PSYC3059 Week 8 Notes Conditioning and Advertising Clickbait PDF

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Illustrations: - Pairing products with celebrities - Pairing products with linked elements - for example a car and a lady in a bikini - Pairing products with linked events - red bull events - Some strange pairings - articles about sad things or negative things paired with bikini ads Some Initial Remarks: Two potential means of persuasion - Propositional content: persuasive arguments, thoughtful rationality, use of texts and phrases - Associative context: arbitrary associations, sentimental irrationality, use of images and design Classical or Pavlovian Conditioning: - Pavlov (dogs): conditioner precedes, accompanies - US produces UR (food -> salivation) - CS paired with US (bell -> food) - CS produces CR (bell -> salivation) Operant or Instrumental Condtioning: - Skinner (rats): conditioner follows, depends on - R(+reward) -> CR (press lever -> food -> press more) - R(+punisher) -> cr (press lever -> shock -> press less) Complications and Elaboration: - We are neither dogs nor rats, our brains our bigger and minds fancier - Abstract thought, linguistic narratives, causal reasoning, mental time travel, hypothetical ideas, identity goals - So the conditioning process is more sophisticated - The outcome is (at first) mental, not behavioural - Involves meanings as well as links - Hard to map on to elements of C.C and O.C - Relatively few pairings of stimuli involved Some Alternative Associative Approaches: - Observational learning (Bandura) - Evaluative Conditioning (De Houwer) - more general than classical conditioning - Contagion dynamics (Rozin) - how mere contact spreads meanings Advertising Examples: - David Beckham what he smells like - linking to looks, smartness (suit) - > Pavlovian conditoning: looking cool is the conditioned response - Instrumental pairing - the Lynx effect (women go crazy for him) - Instrumental pairing - should have gone to Specsavers - Contagion pairing - would you like to holiday in this Highland home (nice) but make contagion pairing negatively, transfer of disgust - previously occupied by Jimmy Saville or stay somewhere the celebrities stay! Transfer of positivity

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Analysis: All these scenarios, identify the US, UR, CS, CR Identify reward or punisher This is not easy! Some questions about elements: are they material or symbolic, when do they occur, what is the course of the learning, is the pairing arbitrary? David Beckham watch advert with hashtag born to dare - serious face > US: david beckham, respond positively > UR: he’s cool! > CS: watch - signals David Beckham So think will take on something DB has wearing watch Operant: R = buy watch, Reward = being call like Beckham, CR = buy watch Some Possibilities: Alterative ‘Loose’ Framework: watch (tells time) -> + watch Material property Beckham (cool!) symbolic property [watch+Beckham](tells time+cool!)-> ++ watch Material + symbolic properties Why Human Learning is Special: Stimulus Equivalence: Only humans show a unique type of learning Teach to select B (not distractors) when A is present Teach to select C (not distractors) when B is present You only teach A -> B, B -> C Yet we infer: B -> A, C -> B A -> C (transitivity); if C then A (equivalence) Implication: bunch of things classed together - same meaning The symbol is functionally equivalent to the person - helps how branding operates

Conditioning Research: Some Distinctions: - Classical Conditioning (C.C): E.E and C.C related and overlapping but still distinct - UCS produces UR - CS signals UCS in a predictable way (pairing) - CS comes to produce CR (no longer UR) - C.C is also called signal learning - about predicting outcomes from signs, learned if-then expectation - Evaluative Conditioning (E.C) - Staats & Staats (1958): cover story - cross-modality learning to assess ‘interference’, eliminated 20% of suspicious participants - CS = nationalities (Swedish, Dutch) & men (Bill, Tom) - words on a screen - UCS = positive and negative words spoken aloud - DV = how do you feel about this word (in case it influences your memory) >> Swedish, Dutch and Bill, Tom

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Many distractors present Found CS took on valence of US Distinguishing E.C from C.C (Walther and Langer, 2008): Awareness of contingency: necessary for C.C but not always for E.C Strength of contingency: reliable pairing needed for C.C but not for E.C Resistance to extinction: showing CS alone reduces C.C but not for E.C Spread of attitude: changing US changes CS and also related CSs Consumer Psychology Illustration (Till et al, 2008) Celebrity pairings Study 1: Slideshows in classroom Featured many celebrities and products as fillers Control and experimental group Key manipulation: Jennifer Aniston with fictitious Garra Styling Gel DV = brand effect (mean of 7 pt scales) (good-bad, attractive-unattractive, etc) Found that in treatment condition that there were more positive valuations of product Did sports drink with good fit (Michael Jordan basketball player) and bad fit (Pierce Brosnan) When good fit better association - Olgivy said this Third study tried to show resistance to extinction Showed Jennifer Aniston and Styling Gel again Show Aniston and Gel paired - condition the association Show Aniston and Gel unpaired - if learning persists, means E.C not C.C Still paired regardless Direct Instrumental Conditioning of Opinion Might be extended to consumers via survey research Insko (1965) Rang up intro psychology students in Hawaii Survey about creating Aloha Springtime Week Asked about agreement with statements about it Rewarded or punished with good! Or not Unrelated follow up survey week later featured one item on the topic - attitude reflected verbal reinforcement type Let Toys Be Toys: Punishing expression of stereotypes Negative expressions of retailers who divide their merchandise for boys/for girls Being punished for saying something may have an effect on attitude Evolutionary Modulation of Pairing Success: Preparedness: Garcia & Koelling (1966); Ohman & Mineka (2001) Classical Conditioning: all stimuli not equal Study in rats: Taste > visual or auditory with induced nausea A ‘single trial’was enough to bring a bad association lasts a long time Study in humans: phobic conditioning easier to snakes, yet cars kill many more people -

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this case even when shown too briefly to be recognised Preparedness: Gad Saad (2013) Sex-specific toy preferences Media conditioning or genetic predisposition Boys prefer cars, and girls dolls, pre-socialisation Monkey girls and boys show same preferences Hormonally masculinised girls prefer cars Digit ratio (measure exposure to testosterone in womb) predicts toy preference Evolutionary consumer psychology - general, or sex-typed, aesthetics explained Contagion Dynamics: Rozin et al (2002): Law of ‘sympathetic magic’ Transfer of an objects key properties or enduring essence via mere physical contact Alleged evolutionary basis: disgust protects against parasitic infection, but generalises to morality Examples: drink from sterilised glass that was once peed in? Wear the clothes of a serial killer? Be friends with a friend of a Nazi? Some extended disgust metaphors: Outrage: slimeball, smear campaign Wealth: stinking rich, rolling in it, filthy lucre Some properties: Permanence: once touched, tainted forever Dose insensitivity: slight touch is insufficient Holography: part substitutes for whole The bright side - lust is the opposite of disgust? Kids thinking kissing is disgusting Term ambiguity: moist, filthy Perhaps more than lust or disgust too… sentimental objects have high value, they contain a beloved history, adding value Example: real paintings preferred over identical fakes (Bloom, 2010) Implications for advertising (Huang et al, 2017) Negative contamination Second hand aversion Less likely to buy previously tried on clothes In supermarket trolley, cookies beside tampons > no prior users, physically sealed - yet cookies rated worse and less likely to be tasted When celebrities go bad (Tiger Woods, OJ Simpson) liable to contaminate products Positive (perfuming) Fame attraction (dose-dependent) Pay more for pen if JF kennedy used it more Pay more for earlier prints by famous artists (greater proximity) Products made in original factory seen as more authentic and capturing essence of brand Ability enhancement - touching or using sports equipment used by stars leads to selfperception of enhanced ability

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> Why nike sells Michael Jordan trainers so well? Positivity more reversible than negativity Probably an evolutionary bias

Is Association Necessary? - Mere exposure Effect - Classic study (Zajonc, 1968) - Ideographs, nonsense words, photos - shown 0, 2, 5, 10, 25 times, better liked the more shown - Follow ups (Borstein, 1989; Bornstein and D’Agostino, 1992) - Replicable, including in real world contexts - Shorter exposure and longer delay = bigger effects - Levels off, may decline after 20-30 exposures - Advertising implications: bare exposure increases liking Implications; - Just showing has benefits as well as learning - Not all about positive cues or strong arguments - Awareness not wholly separate from evaluation - Hierarchy of effect models are mistaken Explanations: - Great perception fluency caused by prior exposure - 1) fluency extremifies all judgements, includes liking - 2) fluency prompts positive affect, get misattributed - Evidence favours 2 - Other judgements do not always extremify - Negative valences not exacerbated - Reatrribution eliminates mere exposure effect Clickbait: Definitions: - Clickbait = click and bait - Click: an online behavioral response associated with search for additional information about a product - moves consumer closer to purchase - Bait: a seductive offer that by design is a traip promising more than it delivers, leading to buyers remorse - bait serves baiter more than baited - The bait is robustly alluring - Knowing it’s clickbait doesn’t always stop you clicking - Taps into automatic, instinctual, appetitive, substratum of mind - Wanting is not just due to liking - Berridge and Robinson (2016): cues (salient incentives) trigger dopamine mediated reinforcement, account for addictive habits - Anticipation is partly independent of enjoyment - Occasional big pay out can keep you hooked - intermittment reinforcement is more resistant to extinction

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Automatic credulity and wishful thinking Gilbert (1991) belief is immediate, doubt takes time - if it’s good, well, maybe it’s true!

Histroy: - Precursors of Clickbait - Was called Yellow (Kid) Journalism - Originated in rivalry between two US newspapers in the roaring 1890s for readership - New York World and New York Journal - Seems to derive from use of yellow ink in cartoons featured in new york journal and a character linked to think in that period - Both papers also covered the Spanish-American WAr fought over Cuba which had been a Spanish aquisition since Columbus arrived - They made the case for Hawkish US intervention, reporting and beefing up stories about Spanish atrocities conducted on Cubans, who had been in revolt against spain during the 1800s - Hence the link to fake news - Trigger for war: the sinking of USS maine - In reality, cause of explosion was ambiguous - It was made out at the time that it was caused by Spain - Mott (1941) non news colourful supplements, scare headlines in huge print, lavish pictures and fanciful drawings, misleading headlines and faked authorities - Sympathy with the underdog - Iraqi weapons of mass destruction under Saddam - Much alarm in Western media, dodgy ‘dossier’ - 45 minutes to deploy biological weapons - Main grounds for 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq - Yet cache of weapons never discovered - Dossier subsequently determined to have been over egged by Chilcot enquiry Information Consumption: Non-tangible Consumption: - Human and animals consume materials: food, drink, resources, capital - Humans also consume symbols - They munch on info and ideas - ‘Good’ curiosity; appetite for nutritious facts - Hunger to know (vitamins and minerals) - ‘Bad’ curiosity: appetite for sensational fictions - Hunger to believe (fats and sugars) - Consumption of informaton is partly feels and tastes - All advertising seeks to get you to consume information - As an interim step to consuming associated products - All advertising, if done well, is multi stage clickbait - Image ‘baits’ you to ‘click’ headline - Headline ‘baits’ you to ‘click’ sub-headline

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Sub-headline ‘baits’ you to ‘click’ long copy Tagline summarises it all for you Advertisement baits you to click and buy A multi course meal: not just yummy but appetising

4) Examples of Clickbait: Deeper Characterisation of Clickbait - Form of the bait: headline; picture + headline; picture+headline+sub - The related ‘long copy’ becomes available upon clicking - Context of the bait - The click through metric for advertisers - A pre condition for further action (reading, sharing) - Alternative baits massively subject to haphazard or hypothetico-deductive experimental A/B testing - Darwinian selection: survival of the fittest to persuade - Thus, all clickbait near-optimised for click-through - By existing, clickbait examples necessary reflect what works empirically - Through in section and analysis, one can reverse engineer the principles guiding them - Cascading bait - Media are social: sharing of content, the consumers do the advertising - Social proof is a type of bait - Rapid catastrophic rise in popularity = virality - The holy grail Types of Clickbait: - Spontaneous pop ups - Dedicated sites - Clickbait vortex - one clickbait leads to another, often in a cluttered way 5) Psychodynamics of Clickbait Principles of Clickbait: - Olgivy master of the art of ancestral clickbait - Ruthless empiricist 1) Intolerable Incompleteness: - Stimulates curiosity via anticipatory loss - Whets appetite for information: creates desire - Loewenstein (1991) curiosity is a feeling of cognitive deprivation due to a perceived information gap - Curiosity is characterised as being: involuntary, transient, intense, impulsive - Analogous to sexual desire - ‘You’ll never know and i’ll never tell you’ - People seek to solve real and artificial problems - In Olgivy featured ads - you want to know more about construction of Rolls Royce, you want to know more about cause of ladies delightful

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experience In online clickbait: images reveal something but conceal more 2) Emotional Evocativeness - More emotion => not indifferent, means something - What does more mean? Vague and incomplete - Which emotions? Joy, sadness, happiness, suprise, anger, fear, disgust, nostalgia, outrage, pride? - Which aspects of emotion? - Reis et al (2015) news paper headlines: more positivity and negativity predicted popularity and comments - negativity predicted better - Guerini and Staiano (2015): examoine sharing of and comments on thousands of news stories from two sources - Assessed emotions felt after reading stories based on 3 factor model - Looked at how they predicted global virality and local engagement - Also looked at specific emotions valence arousal dominance - Found negative valence = more sharing and comment - Low dominance and high arousal = more comment - High dominance and low arousal = more sharing - For specific emotions; differed by source, sometimes anger and sometimes sadness 3) Munchable Manageability: - Internet age - swamped by info - Curation reduces paradox of choice (Schwartz, 2004) - Applies to listicle - broken into handy bite size chunks - But once started you have to go to the end, succession of entraining numerical hooks - What numbers are best in terms of size and type - Lotan (2014) buzzfeed listicles: N actually used - 10 is predominant mode then skewed decline - Efficacy mode at mid 20s, some large Ns also good - Odd numbers od better but not prime numbers - Olgivy pioneered this 4) Desire Satisfaction: - Youth, beauty, strength, health, wealth, love - Looks years yonger, get rid of fat, build muscle, eat right, make money, meet young girls 5) Ease and Simplicity - The promised means to satisfy the desire is simple to understand and requires little effort to implement - 27 easy meals that won’t break the bank 6) Relevance

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Tailor the ad to the audience 7) Specificity - Exact monetary amounts are specified - Earn 675 a day 8) Oddity - The unusual feature must be learned about - One weird trick to reduce belly fat 9) Concealment - Knowledge deliberately hidden provokes reactance - Alzheimers’ treatment most doctors keeping to themselves

10) Shock or Surprise - Can be consumer or another person - You won’t believe what… 11) Scarcity - Limited time offer or secret - Few students know this ancient memory enhancing technique 12) Revelation: - Often comes in the form of a supposedly telling quiz - Pretend to buy things from Amazon and we reveal your age 13) Flattery: - Reader is member of a select group - Only those over IQ150 can get question right 14) Voyeurism: - Satisfies curiosity; allows positive social comparison - She didn’t realise why the audience were laughing at her 15) Explanation: - Explains why something is the case - This is why women live longer than men - What headline phrases work best? - Rayson (2017) from Buzzsmo - 100 millions headlines - DV = likes, shares, comments - IVs= embedded phrases, openers, closers, number of words, number of characters - What headline mini phrases work best and worst: - Best: emotions, reasons, impacts, flattery, lists - What headline openers and closers work best? - Start: lists, specifications, how-tos - Closers: online location, virality, specified times

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How many words and characters work best? Very clear answers 14-75 words, 85-95 characters; normally distributed...