Over the last 20 years, a big trend in Psychology has been a
focus on how the world helps you learn.
A hundred years ago the behaviorists (like B.F. Skinner) assumed that
everything from your knowledge of skills like riding a bicycle to your
knowledge about how to use language was learned. By the 1950s, though, psychologists assumed
that many things like language were so complex that they probably could not be
learned completely from scratch.
Instead, linguists like Noam Chomsky suggested that a lot of the
mechanisms for using language are built into the brain from birth.
More recently, the pendulum of research has begun to swing
back toward learning. The idea is that
the brain is able to pick up on information about how frequently you encounter
things to learn. Jenny Saffran, Richard
Aslin, and their colleagues have demonstrated that babies learn a lot about the
sounds of language that make up words by keeping track of the patterns of
sounds that occur in sequence. Tom Landauer
and Susan Dumais found that you can learn a lot about what words have similar
meanings by using the patterns of words that occur together in the same
conversations. Over time, you are much
more likely to hear about doctors and nurses being talked about in the same
conversation than to hear about doctors and lettuce.
One place where this kind of learning has an influence on
your daily life is in affecting what you like.
People are wired to be uncomfortable with objects that are completely
new. Anything unfamiliar might not be
safe, and so we are cautious on our first encounter.
Quickly, though, we become much more comfortable with things
that are not dangerous. In the 1960s,
psychologist Robert Zajonc (pronounced ZAY-ons) observed that after seeing something
just once, people like it much better than they did when they had never seen it
before. You have probably noticed this
with music. The first time you hear a
new song on the radio, you may or may not like it, but you enjoy it better the
second time. If the song plays often on
the radio, you come to like it. By the
time you see that band in concert, the songs that get the biggest cheers are
the ones that have been on the radio. It
isn’t that only the songs on the radio are good ones. It is just that people like the songs they
have heard before more than the ones that they have never heard.
So far, so good. You
use a lot of information about how often things happen in the world to make
judgments about what you like. And the
things you like tend to be the things you buy.
Remember, though, that the brain evolved in an environment
in which nature decided what you were going to see often. Thousands of years ago, the people, animals,
plants, and foods that you saw most often were the ones that were a part of
your ecosystem. The number of times that
you came into contact with things reflected how often you were likely to see
them.
The statistics of the modern world are quite strange. Certainly, there are lots of things in your
local neighborhood that become familiar because you see them all the time. You recognize the neighbor’s car, a friend’s
dog, or a building you pass on your way to work.
But, you have also lost control of your information
environment. In exchange for watching
shows on television, listening to new music on the radio, and reading riveting
blogs, you allow people to pay for the right to expose you to ads. The most significant effect of advertising is
to change what is familiar to you.
Products and services that you might never encounter in your
neighborhood become familiar because they are being presented to you in
ads.
Now, you might think that you’re a savvy consumer. You know the ads are out there, so you try
not to pay too much attention to them.
You’d prefer to make your own choices.
And there’s the rub.
These learning mechanisms that use information about how
often you see things work particularly effectively when you are not really
paying attention. Seeing a product in an
ad gives your knowledge about that product a little boost of familiarity. If you’re not really paying attention to the
ad, though, then you don’t necessarily realize why that product feels so
familiar. When you see it later at the
store, or a snack bar at the movies, that familiarity gets translated into
liking that product and wanting it.
And there is a lot of research suggesting that ads are very
effective at influencing what you want precisely because they make products
feel more familiar. A clever study by
Melanie Dempsey and Andrew Mitchell in the Journal
of Consumer Research in 2010 found that people who saw an ad for a new
product would choose that product later, even if the features of that product
were a little worse than the features of another product that was
unfamiliar.
So, what can you do?
First, when you are making important choices you should slow
down. The effects of familiarity on what
you like are strongest when you act quickly.
Familiarity still has an influence when you think for a long time, but
at least you are giving yourself some time to consider other factors that might
go into making a choice.
Second, be more deliberate about who you allow to feed
information to you. For example, many
websites, computer programs, and smart phone apps have both paid and ad-supported
versions. Ask yourself whether it is
worth a small amount of money to seize control of your own information
environment. The more that you cede
control of that environment to others, the more that you are allowing the
things you like to be sold to the highest bidder.