Smile right

This was originally published by the BBC (see here).


There are any number of sayings about the power of the smile. 'Peace begins with a smile.' 'A smile is the universal welcome.' 'Life is short but a smile only takes a second.' All good advice. But it may not be as simple as that. According to new research, if you want to make a good impression when you meet people, it's not just that you smile. It's how you smile.

We all know that smiling is important when meeting new people. However, new research suggests that different types of smiles affect what people think of us.

The study was carried out by the Go Group, a business support organisation based in Scotland. They looked at people's reactions to different grins. They found that responses varied considerably.

Through this they say they have found three types of smile to avoid: The first is 'The Enthusiast', very wide, all teeth showing, possible evidence that you can have too much of a good thing. Then there is the 'Big Freeze', a fixed grin that looks practised and fake. Finally comes 'The Robot', a small, thin smile, lacking in warmth.

The group also warns about smiling too quickly, saying it can make you look insincere. The best smile, they say, is slower and floods naturally across the whole face.

Neurosky Brainwave Sensors

Here's a video of a biosensor - one that reads your brain waves. Great technology, coming to a store near you soon...

Blink: Malcolm Gladwell talks

Malcolm Gladwell talks about hig book 'Blink'. Published in 2005, the book describes the main subject of "thin-slicing": our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, this is an idea that spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones. Gladwell draws on examples from science, advertising, sales, medicine, and popular music to reinforce his ideas. Gladwell also uses many examples of regular people's experiences with "thin-slicing."





Gladwell explains how an expert's ability to "thin slice" can be corrupted by their likes and dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes (even unconscious ones), and how they can be overloaded by too much information. Two particular forms of unconscious bias Gladwell discusses are Implicit Association Tests and psychological priming. Gladwell also us about our instinctive ability to mind read, which is how we can get to know what emotions a person is feeling just by looking at his or her face.

We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than they do with volumes of analysis.

Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, speed dating, tennis, military war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce.

Gladwell also mentions that sometimes having too much information can interfere with the accuracy of a judgment, or a doctor's diagnosis. This is commonly called "Analysis paralysis." The challenge is to sift through and focus on only the most critical information to make a decision. The other information may be irrelevant and confusing to the decision maker. Collecting more and more information, in most cases, just reinforces our judgment but does not help to make it more accurate. The collection of information is commonly interpreted as confirming a person's initial belief or bias. Gladwell explains that better judgments can be executed from simplicity and frugality of information, rather than the more common belief that greater information about a patient is proportional to an improved diagnosis. If the big picture is clear enough to decide, then decide from the big picture without using a magnifying glass.

The book argues that intuitive judgment is developed by experience, training, and knowledge. For example, Gladwell claims that prejudice can operate at an intuitive unconscious level, even in individuals whose conscious attitudes are not prejudiced. An example is in the halo effect, where a person having a salient positive quality is thought to be superior in other, unrelated respects. Gladwell uses the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, where four New York policemen shot an innocent man on his doorstep 41 times, as another example of how rapid, intuitive judgment can have disastrous effects.

New Scientist uses neuromarketing

I have talked about neuromarketing before (see here). New Scientist, the fantastic international (British) magazine that shares news stories from the world of science, recently undertook its own neuromarketing experiment. They took three options for covers for a single issue, hooked up 19 customers to an EEG machine and asked which cover was the best. They went with the winner and the result was a 12% rise in sales (see here). Here is an article from the NY Times that describes the 'experiment' in more detail (see here). While there is a definite element of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at play - there is no control in the real world for comparison - it is another case in point where the application of neuromarketing has yielded an increase in sales.

Musical intervention

Scientists at Glasgow Caledonian University are using a mixture of psychology and audio engineering to see how music can prompt certain responses. See here. Emotions and moods can be influenced by outside forces. This study aims to identify the components that influence specific responses. One application will be to compile personalised packages of musical components to help improve people's wellbeing.

There's nothing new about music therapy. This study is the first to try and model specific components to specific responses. The commercial applications will also be interesting. The retail environment could capitalise on the research to influence shoppers' buying decisions or define new ways of communicating brand empathy. It could also form part of the optimisation of advertisements and assessed by neuromarketing techniques. The opportunities are endless.

I have spoken about the use of scents in influencing human behaviour (see here). Now music.

Watch 'Surrogates' streaming

Here is a movie which shows how our understanding of brain functioning can manifest itself. Watch, think and enjoy.

Double click so it pops up into a new window.

Controlling our brains

Here's a great video from TED that demonstrates how we can read our brainwaves in real time and learn to control ourselves (our experiences, emotions etc) by modulating our own brain chemistry.

Selective attention

The human brain is excellent at eliminating background information which allows us to focus on the task at hand. We blank out white noise so that we can hold conversations. We block registration of background scents so that we can enjoy the smell of dinner cooking. This was demonstrated brilliantly by Chabris and Simons in 1999. Watch the video to find out more...

Scent Bomb

Have you ever walked past Lush? That's the shop you can smell 200 meters away that makes smelly bathroom products. It has been around for a long time and everyone knows it as the shop that smells. Well it is not the only one. Lots of businesses are starting to develop their own scent brand - the view is that it helps make a distinct emotional connection with the consumer. Is this a new fad or something for the long term? Is this ethical? How much work goes on behind the scenes to get the right scent? Is it a form of air pollution? The questions go on...

In a recent article in Business Week, the latest ambition is to plant a scent bomb into a low income housing development in New York in an attempt to make the residents happier. Smell does affect mood - we don't need scientists to tell us that. So the concept is sound. And if there are ways of helping people then lets do it. I just hope it is used responsibly and does not turn our high streets into an overwhelming and unpleasant experience. There is something nice and comforting with consistency - even if it is the consistent smell of background pollution.

Buying without buying

In a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, it was demonstrated that purchasing behaviour is predictable and not dependent upon the level of attention paid to specific products (see here). This is an important piece of scientific research to support Fred Dretske's research around epistemology, specifically Perception without Awareness.

Here is a video where Dretske describes his work. Fascinating.

Brain scans as lie detectors

I have talked about the use of technology that reads brain patterns - and the applications that we are starting to see (see here). This technology is new and experimental. As in all cases, the robustness of the theory is yet to be fully corroborated through rigorous field testing. While the potential uses are unquestionable, the reliability of the application will take time to validate. This week, experts warned that measures are needed to stop brain scans being misused by courts, insurers and employers (see here) as evidence of people lying.

Clearly the technology, in this case imaging technology (not EEG), is courting attention - a welcome indicator of the sign of things to come. But anticipate this boom in commercialising bioscience, with neuromarketing being another application, to be enveloped in ethical debate and government policy.

The paradox of choice

I have talked about the anxiety we feel through being overwhelmed by too much choice (see here). The last decade, driven from consumers' needs for instant gratification, on demand services and personalised products, has created a culture of anxiety full of ephemeral relationships with people and brands. Finally the corporate world has woken up and taking a stand against the world of excess.

Wal-Mart in Canada has started to drop the number of product lines it holds on its shelves. Sales of these product lines has not been affected ie. people still buy the product and and are less wedded to the brand than we may think (see here). Duncan Mac Naughton, chief merchandising officer at Wal-Mart in Mississauga says, “Folks can get overwhelmed with too much variety. With too many choices, they actually don’t buy.”

Regardless of the intent, the outcome clearly does not impact the corporate bottom line. What, though, is the impact on the shoppers' experience? Are they grateful for less choice, are they less anxious or do they feel defeated that their preferred brand is not present so they have to go for brand x? The main thing is that the customer is not always right...and it takes someone brave to put that knowledge into action.

So what does this mean? I believe that we have entered a period of reconcilliation, rationalisation and retrenchment to meet basic needs. We are living in a period of personal responsibility. It is the responsibility of the corporate world to remove choice to help the psychology of society.

Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one's physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it. Marketing analysts will use neuromarketing to better measure a consumer's preference, as the verbal response given to the question, "Do you like this product?" may not always be the true answer due to cognitive bias. This knowledge will help marketers create products and services designed more effectively and marketing campaigns focused more on the brain's response. This makes neuromarketing and its applied results potentially subliminal. Neuromarketing will tell the marketer what the consumer reacts to, whether it was the color of the packaging, the sound the box makes when shaken, or the idea that they will have something their co-consumers do not.

Here is a video on the subject (you have to wait for the advert to pass - sorry but I can't do anything about it).






Beyond subliminal advertising, Darpa (the Pentagon's innovation department) has invested $4m in an attempt to help soldiers communicate by telepathy. See this link: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/

This truly is mad science but the ideas are sound. Using EEG, if a device can collect, transmit, receive and translate brain waves, soldiers will be able to communicate by telepathy.

Judge me on my intent

I previously raised the question of judging someone based on their actions or intent. It seems that scientists have taken us one step towards answering this question. When we are faced with a simple task, scientists are able to predict our actions by analysing our brain activity in real time. These simple tasks can be adding or subtracting two numbers. By scanning our brains, scientists can predict our intent before we are consciously aware.

Here is an article from New Scientist that describes the work.

This form of mind reading leads to a philosophical and ethical consideration. If our intent is a true and unconscious reflection of our belief system, do our actions always mirror our intent? The answer has to be 'no'. We have a conscious filter that stops us acting on gut instinct, that forces us to behave appropriately in polite situations. If someone were to commit a crime would they be guilty if their intent was never to take part - perhaps they had been coerced, or felt obliged for some reason?

As we learn more about the brain, society will need to hold these debates. As we, individually, learn more about the brain, we have a responsibility to increase our self awareness and be 1) mindful of our intent 2) conscious of our actions.