3BI: Signaling, psychic numbing, and why we forget
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Signaling Prestige
Signaling is a critical concept for understanding behavior.
As social beings, we’re constantly judging and being judged. The mechanism for this constant judgement is signaling. In evolutionary biology terms, signaling is anything used to communicate or convey information. In practical terms, it’s the subtle and hidden ways humans communicate with each other.
At all times, we’re consciously or subconsciously evaluating others’ signals, while simultaneously sending out our own. Clothing, credentials, group affiliations, body language, and even political beliefs are all signals. Driving an expensive car or wearing designer clothes signals wealth, while hipster or punk style signals indifference to authority and independence. We’re wired to effortlessly display the best version of ourselves to others (or whatever version we want the world to see).
Signaling is also core to marketing and advertising:
Most ads are not really about espousing the positive qualities of a product or service. They might not even mention those at all. Instead, ads signal the kind of people a product is intended for—sending the message that buying it will further help signal their identity. There’s a big difference between a chocolate bar commercial that shows a bunch of college students partying on the beach and one that shows a working parent relaxing once their kids are in bed. When we stand in a shop or browse a website deciding which shampoo or coffee to buy, those advertising signals influence our decisions. We’re drawn to the products that signal they’re for people like us, and in turn, will signal our identities.
Advertising also serves to signal the quality of the company itself, not just its products. From Gregory Mankiw:
“In the signaling theory of advertising, the advertisement itself contains no real information, but the firm signals the quality of its product to consumers by its willingness to spend money on advertising…An action is being taken not for its intrinsic benefits but because the willingness to take that action conveys private information to someone observing it.”
A new study measured this effect, demonstrating that the channel an ad is shared in impacts the company’s perception among consumers.
Each respondent was presented with a description of a fictionalised brand in one of four product categories alongside a brief outline of its launch advertising campaign. The respondent was then asked to answer a series of perception statements in relation to this brand, based solely on its description and proposed launch campaign.
In each case, all information was identical except for the medium being used in the campaign. This allowed house51 to isolate the ‘signalling effect’ of the media channel used, as all other variables were identical for each respondent.
They found that when participants were told the campaign would run on TV, their “fitness” signals - the perceived brand quality, financial strength of the company and the company’s confidence in their brand - were significantly higher.
50% of respondents rated brands that advertised on TV as financially strong. 43% rated brands advertising on TV as being successful and 50% of respondents rated TV advertising as demonstrating that lots of people were buying the brand. They also rated them as more trustworthy. Social media and online video sharing were rated the lowest in these categories.
Why? TV ads are a “costly signal" - they are expensive and time consuming to produce. Those costs signal that a company is doing well enough to invest those resources. This is why companies pay exorbitant, and often unprofitable, amounts for Super Bowl ads or flagship stores on premium real estate.
Read more about signaling at Farnam Street and see the study at Thinkbox.
Psychic Numbing
Joseph Stalin famously said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” This chilling observation is an example of psychic numbing, or compassion fading.
Basically, we struggle to continue caring about a tragedy as its numbers increase:
Our sympathy for suffering and loss declines precipitously when we are presented with increasing numbers of victims. In the 1950s, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton studied survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and discovered that a condition he labeled “psychic numbing” enabled them to withstand the psychological trauma of this experience.
A recent study, aptly titled "The More Who Die, the Less We Care,” measured this phenomenon using natural language processing:
We analyze valence, arousal, and specific emotional content of over 100,000 mentions of death in news articles and social media posts, and find that language shows an increase in valence (i.e., decreased negative affect) and a decrease in arousal when describing mortality of larger numbers of people. These patterns are most clearly reflected in specific emotions of joy and (in a reverse fashion) of fear and anger.
This concept is especially salient as the US just crossed the threshold of 200,000 official COVID-19 deaths in a very unceremonious manner.
Why is this? It likely is consistent with our general proclivity to value vivid stories over broad and generic data. We can emotionally connect with individual examples and stories, but can’t do so with thousands at once.
We can also do so when the tragic event itself is vivid. The 9/11 attacks are seared into our memory because we watched the horrifying events unfold in real time. A pandemic, on the other hand, is an invisible tragedy that happens behind closed doors in hospitals.
The Science of Forgetting
Our memories are an essential part of being, and scientists have long aimed to understand how and why we retain some memories but not others. In some interesting new research, it turns out that understanding how we forget is just as important as how we remember.
Until about ten years ago, most researchers thought that forgetting was a passive process in which memories, unused, decay over time like a photograph left in the sunlight. But then a handful of researchers who were investigating memory began to bump up against findings that seemed to contradict that decades-old assumption. They began to put forward the radical idea that the brain is built to forget.
A growing body of work, cultivated in the past decade, suggests that the loss of memories is not a passive process. Rather, forgetting seems to be an active mechanism that is constantly at work in the brain. In some — perhaps even all — animals, the brain’s standard state is not to remember, but to forget. And a better understanding of that state could lead to breakthroughs in treatments for conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and even Alzheimer’s disease.
Forgetting, it seems, “is not a failure of memory, but a function of it,” says cognitive psychologist Oliver Hardt. This seems to be because the brain must use existing resources to store memories, explains neuroscientist Paul Frankland:
“When neurons integrate into the adult hippocampus, they integrate into an existing, established circuitry. If you have information stored in that circuit and start rewiring it, then it’s going to make that information harder to access,” he explains.
Because the hippocampus is not where long-term memories are stored in the brain, its dynamic nature is not a flaw but a feature, Frankland says — something that evolved to aid learning. The environment is changing constantly and, to survive, animals must adapt to new situations. Allowing fresh information to overwrite the old helps them to achieve that.
Remembering too much is, in fact, a problem.
People with a condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) remember their lives in such incredible detail that they can describe the outfit that they were wearing on any particular day. But despite their exceptional ability to recall such information, these individuals tend not to be particularly accomplished and seem to have an increased tendency for obsessiveness, “which is exactly what you’d predict from someone who can’t extract themselves from specific instances”, says Brian Levine, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto.
This is consistent with the behavioral science idea that our brains are essentially made for efficiency. With limited cognitive resources available, they do a remarkable job automating and eliminating information so our mental bandwidth can be utilized for more important tasks.
Read more at Nature.
Other stuff
An interactive behavioral design case study via Samuel Salzer’s excellent Habit Weekly newsletter.
The Distribution of Vaccines in the 19th Century
Fleet Foxes new album is great and will make you want to retreat to a cabin in the woods immediately: