Thursday, December 24, 2020
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
interview in evolutionary Inc
Here's a short interview I did for Lachezar Ivanov's Evolution Inc newsletter.
It comes out every week and is well worth subscribing to.
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Evolutionary Psychology Meets Advertising: An Interview With Eaon Pritchard
Evolutionary psychology is the study of the innate programs of the human mind.
Due to its meta nature, evolutionary psychology represents a very broad field, with implications in business, public policy and more.
This interview is part of a series interviewing prominent people in the field.
In today's interview, we are talking with Eaon Pritchard.
After unsuccessful attempts at neo-expressionist painting, punk rock stardom and, later, Balearic/acid DJ superstardom (although he did achieve one global techno-house hit in the mid-90s) Eaon finally turned to advertising as a last-gasp creative outlet.
Initially (and equally unsuccessfully) as a Creative Director he eventually found his calling in Account Planning and Strategy when he found out who Tessa Pollitt’s dad was.
Eaon’s 20+ year advertising career includes multi award winning spells at Weapon7 in London and Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne.
He is widely regarded as an ad industry authority on consumer psychology and is author of two books ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ from 2018 and ‘Shot By Both Sides’ in January 2020.
Eaon is now the founder and principal of ArtScienceTechnology, an applied evolutionary psychology business consulting firm working with global clients out of Melbourne, Australia.
When and how did you encounter evolutionary psychology?
Around 2008 some sections of the advertising community in London latched onto Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, and I was among them.
I’d been working as a creative/tech hybrid since the rise of digital media in the early 2000’s but Ariely’s book switched me on to the human psychology component to advertising and comms.
I became a proponent of applied behavioural
economics and suchlike in the following years, however, there was a point about 6 or 7 years ago where it occurred to me that advertising planners invoking cognitive biases had taken on
‘magical’ properties.
It seemed too easy to me for every planner and their dog now like to point
out how human decision making had become bamboozled by biases. To paraphrase Feynman, knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing something.
I’d already figured out that these cognitive biases do not ‘produce’ or ‘cause’ behaviour, all they do is describe behaviour that’s already happened. And it follows that there must be a more fundamental, or ultimate, cause of behaviour. I read Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained and the Dawkins Selfish Gene and then I was off down the rabbit hole.
I then invested in a couple of textbooks, the David Buss one and Tooby/Cosmides and decided to take some time learning about EP properly as it seemed to be such an elegant theory and proved to be revelatory in how I approached my advertising work.
How do you apply evolutionary psychology to improving advertising? Can you give one insight as an example?
There are many ways that even a basic understanding of how the mind works could improve advertising.
In a simple sense, understanding that the mind is a collection of evolved, domain-specific
programs and whatever a person is thinking and doing right now depends on which of these
programs is currently in command of the ship.
This fact alone has big implications for things like brand positioning, targeting, segmentation and selection of media. In segmentation of audiences, for example, most segmentation studies are based only on proximate needs. These are typically specific to the category, so not transferrable.
In any case, the methods used to try and uncover these consumer ‘insights’ (e.g. focus groups, surveys) are unlikely to reveal anything of importance.
By giving much more attention to the ultimate motives driving consumer behaviour and preferences, communicators could speak more directly to what consumers really want, even if the consumers themselves don’t know it.
And those motives are almost certainly not identifiable through traditional self-reporting methodologies.
What are some key insights you wouldn’t have discovered void of evolutionary psychology?
Many of the problems we face in the modern world are down to modern society representing an
evolutionary ’mismatch’. A mismatch happens when people (or a species) are faced with a fast-changing environment to which their bodies and minds – their hardware and software – are not
well-adapted.
We should be afraid of cars and electricity. But we’re not. These are evolutionarily novel sources of
danger. Too novel for our old equipment. Instead, our innate fears - spiders, snakes and the dark, for example - have more ancient origins.
When I was working with a government road safety department I wanted to put pictures of redback spiders on road safety billboards to get attention – in Australia we have nearly all of the top ten most venomous and lethal spiders in the world. Unfortunately they didn’t buy it but I stand by the idea.
Pick one of these three groups — businesses, consumers, policy makers — and give your best piece of advice.
For policy makers, I’ve been disappointed with almost all the COVID comms from governments around the world. Messages about ‘we are all in this together’ and ‘save other lives by staying home’ etc are out of step with human nature.
The desired behaviour framed around self-interest and status motives would have been much more effective. Although it would have to be cleverly disguised as few people like to believe that they are acting out of self-interest or competitive altruism.
Which evolutionary psychologists would you love to read an interview by?
Robert Trivers. He’s not strictly a psychologist but is one of the greats in evolutionary biology and quite a character. Probably the only white scientist to be a getaway driver for the Black Panthers, he’s been arrested numerous times, in prison at least once and almost got killed in a yardie attack in a Kingston brothel while living on and off in Jamaica since the 70s. And when a couple of machete-wielding burglars had tried to get into his house, he stabbed one of them in the neck.
Not your typical professorial behaviour.
Perhaps his most influential theory - that self deception evolved to facilitate the deception of
others – was introduced as an almost off-the-cuff remark in the foreword to The Selfish Gene for Dawkins. Apparently, he’d planned to flesh out the theory a bit in a proper paper but didn’t get around
to it because he was smoking too much weed at the time.
What is a message that you want to spread across and where people can find you online?
The best place to connect with me is via the website artsciencetechnology.com, we are always looking for new clients or projects to help with.
Or on LinkedIn.
Both of my books are available on Amazon worldwide in paperback or for Kindle. Readers may find the odd spelling mistake, I call it jazz-grammar.
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
saving the world (or, can brands really be altruistic?) WDIAGW revisited
This was a chapter in my first book, 'Where Did It All Go Wrong?' from 2017.
Seems to be kinda relevant these days, too....
_______________________________
Different philosophers define altruism in different ways, however, most definitions will generally play in and around describing altruistic behaviours as actions that benefit others rather than oneself.
The term altruism (French, altruisme) was coined by the 19th century philosopher - incidentally, also the founder of the discipline we now know as sociology (although we won’t hold that against him) - Auguste Comte.
He described altruism as our ‘moral obligation to renounce self-interest and live for others’.
Aside from ethics, altruism in biology similarly describes a range of behaviours that may be performed by animals, which benefit others while seemingly to their own disadvantage.
We say ‘seemingly’ as there is no moral lens that can be applied.
For instance, by behaving altruistically, an organism may reduce its own chances of survival, or the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but give a boost to the likelihood that other organisms that share its genes may survive and produce offspring.
It doesn’t make any Darwinian sense to share food with just anybody, it is far more sensible to share with your relatives - they are genetically similar to you.
The costs and benefits of animal altruism in the biological sphere are measured in terms of the resulting reproductive fitness, or expected number of genetic descendants.
It is, therefore, reasonable to suggest that the biological notion of altruism is somewhat different from the ethical concept.
For humans, an act would only be called ‘altruistic' if it was done with the conscious moral intention of helping another, but in the biological sense, there is no such requirement.
So, which definition is appropriate when talking about brand altruism?
In 1973, the Russian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’.
It could also be noted that nothing in brand behaviour makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Brands, like organisms, have two principal concerns. Survival and reproduction.
Survival should be a self-evident notion, just staying in business. For reproduction, we could think about the number of category entry points in which the brand is salient and perhaps breadth of distribution as measures of fitness.
But, so-called, brand altruism, is perhaps better understood through the lens of Biological Market Theory.
Animals (including humans) can be observed exchanging benefits through reciprocity mechanisms. This happens in a variety of ways and in a variety of scenarios, however, the common thread is that benefits in kind almost always find their way back to the original giver.
This (r)evolutionary theory of reciprocal altruism was originally developed and published in 1971 by the biologist Bob Trivers in order to explain to explain instances of (apparent) altruism among unrelated organisms, including members of different species.
Trivers' basic idea was pretty straightforward: it may payback to help another if there is an expectation of the favour being returned in the future.
Equivalent to the heuristic ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’. The classic tit-for-tat strategy.
The cost of helping is offset by the likelihood of the return benefit, allowing the behaviour to evolve by natural selection.
However, even reciprocal altruists are vulnerable to exploitation by rogue non-altruists.
Suppose we have a group or category - let’s say supermarkets - made up exclusively of altruists, all playing nicely together, and placing the benefit of their suppliers and customers above their own needs.
It only takes a single mutant to enter the category, adopt some selfish policies to gain relative fitness advantages then the altruistic system starts to collapse and eventually become overtaken.
Altruism, by definition, incurs a fitness cost. So why would a brand perform a costly act?
As an aside, it’s probably no accident that the current popularity of the brand altruism idea corresponds with the development on another on the consumer side - virtue signalling.
Much has been written elsewhere on the pros and cons of online virtue signalling - the highly conspicuous expression of particular moral values done primarily with the intention of gaining status within a social group - but suffice to say that (and depending on which report one believes) apparently upwards of 70% of millennials will claim that the social responsibility record and ‘altruism’ of a brand is a major factor in their propensity to buy or use that brand. Sure.
It is also claimed by many that this generation of consumers is even willing to PAY MORE for altruistic brands! Right.
Maybe so, but what cannot be disputed is the propensity of the connected generation to perform actions (mostly online) that signal to others that ‘I'm a good person'. It’s worth noting that the message need not be actually accompanied by actually doing anything good. This opens the window for brand altruism as a virtue-outsourcing vehicle.
The ‘feelings’ of self-righteousness are so good so it’s no wonder that we are inclined to seek them - and will happily take a shortcut to acquire them.
So, is brand altruism something of a misnomer, and simply a contemporary biological market tactic pandering to the current cultural mode for a particular flavour of virtue signalling?
If this were the case then that may cause some significant cognitive dissonance for the authenticity-seeking future consumers.
(Not all is lost, however. Lack of millennial buying power notwithstanding, there is still much fun to be had given that the only thing people seem to like more than virtue signalling is judging other people!)
Perhaps another idea to consider is this. Brand altruism may simply be interpreted as signal. A costly and strategic signal, that provides an honest indicator of quality.
A brand might make a strategic investment in altruism that acts simply as a signal of its ability to BE altruistic - the brand signals that it has the assets to do so.
In this sense, brand altruism is simply another form of costly signalling the same as investing in high-quality advertising and equivalent to the ‘handicap' for which the peacock's tail has become a metaphor.
It’s kinda altruism, but it’s competitive.
Let’s return to Ambler and Hollier’s The Waste in Advertising, again.
‘The perceived extravagance of [a brand’s altruistic acts] contributes to advertising effectiveness by increasing credibility. It draws especially on the Handicap Principle in biology: animals use wasteful characteristics to signal their exceptional biological fitness. It hypothesizes that excesses in [altruism] work in a similar way by signalling brand fitness…’
In summary, we should probably understand this emerging idea of brand altruism as a part of the brand marketing process through which brands compete with each other in terms of conspicuous generosity (or if you prefer, observable competitive altruism) in order to enhance the status, reputation and perceived quality of the brand.
If some good is worth doing, it’s worth doing in public. And, of course, the more salient the ‘altruistic’ acts of the brand are then the associated ‘generosity’ traits transfer to buyers and users of the brand, more grist to our virtue signalling.
For sure, it is good that brands may wish to contribute to a greater good, or to society as a whole.
But let’s not get too caught up with esoteric notions of ‘pure’ altruism.
Rest easy advertisers and marketers. We can make the world better and still be our selfish, insecure and status- seeking selves.
Or just believe in magic.
The term altruism (French, altruisme) was coined by the 19th century philosopher - incidentally, also the founder of the discipline we now know as sociology (although we won’t hold that against him) - Auguste Comte.
He described altruism as our ‘moral obligation to renounce self-interest and live for others’.
Aside from ethics, altruism in biology similarly describes a range of behaviours that may be performed by animals, which benefit others while seemingly to their own disadvantage.
We say ‘seemingly’ as there is no moral lens that can be applied.
For instance, by behaving altruistically, an organism may reduce its own chances of survival, or the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but give a boost to the likelihood that other organisms that share its genes may survive and produce offspring.
It doesn’t make any Darwinian sense to share food with just anybody, it is far more sensible to share with your relatives - they are genetically similar to you.
The costs and benefits of animal altruism in the biological sphere are measured in terms of the resulting reproductive fitness, or expected number of genetic descendants.
It is, therefore, reasonable to suggest that the biological notion of altruism is somewhat different from the ethical concept.
For humans, an act would only be called ‘altruistic' if it was done with the conscious moral intention of helping another, but in the biological sense, there is no such requirement.
So, which definition is appropriate when talking about brand altruism?
In 1973, the Russian biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’.
It could also be noted that nothing in brand behaviour makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Brands, like organisms, have two principal concerns. Survival and reproduction.
Survival should be a self-evident notion, just staying in business. For reproduction, we could think about the number of category entry points in which the brand is salient and perhaps breadth of distribution as measures of fitness.
But, so-called, brand altruism, is perhaps better understood through the lens of Biological Market Theory.
Animals (including humans) can be observed exchanging benefits through reciprocity mechanisms. This happens in a variety of ways and in a variety of scenarios, however, the common thread is that benefits in kind almost always find their way back to the original giver.
This (r)evolutionary theory of reciprocal altruism was originally developed and published in 1971 by the biologist Bob Trivers in order to explain to explain instances of (apparent) altruism among unrelated organisms, including members of different species.
Trivers' basic idea was pretty straightforward: it may payback to help another if there is an expectation of the favour being returned in the future.
Equivalent to the heuristic ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’. The classic tit-for-tat strategy.
The cost of helping is offset by the likelihood of the return benefit, allowing the behaviour to evolve by natural selection.
However, even reciprocal altruists are vulnerable to exploitation by rogue non-altruists.
Suppose we have a group or category - let’s say supermarkets - made up exclusively of altruists, all playing nicely together, and placing the benefit of their suppliers and customers above their own needs.
It only takes a single mutant to enter the category, adopt some selfish policies to gain relative fitness advantages then the altruistic system starts to collapse and eventually become overtaken.
Altruism, by definition, incurs a fitness cost. So why would a brand perform a costly act?
As an aside, it’s probably no accident that the current popularity of the brand altruism idea corresponds with the development on another on the consumer side - virtue signalling.
Much has been written elsewhere on the pros and cons of online virtue signalling - the highly conspicuous expression of particular moral values done primarily with the intention of gaining status within a social group - but suffice to say that (and depending on which report one believes) apparently upwards of 70% of millennials will claim that the social responsibility record and ‘altruism’ of a brand is a major factor in their propensity to buy or use that brand. Sure.
It is also claimed by many that this generation of consumers is even willing to PAY MORE for altruistic brands! Right.
Maybe so, but what cannot be disputed is the propensity of the connected generation to perform actions (mostly online) that signal to others that ‘I'm a good person'. It’s worth noting that the message need not be actually accompanied by actually doing anything good. This opens the window for brand altruism as a virtue-outsourcing vehicle.
The ‘feelings’ of self-righteousness are so good so it’s no wonder that we are inclined to seek them - and will happily take a shortcut to acquire them.
So, is brand altruism something of a misnomer, and simply a contemporary biological market tactic pandering to the current cultural mode for a particular flavour of virtue signalling?
If this were the case then that may cause some significant cognitive dissonance for the authenticity-seeking future consumers.
(Not all is lost, however. Lack of millennial buying power notwithstanding, there is still much fun to be had given that the only thing people seem to like more than virtue signalling is judging other people!)
Perhaps another idea to consider is this. Brand altruism may simply be interpreted as signal. A costly and strategic signal, that provides an honest indicator of quality.
A brand might make a strategic investment in altruism that acts simply as a signal of its ability to BE altruistic - the brand signals that it has the assets to do so.
In this sense, brand altruism is simply another form of costly signalling the same as investing in high-quality advertising and equivalent to the ‘handicap' for which the peacock's tail has become a metaphor.
It’s kinda altruism, but it’s competitive.
Let’s return to Ambler and Hollier’s The Waste in Advertising, again.
‘The perceived extravagance of [a brand’s altruistic acts] contributes to advertising effectiveness by increasing credibility. It draws especially on the Handicap Principle in biology: animals use wasteful characteristics to signal their exceptional biological fitness. It hypothesizes that excesses in [altruism] work in a similar way by signalling brand fitness…’
In summary, we should probably understand this emerging idea of brand altruism as a part of the brand marketing process through which brands compete with each other in terms of conspicuous generosity (or if you prefer, observable competitive altruism) in order to enhance the status, reputation and perceived quality of the brand.
If some good is worth doing, it’s worth doing in public. And, of course, the more salient the ‘altruistic’ acts of the brand are then the associated ‘generosity’ traits transfer to buyers and users of the brand, more grist to our virtue signalling.
For sure, it is good that brands may wish to contribute to a greater good, or to society as a whole.
But let’s not get too caught up with esoteric notions of ‘pure’ altruism.
Rest easy advertisers and marketers. We can make the world better and still be our selfish, insecure and status- seeking selves.
Or just believe in magic.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
cognitive biases. flaw or feature?
Yes, kids, this was pop, believe it or not.
‘There’s definitely, definitely, no logic, to human behaviour. But yet so, yet so irresistible. And there is no map…'
Human Behaviour is the opening track on Debut, the breakthrough album by Icelandic singer- songwriter Björk. The set was produced by Bristol Underground graduate Nellee Hooper and first dropped in 1993.
Talking about the inspiration for the record, Björk looked back on her schooldays.
‘When I went into the sixth form at school, I choose science, math and physics and thought psychology, anthropology, sociology and history and such was for sissies. They call subjects in school about people ‘kjaftafog’, which means nattersubjects.
As I got older, I have learned to appreciate nattersubjects and recently read many books for the first time about psychology and... So I have learned a little about humans.’
But yet so, yet so irresistible. And there is no map
Is there a map? What does motivate human behaviour?
I’ve been a proponent of applied behavioural economics and suchlike in recent years, however, even invoking cognitive biases has now taken on ‘magical’ properties.
When wearing my consulting hat, I sometimes help clients evaluate creative pitches from agencies.
Of course, I pay most attention to the strategy parts of the pitches. It’s always interesting to see what the competition are up to, or where their heads are at.
Some form of applied pseudo-behavioural economics theory is clearly the flavor du jour.
It’s been a remarkable rise. In just a few years behavioural economics has gained significant traction in advertising agencies to the point that nearly every planner and their dog now like to point out how human decision making has become bamboozled by biases.
The irony, of course, is that the standard line trotted out to preface the ‘insights’ – humans are irrational and make emotional decisions etc. – is as fallacious an example of thinking, as the thinking ‘errors’ of consumers the planner is trying to describe.
Planners fail to understand that biases are just tendencies and are also highly context-dependent. This - very thin - focus on biases is unhelpful in several ways. It’s Wikipedia planning.
In one particular pitch I sat in on, every agency played a (magical) loss aversion card in their ‘consumer insights’ slide. Yet demonstrated little real understanding of the concept and where it might or might not come into play, and what purpose it serves in decision making.
They knew the ‘name’ of the thing, though.
Being able to reel off a list of definitions of cognitive effects does not magically turn someone into a behavioural practitioner.
The thing is, most of these commonly invoked ‘irrational’ biases evolved for excellent, rational and adaptive reasons.
When resources are scarce—as they were for 99.9% of our existence as a species—loss aversion would have been a perfectly rational bias to possess.
For early humans, the implications of losing a supply of food would have been significant.
Almost certain death.
Whereas gaining a week’s worth of food meant survival and perhaps trade opportunities for one more week.
Your mind is a collection of evolved, domain-specific programs and whatever you are thinking and doing right now depends on which of these programs is currently in command of the ship.
Each of these programs is functionally specialised for solving a different adaptive problem that arose in what is called the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, or EEA.
EEA describes the situational and external factors in which an evolved trait adapted over time. And the collective influence of selection pressures that caused an adaptation to develop.
The EEA of early humans that produced our brain development – from around one million years ago until around ten thousand years ago - is very different from our modern world.
And so, it’s an important distinction to make. Being well adapted to a particular environment and being adaptable to environmental change are different.
This is why many psychologists are arguing that many of the problems we face in the modern world are down to modern society representing this evolutionary ’mismatch’.
A mismatch happens when people (or a species) are faced with a fast-changing environment to which their bodies and minds – their hardware and software – are not well-adapted.
We should be afraid of cars and electricity. But we’re not. These are evolutionarily novel sources of danger. Too novel for our old equipment. Instead, our innate fears - spiders, snakes and the dark - have more ancient origins.
It’s not always neat. In fact, it’s a bit messy.
Not least because these programs, or modules, all evolved at different times in our evolutionary history. Not only that, but they also are quite distinct from one another, and can (simultaneously) hold contradictory views.
Although, I’m in two minds about that.
The classic rational economists and the modern behavioural economists have both got the story part right but also partly wrong.
For sure, our decision making is biased in ways that sometimes lead us to make silly choices.
But this does not mean that our decisions are dumb or irrational.
And those economists are correct that we are rational and smart. Just not in the way they think we are.
When we look at the deeper logic of human minds, it becomes clear that all decision making is geared to promote deep-rooted evolutionary goals.
If a cognitive bias positively impacted fitness in the ancestral environment - and if it's still around today then it almost certainly did - it is not a design flaw, it is a design feature.
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Adapted excerpt from ‘Shot By Both Sides: What We Have Here Is Failure to Communicate’
Available now at Amazon worldwide and in discerning bookstores.
amzn.com/1655342916
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