The Reality Distortion Field Is Real 270
TimeZone writes "Apparently, even subliminal exposure to the Apple logo can make you 'think different.' Researchers at Duke University subjected participants to subliminal images of the iconic Apple and IBM logos (during what subjects thought was a visual acuity test), and those who were shown the Apple logo generated more creative ideas after the test than did those who were shown the IBM logo. In a second test, subjects exposed to the Disney logo acted more honestly than those who saw an E! Channel logo." Here's a preprint of the paper (PDF) due for publication in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Yeah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Link in parent is NSFW (Score:4, Informative)
Modding me up might be a good idea... Good job I opened that in a tab and was able to figure a way to close it again without showing everyone in the office what I think that was.
So.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Logos (Score:5, Funny)
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Other logos (Score:5, Funny)
Tux - made you grown a long beard and lose all your friends
Novell - made you betray your friends
Democrat donkey - made you find new ways to destroy yourself
Republican elephant - made you question the value of an education
What is next ?
"Judge, I crashed my car because I stared at a Ferrari logo for too long." ?
Re:Other logos (Score:5, Informative)
I'm assuming your talking about Stallman in which case it would be the GNU not Tux. Rule Number 1 of geek humor: Be accurate.
Re:Other logos (Score:5, Funny)
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I think he is talking about the fabled unix beard [imageshack.us] that many gurus sport and which is said to convey great powers to he (or she!) who grows it.
Re:Other logos (Score:4, Informative)
Rule Number 0 of geek humor. Be funny!
Rule Number 0.1 of geek humor. Be ironic!
Rule Number 0.2 of geek humor. Be dry!
Rule Number 0.9999999... of geek humor. Be real!
Re:Other logos (Score:5, Funny)
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Slashdot logo - made you want to stay in your mother's basement
fixed (we _are_ on slashdot...duh)
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Yaa! CreativIty can be measured now! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yaa! CreativIty can be measured now! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yaa! CreativIty can be measured now! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as how it's all laid out in the preprint linked to in the summary.
Re:Yaa! CreativIty can be measured now! (Score:5, Informative)
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I only skimmed the paper, and while I don't see signs of cheating, I still find the results suspect (the old "correlation is not causation" may apply here). Perhaps a statistician can chime in: how significant are these "statistic
Re:Yaa! CreativIty can be measured now! (Score:4, Interesting)
"Perhaps a statistician can chime in"
Wether you personally accept the paper's conclusion or not is irrelevant. It does however conform to the scientific method and a Marketing Proffessor's 'peer' is likely to know a lot more about statistcs that you do ( judging from the questions in your post and the fact that my partner is a marketing prof.).
On the subject of measuring creativity they use the same sort of tests that are used to study chimpanze creativity...
From TFS: "Participants were subliminally exposed to images of either Apple or IBM brand logos and then completed a standard creativity measure, the "unusual uses test" (Guilford, Merrifield, and Wilson 1958). The unusual uses task allows for two tests of behavioral priming effects: First, the total number of uses generated serves as a measure of participants' motivation to be creative: If a goal to be creative is active, participants should generate a higher number of total uses. Importantly, these uses need not all be creative - just the sheer act of attempting to generate as many uses as possible is often used as a metric of creativity on this test (Eisenberger, Armeli, and Pretz 1998; Glover and Gary 1976) and is an excellent measure of the motivation to be creative. Second, the rated creativity of each use serves as an additional measure of creativity.
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It's quite possible that the test itself was slanted in favor of the desired outcome, if that's the general sentiment within the group. Nothing in this world is purely objective, nothing but math!
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MSFT needs help with that image. As most people think MSFT and get frustrated. When was the last time you enjoyed using windows? When was the last time you enjoyed using KDE/Gnome/Linux? Now when was the last time you enjoyed using your mac/ipod/iphone?
for me about 5 minutes ago as i w
Re:Yaa! CreativIty can be measured now! (Score:5, Insightful)
Which isn't to say we can measure it with 100% accuracy or that there's no debate still about what it is, what should be included, etc etc. But it's so nice of you to completely dismiss out of hand the very idea of measuring it in any way.
I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe because if you're seeing the Apple logo, you're looking at the wrong side of the screen...
I keed, I keed... typing this from my MacBook.
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Re:I knew it! (Score:4, Funny)
Amiga: the computer for the creative mind!
Macintosh: the computer for the rest of us!
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Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
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RDF, not in the logos! (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, the logo is on the back of the screen. And assuming that most computer users tend to look at the screen when they use it, the logo is (by default) facing the rest of the world.
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I thought we were talking about Mac here, not Ubuntu!
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and the playboy bunny logo... (Score:5, Funny)
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Someone quick - mod parent 'funny'!
Otherwise: dude, if you really have to ask...
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Re:and the playboy bunny logo... (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm hoping it's me.
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I can't believe this article is real (Score:2)
Genetic effects (Score:4, Funny)
Steve Jobs is screwing with your mind, people. And your children's nascent minds too. Be afraid (of non-shiny things). Be very afraid (of anything not cool).
Simon.
Um, guys... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is humour - lay off the "insightful" mods, will you please ? It's starting to erode my confidence in my fellow man...
Simon
Windows logo? (Score:5, Funny)
Blue tree on yellow background. (Score:2, Funny)
hmmm. (Score:2)
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Apparently it resulted in mildly increased productivity... Interestingly, this also motivated women for some reason.
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If you want to sell a magazine to a woman, what do you do? Put a woman on the cover, of course.
It works for motivation too. Men want to show off. Women want to show up. You don't think they dress up when they go out for US, do you?
Apple is just the new Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
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Suggestions:
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It's a refleciton of pre-test scores (Score:5, Informative)
They chose the brands that they chose because Apple was rated as more creative a brand than IBM in pre-test:
"As predicted, there was a significant difference in the extent to
which Apple and IBM were perceived to be creative, t(23) = -4.91, p
higher ratings (M = 7.62, SD = 1.23) than IBM (M = 4.17, SD = 2.12). Thus, pilot tests confirmed that in
our college sample, Apple is believed to be more creative than is IBM. IBM, it is important to note, is
not seen as particularly creative or uncreative; it is rated at approximately the mid-point of the scale."
And because Disney is rated as being more "honest" than E!:
"As predicted, there was a significant difference in the extent to
which Apple and IBM were perceived to be creative, t(23) = -4.91, p
higher ratings (M = 7.62, SD = 1.23) than IBM (M = 4.17, SD = 2.12). Thus, pilot tests confirmed that in
our college sample, Apple is believed to be more creative than is IBM. IBM, it is important to note, is
not seen as particularly creative or uncreative; it is rated at approximately the mid-point of the scale."
It's not showing that people subliminally exposed to the Apple logo - regardless of prior beliefs - will be spontaneously more creative. It's showing that people spontaneously exposed to things that they (at least, a similar sample) feel reflect creativity will prime, behaviorally, creativity.
It doesn't mean that people who work with Apple are more productive, or that people need to buy Apple to be creative. It's a neat implementation of priming on future behavior, but it's really showing that specific brands are associated with specific traits (and that those specific traits prime actions).
To summarize then... (Score:2)
Re:To summarize then... (Score:5, Interesting)
The basic idea behind priming is that there is a large interconnected network of information and that activating one piece of information partially "boosts" other connected pieces of information. When you are prompted to act in new tasks, you have a higher likelihood to engage in actions that have this extra "boost" in activation.
Geek Priming Example:
In geek terminology, it's something like this. Suppose you were Google, and imagine you were designing a system to deliver targeted advertising to people. You had thousands of possible ads you could show someone, but you want the advertising to be more specific.
Lets say you were choosing between just two companies that want to sell advertising today. One of these companies is called "Joe's Fisheries", and they have a special on Sole (a kind of fish). One of these companies is called "Joe's Shoe Supply", and they've got a special on Sole Repair (the bottom of your shoes).
You might intercept an email about Soles, but you're not sure which sole it is. You don't want to be selling Fish to guys who need shoe repair, and you don't want to be selling Shoes to guys who want fish. On the other hand, other words in the email tell you if it's about shoes (like laces, or boots) and other words tell you if it's about fish (scales, salmon, whatever).
Whatever your way of deciding is, you probabilistically weight Fish over Shoe (or vice versa) depending on some other cues. Then you show the ad you think is most appropriate.
In a priming study, basically what they're doing is providing some bogus information to your same cortical networks that weight and categorize information. They're feeding you stimuli (like "scales", and "salmon"), and when they ask you to use the word Sole in a sentence, you say something like, "Gee, I could really go for a nice filet of sole", rather than "I hate it when gum sticks in the Sole of my shoe".
Mostly, these primes only affect the way you behave in either carefully constructed follow-up tasks, usually ones that require you to categorize or manipulate information. A classic example is something like Word Completion, for example:
"SOL_".
I'm sure you filled in "Sole" even though you could have put in "Solo" and "Sold", far more common words.
See! You can be primed too!
Umm... yes. So? (Score:2)
-fred
Re:It's a refleciton of pre-test scores (Score:5, Informative)
I've RTF preprint too, and I'm not sure this is a fair criticism. You've misunderstood something - specifically, you write:
Which is incorrect. The researchers chose the brand before the pre-test because they themselves believed it to be associated with creativity. The purpose of the pre-test was to verify that the researchers were correct in believing that the test participants perceive the Apple brand as associated with creativity. They also tested the participants' associations of the IBM logo (which was the other logo they showed) to see whether it too was associated with creativity, and found that it was not.
The end goal of the study was to measure whether or not exposure to a familiar brand would cause people to exhibit characteristics associated with that brand. Having verified that the Apple brand was associated with creativity in the population they were studying, and that the IBM logo was not, they primed their participants by flashing a logo at them for 80 milliseconds as part of a video, then administered a standard psych test measuring creativity (the Unusual Uses test - it was first put together in 1958 and has been thoroughly validated since then). There were 341 participants (190 male, 151 female). Out of those:
They also asked participants after they had completed the test whether they had noticed any images in the video shown beforehand; except for the 80 millisecond flash of logo, it consisted of abstract testing patterns. Not one single participant reported being aware of any recognizable images in the video, so it really was subliminal.
Their analysis of the results showed statistically significant differences between those shown IBM and those shown the Apple logo. Specifically, the people who got Apple produced a greater number of responses on the unusual uses test, which is a quantitative difference that nicely demonstrates their desire to be creative if not the actual creativity. The researchers also had judges independently rate the responses on a qualitative scale. The judges didn't know which logo the participants they were evaluation had seen. The researchers then did statistical analysis on the qualitative judgments, which showed that the judges consistently rated the responses of the Apple participants as more creative than those of the IBM participants.
Then they did it again, two more times in fact, with different brands and traits.
They had lots of checks and counter-checks built into it, and they used some fairly sophisticated statistical analysis on the results, including some analysis of variance (ANOVA) checks. As is common with psychological studies, the test participants were all undergraduates taking an intro to psych class. So the population was not particularly diverse in terms of age. But on the whole, it looks to me like a pretty well designed study.
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I was just trying to quell the legions of people who would suggest that Apple was chosen because of it's transcendent quality of awesomeness. It was chosen because of it's association with the particular trait in question, relative to the other brand choice.
It wasn't a criticism so much as an explanation. =)
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But then you're probably stuck trying to explain the Disney vs. E! "honesty" bias in terms of text vs. picture, and I'm not sure how that would work.
April issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Beer (Score:4, Funny)
Experiment 1 is flawed.... (Score:5, Interesting)
They don't mention whether exps 2 and 3 were done on different days, but given that they did it for expt 1, they probably did for 2 and 3 too.
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Next Issue (Score:2)
Fox News Logo results (Score:3, Funny)
Hogwash. Hooey. Hokum. (Score:5, Funny)
"Mozart Effect"? (Score:4, Informative)
Apple Logo and Visual Acuity (Score:3, Interesting)
Consumer Research? (Score:4, Funny)
subliminal messaging? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also...Disney...
honest?...come on....
Disney = honest? Buhwahahaha! (Score:3, Funny)
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