one very useful story to help us think about the identifiable victim effect is
the story of Baby Jessica. Baby Jessica was a little girl in Texas
that fell to a hole. This was u, some kind of digging h, device
and she fell into it and she was there for quite a long time for I think about 50
hours or so. But she, she was stuck there.
It was really, it was really sad and our hearts went to her.
And you know what, she had more CNN and coverage than Rwanda and Darfur put
together. And the question is why?
And of course it's about the fact that she was young, cute, innocent girl, who fell
into the well. And we could all look at the TV coverage.
We could all sympathize. We could all feel her pain and the pain of
her parents. And there were some as this drama evolved.
Eventually somebody rescued her and that picture is an incredibly iconic picture in
the history of rescue. And everybody was very happy.
By the way, after the fact, people started donating money to Baby Jessica.
She was already safe. But after the fact, she don-, they donated
money for her. And she became a very wealthy young lady,
when she, came of age, and could get, could get this money.
Why do we care so much about her and not about, not about other things?
And this of course is the problem of genocide.
And you can look at the history of the world and you can look at all kinds of
terrible things that have happened. And every time, we wake up after the
tragedy and we say, never again, never again.
And every time, it happens again and again and again.
And if you just look at the list of all the genocide that happen in the world this
is just incredibly sad. And this of course is not new observation.
You can see all kinds of thoughtful people in our past who have commented on this
idea. >> [music] I am deeply moved if I see one
man suffering and would risk my life for him.
Then I talk impersonally about the possible pulverization of our big cities,
with a hundred million dead. I am unable to multiply one man's
suffering by a hundred million. >> The numbers are important, and yet
there are not everything. For whatever reasons, images often strike
us more powerfully, more deeply than numbers.
We seem unable to hold the emotions aroused by numbers for nearly as long as
those of images. We quickly grow numb to the facts and the
math. >> The atrocities that were known remained
abstract and remote. Because the savagery of genocide so defies
our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it.
Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the twilight between knowing and not
knowing. >> The discussion of an infallible victim
effect is mostly kind of depressing, but there is a brighter version of it, which
is to look at what spammers are doing. And spammers are interesting because they
try different version, they learn what's working and not working.
And if you got spam, you probably got spam that looks much like this.
From somebody who's a twenty three year old female in somewhere in Africa and she
has a particular problem and you can get pictures of her and you can create all of
those things. And of course, what spammers are trying to
do are trying to create an emotional link with us, they try to portray themselves as
individuals, individuals in problems. When they try to get us to care about
them, to want to work with them, to want to help them.
I've talked to some people who are working for companies like Yahoo and Microsoft and
trying to basically reduce the chances that they're users are going to fall for
those scams. And what, what happens, what they say
often is that they get them through some church bulletin board or through some
online dating. And they started to create a relationship
with them that last over a while. And they ask for money first and they ask
for then a little bit and little bit more and so on.
It's the relationship that they build and the caring that they build and then they
abuse to a very high degree. And, so this is what spammers and, you
know, people who tries to get us to part with our money, doing the internet in
terms of using the identifiable victim effect.
There's one more thing that is not connected to that, that is just worthwhile
mentioning as long as we deal with spammers and scammers.
If you got these letters, these emails, you probably noticed that their grammar is
not that good. And the question is why.
And one possibility is that they just can't write.
But there's been another suggestion, which is kind of interesting.
And that suggestion is that they do it on purpose.
The their problem is that they send lots of emails out, and they want the email
that comes back to be from the people who are the most gullible, the most ones who
are likely to follow. If many of us who would never go with
those scams, would start writing them, they would be burdened by the amount of
work that they have to respond to all these people as they try to push them
through the different steps of the scams. So what they want is they want a system
that would leave the gullible people in the system and get rid of all the people
who might not follow with them. And one suggestion has been that adding
spelling mistakes are actually a way to differentiate between those two people.
But if they wrote in a nice way, maybe more people who would not be, giving the
money at the end of the day will come into the final, wouldn't waste their time.
So by creating lots of spelling mistakes, they get rid of some of the less gullible
people. They stay with the more gullible people.
And this way they can concentrate their efforts.
Now, the evidence for this is just starting to build up, but I think it's
interesting. In any case I think that spammers are
people who are getting very quick learning process because they get to send lots of
emails. They get to get lots of responses back,
and very quickly, they can learn and adapt.
Sad, but if you wanted to be in the domain of learning something about human behavior
spamming this probably a good place to learn how people really think and behave.
When we thing of that emotions and cognitive inputs into, into decision,
there's a question of when does one of them overpower the other.
And when do we get the kind of information is actually good for us.
So there was one early experiment that I really, really love.
And they got people into a room and they say, which jam would you like to buy?
And they showed them all kind of jams. And to other people they said, which kind
of poster would you like to get? And then the people got the jam that they
wanted or got the poster they wanted and they went to their dorm room and ate or
didn't eat the jam and hang or didn't hang the poster.
And they went back and they measured later how much jam did they eat and did they
hang the poster or not. But here's a thing.
When they initially made them decide, some people, they just said, just decide.
Use your emotion. What would you like?
And some people, they gave them cognitive input.
They gave them ratings from experts. They gave them all kinds of other
information. Which one of them do you think was the
right one? The ones including just the emotion in the
beginning of the one including both the emotion and the cognitive input.
Well, when people just based, work based on emotion.
They made decisions they liked better on. If they bought jam based on emotions, they
got jam and they ate the jam. If they got their poster based on emotion,
they got their poster and they put it on the wall.
But if people started using more of cognitive thought, all of a sudden they
got jam that they did not use and they got poster that they did not hang up.
Why? The reality is the consumption experience
of jams and posters is all about the emotions.
What do you get? What kind of pleasure do you get?
When it's on your wall or when you're eating it in the morning.
It's not about cognitive thought. So what this suggest is that when the
decision environment Includes the same element as the consumption environment,
that will be the ideal situation. And if you have a situation in which
includes something irrelevant to the consumption, that is not going to work
out. So it means to think, it means that their
inputs or emotional cognition are different.
And it means that you want to think about what is your conceptional experience when
to be like. Are you going to be consuming based on
emotion or based on cognition, and how can you make the decision environment
encapsulate those elements that are going to be relevant later.
Another example for this is from Chris Hsee.
Imagine you go into a store and you see different speakers for your new, wonderful
stereo. And some speakers look more beautiful, and
some sound better. What's more important?
Well, when you stand in the store, you see them side by side.
So now, all of a sudden, tiny differences in quality might seem very big for you.
Because you put your headphone on, and you say, left, right, left, right.
And tiny differences in quality might seem relevant.
And you might decide to get the ugly one that sounds likely better.
But then you take it home, and when you take it home you only have one speaker.
And you can't do the, compare this one to this one and this one to this one, all of
a sudden you get just one. And now you got one that has slightly
higher quality of sound but is uglier, and the ugliness stays with you for a long,
for a long time. So, think about this notion, of the fit,
between the decision environment and the consumption environment.
And think about what roles are emotions playing in one, versus the other.
And if you can get those to be more compatible and more similar, you can
actually get people, and yourself, to make better decisions.