I’ve been re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s classic “Blink”. It’s a great book about how we react to things very quickly, before our brains are aware of it. This is applicable to ecommerce in many ways - what are the unconcious cues we give our visitors which persuade or dissuade them from buying?
Gladwell talks about tests done by John Bargh at New York University. The book gives a fair bit of detail so I’ll try and summarise.
His test participants thought they were doing some sort of cognition/English test. He would give them, for example, 5 words such as:
“from are Florida oranges temperature”
And they would need to construct a four word sentence from that. Pretty easy. However, that wasn’t the real test. The real test was called “priming”. Through these sentence groupings he would scatter words to influence the person, to see how it would affect their behaviour.
In one example, one group of students were given a bunch of words such as rude, bold, disturb, bother, intrude, etc. The other group were given respect, yield, polite, courteous, etc. The students on completing the “test” were told to go to a nearby office to get their next assignment. This is where the real test started. When they got to the office, the person they were to see was busy talking to someone else. The people were timed to see how long it would take them to interrupt.
The group who had the rude words averaged five minutes. The “polite” group, 82% of them hadn’t interrupted by 10 minutes (the limit for ethical reasons).
The book gives several other convincing examples about how the words used to prime people, or in some cases, words people were led to use themselves, influenced their later performance.
The question is, how can this be used to prime our site visitors? Surely there must be a way to increase conversions. It also opens up a bit of an ethics grab bag. Is this unethical, is it too manipulative? I would say not, but curious to hear other views on it.
