CXL Week 1 Post – Review

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.27.1″ fb_built=”1″ _i=”0″ _address=”0″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.27.1″ hover_enabled=”0″ _i=”0″ _address=”0.0″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.27.1″ _i=”0″ _address=”0.0.0″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.1″ hover_enabled=”0″ _i=”0″ _address=”0.0.0.0″]

CXL Week 1 Paper

I have just finished my first week in the CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion program. Needless to say, I am very excited and thankful that I have received a scholarship for this program. Each week, I will write a 1,000 or more word paper reviewing what I have learned. With that said, I will now discuss what I learned in my first week. To start the program, I looked around at different courses within the program and watched different videos within each of the courses I explored. The courses I looked at were the following: People & Psychology, Attention Basics, Decision Making and Emotions, and Intro to Neuromarketing. I learned from the following instructors: Peep Laja, Roger Dooley. I also watched a seminar by André Morys.

I will now discuss some of the principles I learned. The first principle I learned was Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion. I was already familiar with these, as I’ve already read Dr. Robert Cialidini’s Influence: Science and Practice. I’ve also read Pre-suasion, which I think offered a lot of new, useful models for thinking about persuasion in modern times. I hope that book is covered in this course too. Cialidini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion are as follows: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and the unity principle.

I also learned a lot about neuromarketing from Roger Dooley. I was already familiar with him, as I listen to his podcast, “Brainfluence”. I’ve also read his book on neuromarketing, which is also called Brainfluence. Its full title is Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing. Before I start talking about some of the principles of neuromarketing I’ve learned so far, I will first discuss one of the important videos I watched from instructor Roger Dooley. The title of this video is “How Do I Know this Isn’t Bullshit?” In this video, Mr. Dooley covers important research in psychology and neuroscience seeking to discover whether neuromarketing was a legitimate science, or just “hocus pocus”. The question came up when I major research paper found that many psychology studies did not survive replication. If I recall correctly, I think they only found that about 30% or so were replicable when they tried to replicate them in recent years. This caused many to question the legitimacy of psychological research. However, a study, which I believe was done at Temple University, found that neuromarketing can be a highly legitimate science. They found this via MRI. The researchers found that MRI studies can be indicative of actual consumer responses. This paper helped further legitimize neuromarketing as a science.

In another video, Roger Dooley covered EEG, biometrics, eye tracking, and facial coding. MRI is considered to be the gold standard of neuromarketing. However, it is very expensive. Further, it is hard to replicate real life situations in a MRI machine. EEG is another high-quality research tool. Even more, you can more accurately measure real life EEG devices, which likely highly increases their external validity. There is also eye tracking. With this technology, you can get a heat map of what people are specifically looking at a on a screen. You can also get a gaze map. This technology is useful because instead of asking people what caught their attention on a screen, you can actually specifically see what they’re looking at. I will actually be ordering my own eye tracker soon. I also have my own EEG device in the Muse S. I intend to use both of these technologies for my company soon. I hope that this course will discuss some more ways that these technologies can be used! There is also facial coding. With this technology, a computer can read a person’s facial expressions and determine their emotions! Because of modern technology, this research can be done with webcams. In the olden days, this was originally done with trained, human researchers who observed people’s reactions with slow motion video. Technology has truly come a long way.

Also in the “Intro to Neuromarketing” course, I watched Andrey Morys from web arts discuss “Five Neuromarketing Hacks to Dominate Your Market”. The video didn’t discuss that many neuromarketing hacks. Rather, this talk was more about maximizing the validity of one’s statistical data. The key insights from this course were to (basically) never believe A/B tests. He says this is true because they only tell part of the truth. Without a valid statistical test set up, an A/B test could have simply happened by chance. Further, other things like sample size are also important. I don’t recall him discussing effect size, but that is important too. He also said that statistical significance is not validity, which I agree with. I think many old papers in the field of psychology are remiss in discussing this, and this often gives psychological studies a bad name because people question the validity of the research done. In order to help maximize validity, Andre Morys says you should make sure you have a large enough sample size and a long enough test duration. Further, it is wise for one to discuss the “conditions” of your study. For example, did your sales go up because of your change in text copy, or did your sales go up because you sell beach clothing, and it is now summer time? He also says you should see your website as a salesperson, and it better be a good one. To do this, one should know and understand the cognitive biases. You can learn these on the Internet. Cognitive biases are not exactly hard to find. I learned a lot about them when reading Charlie Munger’s book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack.” He also gives a formula for a growth system. His formula is growth system = ability + culture.

For the sake of time (so that I can get back to my course and start applying these concepts!), this is all I will discuss about the program today. All in all, I quite like the program, and I look forward to learning more useful concepts. Now that I’ve had my fun exploring the course content, I think I will start watching the videos in a more “ordered” format. That is, I will start more closely following the order in which the courses are already set. I look forward to my next paper for week 2, where I will discuss the next set of concepts and principles I learned.

[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]