All Your Brains Suck - Known Bugs And Exploits In Wetware

[Iterate]

Open Source Conference from O'Reilly Media
29 minutes, 13.3mb, recorded 2011-07-29

At the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Perl Training Australia's Paul Fenwick presents a number of psychological studies showing how to influence people's behavior, moods, and buying decisions. Infusing humor throughout his entire presentation, he initially lists the top three contributors to the understanding of human minds -- psychologists, neuroscientists, and salespeople -- and describes quite a few weird effects of mental tricks.

Ranging from priming study participants to set up certain feelings, to blocking long-term memory foundations with Tetris, studies on how the human mind works have found quite a few bugs, all of which can be exploited by companies out to sell us products. He focuses particularly on humans' virtual inability to assign objects value. Not only can mood affect our purchasing decisions, the prices of similar objects and price bundling can wreak havoc on our reasoning. What's more, after the studies, people rarely know that they're being manipulated or affected; instead, they attribute their actions to different factors or don't notice a change in their behavior at all.

With witty commentary and a sardonic overview of key studies that advertisers and corporations utilize to increase sales, Paul Fenwick gleefully describes the pitfalls of our ability to think rationally. As he touches on concrete examples for each 'bug and exploit in wetware,' Fenwick presents a near 'how-to' guide to manipulate those around us, but how to recognize those manipulations, as well.

Site with audio player/pop out: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5090.html#

Mp3: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/ITC.oscon-PaulFenwick-2011.07.29.mp3.mp3

An entertaining bit of audio, thirty minutes. It was impossible to listen to it without thinking of the applications in the political sphere. Be forewarned, you've been primed.

[JDPriestly]

2. My local grocery offers a two-pound bag of frozen

vegetables for $2.15 and a one pound bag of the same vegetable, same brand, same everything for 98 cents. Who would buy the two-pound bag? This "offer" has been on the shelf for months now. It's only a few cents difference, but still, why would anyone fall for something so obvious?

[Iterate]

4. It sure looks like a decoy sale.

I first heard this when the rebub primaries were starting to sort themselves out, and it made me think of decoy candidates and forced narratives when faced with limited or confusing observations, aka creative speculation.

The bit about ethics committees was good too.

[denbot]

3. The sales monkey in me has bookmarked this for later consumption.

Muwah haa haa haa ha!