리딩파워 유형편 16강

16강

1

In today’s marketing and advertising-soaked world, people cannot escape brands. The younger they are when they start using a brand or product, the more likely they are to keep using it for years to come. But that’s not the only reason 1 companies are aiming their marketing and advertising at younger consumers. As James U. McNeal, a professor at Texas A&M University, puts it, “Seventy-five percent of spontaneous food purchases can be traced to a nagging child. And one out of two mothers will buy a food simply because her child requests it. To trigger desire in a child is to trigger desire in the whole family.” In other words, kids have power over spending in their households, they have power over their grandparents and they have power over their babysitters. That’s why companies use tricks to manipulate their minds.

 

2

You’d think that whenever more than one person makes a decision, they’d draw on collective wisdom. Surely, a group of minds can do better than an individual. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. The wisdom of a crowd partly relies on the fact that all judgments are independent. If people guess the weight of a cow and put it on a slip of paper, or estimate the likelihood of a revolution in Pakistan and enter it into a website, the average of their views is highly accurate. But, surprisingly, if those people talk about these questions in a group, the answers that they come to are increasingly incorrect. More specifically, researchers have found an effect of group polarization. Whatever bias people may have as individuals gets multiplied when they discuss things as a group. If individuals lean slightly toward taking a risk, the group leaps toward it.

 

1

In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams wrote his science fiction novel, subsequently a movie, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In it, he identifies one problem facing space travelers: the inability to communicate clearly with one another because of the wide variety of languages spoken. Yet a little creature that came to be called Babel Fish evolved that, when placed in the ear, would automatically and clearly translate what a person was saying into the listener’s own language. Surprisingly, rather than helping relationships among different races by promoting clear understanding, the end results of using Babel Fish were some of the bloodiest wars known to the universe. Once people clearly understood one another and assigned similar meanings to words, this clarity sharply defined their differences and led to war.

 

2

Imagine two students examining their grades on a math test. One student tries hard but rarely gets a grade higher than a “C.” The other is the top math student in the school; she always gets an “A.” On this particular test, however, both students receive a “B.” These students might use the same words in discussing their grades, but with a remarkably different tone. The first student would likely deliver the sentence “I got a ‘B’ on the math test” with some surprise and happiness in her voice. She would sound excited and hopeful. The second student’s tone would indicate that she was not happy and suggest disappointment or worry. Both students used the same words, but they did not mean the same thing. The different tones mark the differences in the students’ feelings.

 

3

One study brought in a large group of students to do “market research on high-tech headphones.” The students were told that the researchers wanted to test how well the headphones worked while they were in motion. Following the songs, the researchers played an argument about how the university’s tuition should be raised from $587 per semester to $750 per semester. One group of students had been told to move their heads up and down throughout the music and the speaking. Another group was told to move their heads from side to side. A last group was told to make no movements at all. After “testing the headsets,” the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire about not only the headsets, but also the university’s tuition. Those nodding their heads up and down (yes motion) overall rated a jump in tuition as favorable. Those shaking their heads side to side (no motion) overall wanted the tuition to be lowered. Those who had not moved their heads didn’t really seem to be persuaded one way or the other.

 

4

People have a need to maintain an image of self-integrity. In an early demonstration of this, Steele (1975) threatened women’s self-images by telling them that, as members of their community, it was common knowledge that they either were cooperative with community projects, uncooperative with community projects, or not concerned about driving safely. (A fourth, control group received no information relevant to their self-images.) Two days later, a fellow researcher called each woman, asking her to list every food item in her kitchen to help a food cooperative. Women who had been told they were uncooperative people or careless drivers two days earlier helped the researcher almost twice as much as women in the other groups. Steele explains this effect in terms of the women’s motive to restore their self-concepts as cooperative people.