow experiences occurring in inter alia doing non-routine surgery, rock climbing, dancing, singing in a choir, and generally indulging passionately in your favourite activity—it could be cooking for example. He also devised the experience sampling method (ESM) to measure flow where for example you might be asked to complete various scales on your feelings at random times of the day. 16 The books he wrote became popular and I think there was a need for his writings at the time, the 1970s and 1980s, when the traditional distinction between work and leisure was beginning to become blurred. The emergence of a leisure culture was reflected in academia with the development of interests in both the sociology and psychology of leisure.
Consumers are interested in flow experiences and the media have never been slow to recognise that. In the UK, Gareth Malone popularised choir singing with a BBC TV show called The Choir and before that a BBC series called Strictly Come Dancing filled a regular autumn family view slot year on year. The concept or rather the take-home message for both of these programmes was partly ‘you too can do that’ 17 as well-loved celebrities tried their best to dance with professionals, or failed, and the Strictly… format has been successfully sold abroad by BBC Worldwide. Participants in both shows leave one with the overriding impression that learning and practising the activities of singing and dancing, albeit in a competitive and highly social and immersive context is a very special experience. Words like ‘life-changing’ and ‘unforgettable’ are used to describe the experience.
Rock-climbing and mountaineering have their aficionados and they are also activities that traditionally been part of Britain’s range of outdoor activities since gentlemen alpinists braved the peaks of Europe and further afield, on Everest itself. George Mallory and Sandy Irvine from Britain were attempting the summit of Everest in 1924 and were on their way to the top before they disappeared from view and the question of did they actually reach the top remains unanswered to this day. Colonel John Hunt led the successful expedition to climb Everest in 1953 and become part of British history and folklore. 18 Climbers get intrinsic satisfaction from their pursuits in the mountains and often have difficulty putting into words just why they do it.
Recently with the advent of new materials and specialist equipment together with a desire to try new physical activities we see the rise of testing sports based on parachuting such as paragliding, hang gliding, bungee jumping, BASE jumping and running such as the Marathon des Sables or ultra-running (anything more than a marathon). And there are those who compete to be the best such as Alex Honnold who became the first climber make the ascent (solo with no ropes) up Yosemite’s 3000-foot El Capitan rock wall in 2017 or Kilian Jornet (the Spanish ultra-runner) who summited Everest 26 hours after leaving Base Camp. No fixed ropes or oxygen.
We’ve come a long way from the flow experience but have we gone in the right direction? There is a tendency in many cultures these days to equate extreme activity with success or achievement. It is no accident that we take about ‘ultra’ running and extreme sports and the three adjectives ‘ultra’, ‘hyper’, and ‘super’ are used to grade different varieties of the ‘ultimate’ experience. Why is this relevant to consumption ? It’s certainly relevant to anyone who is marketing anything where achievement or success is one of the drivers behind the promotional campaign, but it is I believe symptomatic of a set of cultural values that has a deep influence on our consumer behaviour. Because it’s a root metaphor . In Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 23) we read that BIGGER is BETTER is linked via the common theme UP. In other words BIGGER is UP and BETTER is UP and these basic spatial metaphors will predict the bigger/better relationship. The bigger/better relationship is culturally dominant in many cultures and is linked to success and visibility. Kyung , Thomas, and Krishna (2017) argued that there is an implicit bias when using numbers in judgments as when rating a good or service and that this bias is based on the bigger/better metaphor. The bigger the number, the better the score. They also argue that there are cultural differences e.g. in Germany the reverse system where small numbers signify better is more dominant in implicit memory. However I would argue that number has two aspects; the cardinal value meaning the size of a set and the ordinal value i.e. the ordering of items within a set, and that these need to be clarified in any analysis. 19 In any case one needs to complete a very careful analysis of the culture to argue bigger numbers signify higher quality. Certainly in Strictly…(and presumably other TV companies around the world that have bought the format) when the judges hold up their paddles with a ‘10’ on each that’s a perfect score and many people remember Nadia Comăneci with her ‘perfect 10s’ at the Olympics. But who’s ‘number 1’? She’s the best.
Have we gone in the right direction? I don’t think so and what we have lost is ‘the middle way ’. This term means many things to different people so we’ll clarify it, put it together with ‘flow’ and see if we have a recipe for a different kind of thinking.
Mindfulness
I left the section on Total involvement with a root metaphor implying that extremes are best. Faster, harder, higher, bigger… They all imply that success with our endeavours is assured if we don’t stop now because we are tired but one more step and we’ll make it. The new morality is to dream impossible dreams, stretch yourself beyond your limits and success is just around the corner. As I write this I hear snatches of music in my head and phrases float into view from popular culture and I feel reassured and ready for action. The middle way reeks of compromise as there’s no striving or effort there and it’s the sort of thing old hippies used to practice. Well, we’ll see. There are several ways of approaching mindfulness and I’ll start with some Buddhist ideas. Bodhi (2011) argues that although mindfulness emerged 20 in the West in 1979 as a therapeutic discipline, the roots of the
practice go back to the fifth century BCE 21 when Buddha lived and taught in north India. For many readers Buddhist philosophy or way-of-life was synonymous with the state of mind often called enlightenment which in the 1960s seemed to be what many people were striving for. Mindfulness is an essential part of that path. My own reading(s) on the topic, and Bodhi ’s description seems to summarise the literature well, is that one needs to first adopt a mind-set where covetousness and displeasure have been removed. This would include of course desire for goods and services per se, and displeasure would include a negative emotional attitude toward the world. The metaphor here is removing or stripping in order to perceive better. Then according to Bodhi , right mindfulness (sammā sati) can occur (op. cit., p. 20). You need to focus your contemplation on your thoughts, your feelings, and your intentions. So there’s reflection here, a turning in. But it’s not done in a quiet place necessarily or one where the beauty of nature or the aesthetics of humankind are on display to be viewed, heard, or felt. What comes through the senses is not perceived as desirable or gives you displeasure. You will have a lucid awareness that’s infused with an understanding that all things must pass, an awareness of process extended to the eternal and inevitable cycle of life and death . But it’s not transcendental and mindfulness plays out against a backdrop of everyday life with all the normal cognitive structures intact. Although the extent to which ancient wisdom has been systematically distorted by fads and fashions of contemporary thinking on the subject might be a fruitful avenue to explore, I shall resist the temptation to be diverted. Suffice to say that mindfulness is not a recipe for permanent narcotic-induced bliss.
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