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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 August 17, 2005 10:14 AM