Decision making, learning and memory — CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree Review — Part 2

This is part 2 out of 12 reviewing the digital psychology and persuasion minidegree at CXL Institute. For 12 weeks, I will deep-dive into areas such as psychology foundations, neuromarketing, persuasion models and behavioral psychology. Each week I will post one article reviewing the course content and discuss my learnings as well as my personal thoughts on it.

Decision making and emotions

If someone asks you how many decisions you make each day you would probably just come up with a few examples, but the truth is that adults make around surprisingly 35.000 decisions every day. As mentioned in my last post these decisions are highly impacted by emotions, but according to psychologists there are four different processes that influence decisions:

Cognitive biases — systematic errors in thinking that affect peoples judgment and decisions

Memories — past experience influences decision making

Reason — reasoning influences decision making

Emotions — emotion influences decision making

We like to think that we are rational beings

In this part of the course, there is a talk from Conversion XL Live 2016 Conference made by consumer psychologist Bart Schultz. He starts off by talking about our brain. In psychology, a dual process theory provides an explanation of how our thoughts are the results of two different processes. These processes can be divided into two different systems — system 1 and system 2. In system 1 subconscious, emotional processes take place and in system 2 our conscious and rational processes take place. When analyzing data we have to be aware of that the results of the behavior are the result of two different processes. System 1 is always on but system 2 is on from time to time. Our task as optimizers is to find out which system that is on and when.

System 1 — automated heuristics, associative

System 2 — prefers to be absent and needs focus

System 2 is always making up reasons for our behavior to comfort us but these reasons are not the cause of our behavior. We think that we are rational beings, but we’re not. This phenomenon is called post-decision rationalizing.

The key takeaway from this talk is that we need to analyze our data and A/B-testing from these two perspectives. By running psychological experiments we can influence a lot of behavioral steps the customers take. By analyzing data and running tests to prove the hypothesis we will learn more about the behavioral aspects of the customer journey. This was a very inspiring talk with a lot of things worth considering and some good examples of how experiments can be based on the fact that our brain has two different systems.

Learning and memory

I ended this week with an interesting lesson about learning and memory. The following is what I learned and how this can be applied to marketing and online persuasion.

Learning and memory are closely connected and therefore easily confused with each other, but according to psychology learning can be defined as the process or behavior of acquiring knowledge whereas memory is the ability to remember past experiences. There are three main types of learning and these are classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning.

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is the theory of psychology which refers to learning through repetition. Most people have heard of the experiment Pavlov’s dogs and this is probably the most well-known example of classical conditioning. In the experiment, Pavlov rang a bell before feeding his dogs. Since before the dogs started to droll when smelling the food but the procedure of ringing the bell made the dogs pair the bell with the food and they started to droll just from hearing the bell.

The goal of using classical conditioning in marketing is to create a spontaneous response to a particular situation by exposing the customer to a specific stimulus. An example of this would be to use celebrities in advertising. If you have positive feelings for a celebrity you will start creating positive feelings for the product after being exposed to the stimuli repeatedly, even if you had a neutral attitude for the brand from the start.

Operant conditioning

Operant learning is the process of learning that occurs through positive and negative reinforcement. An association is made between the behavior and the consequence where positive reinforcement increases behavior and punishment is decreasing behavior. An example of this could be an online store offering a loyalty program or membership in a customer club. If the customers are collecting points from buying that can be used for receiving discount codes etc this will reinforce their behavior of buying.

Observational learning

Observational learning occurs through observing and imitating others. In order for observational learning to occur the following four processes need to be present:

Attention — the consumer needs to focus on the model’s behavior

Retention — the consumer retains the behavior and forms a memory

Reproduction — the consumer has the ability to perform the behavior

Motivation — a situation occurs where it’s useful for the consumer to use the previously observed behavior

Memory

Memory is defined as the ability to encode, store and retrieve information in our brain. Encoding is the process of changing information into a usable form. Once the information is encoded we store the information in our memory and then we retrieve it by remembering it in a situation where the information is needed.

To understand how users are processing information experimentation, surveys and user testing can be useful tools. Using eye-tracking studies can be a great way to understand how users are perceiving information but these kinds of studies don’t tell how the user is recalling the information. The pro tip here is to start off by setting goals before testing and ask questions afterward to follow up.

Summary of the second week

Since I have read books such as ”Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman I was already familiar with the concept of system 1 and system 2. Therefore the most interesting part for me this week was how these learnings can be applied to websites and marketing. I also liked the part about learning and memory a lot. I am looking forward to starting next week’s courses in neuromarketing and persuasion models, keep your eyes open for future updates!