We Buy What We Know
Good morning. It's November 29, 2020
Each week, I share research bits informing 'Perspective Agents'—a forthcoming book about how intelligent products, ideas, and revelations change how we see the world.
On Sensemaking:
"Our brains are very good at putting new things into old boxes."
—Bob Johansen, Full-Spectrum Thinking
News in Perspective:
Why this feels like the year worst ever. We judge the present more negatively than the past, attributed to what psychologists call "decline bias." Through this prism, maybe 2020 isn't the worst year ever. Yes, bad things happened, but consider years like 1918, where 50 million people died from the last global pandemic. We're wired for gloom to keep our brains on high alert, a trait that once protected us from predators and natural disasters. It also leaves us open to destructive media habits like doomscrolling, mindlessly refreshing accounts to catch the latest threats. The scope and pace of news take a toll on our mental health. Nicole Ellison, a professor at the University of Michigan, says, "there's a lot of demand on cognitive processing to make sense of it. There's no overarching narrative that helps us." Yet we still scroll with the unhealthy curiosity of passing a car crash. Search for Doomscrolling is up 2900 % this year. (source: National Geographic, Psychology Today)
In times of stress, we buy what we know. There's a flip side to our biases in the context of time; we exaggerate positive experiences from our past. This leads to "nostalgia bias," when joined with our need for control, nudges us to buy what we know. According to Chelsea Galoni, a marketing professor at the University of Iowa, the loss of control during lockdowns compels us to seek the familiar and stray from unknowns. When we feel uncertain or afraid, practical concerns are overwhelmed by emotional reactions. We regain control by turning nostalgic. We seek out the familiar brands we know and trust — Big Macs become popular again, and Oreos fly off the shelf. (source: Journal of Consumer Research, Harvard Business Review)
Unwritten rules of media no longer apply. News media have an under-the-radar role in the production of reassurance. Seeing murders, famines, natural disasters, and madness from afar leads us to feel sane by comparison. Monitoring outer turmoil helps us moderate inner agitation. Living online obliterates this media peace. News producers and platforms create and encourage unsettledness by designed to sustain engagement. This contradiction keeps us tuning in but wanting for more. According to new research, we're trained to expect the unexpected even in ordinary, uneventful situations. We're hooked because we expect something remarkable might happen any time, all the time. Even with headlines exhibiting madness, it's an empty promise. Studies show consuming a continuous, endless flux of information leaves us feeling bored and lazy. Like doing nothing at all— the 'experience of no experience.’ (source: Sage Journals: Media, Culture, and Society).
Gamers aren't who we think they were. Games aren't what we think they are. We're at the inception of fully immersive, social gaming transforming virtual and physical worlds. Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite give us a clue of what this online experience will be. The build-out of these worlds will be as pervasive as theme parks or even neighborhoods in real life. Business leaders need to pay close attention to what's in play. According to Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, "Every company a few decades ago created a webpage, and then at some point, every company created a Facebook page. I think we're approaching the point where every company will have a real-time live 3D presence." Gaming impact will reach beyond business. A growing cohort of gamers uses virtual worlds for research. They use technology pioneered for video games to simulate real-world events and predict our planet's future. With immersive AR and VR on the horizon of becoming consumer-accessible, there's no telling what kind of gaming experiences we will see next. (source: GP Bullhound Global Insights)
If you write, you should read up on GTP-3. GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is an artificial intelligence tool that produces text with human-like precision. Released earlier this year, GPT-3 analyzed digital prose, spending months looking for patterns in vast amounts of text posted to the Internet. By doing so, it's able to predict the next word in a sequence. By typing a few words into GPT-3, it will complete your thought with entire paragraphs of text. During training, GPT-3 identified more than 175 billion parameters — mathematical representations of patterns — in that sea of books, Wikipedia articles, and other online texts. These patterns amount to a map of human language: a mathematical description of how we piece characters together, whether we are writing blogs or coding software programs. (source: The New York Times).
New Models:
Ben Thompson's maps the Idea Adoption Curve against a "Willingness-to-Pay Curve"; he says it looks something like this:
Stories That Change The Frame:
Technology
Living in technology dystopia. The History of CTRL + ALT + DELETE. How Pac-Man revolutionized gaming. Amazon goes on a hiring spree with no equal. The intelligent virtual assistant market size will be worth $45.1 Billion by 2027. What is the sound of thought?
Education
MasterClass raised another $80 million to bring celebrity mentors to the masses. Coursera is retraining the American workforce for a post-COVID economy. Is this the end of college as we know it?
Sociology
Biden has his first conspiracy theory to deal with: the great reset. Are maskless nightmares the new stress dreams? We're all socially awkward now.
Health and Fitness
Tracking data from digital devices kept NBA players safe in the bubble. The dizzying chaos of calculating your COVID risk. A new robot concept makes you do push-ups. How the coronavirus vaccine shows the potential for innovation.
Nature
Infernos in the Western United States are melting our sense of how fire works. There are signs that standard cosmological models used by scientists are breaking. A new study about color decodes how we perceive it differently. DIY technologies are democratizing science. Scientists just discovered billions of gallons of freshwater off the coast of Hawaii using a new imaging method. Platypuses glow under black light, and we have no idea why.
Stay safe, I'll see you next week,
CP