To quote the immortal Homer Simpson – “Woo-hoo!”

Today the Amazon sales rank for CIG Persuasion hit a new high – 42,985!  Thanks, again, to my family, friends, and the one stranger who are supporting my work.

Who’s more attractive?

The answer depends on one key variable:  Your sex.  If you are a male, then you really like the woman on red compared to the (same) woman on blue, white, gray, or green.  If you are a female, it doesn’t matter.

At least this is true according to a recent study by Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta entitled “Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men’s Attraction to Women” as published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) 2008, Vol. 95, No. 5, 1150–1164.  They conducted five simple studies that merely manipulated the color of the background for a standard head and shoulders shot of a person.  Four of the five studies involved men looking at a picture of a the same woman.  One study used a sample of women as a control.  In all studies the participants were randomly assigned to look at only one picture and in all studies there were only two conditions, red or another color (white, gray, green or blue).  After viewing the one picture each participant provided a self reported “attitude” score (attractiveness, sexual desirablility, and others).

In all five studies, men always rated the same woman more positively when her picture appeared against a red background.  (With women, the rating did not vary – a girl is a girl is a girl to other girls in this application.)  What surprised me was the size of the effect.

Expressed as the Windowpane, the effect ranged from a high of 75/25 to a low of 62/38 with an average across all five of 68/32, or a strong medium effect.

A couple of important observations.  First, red works with men looking at women.  That’s all.  It says nothing about red cars or red hats or red banners or anything else.  This effect is the Romantic Red effect and it’s about boys looking at girls.  Second, red appears to have no effect for women looking at women.  Women might prefer red cars or red hats or red banners, but that’s another study.  Third, this appears to me to be a straightforward application of the Ding-Dong or classical conditioning.  In Western culture, the color red has a very long and strong association with attraction.  It’s no mistake that the classic pinup poster (adult advisory) of Marilyn Monroe puts her on a red background.

Finally, we don’t know if women looking at men might respond the same way.  But just in case, I’ll leave you with this.

Interestingly, this picture of me was taken at Zola, the restaurant in Washington DC.  They seated Melanie and me in a booth with this dark red drape behind us and all the other booths in the room were likewise decorated.  Not all the Zola rooms had this treatment, and if memory serves me correctly every table in our room had both men and women.  There were no tables of just men or just women.  Perhaps Zola’s been reading my work!

Who would have thought that Demon Flynn, our most aggressive, possessive, and selfish cat would have such a favorable opinion of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Persuasion?

Wow!

We drove to Seabrook Island and arrived to find cool weather and mist.  Not great for the tan, but it makes for a moody first shot.

The main point of Seabrook is the water and wetlands.  The condo we rented looks out over the Edisto River.

If you head to the river and turn right in a mile or so you’ll find the beginnings of a fabulous wetland and marsh field that contains alligators and dolphins.

If you follow this river to the right it doubles back to the entrance of Seabrook and goes by the Marina Village.  The Marina has boats, of course, but also shopping and restaurants.  And beautiful sunsets.

If you head to the river and turn left in about a quarter of a mile you find the Atlantic Ocean.

I think I enjoyed the sunsets most this year.  Like this.

And this, too.

And other special times with my girl.

We’ll be back.

The latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied contains a great paper on the persuasive effects of humor.  (Of course, virtually no one in the Real World will read the paper because who cares about Experimental Psychology, Applied or Otherwise?  I did a quick Google search on the paper’s title, “Humor in Advertisements Enhances Product Liking by Mere Association,” for web, news, and blogs and found no hits past the usual very small gang of scientific suspects.  Sigh.  Contrast that with virtually anything coming out of the New England Journal of Medicine which often contains studies that make me laugh yet receives a tsunami of coverage.  It’s enough to break a grown man’s heart.  I mean we’re talking about Experimental Psychology and the methodology employed to test thermonuclear devices.  How can people ignore this!)

On with the opera . . .

The study authors, Madelijn Strick, Rick B. van Baaren, Rob W. Holland, and Ad van Knippenberg from Radboud University Nijmegen conducted three real serious lab studies aimed at understanding how humor can function in persuasion, particularly in a marketing context.  The studies are so complicated that if I tried to explain them, this blog and the software that makes it possible, would explode.  This in turn could lead to a collapse of the Internet and perhaps even Life As We Know It Now.

So, I’ll summarize prettily.

College students looked over magazine style displays on computers in a marketing study of various consumer products like energy drinks and utility objects like scissors and ball point pens.  While viewing these pages, the researchers displayed specific targeted ads of interest under varying, highly controlled, and randomized conditions for the receivers.  The key test involved showing these ads in either a funny context or a neutral context.  Specifically, the researchers would show one energy drink within an ad that contained a funny cartoon, while showing a different brand of energy drink within ads that did not contain a funny cartoon.  The viewing of these energy drink ads appeared within a much larger series of page views so this pairing of drinks with humor was not apparent.  Look at two examples of a funny cartoon versus the neutral cartoon.

And who says experimental psychologists don’t have a sense of humor.

This is a clear application of the Ding-Dong effect or classical conditioning (sometimes also called respondent conditioning).  You take a stimulus (the funny cartoon) that elicits a response (positive affect) which together forms an Unconditioned S-R connection.  You then repeatedly add a new stimulus (ad for an energy drink) and the new stimulus gets associated with the existing S-R connection.  “Gee, I feel good about Red Bull!”

And, we know from the Persuasion Primer that Ding-Dong is a low WATT persuasion play.  No one has to think carefully and effortfully about any persuasion variable.  Just feel good with the cartoon, associate the feeling with the ad, and presto, chango, you’ve got persuasion.  So, the theory goes . . .

. . . and this is exactly what happened in these studies.  Receivers exposed to the humor condition that paired the ad with positive affect, reported much more favorable attitudes and preferences toward the product compared to the neutral cartoon condition.  Furthermore, the effect size of this outcome was “medium” at roughly a Pearson correlation of .30 or expressed in the Windowpane, a 35/65 effect size.  Thus, about two times as many receivers “liked” the product when it was placed in the funny context compared to the neutral context.

(There is much more to this paper than I’m reporting here and if you have anything remotely approaching a scientific interest in persuasion, I very highly recommend this paper.  It is an excellent piece of research.)

So, in the Real World what does this report tell us?

First, it scientifically confirms and demonstrates that humor can function as a classical conditioning Ding-Dong in persuasion.  Thus, if you combine humor with a persuasion TACT, you can cause receivers to feel more positively toward the TACT.  (TACT is shorthand for Target Action Context Time or Who does What When and Where – it the concrete observable behavior you are trying to produce with persuasion.)

Second, it demonstrates how humor can function as a persuasion cue, that is, a persuasion variable that changes people without requiring careful and effortful thinking.  Here, you use humor to generate positive affect, then associate that positive affect with the persuasion object – an energy drink, a political candidate, a voter proposition on a ballot, whatever – to achieve change.

Third, the size of the effect, a medium 35/65 effect, is quite substantial and likely to work in the Real World even with all the noise, confusion, and unexpectedness that occurs in the life.  But you’ve got to be careful:

1.  You must deliver messages that are funny for the receiver (It’s about the other guy, stupid).

The researchers collected manipulation check scores on just how funny receivers thought the cartoons were.  Across the three studies, the “funny” cartoons were rated two standard deviations higher than the “neutral” cartoons.  That’s a huge effect (around a Pearson correlation of .90 or a Windowpane of 05-95!).  In other words, the funny cartoons were really funny for the target audience.  If you can’t be funny – clearly, obviously, and easily – this won’t work.  And from my own work with Humor Orientation I know that most people are not funny; they may have a good sense of humor as a receiver, but as a source of humor, no.  So, be careful here.  You must deliver funny messages.  (You can measure that with the HO Scale.)

2.  You must be clearly and repeatedly connect humor with the TACT.

Literally as people are laughing and responding with pleasure and laughter, you must add in the TACT, the persuasion object, the MacGuffin, the point.  Right now -

. . . My wife and I were happy for twenty years.  Then we met . . . uproarious laughter, show the New New Thing.  Repeat . . .

. . . When I played in the sandbox the cat kept covering me up . . . uproarious laughter, show the New New Thing.  Repeat . . .

You get it?

3.  Since, this is a cue and you are on the peripheral route, you must make the opportunity for action occur closely with this Ding-Dong.

The persuasion effect of cues rapidly diminishes over time and across place.  Delay just five minutes or move to a new room and the cue effect wears out.  If you want the cue to produce action, you must give the receiver an immediate and easy opportunity to perform the behavior.  Here’s a running gag to demonstrate.

Imagine we’re 20 minutes into the future and everyone is wearing iEye visors that transmit subliminal images (and if they are well and truly groovy they also have iAcooStik ear buds for subliminal sounds).  As they enter a grocery store and cruise down the beverage aisle, a sensor picks up the signal from the iEye and begins transmitting one of the funny ads from this study for “Mountain Dew” as they approach the Mountain Dew display.

Finally, there is a science of persuasion and this study is a great illustration.

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