Nick Tarleton:
I'm a little worried that calling (a/i)rrational persuasive techniques "Dark Arts", even in seemingly indefensible (though, it must be said, minor) cases like this, biases us against them and will make people averse to using them even when doing so is ethical and beneficial. What do others think? Am I overreacting?
Here is a provocative thought. In my opinion, scientists nowadays command the trust and confidence of the general public largely thanks to the "dark arts."
Nobody except the scientists themselves and a tiny number of hobbyist enthusiasts who have invested the large effort to study the relevant material has the necessary competence to judge whether the work in any particular field is true and sound or just bullshit. (To be precise, in some applied areas, people can be reasonably confident because they constantly see useful new technologies coming out of the research efforts, but that's not the case for most fields.) Now, when scientists make outreach to the general public and try to popularize science -- thus reinforcing their status and authority -- it's absolutely impossible for them to argue things in a way that would be both: (1) correct and logically rigorous, and (2) comprehensible even to exceptionally intelligent and informed readers and listeners, let alone average ones.
Because of this, we get popular science materials that are, from an intellectually rigorous point of view, basically a pile of bullshit arguments for conclusions that are likely true, but for altogether different reasons -- reasons which the intended audience is utterly incapable of comprehending. Even the conclusions themselves are often so complicated and remote from everyday experience that they get presented in a way that is perhaps technically true, but virtually guaranteed to cause misunderstanding and puzzlement in most of the audience. Sure, some fields allow for decent popular presentations, like e.g. people studying the migration patterns of animals. But the stuff found in most pop-science treatments of, say, physics or evolution is just awful, and the silly and naive beliefs that masses of people form by reading them are even worse.
Therefore, for many areas of science, the bulk of the general public has no reason to believe that scientists are right except raw appeals to authority and the "dark arts" pop-science bullshit they've been served. Yet, our political system involves a significant democratic component, and scientists must maintain their intellectual authority in front of wide masses of people lest they lose government and philanthropic support. This might well be impossible to do without serving them a steady diet of "dark arts" pop-science that, on its own merits, has barely any more logical validity than all sorts of superstition and charlatanism that scientists are competing with for authority and public prominence.
Here is a provocative thought. In my opinion, scientists nowadays command the trust and confidence of the general public largely thanks to the "dark arts."
Yeah, but was this relevant? Shouldn't this go in an open thread or its own post?
-- traditional Jewish joke
Related to: Anchoring and Adjustment
Biases are “cognitive illusions” that work on the same principle as optical illusions, and a knowledge of the latter can be profitably applied to the former. Take, for example, these two cubes (source: Lotto Lab, via Boing Boing):
The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles on the top face of the right cube; if you're skeptical you can prove it with the eyedropper tool in Photoshop (in which both shades come out a rather ugly gray).
The illusion works because visual perception is relative. Outdoor light on a sunny day can be ten thousand times greater than a fluorescently lit indoor room. As one psychology book put it: for a student reading this book outside, the black print will be objectively lighter than the white space will be for a student reading the book inside. Nevertheless, both students will perceive the white space as subjectively white and the black space as subjectively black, because the visual system returns to consciousness information about relative rather than absolute lightness. In the two cubes, the visual system takes the yellow or blue tint as a given and outputs to consciousness the colors of each pixel compared to that background.
So this optical illusion occurs when the brain judges quantities relative to their surroundings rather than based on some objective standard. What's the corresponding cognitive illusion?
In Predictably Irrational (relatively recommended, even though the latter chapters sort of fail to live up to the ones mentioned here) Dan Ariely asks his students to evaluate (appropriately) three subscription plans to the Economist:
Ariely asked his subjects which plan they'd buy if they needed an Economist subscription. 84% wanted the combo plan, 16% wanted the web only plan, and no one wanted the print only plan. After all, the print plan cost exactly the same as the print + web plan, but the print + web plan was obviously better. Which raises the question: why even include a print-only plan? Isn't it something of a waste of space?
Actually, including the print-only plan turns out to be a very good business move for the Economist. Ariely removed the print-only plan from the choices. Now the options looked like this.
There shouldn't be any difference. After all, he'd only removed the plan no one chose, the plan no sane person would choose.
This time, 68% of students chose the web only plan and 32% the combo plan. That's a 52% shift in preferences between the exact same options.
The rational way to make the decision is to compare the value of a print subscription to the Economist (as measured by the opportunity cost of that money) to the difference in cost between the web and combo subscriptions. But this would return the same answer in both of the above cases, so the students weren't doing it that way.
What it looks like the students were doing was perceiving relative value in the same way the eye perceives relative color. The ugly gray of the cube appeared blue when it was next to something yellow, and yellow when it was next to something blue. In the same way, the $125 cost of the combo subscription looks like good value next to a worse deal, and bad value next to a better deal.
When the $125 combo subscription was placed next to a $125 plan with fewer features (print only instead of print plus web) it looked like a very good deal – the equivalent of placing an ugly gray square next to something yellow to make it look blue. Take away the yellow, or the artificially bad deal, and it doesn't look nearly as attractive.
This is getting deep into Dark Arts territory, and according to Predictably Irrational, the opportunity to use these powers for evil has not gone unexploited. Retailers will deliberately include in their selection a super deluxe luxury model much fancier and more expensive than they expect anyone to ever want. The theory is that consumers are balancing a natural hedonism that tells them to get the best model possible against a commitment to financial prudence. So most consumers, however much they like television, will have enough good sense to avoid buying a $2000 TV. But if the retailer carries a $4000 super-TV, the $2000 TV suddenly doesn't look quite so bad.
The obvious next question is “How do I use this knowledge to trick hot girls or guys into going out with me?” Dan Ariely decided to run some experiments on his undergraduate class. He took photographs of sixty students, then asked other students to rate their attractiveness. Next, he grouped the photos into pairs of equally attractive students. And next, he went to Photoshop and made a slightly less attractive version of each student: a blemish here, an asymmetry there.
Finally, he went around campus, finding students and showing them three photographs and asking which person the student would like to go on a date with. Two of the photographs were from one pair of photos ranked equally attractive. The third was a version of one of the two, altered to make it less attractive. So, for example, he might have two people, Alice and Brenda, who had been ranked equally attractive, plus a Photoshopped ugly version of Brenda.
The students overwhelmingly (75%) chose the person with the ugly double (Brenda in the example above), even though the two non-Photoshopped faces were equally attractive. Ariely then went so far as to recommend in his book that for best effect, you should go to bars and clubs with a wingman who is similar to you but less attractive. Going with a random ugly person would accomplish nothing, but going with someone similar to but less attractive than you would put you into a reference class and then bump you up to the top of the reference class, just like in the previous face experiment.
Ariely puts these studies in a separate chapter from his studies on anchoring and adjustment (which are also very good) but it all seems like the same process to me: being more interested in the difference between two values than in the absolute magnitude of them. All that makes anchoring and adjustment so interesting is that the two values have nothing in common with one another.
This process also has applications to happiness set points, status seeking, morality, dieting, larger-scale purchasing behavior, and akrasia which deserve a separate post