In search of intuition and its impact on judgement, I was on my research to find more about how our brain works. The work done by world renowned Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman came very impactful on the understanding of how human brain works in the context of judgement and decision making. What is revealing is the biases we all have. This edit is to understand some of theses biases and how they impact our decision making. We start with one such bias called "Priming" and follow it up with others in the subsequent weeks.
In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Barghand his collaborators asked students at New York University- most aged eighteen to twenty two- to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words. For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray or wrinkle. When they had completed the task, young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. The short walk was what the experiment was all about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slower than the others.
The "Florida Effect" happens without any awareness.
Try this : Fill in the blank...
What came to your mind?
Now try this...
The visuals create a priming effect on what we think in the subsequent context. We are all primed all the time unconsciously.
As you can see Priming is not restricted to concepts and words, but our emotions and actions can be primed by events which we are not even aware.
Studies of Priming effects threatens our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgements and our choices. For eg. most of us think of voting as a deliberate act that reflects our values and our assessments of policies and is not influenced by irrelevencies. Our vote should not be affected by the location of the polling station, for eg. but it is. A study of voting patterns in Arizona showed that the support for propositions to increase of funding of schools was significantly greater when the polling station was in a school than when it was in a nearby location.
It is clear that effects of priming reach into every corner of our lives.
Now that we know we are all getting primed, we can use this mechanism also to our advantage in taking decisions in our fashion business.
What people see now has an impact of what they decide. It is then important for us to see as much of truth as possible. In any business, that is the truth at the level of consumers. Now we can make sense of why Jeff Bezos keeps the proverbial "Consumer Chair" in his meetings (check out our previous article on this here). It is to get this bias out from the opinions and judgements and seeing everything through the lens of consumers.
In fashion and lifestyle business and for that matter any business, we come across a lot of information from different sources and get influenced. It is important to ask how much of that is biasing our judgements. Are we seeing the right things? More and more we get to see consumer led information, and insights, the better it is for all of us to be primed the right way.
Whatever route you take, it will be important to always challenge what you are observing, and be conscious of the fact that "What we see is what we become". Keeping consumer in mind always and being curious to seek evidence can minimise this priming bias.
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