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I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts. The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)
But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.
“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman
I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.” I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.
You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics. Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!
Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them! Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!
It may not look like much at first, but click through to play and learn with this great interactive infographic from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. From Coffee Bean to Carbon Atom.
Any one who has read Freakonomics will be familiar with this story: A University of Chicago grad student does some research in the projects and ends up with a bunch of data about the finances of crack dealers. As it turns out, that was only the tip of the iceberg.
In Gang Leader for a Day, that grad student, Sudhir Ventakesh, tells the whole story. It all begins as a little quantitative survey conducted for one of his faculty advisors. It becomes a sprawling ethnography that takes place over the course of five years, against the wishes of his mentors and his own best judgment. Along the way, Sudhir sees the world inside the roughest projects in Chicago unfold before him in all its complexity. We meet a gang leader who deals crack and serves as a sort of social glue for the community. We meet a community leader who does what she can to help her fellow residents, all while taking kickbacks to better her own circumstances. We meet the police, charged with patrolling the projects, who never show up when called.
Ultimately, it’s a great piece of research, and a story well told.
The ultimate goal of most advertising is to drive purchase / consideration. To this end, ads typically either try to grab the consumer’s attention using mechanisms that have little to do with the actual product (e.g., beer makes you more attractive) or focusing on the benefits the consumer will recognize if they use the product/service.
However, DTC pharma advertising is interesting in that they are required by the FDA to lay out the side-effects of their products. They must strike a balance between the benefits and drawbacks that will entice the consumer to still consider trial and adoption. Unfortunately, many pharma products have side-effects that often seem to outweigh the benefits.
Therefore, pharma must rely on more traditional advertising mechanisms such as visual appeal. The best example is the Nasonex bee. The bee floats around flirting with flowers as the voice-over goes into the benefits and side-effects of Nasonex. However, Ruth Day, a professor in Duke University’s Department of Psychology and Nueroscience, found that the bee either a) beat its wings at a higher frequency, or b) flew around the screen more, when side-effects were being disclosed. The argument is consumers would focus on the movement of the bee when it was more active, and therefore pay less attention to the side-effects being discussed.
The point is that creatives are having to turn to cutting-edge cognitive science in an effort to reach out to consumers. I personally would not be surprised if we see an influx of cognitive scientists into advertising over the next decade as we continue to search for new ways to communicate. For a marketing research context, see eye-tracking.
Jonah Lehrer, over at The Frontal Cortex, has another great post this week, “Reason, Emotion, and Consumption.” The primary focus of the post is a paper published in the Journal of Economic Research, “In Search of Homo Economicus.” This is cutting edge consumer science with huge dividends to be paid to those who learn its lessons.
The research, conducted by a number of behavioral economists (including Dan Ariely, a graduate of UNC and Duke, both within minutes of our office here in Durham), sought to understand the role cognitive and emotional drivers play in the consumer decision making process. Interestingly, when consumers used unconscious emotions, their decisions were more consistent than when they relied on cognition.
The key here is consistency of decisions made. Brand loyalty is built on consumers consistently choosing the same product. Understanding that emotion, and not cognition, will be the facilitator of loyalty, goes a long way in helping us foster consumer loyalty. We can’t always rely on consumers as rational agents; sometimes we have to appeal emotions that many consider irrational. We must continually strive to know as much about our audiences as possible. This must go beyond demographic and socioeconomic profiling, and focus on psychographics, emotions, behavior, etc. Though a product/offering/company may be superior on paper, it will find little fanfare if it does not adequately stir up the emotions of the consumer.
2009 is looking to be a big year for conjoint analysis. Sawtooth will be releasing Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint (ACBC) the first half of the year, giving market researchers yet another tool in their arsenal to answer those two FAQs, “What do consumers want?” and “How much will consumers pay?” As more information about ACBC comes out over the next several months, we’ll be sure to pass along our own thoughts on this new methodology.
Conjoint is also starting to get some play in mainstream media. The Price of Prejudice, appearing in the January 15 issue of The Economist, discusses the work of Eugene Caruso, a behavioral science professor at The University of Chicago. He and his co-authors find that people often deceive themselves as to what they actually take into consideration when making choices. Using conjoint analysis, Caruso et al were able to conclude that it’s not what you say, but rather what you do that counts – long a tenet of conjoint researchers. Overall, an interesting application of the methodolgy to social cognition research.
