Okay, we're going to continue talking about Familiarity now. But this time, I want to show you kind of another face of familiarity. Because it's one thing you know, when we're struck by those feelings of extreme familiarity. The ones that kind of make us think that some previous experience is, is at play. And then we're trying to search and figure out, you know, who is that guy on the bus or, why do I have this deja vu like feeling. but there's another more insidious side of familiarity. There are times when previous experience, influences your current behavior through a familiarity like process. But, it gets transformed somewhere along the way such that you end up taking ownership of something. And believing that you're making a conscious decision, when in fact, you're being influenced heavily by familiarity. So that all sounds a little luminous/g, and it is, that's what makes it cool. So, let's get at it. All right, so we're at Week 5, Lecture 6 then. And I've called it Sneaky Familiarity, because I want to get at that notion that, you know. It can influence us without us even understanding what's going on, or appreciating it. So here let's imagine, we've all been in this kind of situation. We're in a voter's booth now, and we're presented with some card like this, and we have to ultimately pick names of who we want. Now some of these names we may know a lot about. You know maybe we actually took the time to figure out who the presidential candidates were or something like that. And we may be looking at that in quite a bit of detail. But often these, these elections things have all sorts of little sub-elections for all sorts of little positions. and in a lot of cases, we have not taken the time to really get to know who these people are or what they're about. and, and sometimes you just can't. In fact, even sometimes, you know, our most well intentioned moments, we may be voting for a very important position. But we still really haven't taken the time to do the research. And yet we feel it's our citizenship responsibility to go and vote. What is now guiding who we vote for? If there's multiple people for a given position, what draws us to pick one over another, when really we don't know a heck of a lot about them. Now, in some cases, it might just be party allegiance, we might just pick a party. And in some cases, you know, for school boards, or whatever, parties aren't even involved at all. and that's really where familiarity can start to play a role. So, let me put this aside and come back to it. There is a experimental procedure that's been used to study some of these effects that we've been talking about. In fact, it's sometimes called the mere exposure effect. By merely being exposed to something, there are these strong influences that come from that. So they use, in the experiment, something usually called the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP Paradigm. I'm going to give you a feel for that. What you're going to see is a box here with a word in it, but I'm just going to snap right through. So, you're going to see word, word, word, word, word, and there's going to be a whole bunch the last two words will be the end. I will try to stop on end, but we'll see. so just look right around here and watch these words go by. Okay, so here goes [SOUND]. All right, that was a lot of words, do you remember all those? chances are you don't, and that's the idea, but you were exposed to all of them. So, often these studies would have an exposure phase, like what you just saw, and then you'd see things like this. And you might be asked, okay, of these two words, which do you like better? And, and don't overthink this. Just, kind of, if I had to pick which one of these words, which would I like better? what do you think? Pick one, okay, now I want to go to this next trial. Which of these do you like better? Which of these do you like better? Which of these do you like better? Okay , in these trials, let me go back to the beginning. One of them was always presented in that stream of items, that RSVP stream, and one was not. In this case printer was, is that the one you liked? Then octopus, is that the one you liked? Poker, and online okay those 4 items were in the stream, and the other 4 weren't. What the experiments show is that when you do this kind of experiment obviously much more expanded then what we've just done. People show a tendency to like the one that they were exposed to. So does that mean previous exposure just makes you like something. Well, yes, it does. But you can also ask people other questions. So for example, if instead you asked, if you said, you know what? There's two items here, one is a little bit brighter than the other. You, you're hardly going to be able to notice, but one should feel a little brighter than the other. Pick the one you think is brighter. In that case people also pick the one that have been exposed earlier. And, so, what's that telling us? Well, maybe there's something about previous exposure that makes an item stand out somehow and maybe it feels brighter. Well, there's a trick to that, stand out maybe, but not brighter, because if you also ask them which item is dimmer, same idea. One's a little dimmer than the other, going to be really hard to tell which one's dimmer, again, they picked the one, from, that list. The question almost doesn't seem to matter, and this the point of the Mere exposure effect. When you're exposed to something. very quickly even without you really getting a chance to process it, then later if you see that something, and you have some question in your mind. Which one do you like? Which one is brighter, or which one is dimmer? That previously exposed item seems to stand out as the answer. Whatever the question is. And so if you're in a voting booth, for example, and you're thinking, who do I think should head my school board? Well if you've seen one of those names a lot more, it will stand out and you will think, that's who I want to lead. if you'd instead been asked who is most likely to embezzle your money and you saw those same names. You might be drawn to that same name again and say I think that person. So, that's what mere exposure is doing. It's drawing you to something and making it seem like the answer to whatever question you have in your mind. Sneaky huh? Let's explore this a little bit. It's used in marketing all the time, okay? Billboards, buy our product on a billboard. But we have these billboards on our streets. Sometimes, there's a ton of them, they are like an RSVP stream almost. You go by them fast, you don't pay a lot of attention to them, you don't look at them. But why do they put them there. Well, because if they have their product there, if you see that logo and you see that thing. And let's say it says Samsung, I should get royalties for this, let's say it says Samsung. and you come, you keep coming across things that say Samsung. And then one day you're in a TV store and you're saying, in your mind, what TV do I want? And you look at the various brand names, and there's a Samsung. It stands out as the answer to your question. That's why advertisers try so hard to get their products in front of you. Sometimes, if you watch ads, they don't even tell you anything about the product really. They don't give you any rational reason to choose their product over another. What they instead do, is just try to get these labels and logos in front of your face. They want this to become very familiar through repeated exposure. If it's familiar through repeated exposure, then when you go and look at peanut butter. Then the one with the familiar label will feel like the peanut butter you want. It's used all the time in marketing. And yes, it's used all the time in politics, and it's used two ways, this mere exposure effect. You know, one is when you look at some of the signs that are up for things. Often the signs don't say much at all. You know, Giffords for US Congress. that's all it says Jay Quick for US Congress. it may give you some sense of what party they're affiliated with, maybe, maybe not. but really, it's, it's just putting the name in front of you. They just want you to see these names. and that's why you can often see, you know? This, this poster, let's say, plastered all over your city and everywhere you go there's like a ton of them. And you come to these corners and there's a bunch of them up there and they're not saying anything. This is not giving you any reason why you should vote for Captain LL Melvin. It's just putting his name and what he's running for, state senate. That's all they think you need. If they make that name familiar, then you're more likely to take off the box, buy them. Now, of course, that's not always true, and in some cases, you know, there's a lot of debates and things to try to flush out who a person's about. But we tend to do that only for the most important positions, for the rest of them. Familiarity can often play a huge role. The other way in which this is used in politics is when we have political pundits. And I'm not, I'm not picking on him in any, in any way. He's just my example of a political, pundit, of a sort. But often, you will hear, people from within some party, either the party in power, or the, or the opposition party. they will come on TV and they will state some message, almost always a very over simplified message. But they will state some message over and over and they'll have different people state that same message, they're called talking points, on different shows. And the idea is, if you hear that message over and over and over, and especially if you hear it in different places spoken by different people, it starts to feel true. So if somebody says over and over again, we should not tax the wealthy. Because if we give, if we let the wealthy keep their money, the money trickles down to people. You hear this trickle-down economic story over and over and over. Then when someone says, should we tax the wealthy, you might say. No, I don't think we should. that familiar message starts to feel like the answer to the question. and that's why they repeat these same talking points, over and over. So much they're trying to influence you with familiarity. A familiar argument feels like a correct argument, creepy stuff. [LAUGH]. Well, there you go, but better to be informed, right? You want to know about this stuff and you want to, be on sort of, be on guard for it a little bit. So, if you'd like to learn more, here's some videos. Here's one on the Mere Exposure Effect. Here's one about Familiarity and Attractiveness, too. How familiarity can enhance someone's sense of attractiveness. So check that out, couple of readings, one about purchasing, consumer behavior. and, familiarity in some of the ways in which, marketers and other people will use familiarity, to try to get you to buy stuff. and then, this is, this is a multi-part series, but in this part of the series they talk a lot about the mere exposure effect as well. So, I've got that on there too. so it's, it's a page that has little embedded videos, and stuff. So check that out as well. I don't think you have to go back, and look at part one, and two, I, I got the sense I could just get in part three fine, and learned a lot about it. and it brought in some of this political stuff. With was mere exposure, so I threw it on there, all right? So check that out and beware of familiarity. Be sure the decisions you make are decisions that you believe in. Not decisions that you are making just because you've heard that's the right decision over and over, all right, cool. See you on the next one. We're going to start talking a little bit about the brain and, and the link between the brain and memory, and some amnesia's and things like that. So that's what's, that's what's up in the next lecture. I will see you there.
