What’s In A Name?

Maybe your parents chose it for you. Maybe you chose it for yourself. It’s probably your father’s surname, though I know people who have hyphenated, or a husband’s, or a great-grandmother’s, or even a hippy blend of both their parents’ first names. And your parents picked out your first name, hopefully checking it for potential teasing nicknames and terrible combinations of initials. But your name might have even further-reaching consequences.

There’s a bizarre phenomenon where people’s own surnames guide them towards their career paths. The New Scientist nicknamed this ‘nominative deternism’ after noticing trend in scientists’ names to reflect on their subjects, including a paper on incontinence, written by J W Splatt and D Weedon.* It might also be genetic – that a good baker comes from a long line of ‘Bakers’, who were originally named for their trade. (No comment on the urologists though.)

The Economist even identifies that world leaders are much more likely to have surnames with A-M than the last half of the alphabet.* It might be that the early-letter surnames spend their time sitting alphabetically, at the front of the class, receiving more attention, being asked to speak more often, and learning more. Or that we still see lists as orders of merits – with those at the top, with the earliest surnames, being the best. The same effect is found for fellowships and Nobel Prizes in economics, where names of contributors are cited alphabetically, but not for psychology, where you’re credited according to the size of your contribution.*

People are even more likely to give to a hurricane relief effort if the initial of the hurricane matches that of their name.*

Our names form a crucial part of our identities, something others label us by. How often have you felt more drawn to, or more competitive with, someone who shares your name? And notice how weirdly intimate you feel when a relative stranger keeps calling you by your name all the time: a standard persuasive technique for pushy salespeople or flirty shop assistants.

‘What’s in a name?’ Juliet might have asked, but a Rose by any other name may not be as sweet.

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8967602/A-persons-surname-can-influence-their-career-experts-claim.html
• http://www.economist.com/node/760345
• http://www.stanford.edu/~leinav/extra/Surnames_WP.pdf
• http://www.influenceatwork.com/just-for-you-__insert-your-name-here__-a-stormy-lesson-in-influence/

In your prime

I’ve just started reading Lean In and Sheryl Sandberg has a great piece on priming.

 

Sandberg calls it the ‘stereotype threat’ – that if you suggest a stereotype to people, they are likely to live up to it. So, as boys are stereotyped as better at maths and science than girls, you ask children to tick a gender box on the top of their maths test. The girls then perform worse.* But it’s also an example of social priming.

 

Here’s another example: students were given words that reminded them of elderly people, such as retirement, wrinkle, forgetful, in an unrelated test then measured secretly as they walked down the corridor. Those primed with elderly words walked more slowly than those primed with neutral (unless you disliked elderly people, and then you walked faster!) Another group were primed with rude and neutral words: those with rude were more likely to interrupt.*

 

So even the words we use, without being aware of it, change the way we act towards others. Considering how often we’ve filled in our names and dates of birth on the front of tests, how have we quietly primed ourselves to succeed or fail, based off subliminal stereotypes?

 

Currently, priming is having a moment of crisis, as some studies fail to replicate the original results. (Replication means the ability of an entire study to be done again, or done by other people, to cross-check the results, and is a cornerstone of scientific knowledge.)*

 

Yet social priming still seems a powerful tool. How can we overturn the implicit stereotypes in our society? And how can we use our primed selves to demonstrate greater empathy, or prime ourselves for more positive traits? 

 

And if you suddenly feel a little more frail, check the photo at the top of this post again, and wonder if you’ve been primed.

 

* http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00362.x/abstract

* http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.230

* http://www.nature.com/news/disputed-results-a-fresh-blow-for-social-psychology-1.12902

TIME IS MONEY

Do any of these phrases sound familiar to you?

You’re wasting my time.

This fix will save you hours.

How do you spend your time these days?

That late train cost me an hour.

I’ve invested a lot of time in her.

You’re running out of time. Is that worth your while? Do you have much time left?

He’s living on borrowed time.You don’t use your time profitably. I lost a lot of time last week.

 

As Lakoff & Johnson point out in their book Metaphors We Live By, we construe Time as Money. This is a buried metaphor, used for so long that we use it without thinking. It’s become a cognitive metaphor, that shapes how we live and act every single day.

In the capitalist system, it makes sense – we are paid by the hour, day, month or year, and we tend to charge by it too. Our time has been exchanged for money. But we extend this metaphor to every part of our lives – spending time with friends, asking if that film was worth seeing. Would we be more generous if we didn’t have this idea that our time can be spent, wasted, or lost?

One of the purest forms of this is the queue. When there’s a limited amount of resource available, like the number of open counters at the Post Office (never enough!), you line up and form an orderly queue. Many jokes have been made of the British love of queuing. Our basic sense of fairness means that everyone, rich or poor, has to take their place in the queue.

Sometimes, you can exchange money for queuing time though. You can pay to ‘queue jump’ at clubs or theme parks. Or you can pay for someone else to queue for you, like these people selling their iPhone 5 spots.

But woe-betide you if you attempt to skip our value system, offer neither time nor money, and queue-jump.

Our (remembering) self

One of the experiments that most powerfully affected me from Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow was the cold water trial.

Participants went through a trial where they measured levels of pain while placing one hand in cold water. They had one 60 second trial in 14 degree Celsius water, which is painfully cold but not unbearable. They had a second trial that lasted longer – for 90 seconds, where 60 seconds were in the cold water, then another 30 seconds in that water that was secretly made one degree warmer. The trials were carefully controlled – participants were randomly assigned different hands and different orders for their trials, and didn’t know how long their trials were.

They were then given the option of repeating one of the trials. Over 80% chose the longer trial, voluntarily choosing to suffer 30 extra seconds of needless pain. If they’d been told the trial was longer, they wouldn’t have picked it. But how people remembered pain and how they actually experienced pain was different.

This is due to a conflict between our remembering and experiencing selves. Our experiencing self suffers more pain while the trial is happening – but our remembering self remembers only the worst or best moment, and the end. This is called the ‘peak-end rule’. Kahneman then explores the implications of this for doctors, national happiness, and palliative care at the end of life. Should doctors aim to minimise pain at the end of the procedure, not control it during? Are you happier with more money?

However, what blows me away about this is how this changes our notion of self. We constantly alter how we actually experience the world around us, in order to fit in with our memories and our sense of self. Every minute, we are changing what is actually happening in order to construct our own narratives, overcoming actual real-life experience in order to form cohesive memories.

Who we are is not what we are experiencing – but what we remember.

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Extra link: Daniel Kahneman on The Riddle of Experience vs Memory, TED

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

Lush

What is this picture?

It is not merely, as it seems, a photo of some samples of Lush leave in hair conditioner sitting on my bathroom shelf.

It is, in fact, a behavioural problem. Or to be more specific, a context problem.

See, these samples, so generously given by a Lush employee (who then pursued me for a date over Facebook, which is an entirely different problem, mired in the delicate etiquette of flirting for free samples) have sat in my bathroom, unused, for about a year now.

I put them in the bathroom because that’s where I shampoo and condition my hair and do other various beautification tasks to make me the glossy-haired vision of perfection you see before you.

But this is a leave-in conditioner – an altogether different beast – meaning it needs at least ten minutes on my hair to permeate through before being shampooed out. And I’m always in the bathroom either about to shower and impatient, or just leaving the shower when it’s already too late.

The fact is – this conditioner is in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Behaviourally, contextually, it just doesn’t work.

Where and when have always been important in behavioural change. The people who persuaded consumers to use Listerine as a once-a-day bad breath prevention product, instead of an occasional salve for cuts and grazes, understood that, as surely as they understood inventing neurosis over halitosis and the laws of volume (mouthwash using up more product than treating scrapes).

Habit formation really interests me. You might have heard the adage ‘it takes 21 days to form a new habit’ – though current research pegs it at more like 66 days (depending on the complexity of the task).

It’s also easier to do something every day rather than every other. If you go to the gym every day, for example, it becomes a habit, rather than requiring constant bursts of willpower. Good habits are hard to form, and bad ones hard to break. A habit has a powerful cultural context that comes attached to it – think of toothpaste, or shaving.

So two small conclusions.

Firstly, put something in the right place at the right time.

Secondly, if you want to do it more than once, turn it into a habit.

We Love Our Pack

There is a single line that can increase the rate of tax repayments by around 15%. And that line is:

‘Nine out of ten people in your area pay their tax on time.’ *

We are in many ways still pack creatures. We act as a herd. We obey certain social norms. We fit in.

And we like to copy people around us. We like to do what they do.

When someone near you yawns, you often find yourself stifling a yawn a few seconds later. No one knows why yawning is ‘contagious’ but it’s easier to catch if we feel emotionally connected to the person yawning – relatives first, then friends, then strangers. There are suggestions as to why we catch yawns – to help synchronise sleeping patterns as a pack, to put us all into the same mood, to show empathy – but no one knows why this behaviour is quite so social.

Studies have showed that even dogs catch yawns from humans – they will yawn and settle down if we do, but they’re not fooled if we only open and close our mouths. Younger dogs don’t catch the yawns in the same way – it’s only over 7 months old that the puppies begin to copy us. *(Have fun practising on your dog today!)

Such social behaviour is vital even now. The code of morals and expectations we all agree on keeps the fabric of society together. We still yearn to be part of the pack.

* Behavioural Insights Team report

* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7541633.stm

Drake’s Uncle

I never really had no one like you man this all new, shit,

Made the world I knew bigger, changed the way that I viewed it.

Drake – Look What You’ve Done

 

We all need someone like Drake’s uncle. Someone who comes with a fresh perspective, expands our existing frame of reference and changes the way we see things. Someone who, as Daniel Kahnman might say, provides the outside view, not the inside view.

 

We plan ahead based on what we know – the inside view of our lives, of past experiences and our abilities. This, combined with usual human optimism, means we always think forecasted projects will be faster, cheaper and less risky than it is. Big government projects continually come in wildly over budget and over time, as the general public could gloomily predict. Or, on a more local level, your kitchen renovation always costs double what it was meant to.

 

Kahneman and Tversky recommend instead ‘reference class forecasting’. Instead of relying on what you know – or what you think you know, study the outcomes of other, similar projects and estimate the probability of the most likely outcome of yours.

 

The outside view shouldn’t just be for the economics of new train lines and Olympic Games. It’s worth us remembering that everything we do is praised and okay’d within a very small circle of similar people. In advertising, we optimistically predict our Youtube advert will be a huge viral success – after all, have we not lavished our talents on it, sweated over it, produced it? Our client loves it. But just one person less close to the project could tell us how boring it really is.

 

Often in meetings, I have to stop myself saying ‘my brother wouldn’t get this’ or ‘my mum would love this’. And while it’s a mistake to base a whole campaign off one relative’s likes or dislikes, it’s probably worth hearing their views. After all, the target customer is unlikely to be the web-savvy, hyper-connected, bandwagon-leaping advertising exec. Maybe you can’t imagine life without them, but only 16% of the UK’s population are on Twitter and 50% are on Facebook. So it’s time to ask – what are the other half doing? How can they make our world bigger?

A Brief Breakup Letter To Starbucks

Dear Starbucks,

Please stop calling.

I know it’s been hard on you: it’s been hard on me too. But I think this break up is for the best. You, a giant multinational coffee chain; me, one lonely consumer. I was a fool to think it ever could work out between us. A fool to think you’d be different.

You promised you weren’t like all the other corporations. You had smiling baristas and community book drives and comfy sofas you never hurried me out of. It was the age of Innocent. I was courted by brands, talked to, admired, flattered. But it was you I fell for so hard, Starbucks. You who soothed me through essay crises and bad boyfriends, who warmed me on cold winter mornings with hot chocolates and cooled me on hot summer days with Frappucinos. You were always there for me.

We’ve been together so long – since I was a teenager, when you first came to this country. Do you remember how I used to come in with my friends three times a day, just to be with you? Oh, I was always happiest inside you.

I’d like to say it’s not you, it’s me – but we both know that isn’t true. We just don’t share the same values. I pay tax; you don’t. How can we raise our kids together like this?

I should have suspected it all along – your secret bank accounts, your predatory store openings, the way you left in the middle of the night. But I loved you. I was wilfully blind to your failings. And now, here it is, out in the open, splashed all over the tabloids.

I feel betrayed, Starbucks, and let down. I just can’t trust you anymore. Your Mediterranean Chicken panini turn to dust in my mouth. I cross the road to avoiding looking upon your bright face. I even forsook your red cups, for so long our personal herald of Christmas.

You say you’ll change, you beg, plead, promise, but I just can’t trust you anymore. You say you make no profit in the UK, but I know how much I’ve personally put into this relationship. And you gambled it all down to nothing, and thought you could get away with it.

While it’s hard to walk away from you, it’s even harder to stay.

Goodbye, Starbucks.

Philippa x

PS – I had a brief rebound with Costa but it just wasn’t the same…

Letters To A Cold Corporation

All these brands are so honest and authentic and friendly and open nowadays, but only few of them get a chance to practise their super-fun customer service message with someone who might concievably write something funny and then post it on Twitter. So if your local friendly global corporate entity wants to get like Sainsburys and Tiger-Giraffe Bread, you better reply to one of my letters. Or just send me some free vouchers.

 

Eat, Christmas 2011.

Dear Eat,
I love you, I really do. That is why I queued up today to buy a Christmas Full Works sandwich, in the hope of a turkey taste explosion in my mouth. I also got it toasted. For a toasted turkey taste explosion. But there is no point in me paying seventy extra pence – that’s seven shiny silver ten pence pieces or three of those funny shaped twenty pence pieces plus a ten – for you to toast my sandwich if by the time it’s back in my office (a mere five minute walk away) it is cold and flabby. Flabby is rarely a word I associate with sandwiches, but unfortunately it was all that would do this sandwich justice. I can only presume the moistness of the cranberry sauce has absorbed into the cooling bread through the layer of lukewarm turkey and created this inexplicable phenomena, previously unknown to the sandwich world. I might even venture to say your Christmas ‘The Full Works’ sandwich should be renamed ‘The Doesn’t Fully Work’ sandwich. Hahaha. Or ho ho ho. Please stop ruining Christmas.
xxx

 

(Eat sent me £3 worth of vouchers and a boring apology. Thanks, Eat.)

A Smooth Choice

A few months ago, Innocent launched a 160ml smoothie.
It’s a good idea. I’ve always found the last couple of mouthfuls are unnecessary. It’s nice to have the choice of a smaller smoothie that’s conveniently under 100 calories. They’re priced closer to £1 than £2, unlike the bigger version, so seem good value as we do the maths in our head. And they’re being sold as part of supermarket meal deals, so there’s a good commercial reason.

Another great reason might have something to do with framing.

After all, all your choices are made in context. You pick a smoothie by considering it alongside other brands of smoothie, other sizes of smoothie and whether you should give up altogether and buy apple juice. Suddenly, adding this 160ml version makes the usual 250ml version look bigger. It makes the child size version look smaller. It provides another choice of sizes from Innocent to deliberate between – you can now compromise if you’re indecisive on a smaller size.

And it adds an anchor for smoothie prices. The 160ml smoothie is £1.09, the 250ml £1.79. Now you feel smoothies should cost between those ranges – Innocent doesn’t seem unusually priced. It’s not surprising Sainsbury’s own brand smoothies are £1.25, a bit cheaper than the premium Innocent brand, but more expensive than a Coke – they’re pricing within their category.

If only I could find a way to persuade all of London’s coffee shops to stop charging upwards of £2.50 for a latte, just because Starbucks does.