Last week I joined a minidegree course in Digital Psychology and Persuasion at CXL. I am very excited that finally I’ve taken the big step, I was already interested in psychology but now after going through this course I know I’ll come out as a different person.
This minidegree is not like any other course available online or even offline, while we can easily find many good resources on similar topics but the reality is most of them are limited and just basic or bookish. Here, I am talking about real world examples and the course itself is a gem because all lessons are delivered by experts. What I really like about this course is its syllabus, the diversity of topics and in-depth topic selection and on top of that teaching faculty are experts in their respective fields.
Here is a outline of this course:
This minidegree is divided into 3 tracks as you can check here, and each track is further divided into multiple courses. Each course is consist of multiple lessons. This way a student or learner can easily manage its learning while also keeping track of everyday lessons. The final certification exam is locked by default and can be unlocked by simply completing all the courses in the 3 tracks. The three tracks covers Psychology fundamentals, Neuro marketing & persuasion and Applied Behavioral Psychology related topics.
As I said, I am just warming up with this minidegree as I only started it a week ago, so can’t predict what I am going to go through for completing this, but one thing is sure that I am going to learn a lot of stuff about consumer psychology and persuasion, and that’s what make me feel great. This review series will help me in tracking my learning journey, in understanding my point of view on what I learn, as well as its a new kind of way for me to revive my inner writer and nurture it. So, I am extremely excited to share this journey of learning and self improvement with the universe.
Here is what I am going to cover in this post:
- Dr. Cialdini’s 7 principals of persuasion
- Dr. BJ Fogg’s Behavior model
- Lessons from Neuromarketing
I’ll try my best to write my point of view and understanding on these topics in short notes so anyone can get a rough idea on what these topics are about by just going through this post.
Dr. Cialdini & 7 Principals of Persuasion
Dr. Robert Cialdini is a Psychologist, Author, Speaker and Professor. He is the author of many bestsellers and well respected in psychology community. He is mostly known for his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion which was published in 1984. In this book he introduced and explained 6 of these 7 principals of persuasion. The last principal Unity was introduced by Dr. Cialdini in 2016.
7 Principals of Persuasion
- Reciprocity
- Commitment/Consistency
- Social Proof
- Authority
- Liking
- Scarcity
- Unity
Reciprocity: According to this principal “when we give someone something, even a favor, they unconsciously feel obliged to give us something in return”. This is one of the reason why most websites these days offer some kind of freebie, like a ebook, so you feel an urge to give something in return.
Commitment / Consistency: This principal states that “when we commit something, especially in a public setup like on a social network, we are highly likely tend to go through that pledge/promise and complete it”. We can easily see this principal in use at sites like javascript30 or 100daysofcode where user publicly commit to code for some numbers of days on any social media by the help of special hashtags.
Social Proof: This principal talks about “Safety in numbers”. Did you ever noticed we prefer buying a service or product which is having lots of good ratings and positive user reviews as compared to the one which don’t have such social proofs. Or we like to go in a restaurant which mostly stays full of customers instead of visiting a restaurant which stays empty, even though we know that it’ll take some time in waiting queue for our number.
Authority: “People likes to obey authority”. See any commercial and in most of them you can easily spot a famous personality who encourage you to use that product or service. Why brands spend big sums on these celebs? The answer is Principal of Authority, we unconsciously programmed to appreciate & love authority and want to obey any instruction given by any authoritative person, even celebs.
Liking: “We trust those people, we like”. This principal is all about trust and its direct relation with what we like or whom we like. When we like someone we trust them and we take advice from them, we take their suggestions seriously and this helps us in building our choices, like/dislikes and perspective.
Scarcity: “When we know something is in short supply, we want to get hold on it more or want to get it in more quantity”. People tend to desire more for something that is in short supply or exclusive. This is the reason many big fashion brands sell exclusive items, because that exclusive tag motivate buyers to pay more and promote quick buying. Some brands launch and sell some of their products like mobile phones, watches or jeweler exclusively on big eCommerce giants like Amazon, some sellers even launch all of their product range exclusively on a single eCommerce platform.
Unity: “We feel connected with those people, who share identity with us”. When we meet someone from our school or college time after a long time we instantly connect with them, or when we see someone doing something that we love to do, we automatically starts liking them. This happens because they share an identity with us, it could be school/college, office, some kind of activity, interests, celebs or even same movie/music/game genre. Anything could help us in unify with others because anything could become a part of our identity.
So these were the 7 principals that Dr. Cialdini introduced and my views on them. Now lets move to our second topic.
Dr. BJ Fogg’s Behavior model
Dr. Fogg from the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University has done great work on behavioral design and proposed a model based on that research which is known as Fogg’s Behavior Model. In this model Dr. Fogg explained that, “for a behavior to occur, three elements are required which are motivation, ability and trigger. And these three elements must occur simultaneously for the behavior to occur successfully”. He further explains that, if the behavior doesn’t occur, any one of these elements (i.e., motivation, ability or trigger) must be missing.
Here is a formula to easily remember this model:
Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger or B=mat
Let’s take a look at the three factors on which this model is based:
- Motivation
- Ability
- Trigger
Motivation: Dr. Fogg created a framework for motivators which has three core motivators as follows in no particular order.
Motivator#1: Pleasure / Pain
Motivator#2: Hope / Fear
Motivator#3: Social Acceptance / Rejection
Pleasure / Pain: Pleasure and pain both are primitive and we are programmed to respond to these two immediately. Our mind consider both pleasure and pain as signals of self-preservation and consider them critical for our survival.
Hope / Fear: Hope and fear both represents our expectation to some outcome, while hope represent some positive outcome to an event or action, fear represents negative side or the opposite of hope.
Social Acceptance / Rejection: These two motivators effects us both on surface and deep inside. What we are, how we think, how we live, how we dress, how we talk, etc all are the outcome of social acceptance / rejection. This works because we are subconsciously programmed to stay in groups, and social acceptance not only help us in forming a group of our own but also give us pleasure of accomplishment and status, while social rejection can still leads to lonely life or even life or death situation.
Ability: Ability is all about how easy is the task at hand. If someone can effortlessly perform that task we can say that the person holds the ability to perform such a task. According to Dr. Fogg, the ability is more important than motivation.
Trigger: Trigger is the most important factor for a behavior to occur because even if a person has high motivation and ability, a trigger is still needed which can safely leads the persons attention to the desired behavior. Without trigger the chances of a behavior to happen reduces drastically.
And with this, here ends this topic too, let’s move to the next one.
Lessons from NeuroMarketing
Our brain is divided into 3 parts or layers, each layer has its own functions and set of responsibilities. The “New Brain or the outer layer” thinks, the “Middle Brain or the middle layer” feels and the “Old Brain” decides. The old brain takes inputs processed by the other two layers and further process them and use them in decision making process.
Mostly marketers only focus their activity on new brain because it thinks, but it don’t make decisions and hence can’t help much. This old brain is also know as Reptilian Brain (because we share it with reptiles and all other vertebrates). It’s mostly concerned with its own survival.
According to neuroscience the old brain can only be triggered by 6 stimuli:
- Self Centered: It is highly selfish and mostly thinks about its own self.
- Contrast: It can only observe the difference, such as before-after, safe-risky, with-without, fast-slow etc.
- Tangible: It like tangible inputs so it can avoid the extra time and efforts in processing the information.
- First and last: The old brain is triggered when something changes like we start a interaction or ends it. This is majorly a survival mechanism. Also, it always look for different patterns in our surroundings and ignores sameness.
- Visual: An image is worth thousand words, our old brain loves visuals, it not only give attention to visuals but also process it quickly. Our optical nerve is 25 times faster than the auditory nerve, not only this, the visual nerve is directly connected to the old brain.
- Emotion: Our old brain can easily be triggered by emotions. It takes information from other layers using a filtering system known as the reticular system. To trigger the old brain we can use emotional stimuli.
So, this is all for this part, I know I am not a good writer but still I tried my best to explain what I learned in past 1 week, there are some more concepts but I want to go through them one more time before writing about them. Hope everyone who go through this post enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it while writing. Thank you for your time and for reading till end. Have a blessed day.
