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August 25, 2005
Join us for Lab meeting
We occasionally welcome interested visitors to our Lab meetings. If you'd like to attend, please let us know! Meetings are at every Tuesday at 6:30pm on the Stanford campus.
Posted by Ramit Sethi at 10:24 AM
August 22, 2005
Is removal of barriers a persuasion strategy?
You might find this interesting. Here's an email exchange I had a couple of days ago:
BJ, check this out:"Wouldn't it be great if you could just show up to the laundromat with your bag of dirty, filthy laundry...and throw the whole thing in, lock stock and barrel? Well with WashingSacks you can-they're laundry bags infused with detergent that also dissolve in water."
BJ's response:
Yes, in the chapter on tools I talk about reduction strategy - a different name for removing barriers.BJ
What kinds of barriers could you remove to increase persuasion?
Posted by Ramit Sethi at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2005
Where do captology ideas come from?
Lots of places. I ran across this article today:
Depression and trust in their doctors are important factors influencing whether patients take their prescription medicines, and this may be especially true when medication costs are high, researchers report.
As a Lab, we might decide this is interesting and try to dig into the research. Is there a way to replicate doctors' trust using technology? What would be the advantages and disadvantages? How could we set up an experimental design to test our hypotheses?
So one of our main resources for new ideas is emerging research. And we use many, many disparate areas, including social psychology, organizational psychology, sociology, business, economics...essentially any area where people are involved.
Another source of ideas is a top-down approach: We come in having decided there is some kind of problem and try to investigate the best ways to solve this. For example, we might say "How can we help people exercise more?" There are ethical concerns with this approach and we're careful to think them through.
Finally, to find even more ideas, we work from the bottom up: Sometimes in our Lab meetings, we'll brainstorm a general question like 'What's the best persuasion tactic that has been used on you in the last week?' or 'What do you wish you could persuade someone to do?' Then we brainstorm and almost always find interesting collective ideas that we hadn't individually realized.
So captology ideas come from everywhere. For us, the key is running them through our captology framework and seeing if they can be experimentally tested, ethically validated, etc. And most importantly--does the idea matter?
If you have any ideas, feel free to send them our way!
Posted by Ramit Sethi at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
Jerk-O-Meter: Empathy Crutch or Empathy Trainer?
Do you ever wish you knew how annoyed you sound when you speak or whether you're really interested in what someone else is saying? For those of us who have no social skills or the ability to gauge how others interpret the verbal and non-verbal cues we toss out during standard social interactions now there's the "Jerk-O-Meter".
MIT researchers conducted a study entitled "Voices of Attraction", which examined the conversations of people involved in speed-dating sessions. They found they could realiably gauge a subject's interest level by the tone of their voice. Enter another MIT researcher with a VoIP phone, add a complex algorithm and you have a phone that anaylzes your voice to determine your emotional state. So far, it has the capability to warn others that you're pre-occupied or tell you if it senses you're becoming too angry.
Commercial applications are already in the offing including a "wearable 'social signaling meter'" (mood rings of the new millenium?) or more sophisticated applications which would allow advertisers to more accurately gauge the effectivness of their pitches.
My question is, if you messed around a bit with it could you use it to train people to believe they were interested in something when they weren't? Could you use it to manipulate someone's interest or anger levels by intentionally giving alerting them to the wrong cues? Does it seem somewhat odd that we're developing elaborate systems to tell ourselves (and outside parties) how we "really" feel?
To read more, check out:
Software helps you stop being a jerk
Posted by Matt Markovich at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)
What do Quail and Domain Name Registrars have in Common?
During a recent run, I came upon a covey of California quail. The male with his brilliant plumage and impressive crest feathers started strutting up the path cooing all the way.
I could not help but watch his performance even though I knew its purpose. The male quail was intentionally leading me astray while the female quietly herded the chicks into the tall grass, out of harms way.
The quail used a crude but effective form of persuasion called sidetracking. Sidetracking is a derivation of tunneling which is described in detail in BJ's book, Persuasive Technology.
Domain name registrars also employ sidetracking. Just like a quail, a demain name registar uses bright colors and bold statements to distract its users. They hope the user will miss the dull gray 'Proceed to cart' selection and purchase additional services.
Posted by Steve Wilhelm at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
Search Engine Loyalty
Search engines survive on money generated through page views. The more people you have using your engine, the more people you'll have clicking your ads - this translates into revenue.
It's pretty clear that search companies should try their hardest to get as many users as possible, and that's where captology comes in. After all, their job is to persuade us, the user, into using their service instead of their competitor's.
So, what are some ways that the big search engines try to get us to use their particular service? Well, Yahoo! is betting that size matters. Last week, Yahoo! announced that they were increasing their searchable index to 20 billion objects (19.2 billion of which are web pages). This created quite a stir in the search community, for good reason. 20 billion pages is a lot. More than double Google's published index.
Bigger is better, right? It worked for computers and digital cameras. However, in Yahoo!'s own blog entry, the author notes that "size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine." Indeed, in a news article I read repeating Yahoo!'s announcement of their increase, the article was quick to mention that this increase in size did not necessarily mean that Yahoo!'s results would be better than Google's.
So much for size. What about the interface? Usability can be extremely important in software. Now that I think about it, Google and Yahoo! look pretty identical these days...
How about branding? There's no denying that Google is hot right now. Yahoo! has little trouble hiring smart people, though, so their brand is still fairly strong. And really, I don't think any number of news articles would cause me to switch search engines.
So, what's the point? There's more than meets the eye to persuading users to change something as seemingly easy as their search engine. I don't think one single factor will change someone's preferred engine, but a combination of factors might be enough to tip the scale one way or the other.
Posted by Gregory Cuellar at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)