What If Your Customer Is Living in a Different Reality?

Picture a close LBW appeal in an India match. The ball hits the pad, the replay runs in slow motion on the big screen, and thousands of people watch the same three seconds of footage. Half the stadium is certain it is out. The other half is equally certain it is not, and neither half is lying. You have probably watched this happen in your own living room, with one uncle on the sofa and one cousin on the floor, both pointing at the same television and both completely sure of what they saw.

In 1951 something like this happened after a football game between Princeton and Dartmouth, a notoriously rough afternoon. Two psychologists, Albert Hastorf from Dartmouth and Hadley Cantril from Princeton, got curious about why the two campuses were telling such different stories about the same game. They showed film of it to students from both colleges and asked them to count the infractions. In the figures usually reported from their 1954 paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Princeton students counted an average of 9.8 infractions by the Dartmouth team while Dartmouth students counted 4.3. The authors concluded that the game was “many different games”, and that each version was just as real to the person who saw it as the other versions were to everyone else.¹1 Hastorf & Cantril · 1954

That conclusion is the idea I want to build this whole piece on, and I want to state it carefully because it is easy to overstate. I am not saying that reality does not exist. There is a physical world and it is the same for all of us. What I am saying is that nobody experiences it directly, and that what each of us experiences is assembled by a brain using incoming signals plus expectation, history, mood and attention.

We share a world but not an experience of it.

For anyone in marketing that is not a philosophical curiosity. It means your product is never judged as it is. It is judged as it is perceived, and perception starts working long before the customer touches anything.

0101The dress that split a family group

Early in 2015 a photograph of a dress went through every family WhatsApp group in the world, and you probably remember where you stood. Some people saw blue and black, some saw white and gold, and the argument that followed was not polite, because each side could not believe the other was serious. It felt like a joke, until you realised nobody was joking.

A team led by Bevil Conway at Wellesley College took it seriously and published the results in Current Biology that May. Of 1,401 people surveyed, 57% reported blue and black, 30% white and gold, 11% blue and brown and 2% gave other descriptions.²2 Lafer-Sousa et al. · 2015 (Figure 1)

Their explanation is that the image does not tell the brain what light the dress is sitting in, so the brain has to assume, and different people assume differently. Some people’s visual systems favour a cool, bluish daylight and subtract the blue, which leaves white and gold. Others favour a warm artificial light and subtract the yellow, which leaves blue and black.

0202You see what you were looking for

Think about a railway station at the end of a long journey, with someone you love coming to pick you up. You do not scan the crowd face by face. You spot them across a hundred people in half a second, because you went in carrying a ready-made picture of them, and the world only had to confirm it. That same machinery has a cost, which is that anything that does not fit the picture is slow to arrive, or never arrives.

Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman tested exactly this in a 1949 paper in the Journal of Personality. They flashed playing cards at 28 Harvard and Radcliffe students and slipped in trick cards that did not belong, such as a red spade. Normal cards were recognised at an average exposure of 28 milliseconds while the trick cards needed 114, about four times as long. Many people reported compromises, calling the red spade “purplish”, and at the longest exposure of a full second roughly one in ten trick cards was still not correctly seen.³3 Bruner & Postman · 1949 It is a small and old sample and I would say so plainly, but the effect has been echoed in dozens of ways since.

The more famous version is the one with the gorilla. In 1999 Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked people to count basketball passes among players in white shirts, and about half of the viewers failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walked into the middle of the scene, beat their chest and walked out.⁴4 Simons & Chabris · 1999 Simons and Chabris are clear about what this shows, which is that we are aware of far less of the world than we believe we are. What matters for us is that nobody in that experiment felt they had missed anything. Their experience of the video was complete.

0303The brain predicts first

So why does it work this way? The leading explanation in neuroscience is called predictive processing, set out by the philosopher Andy Clark in a 2013 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and popularised by the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who calls perception a “controlled hallucination”. The brain does not wait for the world to arrive and then work out what it is. It makes its best guess about what is out there, constantly, and uses the incoming signal to correct the guess.⁵5 Clark · 2013 (Figure 2)

What you experience is mostly the guess. There is a live debate about how far to push this, and it is fair to mention it. Some philosophers argue that calling perception a hallucination makes it sound too locked inside the head, when in fact experience is built through continuous interaction with the real world. I find that objection useful rather than damaging, because it keeps us honest about the claim we are making. The world is not optional, but the picture of it is something your brain paints, and no two brains paint it alike.

0404Where it reaches the taste buds

If you have ever had a cup of chai from a roadside stall that was better than the same chai in a five-star lobby, or the other way round, you already know that something is happening before the tea arrives. The question is whether it is only opinion, or whether it changes the experience itself.

Hilke Plassmann and colleagues tested this in a 2008 study in PNAS. Twenty people tasted wines inside an fMRI scanner and the prices they were told varied while the wines did not. The same wine presented at $5 and at $45, or at $10 and at $90, was rated as more pleasant at the higher price, with reported pleasantness correlating with price at r = 0.59. The activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in experienced pleasure, rose with the price too.⁶6 Plassmann et al. · 2008 (Figure 3)

Twenty people is a small sample and the effect was on pleasantness rather than on how intense the taste was rated, but the brain data matter because they suggest the price did not merely change what people said. A behavioural follow-up eight weeks later, with no price information, showed no such difference between the wines.

Brand does something similar. In 2004 Samuel McClure and colleagues published a study in Neuron in which people tasted Coca-Cola and Pepsi, first without knowing which was which and then with the brand shown. Without labels preferences were roughly evenly split. With the labels, knowing it was Coke had what the authors called a dramatic influence on stated preference and on the brain response, including activity in the prefrontal cortex.⁷7 McClure et al. · 2004 I could not confirm the exact sample size from the sources available to me, and the popular retelling that “Coke wins in the brain” goes further than the paper does, so I would keep to what it actually shows, which is that brand knowledge is part of the taste.

My favourite of these is the simplest. Leonard Lee, Shane Frederick and Dan Ariely ran a study in a Cambridge, Massachusetts pub, published in Psychological Science in 2006, with nearly 400 patrons. They compared ordinary beer with “MIT Brew”, which was the same beer with a few drops of balsamic vinegar.⁸8 Lee, Frederick & Ariely · 2006 (Figure 4)

People who did not know about the vinegar tended to prefer the MIT Brew, and so did people who were told about it only after tasting. The people who were told before they tasted liked it significantly less. The authors’ conclusion was that the disclosure changed the experience itself, not just the judgement of it afterwards.

0505What this means for the person with something to sell

The first consequence is that the customer meets a prediction before they meet your product. By the time anyone tastes, uses or reads what you have made, they have already seen a price, a pack, a name, a review and a friend’s reaction, and their experience will be built partly out of those. A product that is excellent and arrives wrapped in the wrong expectation will often be experienced as a worse product.

The second is that the order of information is a decision, not an accident. The beer study shows that the same fact lands very differently before and after the experience, which is worth thinking about the next time you decide what goes on the label, what goes in the first email, and what the salesperson says in the first minute.

0606Coming to 1&O

1&O does social media marketing, which is the business of shaping what people expect and what they notice, so it would be easy to read everything above as an argument against my own industry. If perception can be moved this much by a price tag or a brand image, is shaping it not a form of manipulation?

I think the channel is not the mechanism. Perception gets shaped by everything: by the price you set, the colour of the pack, the speed of the reply and the things you decide not to mention, whether or not anyone designed it that way. So the choice facing any business is never between shaping perception and leaving it alone. It is between shaping it on purpose and leaving it to chance.

The harder half is that this does not make every method fine. The industry does things that sit on the same spectrum as the wine study: the crossed-out “original price” that nobody ever paid, the testimonial chosen because it is the only warm one, the premium look wrapped around an ordinary product.

Would the customer feel fairly treated if they could see exactly how the impression was built?

That is the test I try to apply to our own work first, and I would like you to hold me to it. If the answer is yes, it is communication. If the answer is no, it is the thing we should not be doing.

0707Two honest constructions

There is one more thing in all of this that goes beyond marketing. If experience is assembled and not received, then most of the time that two people disagree, they are not one person who sees clearly and one who does not. They are two people who built a picture from different materials, and each is describing their picture accurately.

That does not mean every view is as good as every other, because some pictures are more accurate than others and evidence is how we find out which. But it changes how the disagreement feels from the inside. The uncle on the sofa is not being stubborn about the LBW. He is telling you what he saw. The customer who loves what you made and the one who is cold about it were, in some real sense, looking at different things.

You cannot sell to the world as it is. You can only sell to the world as it appears to the person in front of you, so it is worth going to stand where they are standing and looking from there.

0808Sources

1. Hastorf, A.H. & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game: a case study. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 129–134. Figures as reported in the SPSP summary. ↩
2. Lafer-Sousa, R., Hermann, K.L. & Conway, B.R. (2015). Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by “the dress” photograph. Current Biology. Paper (Wellesley PDF) and ScienceDaily summary. ↩
3. Bruner, J.S. & Postman, L. (1949). On the perception of incongruity: a paradigm. Journal of Personality, 18, 206–223. Full text. ↩
4. Simons, D.J. & Chabris, C.F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst. Perception, 28, 1059–1074. Summary via LiveScience. ↩
5. Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Discussion in Philosophy of Brains. ↩
6. Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B. & Rangel, A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. PNAS. Full text (Caltech). ↩
7. McClure, S.M. et al. (2004). Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks. Neuron. Abstract. ↩
8. Lee, L., Frederick, S. & Ariely, D. (2006). Try it, you’ll like it. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1054–1058. Abstract and Observer summary. ↩