Archive for the 'Psychology' Category

Some things you can learn from using Twitter

Published
by
Dave
on July 8, 2010
in Media and Psychology
. 13 Comments

So, Twitter is full of inane babble, right? Well, perhaps not. It can also be a source of inspiration, insight and learning if you want it to be. Here’s six  things I think we can learn from using Twitter:

1. Perception is Contagious. The people you surround yourself with affect your experience and perspectives. Your experience on Twitter is largely determined by the people that you follow – if you follow boring, prejudiced or self-absorbed people on Twitter, you’re probably not going to have a very enjoyable experience of it. However, if you following curious, interesting and insightful people, you’re likely to be surprised and delighted regularly.

2. It’s not all about you. Being selfish and cagey is a sure way to be ignored. The more interested you are in others, the more interested they’re likely to be in you. The most popular people on Twitter engage and respond to others, share the ideas of others, acknowledge others, and add value with their own ideas too.

3. Sharing is joyful. There’s a certain delight that comes from sharing an idea that you care about publicly. This is compounded for every person that acknowledges your idea and passes it along (in the form of “Retweets” usually). In the same vein, it’s amazing how willing people are to help out with ideas or resources in response to questions you might pose on Twitter (of course, in this case you’d probably need to have some active followers for this to work).

4. Everyone has a story. One of the most remarkable things about Twitter is the abundance of experiences and perspectives that people have. Just browsing what people are writing about at any given time, or around any given topic is often humbling and enlightening. For example, I loved sharing the experience of fans around South Africa of the World Cup opening ceremony and game – people in the stadium, at fanparks, at home alone (dancing!), or with family and friends.

5. A little humour goes a long way. An informal survey I conducted on Twitter revealed that the most popular tweets for South Africans are humorous one-liners. In response to even the most tense debate, helping people laugh is sure to win you friends and followers.

6. Mean what you say. Insincere expression of feelings – whether good or bad can come back in surprising ways. People have lost jobs, business contracts, friends and followers from saying things they didn’t mean on Twitter. I think this stems from a sense that complaining is a good way to build sympathy – it works if you’ve had a real experience but can really backfire if you’re making it up. Just because you’re saying it online, it doesn’t mean there aren’t real people or real consequences on the receiving end. On the other hand, flat praise or outright lies tend to be exposed online, and people tend not to follow those who they don’t trust.

Lastly, I’d say that ultimately Twitter is pretty meaningless if you’re only using it to accumulate followers. The real value of it is in the relationships you develop and the ways in which you can get to know people, share experiences and resolve problems.

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Decision-Making Biases

Published
by
Dave
on April 14, 2009
in Marketing and Psychology
. 6 Comments

Flip a Coin by The Bartender 007 on Flickr

While there are many rational reasons for people to choose to buy a particular product or service, it’s often our emotions and personal biases that drive us.

Below is a list of some of the more commonly debated cognitive biases that can affect people’s decisions (From “Decision-Making” on Wikipedia):

  • Selective search for evidence (a.k.a. Confirmation bias in psychology) (Scott Plous, 1993) – We tend to be willing to gather facts that support certain conclusions but disregard other facts that support different conclusions.
  • Premature termination of search for evidence – We tend to accept the first alternative that looks like it might work.
  • Inertia – Unwillingness to change thought patterns that we have used in the past in the face of new circumstances.
  • Selective perception – We actively screen-out information that we do not think is important.
  •  Wishful thinking or optimism bias – We tend to want to see things in a positive light and this can distort our perception and thinking.
  • Choice-supportive bias - occurs when we distort our memories of chosen and rejected options to make the chosen options seem relatively more attractive.
  • Recency - We tend to place more attention on more recent information and either ignore or forget more distant information. (See semantic priming.) The opposite effect in the first set of data or other information is termed Primacy effect (Plous, 1993).
  • Repetition bias – A willingness to believe what we have been told most often and by the greatest number of different of sources.
  • Anchoring and adjustment – Decisions are unduly influenced by initial information that shapes our view of subsequent information.
  • Group think – Peer pressure to conform to the opinions held by the group.
  • Source credibility bias - We reject something if we have a bias against the person, organization, or group to which the person belongs: We are inclined to accept a statement by someone we like. (See prejudice.)
  •  Incremental decision making and escalating commitment – We look at a decision as a small step in a process and this tends to perpetuate a series of similar decisions. This can be contrasted with zero-based decision making. (See slippery slope.)
  • Role fulfillment (Self Fulfilling Prophecy) - We conform to the decision making expectations that others have of someone in our position.
  • Underestimating uncertainty and the illusion of control – We tend to underestimate future uncertainty because we tend to believe we have more control over events than we really do. We believe we have control to minimize potential problems in our decisions.

Reading these, I realise the truth in what Bertrand Russel said: “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd” – decisions and beliefs are hackable.

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The Start of my Low Information Diet

Published
by
Dave
on September 7, 2008
in Attention, Attention Economics, Email, Psychology, Writing, blogging and way of life
. 11 Comments

Some of the regular visitors to this blog may have noticed that I have posted progressively less over the last 6 months. Recently my posting has almost come to a standstill. There’s a lot behind this, which I’ve been trying to make sense of.

In short, it comes down to a sense of frustration I’m having with the amount of information I seem to have to deal with before anything actually gets done. As an example, besides spam, I get around 80 emails a day, all of which seem to require an urgent response. This is not good for someone who spends most of his time out the office working with groups. It basically means that most of my time in the office is split between dealing with email, and reading news so I can stay in touch with industry trends and innovations. This leaves very little time to spend working with my colleagues (at Huddlemind, Creative Commons and Muti) on important stuff like strategy. All this information feels like it’s paralysing me!

In fact, this sense has sat with me for a while, and it’s the primary reason why I’ve been so drawn to the study and practice of “Attention Economics”.

So, regarding my blog…

Someone Has Already Said It

Perhaps the main reason I haven’t been posting is because, quite honestly, everything I can think of saying has already been said by someone else online. And its not often that I have felt I could say it better.

For those who are interested in what I recommend reading, or what I find interesting, I would like to introduce you to my Diigo links which you can see in the sidebar on the right. There are some superb finds there, and they’re all sorted by topic/tag.

I feel so full up with other people’s information that there’s barely enough space for me to form my own insights and share them.

Experiences vs Information

Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you tell them, but will never forget how you make them feel”.

For people, like me, who believe that our Attention is increasingly scarce and valuable today, there is a cost attached to each new piece of information that we consume. Information consumes Attention. Despite my knowledge and understanding of “Attention Economics”, I’ve been spendthrift with my own Attention. Now I have a bit of a deficit to deal with – each waking moment is currently spent processing the information I’ve amassed, at the expense of the experiences and interactions I could be having.

Information, by the way, is inherent in everything. It’s just that we have come to prioritize encoded information – in the form of writing, sounds, and video – over real-world, information – in the form of experiences.

Reading and Writing

When I first started blogging, I enjoyed the sense of personal discovery through public disclosure. However, at some point the blogging became more about building an audience than about sharing ideas.

I can say the same about live chat, email, and meetings. My initial experience of these filled me with delight in the process of sharing ideas. They all now seem more like an obligation than a priviledge.

So in my attempt to reclaim my own sense of daily delight in my work and online pursuits, I am cutting down on all these attention traps, drastically. In their place, I hope to clear some space to experience and to reflect more, and to allow my own insights to emerge.

As my esteemed friend, Joe Botha, has said: “The true breakfast of champions is a low information diet”.

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Success: Passion, Persistence and Pushy Mothers

Published
by
Dave
on October 27, 2007
in Principles, Psychology and way of life
. 5 Comments

I recently completed the first term of a new course at UCT called “Attention Economics”, where I was working with a group of bright undergrad commerce students who are all interested in learning how to find their place in the world and make a success of their careers. This has been an invigorating and fulfilling process for me, and I think that much of the value for myself and the students has been the shared exploration of the potential within us.

Anyway, this video is for them. And I hope that you enjoy it too:

(Talk by Richard St.John at TED)

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