Welcome to the first edition of “Humans Are Robots Too”!

Let’s kick this off by explaining what this publication is all about and why I decided to do it…

You are highly susceptible to suggestion.

So am I.

We can be nudged by the first number we hear, trust something more because other people do, want something more when there’s less of it, and make completely different decisions depending on how the exact same information is framed.

Meanwhile, we remain fairly convinced that we’re making up our own minds. That fascinates me.

First through my studies in anthropology, and later through applied global marketing and extensive travel around the world, I learned to notice the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences in how people think and behave across cultures.

Later, two incredible professors, Steve Neuberg and Douglas Kenrick, at Arizona State University allowed me to audit their social psychology classes and volunteer in their lab. This is also where I had the opportunity to meet Robert Cialdini and hear him speak about influence and persuasion.

I remember coming home to my husband and saying, “Well, we’re basically robots.”

I shared with him concepts from studies that showed, for instance, that we’ll like you more after doing you a favor, become less likely to help someone when other people are around, and even remember things that never happened.

It made me think more deeply about my own decisions, become more empathetic toward people who make seemingly ridiculous choices, and generally wonder more about what makes us tick.

This lifelong curiosity is part of why I started Indigo Fox Marketing. It’s a place to put behavioral science to work for brands, particularly the medical brands I work with, where trust and credibility are everything.

HART is where I’ll regularly explore and share these ideas: digging into both cutting-edge and well-established research on human behavior and applying it to marketing, communication, and the decisions we make every day.

Sources

Jecker, J., & Landy, D. (1969). Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour. Human Relations, 22(4), 371–378.

Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4), 377–383.

Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720–725.

Murphy, G., et al. (2023). Lost in the mall again: A preregistered replication and extension of Loftus & Pickrell (1995). Memory, 31(6), 818–830.