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On 23 June, I released a podcast titled I Debunked Psychology's Greatest Myth. In this episode, I took five of the priming studies cited in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow and I tried to debunk them. For example, I recreated one 2008 study on creativity that suggested that merely looking at the Apple logo would make participants more creative. The original study found that those looking at the Apple logo, even very briefly, rather than the IBM logo, well, those people who looked at the Apple logo, they came up with more creative uses for a brick. The idea being that merely seeing a creative company's logo will make someone more creative. I repeated this study with 60 British people.
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You can obviously use bricks to create garden paths.
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A brick could be used as a weight for exercising. I use it for fire pit in the in the garden. It did not work. In fact, those primed with the IBM logo in my study actually came up with more uses for a brick than those who saw the Apple logo. I also replicated the famous Florida effect study. This study found that participants primed with words relating to old age walked slower out of the room where the experiment finished, simply reading Florida, forgetful, bold, grey or wrinkle old age style words. Well, reading those words literally changed how fast people walked. Or at least they did. In this study. I replicated this test in a slightly different way. I asked 64 Brits to read out a set of words associated with aging and decay.
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Forgetful, bald, great, stooped, faded, slouched.
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And I asked a totally separate group of 64 Brits to read out words relating to youth and energy.
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Playful, loud, bright, tangled, swift.
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I measured the actual time it took to say those words. See the actual total number of syllables for the whole list of words in both cases were the same. So I expected those reading words relating to old age to slow down a bit. But they did not. They read the words at pretty much the exact same pace as those who read words relating to youth and energy. There was no priming effect here either. Over five mini experiments, I claimed that I had debunked priming. And I'm hardly the first person do this. Shortly after Thinking Fast and Slow was released back in 2011, researcher Doyen failed to replicate a prominent study featured in the chapter on priming. And then there was a larger study by three researchers for the site Replicability Index, which analysed 12 studies in Kahneman's chapter on priming and found that 11 were unreliable. And then Kahneman himself quickly published an open email addressing the issues. He wrote that while he was a general believer in priming, he feared it was a train wreck waiting to happen. And yet today's guest on Nudge thinks I have missed something. He thinks that in some cases, priming can work. So let's reopen the debate on priming. Is it a reliable behavioral science principle or is it overblown? All of that coming up. HubSpot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers. And there is a perfect example. It is Morehouse College. This is a college in Atlanta in America. And like most organizations that are been around for decades, they had a huge amount of content on their website. 900 different pages and even the tiniest of updates took 30 minutes for them to publish. And yet they needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content. So they used Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools. This helped them write new content, optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked. They got 30% more page views and their visitors now spend 27% more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about. So if you feel like growth is impossible, it might be worth reaching out to HubSpot. Go to HubSpot.com today's guest on Nudge is the leading consumer behavior expert, Phil Graves.
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I'm a consumer psychologist, author of the book Consumerology and founder of Shift Consultancy.
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Phil has spent his career studying consumers and understanding their behaviour. He's not only read most of the studies on priming, he's repeated many of them himself and he thinks, thinks some are more reliable than others. So let's start with one of the reliable ones. A study, well, a couple of studies in fact, on wine.
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For whatever reason, and we can only speculate, a lot of research in, in the field of psychology is done on wine and. Fair enough. So there was a study that was done that was again using FMRI imaging to look at people's reaction to wines of different prices. And what it showed was that the reward centres of the brain lit up more when the wine was positioned as being more expensive. Of course, as with all these things.
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Same wine, this 2008 study found that the regions of the brain believed to be responsible for encoding pleasure relating to taste and odour showed increased activity when the participants believed the prices were higher.
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What's interesting about that is that it's easy to observe that we have a price quality heuristic. We're faced with a range of product, it's difficult to make a decision, okay, well, do we go for the cheap one? Well, it's probably cheap for a reason. Do we want to go for the really expensive one? Well, is that more than we need to pay? But it's probably the best because that's why it's expensive. And we develop those heuristics over time because they broadly work. We develop these heuristics and what's interesting about them is that they kind of work in reverse. When we spent more, this study on wine shows we actually get more pleasure. So, you know, are we deluding ourselves? Are we not? Well, it doesn't really matter. You know, we believe it to the point that actually what we experience is better as a result of just knowing that we've spent more. And then in another study, and they manipulated the perception of the wine they gave people in a restaurant by using labels that looked fancier and more premium. And I'm sure we can all imagine kind of what that might look like. And then another one that looked like a cheaper bottle of wine, same wine. And not only did people think the wine in the fancier bottle was better, they also rated the meal that they'd eaten as being superior.
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Here, diners at a restaurant in Illinois were given a free glass of wine to accompany their meal. In each case, the actual wine used was the same. It was a cheap bottle. However, different bottles were used to signal different wine qualities. When the wine was perceived purely from the label as being better quality, people rated both the wine and the food as tasting better and they ate more of the meal as well. In a second study, also cited in Phil's book, people were given a wine they believed from the packaging again, that was from a superior region. So an old world, superior region versus a new world, cheaper region. And they rated the wine at 85% higher for taste and the food at 50% higher for taste as well. This reminds me of a 2017 study by Charles Spence from Oxford where 140 people rated a Malbec wine as 10% higher in quality when they opened that wine in a cork top bottle rather than a screw top. The association with cork tops and high quality literally increased enjoyment.
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We're processing all of this, but it's happening outside of conscious awareness. And what we end up deciding and acting and the decisions we make are influenced by lots and lots of things that are peripheral. But how we account for what we found ourselves doing is driven by our own need to post rationalise a narrative that makes us feel like conscious agents, even though it largely points to the fact that we're not.
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Phil says that these quick opinions we form on wine aren't due to rational reasoning, but instead due to quick heuristics, these shortcuts that our brains use to make sense of the world. And he has another great example of heuristics that I think everybody listening to this podcast has followed before.
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A classic one is, you know, reading terms and conditions. You know, you come up onto a website, you're trying to buy something, whatever, you agree to our terms and conditions. No, right thinking human would actually read the terms and conditions because by now you've done that probably a thousand times in your life and nothing bad has ever happened to you. So it makes no sense from a human brain point of view to invest the energy in reading what can sometimes be the length of a book of legal speak, you know, when nothing bad is likely to happen to you. And that's not a conscious decision, although we can post rationalize it because you click that button in a fraction of a second. So that's showing us this is an unconscious response.
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But all of these studies, are they actually about priming? Part of me would argue that the price of the wine is more to do with the Verbeila effect, that the labeling is maybe down to the halo effect, or that opening a cork is input bias. Is it really the same as having participants read words relating to old age and then watching them walk slower?
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This is a kind of controversial topic you get into, and I would argue there are lots of things going on here. So there are elements of anchoring or priming. There are implicit associations that people have from past experiences and then misattribution, which we've talked about a fair amount. But coming back to the priming anchoring point, as I say, this is, I know, controversial. I know it's something you've talked about in your podcast before. A lot of the studies that have identified priming or anchoring effects are kind of like parlor games. They're sort of giving people little things to do, and then they walk more slowly or they act more creatively. And they. Coming back to the point I've made about how so much is going on contextually, there might be other contextual factors that are influencing them in that particular moment. There might be researcher effects. All the rest of it. Forget about all of that. I would say I have demonstrated priming effects on numerous occasions, particularly numerically. So I think this might have been one of Kahneman and Tversky's. But when you give people a multiplication of 1 times 2 up to 8, and then other people 8 times 7 down to 1. Mathematically it's the same, but you get a guessed answer when you say people. Okay, quickly guess the answer to this. When it starts with a one, you get a lower guess and you get an appreciably higher one when it starts with the eight. I've also done the how many countries in Africa where you prime people with an initial number? Say some school children thought there were 10 countries in Africa. They didn't know how many countries there were. Do you think it's more or less people? You think it might be more. And then other people, you say the school children thought there were 70. Do you think it's more or less? I think it would be less than that. And what you see is people working from the number they've been given. And again, in some of the experiments, even random numbers have been shown to influence that.
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I don't disagree with Phil at all. I think all of those studies and examples are reliable. I also believe the same is true with words. In his book, Phil shares how participants can be asked to consider two people, and quickly they need to decide who they think they would like more. So, for example, John is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and jealous. Mark is jealous, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent. It should make a difference since the descriptions contain the exact same words about both John and Mark. And yet most people unconsciously attach more weight to the words they hear first. And thus they say they prefer John over Mark. Richard Shotton has proven the same is true with product descriptions. Vodka described as award winning, vinegary and weak is preferred to the same vodka described as weak, vinegary and award winning.
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But you know, if you think about things like the wine example we were talking about, where people are getting a perception from, in this case how the wine looks when they're having their meal, or what they've been told about the price of it. Well, that's opening up. This is the way I think about it. Particular neural paths. It's starting their mental journey in a particular place, and that makes it easier for the brain or to go in that direction. And that I have found routinely in marketing situations is a really important thing to consider. So where are people starting their mental journey? Because it can subject to them not having a strong belief about whatever it is, and subject to them being involved in one of these sort of more unconscious decisions lead to them feeling very different or acting very differently.
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I don't disagree with anything Phil has shared here, but I did want him to share another Example, perhaps one outside of the lab and in the real world.
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So there was a project I was involved in a few years ago where Innocent, the smoothie company, were trying to launch a fruit and veg juice. And when we were testing it, I mean, and the first thing to say is, you know, the last thing I would ever do testing a product is stick it in front of people and say, what do you think about this? Because wrong part of their brain. So we use different techniques, purchase simulations to get them reacting in the way they would as shoppers. And we had different packs that expressed this proposition in different ways. And one of the things that they did was they listed the ingredients on the front of the pack quite prominently. Because obviously if you're buying a fruit juice, you need to know what the fruit is. Likewise, you're buying a fruit and veg juice, you need to know what the fruit and veg are. But what became very apparent in our testing was that if you led with the veg ingredients, which in many ways makes sense rationally because that's the point of difference, people wouldn't buy them. And if you lead with the fruit ingredients, they will. Now, you're still listing the same ingredients, you're not listing the proportions of them, although people are used to seeing the most prominent significant ingredient listed first. But it was to do with the priming effect that, you know, if you see this juice and you see that it's a kale, cucumber and apple juice, and forgive me, I can't remember the flavours. Now you're starting your mental journey at kale, and that's quite a challenging taste for a drink, quite a challenging taste for a vegetable, frankly, but it's good for us, so we're supposed to eat it. Whereas conversely, if you're starting with the apple and then you're getting to the kale, it kind of feels alright. And that was a huge difference, you know, that was the difference between, I'm sure it's very good for you, but the only people who were ever going to buy it were absolute health lunatics. And where this product needed to sit, which was, well, you know, give people something that's a bit healthier, a bit, you know, can satisfy that health desire they've got without them thinking, oh God, am I going to buy this and then feel like I can't even drink it? Because of course with anything new there's a lot of loss aversion, you know, I'm going to buy one thing and me, I will have a strong unconscious fear that I'm going to get it, sit down with my sandwich and just not be able to drink it. And at that point is a massive loss versus the potential upside of, well, you know, I might have something that's new and that I like, or something that's got some healthier ingredients in it, potentially.
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What's going on here? Why is priming working for Phil and not for me? Well, let's break down the differences in the studies I debunked and the examples Phil has given. Phil found that listing the vegetables first on a package for a health drink lowered the likelihood that people would buy compared to listing the fruit first. In my studies, I found that showing people the apple logo wouldn't make them any more creative than showing them the IBM logo. You can make the case that both of these studies are exploring priming. After all, the stimulus, the IBM logo or ingredient list, is only briefly paid attention to by the participants. However, I think there is another big difference about these two studies and that is context. You see, it is contextually important to know what ingredients there are in a health drink. Your enjoyment of that drink will directly link to the ingredients inside. So being primed by a nice sounding ingredient, an apple rather than one which you probably wouldn't say as typically nice kale, well, that will change your perception. Not because priming always works, but because the prime is contextually important. In my studies, the contextual relevance either wasn't there at all or it just wasn't strong enough. There is no strong contextual link between looking at a company logo and then coming up with uses for a brick. There is not a strong contextual link between reading words relating to old age and then walking down a hallway. So here's what I think is important about priming and possibly about many other behavioural science biases as well. It is the context. Flashing the colour green when I'm looking at a website won't make me more likely to buy because green is the colour of money. That contextual link is far too weak. But smelling fresh bread when I'm walking around the supermarket will make me buy a loaf of sourdough. Both, you could argue, are priming, but one is far more contextually relevant. The smell of bread, it triggers hunger. It suggests pretty reliably that the bread is fresh. It'll attract my attention as well, while the colour green on a website is just largely irrelevant to a buying journey. So that's what I would advise marketers to consider before applying is the prime contextually relevant? The price of a wine will influence enjoyment because it is contextually important. We have a price quality heuristic. The bottle of wine will do so too. But if I ask people to read words relating to taste before drinking wine, I'm not sure that would make them enjoy the wine more. It's just not contextually relevant. Later on in the show, Phil goes on to give more examples that highlight how context is important, including a study that found how art in a restaurant increases enjoyment and how adverts are perceived differently based on the other ads nearby. All of that coming up after this short break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today is Creators Are Brands. It is hosted by Tom Boyd and is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creators Our Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online, from the mindsets to the tactics to the business side. They break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work. One of the recent episodes I listened to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brands, which I think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age. So if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant Creators Are Brands episodes, go and listen to Creators Are Brands wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. Today we are revisiting priming and looking at how in some scenarios where the context is right, priming may work. So listing a tasty fruit instead of a healthy veg first on an ingredient list will prime someone to enjoy the fruit drink more. Seeing an expensive price on a bottle of wine will do the same. That works because the price and the fruit are contextually relevant to the enjoyment of the product. Here's another example sort of fairly simple.
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Study that was conducted looking at people's evaluations of cutlery in this case as they do in a lot of behavioral science experiments. And I think it's really the gift that behavioral science has given the world are these A B tests where we change something without telling people and see what happens. And it gives us the opportunity to focus on behavior and get away from asking people what they think. Because as we keep finding out, what people think they think isn't necessarily really what they think and they don't think how they think, so they're not great people to ask. So in this case looked at some evaluations of, as it happened, cutlery, and the thing they varied was whether or not there was some artwork next to it. So they put a piece of artwork next to it, and when they did, people thought that the cutlery was more luxurious. Same cutlery, obviously. But again, this example of we're processing all the information around us, there is a framing effect from what we're seeing around the object that we're focused on. And you get this misattributed sense of superiority which actually is coming about by the implicit associations that have been triggered by the artwork, which we associate with kind of excellence and sophistication and culture and all those things. So all those paths are kind of firing in the brain at the point that we're looking at these shaped bits of metal and the way we feel about them ends up being influenced as a result.
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I think the context works here because art implicitly suggests that the cutlery belongs in an art gallery, thus improving the ratings. There is a good contextual link there. Now, people also like funny jokes. They like to laugh. But I don't think if you had a very talented comedian telling jokes while the participants rated cutlery, that you would see an improvement in the ratings of cutlery because comedy just isn't contextually relevant to how you would view a spoon, for example. Here's another contextually relevant priming shoes and smell. The smell of shoes is important to us. We've all got old pairs of shoes that just smell a little bit. Well, researchers found that the smell of a shoe can influence perception. In the study, researchers put one new pair of Nike running shoes in a room with a light floral smell and another identical pair in an unscented room. Afterwards, 84% of people said they were more likely to buy the pair from the room that smelled of flowers rather than the unscented room. I imagine this works because there is a subconscious link between smell and shoes. I don't think participants would be more likely to buy the Nike trainers if they just tasted a particularly nice cookie, for example, because there is no contextual link between taste and trainers. But there is a link between smell and trainers, and that's why it works. We evaluate products not just on the product alone, but also what's around it, whether that's a smell or another product. Phil had a great 2008 study by Simonson and Yoon which proved this.
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So the Penn study was looking at product comparisons. What information people had when they were making a comparison about a product or making a decision about a product. And what they found was that where you had a sort of a small competitive set and there was a clearly inferior product, then people found it much easier. They valued the other product more highly. So although in theory, we would probably tell ourselves that if we were evaluating products, we would do it on an objective basis. So either this is good or it isn't. In fact, what they found out was that it's not objective, it's driven by what's around in the context. And so one of the things I was speculating on was, well, how might that apply in advertising? So you've got your product and you're advertising it well. If you've just been on air after a product that's pretty mediocre and shoddy, you may very well shine more than if you've been up against someone else. Competitive.
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Phil writes that when Simmerton and Yun compared how people evaluated the attractiveness of a series of products, including lawnmowers, food processors and cars, the researchers found that the strength for a preference of a product was influenced by the context of choices presented at the time. So, for example, when a pen was selected from a set where it was significantly better than the other. So three pens, two are really bad and one is significantly better. People would pay more for it and think it actually wrote better than the exact same pen when it was from a more balanced set of options. A really good pen next to two okay pens, for example. We are influenced by all sorts of contextual information. Even if we struggle to explain exactly what information influences us, it's just highlighting.
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This, you know, the objective and the rational is so frequently not what matters, that there are other contextual and framing effects that are going on that shape our decisions, but we're oblivious to them. I guess the kind of the thing that marketers should know is that consumers are devious, lying, cheating voices.
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So don't believe everything a customer says. All of us struggle to explain how we make decisions. I think the studies I ran on priming a few months back, I think they hold up. Of the five studies I replicated, they had all been disproven not just by me, but by multiple follow ups from actual scientists who are a lot more clever than I am. But I think there was a mistake I made because I always assumed that priming didn't work because of the inputs, the stimulus. I assumed that a small, subtle stimulus would never be enough to nudge a person to buy. So the colour of a website, for example, wouldn't make me more likely to buy. Or a company logo wouldn't make me more creative because the stimulus is too small. But I think I got that wrong. I now believe that subtle inputs, subtle stimulus can nudge Just like how smelling fresh bread or seeing the price of a wine will influence my decision. Both of those things are very small, they're very subtle. I might not even be conscious that I'm taking them into my decision making process, but they will still change my decision. So now I don't think it's down to the size of the stimulus that nudges people, but rather the contextual relevance. It is contextually relevant to look at the price of a wine in the bottle it's in and the location where the wine is from and the year it was made. Because all of those small things are very subtle. They are relevant, contextually relevant to your enjoyment of that wine. But irrelevant stimulus I don't think will prime you in a strong way. And I think that's where priming went wrong. Too many studies tried to prove that largely irrelevant stimulants would still trigger a behaviour and I just don't think that's true. I don't think a green website will make you more likely to buy and I don't think Florida or saying Florida out loud will make you walk a bit slower. So I still question the validity of many, many priming studies, but I have altered my view. It is not down to the size of the stimulus that you should look out for when reviewing a priming study, but rather if the stimulus is contextually relevant. That is all for today folks. Thank you so much for listening and a massive, massive thank you to Phil Graves for joining me once again on Nudge. He was on last week. If you guys haven't listened to that episode, please do go back and tune in. It's a fantastic episode, one of the most popular actually of the summer, which was lovely to see. And Phil will actually be on one more time probably in a few weeks to do an episode on Social Proof and Herd mentality. His book Consumerology is an absolutely brilliant read. I don't know how I missed it for the decade it's been out. I said this last week, but it really is just an absolutely seminal book, one that I should have read an awful long time ago. Very relevant to all of the content I create on the show. And if you like this show, I think you will love that book. So if you'd like a copy, I have left a link, as always in the show notes, but also just search for Phil Graves or Consumerology wherever you get your books and I'm sure you will find it. If you want more philosophical from Nudge, the two things you can do, as always, is sign up to the free Nudge newsletter, which comes out every Friday. Just go to nudgepodcast.com, click newsletter in the menu and you can sign up. You'll also find all of my past essays there. So if you just want to read them before you commit to giving me your email address to see if it's worth it, you can do so, just go to nudgepodcast.com, click newsletter in the menu and YouTube is probably the other way you can get more content from me. I do often add videos to YouTube which are slightly different from the shows. They're edited down, snappier versions obviously have a lot of visuals on and a lot of those videos tend to do quite well. So if you want more from Nudge, you want to learn more about behavioral science, just search for nudge podcast on YouTube or click the link in the show notes One final thing. I was on a podcast recently that I just greatly enjoyed. It was the Indie Business Club with Mel and Ben. The three of us chatted mainly about behavioral science, about how all these different biases affect us. Really got into a lot of good detail about how small businesses can apply those nudges, and it was just a genuinely very lovely talk. So if you've got 40 minutes after this and you want to listen to something else, go and search for the Indie Business Club. I think you'll really like it. Okay folks, that is all for this week. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.