Exam 2 Flashcards
What is subliminal perception?
Perception of or reaction to a stimulus that occurs without awareness or consciousness; when we are attending to a stimulus and something flashes quickly that we can’t consciously perceive
Identify some examples of ads that attempted to leverage subliminal perception
Sex in the ice of the glass of gin; dollar sign in the 99 cent KFC snacker
What are three examples of how subliminal perception works?
- Presentation of a word will lead you to recognize that word more quickly later on
- Exposure to adjectives can influence judgments of later targets
- Exposure to a stimulus can lead to increased liking for the stimulus (mere exposure)
What is the “mere exposure” effect, and how does it work?
The repeated presentation of a stimulus enhances the subjective feeling of fluency (ease) when the stimulus is encountered again (ex: set of polygons)
What are the limitations of subliminal persuasion?
Hard to make the stimulus subliminal for everyone…
- May make the stimulus too weak or too strong
- Need to get people to attend to the stimulus location
- Need the presentation be to just at the right distance
- Can only prime a word or two—not too much info
What do the “Super-Quencher” and “Lipton Ice” studies tell us about the limitations of subliminal persuasion?
When participants who were thirsty were subliminally primed with these drinks, they were more likely to want that specific drink when asked
What is priming, and how does it work?
Exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus
Provide an example of visual, auditory, and olfactory priming.
Olfactory: Room primed with citrus cleaning product, primed participants more likely to be clean
Auditory: Grocer playing French vs. German music and measured the sales of the French/German wine
Visual: Quickly showing the picture of Lipton Ice Tea to thirsty participants
Describe three examples of how priming certain social groups can lead people to assimilate their behavior to fit the stereotype of that group.
Primed with “politicians” = wrote longer political essays
Primed with words related to the elderly: participants walked slower than control group
Primed with Professors and Soccer Hooligans: asked trivia questions, those primed with Professors answered more questions correctly
Are people likely to have stronger or weaker responses to primes with which they have a lot of previous contact?
Stronger responses to primes that they have had more contact with
Under what circumstances would you get people to do the opposite of a prime, rather than the same?
Contrast: Using stereotypes or extreme exemplars (ex. professors or supermodels v. Einstein and Schiffer) those with the exemplar of Einstein answered less questions correctly than those primed with Schiffer, the supermodel
What is metaphor priming? How is it different from other forms of priming? Provide an example.
Primed with a stimulus that is “metaphorically” related; ex. Cold room and socially included/exclusion; two dots on a plane, asked about strength of bonds with siblings and parents)
What are thin slice judgments?
People can make surprisingly accurate judgments quickly and automatically
Describe three examples of the power of thin slice judgments.
Dorm Room and judgements of personality; Love Lab and analysis of 15-minute convo and predictions of whether they will be married; Lie to Me: we unconsciously judge others’ thoughts in a matter of seconds by analyzing facial emotions
First impressions are powerful – describe an example of the power of first impressions
Analyzing politicians’ faces and making judgment calls on their trustworthiness, attractiveness, liking, etc.
What point does the “bat-and-ball” problem illustrate?
Most judgments and decisions are based on impressions generated by our intuitions
What are the characteristics of “System 1” and “System 2” processing?
System 1: “Intuitive”, Automatic, Effortless, Concrete, Associate
System 2: “Reflective”, Controlled, Effortful, Slow & often serial, Rule-based
What is a heuristic?
A “mental shortcut” used in judgment and decision making
What is the difference between special-purpose heuristics and general use heuristics?
Special purpose: use restricted to specific domains (height as a guide for ability as basketball player)
General use: Affect, Availability, Representativeness
What is the affect heuristic? Provide three examples.
People make judgments based on their current feelings and/or subjective impressions of goodness or badness.
Examples: Correlation between happiness and # of dates; birds and willingness to pay for life-saving nets
What is the availability heuristic? Provide three examples.
Making judgments about the frequency or likelihood of an event based on the ease with which evidence or examples come to mind.
Ex. Overclaiming (people claiming more responsibility for collective endeavors), married couples and responsibilities; product quality and safety perceptions
What underlies availability? Is it the number of examples that people can call to mind? Or is it the ease by which people can call examples to mind? How did Schwarz tease apart these potential mechanisms?
- Number – amount of information generated
- Ease – the ease with which information can be generated
- Participants asked to evaluate their own assertiveness by providing six or twelve examples = ease influences judgments sometimes in spite of number
How can marketers increase availability?
Vividness, personal experience and mood
What is the representativeness heuristic? Provide an example.
Making predictions based on similarities between a specific target and a general category. A member ought to resemble the overall category; an effect ought to resemble or be similar to the cause
Ex: Story of Linda the philosophy major and what is her job
Identify and define three biases that result from over-reliance on the representativeness heuristic, and provide an example of each.
Conjunction fallacy: Judging the conjunction of two events to be more probable than one of the constituent; ex. Linda problem
Misperceiving randomness: Effects should resemble the process that produced them; Random letters in a “pattern”
Regression fallacy: ascribes cause where none exists, regression towards the mean; basketball players making certain shots
What is construal?
The way in which a person interprets the world around them; the same situation may produce very different behavior depending on the subjective meaning that is attached to it
What is framing?
Describing the same options in different ways can lead to different preferences and choices; Both formats convey the same information, the way we construe that information is what differs
Prospect Theory offers several insights about how we construe the world. Identify and define the four insights we discussed in class.
People make decisions based on the potential value of losses and gains rather than the final outcome
Reference Dependence: We evaluate prospects as changes relative to a reference point (comparing two prices, what is fair v. ERP)
Diminishing Marginal Utility: We are less sensitive to each additional unit of change; number of scoops of icecream
Reference points can be internally derived or externally derived. Provide three examples of each.
Internally: “fair price”, last price you paid, price of brand usually bought
Externally: “regular retail price”, what it is placed near, how other items in the line are priced
What is anchoring and adjustment? Provide an example.
Providing people with an externally derived reference point can lead to anchoring (real-estate price anchors; negotiation study=whoever makes the first offer tends to get a better offer)
What are three common marketing tactics that take advantage of reference dependence (anchoring, more specifically), as described in class and in Why We Make Mistakes?
Advertising sale items and raising price on non-sale items, multi-unit pricing, quantity limits
Describe how marketers can leverage the insight that consumers are less sensitive to each additional unit of change.
Diminishing marginal utility; scoops of icecream… sell in a bundle
Describe the “Asian Disease Problem,” and explain what it illustrates about how marketers can use this type of gain/loss framing to leverage the insight that consumers risk averse when choosing among gains, and risk seeking when choosing among losses.
Rephrasing of how many people will die led people to prefer one situation over another although they equaled the same #; more risk averse
Describe three tactics that marketers can do to leverage the insight that consumers are loss averse.
Don’t want to lose a gamble; saleman replacing insulation framing, discounts v. surcharges on gas, opt-in v. opt-out (organ donor)
What are four ways that marketers take advantage of the fact that people tend to be overconfident?
Gold pro shops short putting greens; nutrisystem ads, gym memberships; credit card offers
What is overconfidence? Give an example.
People’s subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than their objective accuracy; people are overconfident that they will do certain tasks
What factors contribute to overconfidence?
Wishful thinking
Confirmation bias
Hindsight bias (e.g., Nixon’s Diplomatic Trip Study)
Self-serving bias (e.g., Gambler Study)
Why are weathermen less overconfident and better calibrated than doctors?
READING?
What are two ways that marketers can help consumers to be better calibrated?
Control condition: Confidence intervals simply given a second time
“Assumers” condition: Asked to assume that their image of the situation was, in fact, correct in all details
Multiple construal condition: Asked to describe several alternative ways the situation they would be in could turn out
What is the planning fallacy? Give an example.
Planning fallacy describes the tendency for people to overestimate their rate of work or to underestimate how long it will take them to get things done; cost of the sydney opera house
What does it mean to take an “outside view versus an “inside view?” Which perspective tends to lead to more accurate predictions?
Outside: we explain away others’ failures and our own past failures as being flukes
Inside: Focus on plans and intentions and construct a (best-case) scenario; typically optimistic
OUTSIDE VIEW is better; more unbiased, better to predict
Is making a detailed plan likely to make you more or less susceptible to the planning fallacy? Why?
Bad. Focusing on plans and intentions might seem like a good idea, experimental data has shown that leads to more optimistic predictions. Ex: Christmas shopping.
Are we more or less likely to fall prey to the planning fallacy when we are making predictions about our own behavior or others’ behavior? Why?
Our own behavior. Observers naturally tend to take an outside view which is less biased.
What are two ways that marketers can help consumers avoid the planning fallacy?
Encourage consumers to take an outside view:
Focus on other people’s experiences AND why we might have similar experiences
Focus on relevant past experiences AND why this might turn out like before
What is the bias blind spot? Give an example.
People tend to believe that their own judgments are less prone to bias than others’
Example: The Third Person Effect, we are less influenced than others by ads and other persuasive messages
What is the Introspection Illusion, and how does it contribute to our tendency to see bias in others but not in ourselves?
We treat conscious introspections as a sovereign source of evidence in making self assessments and give less consideration to our behavior.
We do the opposite when assessing other people, we place more weight on their behavior than introspections
What is and is not a good way of debiasing individuals?
Educating individuals is a good way to debias consumers; but you must be SPECIFIC because warning them in general was not effective
What are three factors that influence consumers’ predictions?
We exaggerate the importance of focal events
We over-rely on our present state of being
We often fail to anticipate adaptation
What is focalism? Provide an example.
We make predictions of happiness based on our reactions to a focal event, without regard to the fact that other things will be happening that will mute that reaction.
The weather, football win/loss and effects on feelings
How might evaluating options together vs. separately lead to focalism?
Considering alternatives side-by-side can highlight attributes that are easily comparable and lead people to focus on those attributes; lead people to exaggerate the importance of these focal attributes
What is presentism?
People tend to over-rely on their present state of being when predicting how they would feel or behave when in a different state of being
What’s a visceral state, and how might it influence how we make judgments? Provide three examples.
Natural state of hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, etc.
- Thirst v. hunger, which you find more unpleasant (asked people who had just worked out)
- Hunger and grocery shopping
- Sexual arousal and questionnaire about sexual acts and (un)willingness
How does presentism sometimes contribute to variety seeking? Provide two examples.
People believe that they will want variety when they choose items in a sequence, when that is only true when they make simultaneous choices.
- Snack choices
People often fail to take into account the speed and extent to which they will emotionally adapt to changes in life circumstances. What are some ways in which people mispredict adaptation?
Hedonic Adaptation, lottery winners are no more happier than normal people, hemodialysis patients are no less happier than controls
What is the durability bias, what is immune neglect, and how to they relate?
Durability bias: tendency to overestimate the duration of one’s emotional reactions to events
Immune neglect: People are generally unaware of the system of cognitive mechanisms that ameliorate the impact of negative events on their happiness
- We often think something will effect us (an emotional state) longer than it actually does –we don’t really know what effects our happiness
