The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think by Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius Read Free Book Online Page A

effective, the first (emphasizing that the restaurant is unique) or the second (emphasizing that the restaurant is popular)?If you considered this question from a traditional market-segmentation perspective, you might guess that the answer would depend on the type of person seeing the ad.One type of person—the conforming, yes-man sort—might be attracted to going where millions have gone before, eagerly following the masses.But another type of person—the rebellious, independent sort—might be turned off by lemminglike conformity, preferring something unique and off the beaten path.Different people are, well, different.Some people have one set of preferences, while others have another.
    But the idea of multiple subselves suggests something radicallydifferent: that the same ad might be effective or ineffective depending on which person inside your head is currently viewing the ad.This means that even for the same individual, an ad might be appealing to one subself and repulsive to another.
    Working with our colleagues Noah Goldstein, Chad Mortensen, Bob Cialdini, and Jill Sundie, we initially tested this idea by asking people to view advertisements promoting products ranging from restaurants and museums to the city of Las Vegas.Before anyone saw the ads, however, we first activated, or primed, one of two different subselves inside people’s heads.The idea was to put people in a situation they might experience when watching television.Ads on TV don’t just appear at random; they pop up during particular programs, perhaps an uplifting romantic comedy or a frightening police crime drama.The type of program a person is watching might naturally bring out one of his or her different subselves.Is it possible that the you watching a romantic comedy depicting flirtatious, sexy characters might be different from the you watching a thriller depicting violent killers in our midst?If so, these two yous might have entirely different responses to the exact same marketing appeal.
    To test this possibility, some people in the study viewed a clip from the hair-raising classic The Shining , in which Jack Nicholson plays a madman chasing his family members around an isolated and deserted hotel with an ax.A few minutes into the clip, at an especially scary moment, we went to commercial, showing people several ads.Some of the ads included a message informing viewers about the popularity and high demand for each product (for example, “visited by over a million people a year”).Other times people saw the same ads, but the ads didn’t mention anything about popularity or high demand.
    When people viewed the ads in between segments of a scary program, they found the products more attractive when the ad emphasized the product’s popularity.Adding the message “visited by over a million people a year” to a museum ad, for example, boosted people’s desire to visit that museum.People became especially receptive to messages about following the crowd after watching a frightening movie clip.Like wildebeests in the presence of a leopard, people who are feeling threatened want to be part of a larger group.
    In fact, the people who had been viewing the scary film weren’t simply drawn to follow the masses; they actively avoided products and experiences that would make them stand out from the crowd.We know this because some of the ads in the study included a message emphasizing the uniqueness of the product (think “limited edition”).After watching the scary movie, people rated unique products as less attractive.Adding a message about standing out from the crowd to the museum ad actually led people to avoid the museum.Despite its being the exact same museum as shown in the other versions of the ad, an art gallery presented as unique and different wasn’t the kind of place people wanted to visit while they were feeling defensive.When people watched a scary movie, then, they were attracted to products that were common and popular and avoided