Tagged with psychology - Personal View Talks

Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?

SeanL78 — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 16:49:49 +0000

The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Choosing your next camera: Do users change their settings?

Vitaliy_Kiselev — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 04:54:24 +0000

Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.

Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.

We thought about that and wondered what the rationale was for keeping such an important feature turned off. We thought that maybe they were concerned about people running off floppies or those who had slow or small disks. Autosave does have performance implications, so maybe they were optimizing the behavior for the worst case, assuming that users who had the luxury to use the feature would turn it on.

We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. We explained our hypothesis about optimizing for performance. They asked around and told us our hypothesis was incorrect.

It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.

Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program.

It seems programmers and designers like to customize their environment. Who would’ve guessed? Could that be why they chose their profession?

(Big takeaway: If you’re a programmer or designer, then you’re not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn’t mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.)

We’ve repeated this experiment in various forms over the years. We’ve found it to be consistently true: users rarely change their settings.

Via: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/

Read this and think why the cameras are designed a way they are designed today.
So, next time you start asking for setting allowing to adjust gamma curve, remember, most users don't give a shit about it.

Choosing your next camera: Dopamine reward

Vitaliy_Kiselev — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 03:11:10 +0000

Few years ago, a team of neuroeconomists at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon investigated the neuroscience of consumer decisions. A few dozen lucky undergraduates were recruited as experimental subjects and given a generous amount of spending money. The subjects were then offered the chance to buy several different objects, from a digital voice recorder to gourmet chocolates to the latest Harry Potter book. After staring at the object for a few seconds, the students were shown the price tag. If they chose to buy the item, its cost was deducted from their pile of cash. The experiment was designed to realistically simulate the experience of a shopper.

While people were deciding whether or not to buy the products on display, the scientists were imaging the activity inside their brains. They discovered that when subjects were first exposed to the objects their nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was turned on. The NAcc is a crucial part of the dopamine reward pathway, and the intensity of its activation was a reflection of desire for the item. If the person already owned the complete Harry Potter collection, then the NAcc didn’t get too excited about the prospect of buying another copy. However, if he or she had been craving a George Foreman grill, then the NAcc showed a spike in activity whenever the item appeared.

But then came the price tag. When the experimental subjects were exposed to the cost of the product, their insula and prefrontal cortex were activated. The insula secretes aversive feelings, and is triggered by things like nicotine withdrawal and pictures of people in pain. In general, we try to avoid anything that makes our insula excited. This includes spending money. The scientists speculate that the prefrontal cortex was activated because this area was computing the numbers, trying to figure out if the product was actually a good deal. The prefrontal cortex got most excited during the experiment when the cost of the item on display was significantly lower than normal.

By measuring the relative amount of activity in each brain region, the scientists could accurately predict the subjects’ shopping decisions. They knew which products people would buy before the people themselves did. If the insula’s negativity exceeded the positive feelings generated by the NAcc, then the subject almost always chose not to buy the item. However, if the NAcc was more active than the insula, or if the prefrontal cortex was convinced that it had found a good deal, the object proved irresistible. The sting of spending money couldn’t compete with the thrill of getting something new.

This snapshot of the “neural predictors of purchase decisions” reveals that there are two basic ways to influence consumer behavior. The first method involves increasing the activity of the NAcc, ramping up our desire for the item. (Marketing is one big ode to the dopamine reward pathway.) Consider the interior of a Costco warehouse. It’s no accident that the most covetous items are put in the most prominent places. A row of high-definition televisions surrounds the entrance. The fancy jewelry, Rolex watches, iPods and other luxury items are conspicuously placed along the corridors with the heaviest foot traffic. The goal of the retailer is to constantly prime the pleasure centers of the brain, to keep us lusting after things we don’t really need. Even though we probably won’t buy the Rolex, just looking at the fancy watch makes us more likely to buy something else.

But it’s not enough to just excite the NAcc: retailers must also inhibit the insula. This brain area is responsible for making sure we don’t get ripped off, and when it’s repeatedly assured by retail stores that low prices are “guaranteed,” or told that a certain item is on sale, or that we’re getting it for the “wholesale price,” it stops worrying so much about the price tag. These retail tactics lull our brain into buying more things, since the insula is pacified. We go broke convinced that we are saving money.

For obvious reasons, online retailers have focused on the insula. They’ve relentlessly gone after the part of the brain that worries about paying too much, taking advantage of their lower overhead costs to offer the same goods for a little bit less. (The last time I walked into a Best Buy I was amused by the number of people who would check out an item and then get out their smartphone, googling to see if the discounted television was actually a good deal.) Once consumers expect an item to be discounted, that discount no longer works its magic on the insula. Instead, we readjust our pricing expectations.

But this singular emphasis on the insula – the part of the brain that frets over cost – reveals the untapped potential awaiting a truly creative online retailer. That’s because the internet has yet to figure out a way to increase the desire of the NAcc, to make us really lust after that thing we don’t need.

Physical stores, of course, have a huge advantage in this regard. When I walk into a J.Crew store, I can feel the softness of the cashmere and try on the latest iteration of the t-shirt. (Trying stuff on triggers the endowment effect, making us more likely to buy the item.) All that tactile stimulation is a “hot” stimulus, exciting the visceral emotions in ways that a picture on a screen just can’t. It’s the difference between smelling french fries and looking at an image of them – the greasy odor is a far more powerful trigger. The smell is what makes us drool.

Right now, online retailers have yet to move past ordinary pictures and boilerplate descriptions of the product. They’re still trying to sell us with information, when it’s long been clear that emotions drive our purchase decisions. (Contrary to the neat models of microeconomics, consumers typically aren’t driven by careful considerations of price and expected utility. ) As far as I can tell, the big innovation of the past few years in online selling has been the “zoom in,” allowing people to see the t-shirt or television or couch at a more detailed level. But even this trick is extremely limited. That’s because I don’t want to see a close-up of the french fry – I want to smell it. And until I can smell that fry – until internet merchants can tickle my NAcc – they’ll always be forced to hunt for new ways to soothe the insula. And that means discounts.

Via: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/the-neuroscience-of-groupon/

Choosing your next camera: Experts and predictions

Vitaliy_Kiselev — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 05:11:14 +0000

University of California at Berkeley psychologist Philip Tetlockmade an experimental project.

He picked 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends" and began asking
them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be reelected? Would
there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst?
In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits
about their thought processes so he could better understand how they'd made up their minds. By the end of the study, Tetlock had
quantified 82,361 different predictions.

After Tetlock tallied the data, the predictive failures of the pundits became obvious. Although they were paid for their keen
insights into world affairs, they tended to perform worse than random chance. Most of Tetlock's questions had three possible
answers; on average, the pundits had selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-thro wing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. Tetlock also found that the most famous pundits in his study tended to be the least accurate, consistently churning out overblown and overconfident forecasts. Eminence was a handicap.

From: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0547247990/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315645820&sr=8-1