6.7: How Words Change the Taste of Biscuits
Remember that words do not only affect the price of a dish – they can also change its taste. Five years ago, we received a worried phone call from Belgian colleague. One of their largest biscuit manufacturers had replaced their most popular brand with a new, lower-fat variant, but as soon as they released it onto the market, sales plummeted. They were bamboozled; they had performed extensive research and testing and many people could notice no difference in the taste of the new biscuit, and yet no one was buying the new version.
This was one of those problems which I was able to solve without even leaving my chair. ‘I see,’ I said over the speakerphone, ‘And did you put “Now with lower fat” on the packaging of the biscuits?’ ‘Of course we did!’ they replied. ‘We’d spent months reducing the fat content of the biscuits – what’s the point of doing that if you don’t tell people about it?’ ‘There’s your problem,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put “low in fat” or any other health indicators on the packaging, you’ll make the contents taste worse.’ In the testing that they had conducted the biscuits had been unpackaged, and they had forgetten that packaging will also affect the taste.
6.8: The Map Is Not the Territory, but the Packaging Is the Product
The Polish-American academic Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) is perhaps most famous for his dictum that ‘The map is not the territory.’ He created a field called general semantics, and argued that because human knowledge of the world is limited by human biology, the nervous system and the languages humans have developed, no one can perceive reality, given that everything we know arrived filtered by the brain’s own interpretation of it. Top man!
One day, Korzybski offered to share a packet of biscuits, which were wrapped in plain paper, with the front row of his lecture audience. ‘Nice biscuit, don’t you think?’ said Korzybski, while the students tucked in happily. Then he tore the white paper and revealed the original wrapper – on it was a picture of a dog’s head and the words ‘Dog Cookies’. Two students began to retch, while the rest put their hands in front of their mouths or in some cases ran out of the lecture hall and to the toilet. ‘You see,’ Korzybski said, ‘I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.’
This effect is not confined to edible products; in cleaning products, adding the words ‘now kinder to the environment’ to packaging may lead people to instinctively believe the contents are less effective. There is an ethical and practical dilemma here: if you wish to produce a greener laundry detergent, should you mention its kindness to the environment on the packaging, given that those claims might unconsciously cause people either to not to buy it or to use more of it than is necessary? In some cases it might be better to do good by stealth, particularly if the number of buyers who care about the environment may be outnumbered by those who don’t.
Announcing even the tiniest tweaks to popular products has been a disaster for Vegemite, Milo and the Cadbury Creme Egg – even if they couldn’t otherwise, people notice a change in taste simply because a change in formulation has been announced. When Kraft wanted to introduce a healthier formulation for their Mac & Cheese, they were terrified of a similar reaction, particularly as the malignant combination of social media and newspapers keen for a story can turn a small number of hostile tweets into national news. So they removed the artificial yellow dye and added paprika, turmeric and other natural replacements – and then kept silent about it. Practically no one noticed a thing – until they announced the change retrospectively, under the headline ‘It’s changed. But it hasn’t.’ This way, they were able to gain the potential custom of people who had previously avoided the product because of its artificiality, without creating an imagined taste change among its regular customers, who suddenly discovered they had been eating the healthier variant all along.*
6.9: The Focusing Illusion
Attention affects our thoughts and actions far more than we realise. Daniel Kahneman, along with Amos Tversky, is one of the fathers of behavioural economics; ‘the focusing illusion’, as he calls it, causes us to vastly overestimate the significance of anything to which our attention is drawn. As he explains:
‘Nothing is as important as we think it is while we are thinking about it. Marketers exploit the focusing illusion. When people are induced to believe that they “must have” a good, they greatly exaggerate the difference that this good might make to the quality of their life. The focusing illusion is greater for some goods than for others, depending on the extent to which the goods attract continued attention over time. The focusing illusion is likely to be more significant for leather car seats than for books on tape.’
In marketing, comparison tables can be used to play a trick on the consumer: if the person compiling the table in the above advert for car breakdown services had wanted to be objective, there are perhaps 50 additional benefits he could have added which are offered by all the companies. However, he instead chooses to focus the reader’s mind on the small proportion of overall benefits that are uniquely offered by the brand being promoted.
The old advertising belief in having a Unique Selling Proposition (a ‘USP’) also exploits the focusing illusion: products are easier to sell if they offer one quality that the others do not. Even if this feature is slightly gratuitous, by highlighting a unique attribute, you amplify the sense of loss a buyer might feel if they buy a competing product.
Recreated by Greg Stevenson. From https://sixtysomething.co.uk/compare-breakdown-cover/
Emphasise the differences, not the similarities.
Camping equipment is one of the most dangerous things to buy while in the grip of the focusing illusion. While in the shop, you imagine yourself using the products in perfect climatic conditions, but these in fact rarely occur.* Secondly, the facets of a product that seem most appealing at the moment of purchase may, in fact, be disadvantageous when we come to use them. For example, all sleeping bags when sold are packed tightly into unfeasibly small bags. However, the long-term effect of these is that, though the product may look attractive when new and professionally packaged, they are all but impossible to repack after use.
We can guard against this illusion by directing our attention to metrics that may seem less salient than they deserve to be. For example, we can imagine ourselves trying to repack a tent in the rain on a windy day. Or, while looking to buy a Porsche, we perhaps should imagine ourselves sitting in it while stuck in London traffic – something that will happen many times – rather than on a drive through the Cotswolds on a summer’s evening – something that will happen only once or twice.
It is interesting that Kahneman uses leather seats in cars as an example of the focusing illusion. I had always wondered whether they were chosen purely because of status signalling: status probably ranks higher on your list of priorities when you buy a car than it does later on in the car’s life, when reliability, running costs and comfort are more significant. Actually, whether leather seats are better than cloth seats also depends on the focusing illusion. There are many dimensions by which you can compare what seats are covered in, including not only status and price, but slippiness, smell, ease of cleaning, durability, ethics and even whether they can be painful to sit on in hot weather.* Depending on which of these qualities you choose to use as a discriminator, leather is either vastly superior to cloth or a senseless extravagance.*
It is fair for Kahneman to say that the focusing illusion plays a huge part in marketing, but I would argue that it is not actually an illusion at all but is rather an evolutionary necessity. Furthermore, rather than marketers ‘exploiting’ the focusing illusion, it is the illusion which makes marketing necessary. Nevertheless, one way you can improve your happiness is by learning that such an illusion exists, and by controlling what you pay attention to. I have a soft spot for the religious practice of sayin
g grace before a meal, since paying attention to good things that one might easily take for granted seems a good approach to life – a pause to focus attention on a meal should add to its enjoyment.*
6.10: Bias, Illusion and Survival
The focusing illusion is indeed an illusion, but so is almost all our perception, because an objective animal would not survive for long. As neuroscientist Michael Graziano explains, ‘If the wind rustles the grass and you misinterpret it as a lion, no harm done. But if you fail to detect an actual lion, you’re taken out of the gene pool.’* It is thus in our evolutionary best interests to be slightly paranoid, but it is also essential that our levels of attention vary according to our emotional state. When walking on our own down an unlit street, the sound of footsteps will occupy more of our attention than it would on a crowded street in daylight.
It is wrong to consider such illusions as things that should be corrected or avoided – it is worth understanding them and the role they might play in distorting our behaviour, but the idea that it is better not to experience them is highly dangerous. For example, if your smoke alarm possessed consciousness, you might confidently say that it suffered from paranoid delusions – it might start beeping furiously when you were doing nothing more dangerous than making toast. There’s a good reason for this – it cannot easily distinguish between the early stages of a house fire and a slice of burnt toast. However, the consequences of being wrong in this situation are quite different. If the smoke alarm goes off when you burn your breakfast, it’s a false positive and annoying, but a false negative can be fatal; the last kind of smoke detector you would want is one that only activates when the flames are licking at its edges.
We have to be careful before we start to casually label biases and illusions as inherent mental failings, rather than the product of evolutionary selection. It pays to consider pareidolia, an optical illusion from which many of us ‘suffer’ when we see faces and human or animal shapes in inanimate objects.
Copyright © Ewan Mirabeau
Pareidolia in action – some people see a face, while some even see George Washington.
You don’t have to study much evolutionary biology to work out why we are highly attuned to detecting faces or animals in the environment. Many threats in our evolutionary history would have been posed by other animals, and being able to recognise them and read their mood would often have made the difference between life and death. Just as with smoke detectors, this raises a question of calibration – yes, the price you pay for being good at spotting human or animal faces is that you tend to see them when they aren’t really there, but it is a price worth paying. It may mean that you might attribute emotions to your washing machine or believe there is a human face in a rock formation, but this comes at little cost to your evolutionary fitness, compared to the advantages that a heightened talent for facial recognition brings.
Image from a study by Greg Borenstein
In the photograph of the key, an algorithm picked out a human face from what is merely two dots and a line cut into it. Software suffers from pareidolia too.
A brain which saw faces in every rock or tree, however, would not be very useful. We can assume that, if possible, evolution will seek to improve its calibration and reduce the number of unwanted false positives. Both smoke detectors and car alarms are significantly less paranoid today than they were in the 1980s but they are both calibrated to err on the side of caution, which is the way it should be. There is always a trade-off, and illusions are the price we pay.
In the same way, facial recognition software must make the same trade-off in order to work. If it never recognises a face mistakenly, it is too insensitive – such high standards would mean that it would fail to recognise faces at a slight angle, or if one eye were closed, which would render it useless. As a result, facial recognition algorithms experience exactly the same pareidolic illusions as humans and some form of calibration is always necessary when dealing with imperfect or ambiguous information. What this all means is that no living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner. Some degree of bias and illusion is unavoidable.
A ‘confused washing machine’ – another example of pareidolia.
6.11: How to Get a New Car for £50
Do you own a car? If you do, is it a reasonably good one? If it is, I have good news for you: the next paragraph will earn you the price of this book back, many times over.
The next time you are thinking about replacing your car, don’t. Instead, wait at least a year, or maybe two or three. In the meantime, rather than selling it, take it to a good valet service from time to time and have it thoroughly cleaned, inside and out. This will cost you about £50–£100 each time, but you will have a much better car. Not just a cleaner car, but a better car – as well as looking nicer, it will drive more smoothly, accelerate more quickly and take corners more precisely. Shiny cars are also simply much more enjoyable to drive. Why? Because of psychophysics.
6.12: Psychophysics to Save the World
How can you stop environmentally friendly cleaning products from being perceived as less effective? Fortunately, there are tricks you can play to fool your unconscious into thinking that environmental gains don’t necessarily come at the cost of effectiveness. Again, such tricks fall under the category of ‘benign bullshit’.
One way in which businesses can reduce their environmental footprint is to sell a product in concentrated form, which reduces packaging and distribution costs, and can also reduce the volume of chemicals used. But there are several problems:
Some people will continue to use the same volume as before, despite the increase in concentration, which leads to overdosing. A smaller cap might reduce this problem, but some people cannot help assuming that less volume means less effect, and compensate with an extra capful.
People may not buy the product at all, because although more concentrated it looks to be worse value for money on the shelf.
People may believe that the product is inferior simply because there is less of it, and lose faith in its value.
A smaller product takes up less space on the shelf, which may reduce its visibility and allow more room for the products of competitors.
There are a few ways to counteract this:
Radical honesty,* such as announcing that the product is, say, 4 per cent less powerful than previously, but 97 per cent better for the environment. Or alternatively, be explicit about a product’s weakness.*
Deploy the ‘Goldilocks effect’ – the natural human bias that means that, when presented with three options, we are most likely to choose the one in the middle. Washing detergent manufacturers use language that normalises the lower and middle usage of the product, while implicitly stigmatising overdosing. For example, ‘Half a capful for light–normal wash’; ‘One capful for a full or heavy wash’; ‘Two capfuls for extreme soiling.’ This creates the impression that one would only use more than one capful if they had committed some brutal crime: as a result, even overdosers will likely use only one cap.*
Change the format: it is hard to believe that a lower amount of powder or liquid will do the same job as before, but if the formulation is changed to a gel or tablets we are more likely to believe it. And if you produce the product in tablet form, consider packaging them in a thin, wide and high packet, so their visibility on the shelf is not reduced.
Add intricacy: simply adding coloured flecks to a plain white powder will make people believe it is more effective, even if they do not know what role these flecks perform. Similarly, tablets that consist of a mixture of liquids, gels and powders help people believe that less is doing more. Remember stripy toothpaste.
Add effort. If a concentrated product requires you to mix it with water first, or to mix together two separate ingredients before using it, our belief in its potency is restored by this small amount of extra bother.*
All these solutions seem like bullshit from a logical po
int of view, and they do all involve an element of smoke and mirrors. If we were capable of objectively viewing the world we would regard this as deception, but alas we can’t. Also, it’s not as if, without these smoke and mirrors, we’d suddenly see the world with perfect accuracy – we’d just see different smoke and different mirrors.
So, do you want the smoke and mirrors that help the environment, or the smoke and mirrors that don’t?
6.13: The Ikea Effect: Why It Doesn’t Pay to Make Things Too Easy
In the 1950s, the General Mills food company launched a line of cake mixes under the Betty Crocker brand that included all the dry ingredients, including milk and eggs. All you needed to do was add water, mix and stick the pan in the oven – what could go wrong? However, despite the many benefits of this miracle product, it did not sell well, and even the Betty Crocker name could not convince anyone to buy it. General Mills brought in a team of psychologists to find out why consumers were avoiding it. One of their explanations was guilt: the product was so damned easy to make compared to traditional baking that people felt they were cheating. The fact that the cake tasted excellent and received plaudits didn’t help – this simply meant that the ‘cook’ felt awkward about getting more credit than they had earned.
In response to these results, General Mills added a little psychological alchemy – or ‘benign bullshit’. They revised the instructions on the packaging to make baking less convenient: as well as water, the housewife was charged with adding ‘a real egg’ to the ingredients. When they relaunched the range with the slogan ‘Just Add an Egg’, sales shot up. The psychologists believed that doing a little more work made women* feel less guilty, while still saving time, but making just enough effort to give the sense of having contributed to the cake’s creation.
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