Sticky Stats

While the year and the decade is ending, it seems that we have to validate or negate those new ideas we rolled out over the course of the year. Number crunching may be no fun, but reading the results doesn't have to be.

The Heath brothers, authors of Made to Stick, write,

A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion. For a stat to do either of those, it must be dragged within the everyday. That's your job -- to do the dragging. In our world of billions and trillions, that can be a lot of manual labor. But it's worth it: A number people can grasp is a number that can make a difference.

See what they mean below.

Link:  http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/made-to-stick-the-gripping-statistic.html

We're Only Human: Savoring the passage of time (12/17/09)

Time flies when we're having fun, but it drags on when we're not. What gives? Since time doesn't pass any faster or slower irregularly, Dr. Aaron Sackett, a professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, sought an answer.

In one experiment, for example, Sackett and his colleagues put a group of men and women in two rooms, each without any clocks or watches or cell phones. They had them do a timed test, in which they had to read a text and underline certain words—so not particularly fun-filled, but not particularly aversive either. The scientists told the volunteers the test would take exactly ten minutes, and made a big show of starting a stopwatch as they left the room.

But the test didn’t take exactly ten minutes. For some, the scientists reentered after just five minutes, but acted as if the full ten minutes had passed; they even left the stopwatch conspicuously in view. For others, they didn’t reenter the room until 20 minutes had passed, but again they left the volunteers with the idea that ten minutes had passed. In other words, for some ten minutes seemed surprisingly long, while for others it seemed short—the lab equivalent of making time fly.

Then all the volunteers rated the experience for enjoyment, challenge, fun, engagement, and so forth. And the results were clear: If the ten minutes passed surprisingly quickly, volunteers found the word search task more pleasurable than if time seemed to drag. This doesn’t mean they found it exhilarating, or that the others found it crushingly boring—but their subjective experiences were definitely different on the pleasure scale.

But what if they had to tolerate something irritating or annoying?

In a second study, the scientists forced the volunteers to listen to a tape recording of a dot matrix printer for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but apparently this was a really irritating noise. While they listened, they watched the elapsed time tick off on a screen-- except that, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the elapsing time was either too slow or too fast. So again, for some time flew, while for others time dragged.

And again, time perceptions shaped emotions. When time flew, the tedious listening experience seemed less tedious, more bearable. When it dragged, it was worse; these listeners said they would rather listen to an electric drill if given the option. They also ran the experiment with a pleasant audiotape—of a favorite song—and once again time distortions determined the pleasure of the listening experience. That is, a pleasant experience became more pleasant.

Basically, our perception of time controlled our emotions. If we thought time flew, the activity became enjoyable, but if we thought time dragged by slowly, the activity suddenly became atrocious.

Talk about food for thought the next time we sit in katha or a boring sabha!

Full Story: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2009/12/savoring-passage-of-time.cfm

Psyblog: Ads For Unhealthy Foods Increase Children’s Consumption 45% (11/24/09)

So snack food advertising makes most people eat more. After viewing them children eat almost twice as much, adults (if they're women on a diet or men) eat around a third more and this effect carries over to foods other than those being advertised and after the adverts have finished. Simply avoiding snacking while watching TV isn't going to cut it.

Curious? Read onwards. The first experiment involved kids.

In their first experiment 118 kids, 7 to 11 years old, were sat down to watch a cartoon with advert breaks at the usual intervals. Each child was randomly assigned either to be shown four adverts for snack foods or four adverts for other non-food products aimed at children. The commercials used were taken from actual children's programming and the snack food adverts were all for unhealthy foods like sugary breakfast cereals and potato chips.

While they watched the cartoon, children had a bowl of cheddar cheese "goldfish" crackers in front of them which they were told they could snack on if they wished.

The experimenters were very thorough and collected all kinds of other information about the children like how hungry they were, how much television they normally watched, whether they happened to particularly like the snack that was used to measure eating behaviour, whether they were overweight, whether they had a TV in their room at home and a host of other variables.

Afterwards the experimenters measured how much of the snack the children had eaten and compared the two groups. Children who had watched the cartoon which included adverts for snack foods ate 45% more of the "goldfish" crackers than those who saw non-food adverts.

None of the other variables measured had a significant effect on how much the children ate, except their like (or dislike) of cheese crackers. It didn't matter if they watched more or less TV at home, were over- or under- weight, or how big their appetite was usually. Over and above anything else it was clear that the snack food advert caused children to eat much more of an unhealthy snack.

The second experiment involved adults, specifically college students aged 18 to 24 years old, some of which were also on diets. As one would figure, the dieters would be more likely to eat more.

For this experiment a more sophisticated set-up was required in which participants didn't have snacks in front of them while they watched TV, but snacks were presented to them afterwards in what was apparently an unrelated experiment.

This time instead of cartoons the participants were shown 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?', an improvisational comedy show. They were told the adverts had been left in because the psychologists were interested in the effects of TV on mood and they were in the 'comedy condition'. Actually, of course, everyone saw the same comedy show, it was just the intervening adverts that were different.

All the participants were randomised into one of three groups. In the first they saw adverts for snack foods, in the second they saw adverts for nutritional foods and in the third they saw adverts for non-food products. After watching the show they were taken to another room for what they were told was a different study involving tasting and rating some snack foods. The snack foods offered varied in healthiness: there were vegetables, multi-grain chips, cookies, trail mix and snack mix. Participants were told to taste each one but left to eat as much or as little as they liked. Afterwards the experimenters measured exactly how much each person had eaten.

Once again the snack-food ads had weaved their magic as those who had seen the snack ads ate significantly more than those who had seen either the nutrition ads or the non-food ads. But when the experimenters looked more closely at who had eaten more they found two particular groups were responsible: the restrained eaters and men (but not unrestrained women). Both had eaten, on average, about one-third more snack food if they had seen the snack ads compared with those who had seen either the nutrition ads or non-food ads.

Perhaps surprisingly the ads for unhealthy snack foods didn't only boost how much of the unhealthy snacks people ate, they boosted how much people ate across all the options available, healthy vegetables and semi-healthy trail mix included. The only exception was women who weren't on a diet who ate no more after being shown the snack food ads than other non-food ads.

Here's the kicker.

The vast majority of adults in the second study, when asked later, had no idea that watching snack food ads would make them eat more, despite the relationship being unremarkable in retrospect. And this is exactly what Harris and colleagues suggest is the key to defending oneself against adverts: understanding the powerful influence they can have on our behaviour, even without our knowledge.

Full Story: http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/11/ads-for-unhealthy-foods-increase-childrens-consumption-45.php