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© The Author(s) 2018
Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_5
5. One Mind or Two? An Introduction to Dual Process Theories
Brian M. Young1
(1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Brian M. Young
Email: [email protected]
Dual Process Theories
There are several ways into this key part of my book on consumer psychology and I have already borrowed Huang and Bargh’s (2014, p. 122) argument that would suggest that unconscious goal setting was an earlier human skill in the evolution of Homo sapiens than the conscious variety and therefore somewhat more basic. I’ll start however by looking at how marketers put together some psychology to explain how advertising works and by looking at some of the major faults of this approach, demonstrate how we can make better sense of it.
The Hierarchy of Effects
In 1898, the oddly named Elias St. Elmo Lewis formulated the slogan that advertising should attract attention, maintain interest, and create desire, adding later the fourth term get action. There is nothing controversial about that and I’m sure that if asked, many of us would be capable of producing similar versions of what needs to be done to persuade people to buy. There is an implicit jerky sequence of images of a passive potential consumer being aroused, interested, wanting and getting, so it makes ‘common sense’. Over the years however these have elevated to the status of ‘models’ (see Chapter 2, section on “Epistemological Creep”) which are given acronyms. The more these initials resemble real words or at least pronounceable neologisms, the better. And so we come to AIDA, not the opera but a sequence of mental states called: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. I’ve emboldened the first letters so you get it. Weilbacher (2001) cites both Frey (1947) and Lucas and Britt (1950) as the sources of the first appearance of AIDA although there is a consensus that it was inspired by Elias St. Elmo Lewis who had read the psychology of William James (1890/1918). But AIDA is not the only such sequence and Lavidge and Steiner (1961) did not provide an acronym but called his model a ‘stair-step model ’. The idea was to coax or otherwise persuade the consumer to climb them. They were Awareness, Knowledge; Liking, Preference; Conviction, Purchase. Here are three major steps that fell into the classic triad of thinking, feeling, and intention/behaviour with two smaller steps in each. So in summary there was no real attempt in these ‘models’ to make claims about how humans process the information in advertising or make up their minds when deciding what to buy that would inform the steps. They may or may not be helpful to the marketer in organising and managing campaigns and there also may be rhetorical potential from the metaphor of climbing steps as a route to success perhaps for marketing managers? These models are still around 1 even though they have been criticised by academics and practitioners.
Barry and Howard (1990) produced a systematic critique by challenging the basic sequence of mental acts which is implicit in the Lavidge and Steiner (1961) model (and most others as well). The basic sequence is thinking, feeling and intending/doing; or cognition, affect , and conation to give them the more psychological names. The authors then made a case that even this sequence which looked so ‘reasonable’ could be challenged and they did this by appealing to experiments that had been done in the late 70s and early 80s so they were at that time citing new(ish) work. In addition they looked at attribution theory and low involvement consumption which was a conceptual area that had been developed in the 1970s. But before discussing these alternatives to the fixed sequence of thinking, feeling then doing I want to look at some startling research on perception without awareness that is often identified with the seminal work of Zajonc 2 and in particular an early study by Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc (1980) although Zajonc (2001) is a more recent and general paper on Zajonc’s findings. The 1980 experiment is briefly and clearly reported and very simple. Different eight-sided two-dimensional solid black figures on a white background were created on a computer display using randomly generated angles. 3 Then they were shown to groups of people and the time of presentation was made shorter and shorter until the recognition performance was at chance level. 4 This was the exposure time 5 that would be used in the experiment proper. A fresh group of participants were brought in and the experiment started. There were two parts we can call exposure and questions with paired comparisons. Exposure was where the participants viewed 10 figures under experimental conditions. Each of the 10 figures was shown 5 times in a random sequence. What each participant saw was a flash of light then pause—50 times. ‘Questions with paired comparisons’ followed: Each participant saw 10 pairs of figures one pair after another, each pair for 1 second. One member of the pair had been shown before and one was new. They had to choose the one they had been exposed to for such a brief time (a measure of recognition) and also had to choose the one they liked better (a measure of liking). These two measures were taken either with the liking part first followed by the recognition part or the other way round and this was decided randomly. Now look at the results from the paired comparisons. Recognition (48% correct) was close to chance. You can get that result by just guessing in this forced choice from two alternatives. But stimuli they had been exposed to previously were preferred and they were chosen on that basis 60% of the time (op. cit., p. 558). This result was statistically significant. Something must be being processed mentally without your being aw
are of it. And this stimulus is just a little bit more attractive to you. The old order of the rational consumer making informed choices and being in charge had been challenged and a new vision of consumers was needed.
Low involvement consumption is routine and attribution theory deals with how people in everyday life make sense of their behaviour. Lacking involvement in consumption is like shopping in a dwam with low attention to the environment and little if any focus. Consequently one is surprised when the checkout till is reached and the bill is presented. What did I buy? From the inventory you gradually build a picture of yourself and as self-esteem is important you assume that the items that appear in your trolley are the ones you must like. ‘I shop therefore this is what I am’ is your self-attribution constructed on the fly from the contents of one trip. If it reflects your own self-image that image is reinforced and if it falls short then the image can be modified.
There’s more to attribution theory than that. Many people of course take shopping more seriously and have a strong enough self-image so that the ‘I do this therefore that’s what I’m like’ is not that common an event. Nevertheless it’s possible to challenge the dominant model of the hierarchy of effects by making a case using attribution theory that cognition → conation → affect can operate in low involvement consumption and that affect → conation → cognition is possible by appealing to Zajonc’s research (Barry & Howard, 1990). These authors go through all possible permutations of cognition, affect, and conation with an admittedly post hoc justification using theories and research that we can consume in these different ways. The effect on the reader is to open up future theories of consumption and for me anyway with the benefit of much hindsight to scotch once and for all the idea of hierarchy of effects as a model or frame of how the mind works. It may well be a useful tool for marketing managers when organising their campaigns but why base it on theorising which is not only wrong but also seriously constricting in its imaginative possibilities?
What is needed is a radical redesign of how the mind works and processes information. The one that is cited in many consumer psychology books comes under various names such as System 1 and System 2 and fast, intuitive versus slow, reflective . They are often called dual process theories and they deal with a major distinction between two different of thinking. According to Evans and Stanovich (2013), such a distinction is a common one in writings on philosophy and psychology over the centuries (op. cit., p. 223). In my opinion the two processes provide a helpful resolution of the ways we process information as consumers in different consumer ecologies. We have already described many of the ways information is processed quickly and intuitively when we examined priming and embodied cognition . The slower and reflective route on the other hand covers a wealth of information usually covered in books or journals with titles such as judgment and decision making or heuristics and bounded rationality. It would take a book this long and more to cover that area so if there is an omission here then it is that.
Elaboration Likelihood
One of the more popular models that utilise ‘two routes to persuasion ’ is known as the Elaboration Likelihood Model or ELM. However one of the perils of popularity is that one’s work tends to become distilled more and more into textbooks and as a consequence loses some of the richness of the original version. So the ELM becomes a diagram with boxes and arrows and the occurrence of elaboration is driven by two factors motivation and ability. If you want and you can, then you do elaborate. Now the authors of this valuable model do not deserve these pass notes and we might get a more subtle version if look at a paper on the subject addressed to consumer researchers who were members and followers of the Association for Consumer Research and they tend to use more words. So let’s start by explaining what the words mean. Elaboration means that a message enters the mind and is thought about, worked through and generally evaluated. The likelihood of this happening depends on various factors. This brief paper by Cacioppo and Petty (1984) also made the important point that elaboration likelihood is a continuous function so we have range of different degrees of elaboration. Once elaboration starts and cognitive resources are deployed then a knowledge base can be built up so that further information is relatively easier to incorporate into this particular schema . Motivation increases as involvement grows. For example, at the time of writing Britain has voted in a referendum on membership of the European Union. Initially the ‘Leave’ campaign promoted its cause using several emotive themes such as fear of foreigners, money sent to Brussels which is the administrative centre of the EU, and taking back our country. These were replete with evocative metaphors of money leaking from the nation, alien people entering the sacred isle, and reclaiming our nation from the grip of Brussels bureaucracy. The Remain campaign however focussed on the financial advantages of staying in the EU and painted a doom and gloom picture of financial ruin if we left. There’s really very little to elaborate there and my own response would be to mentally file it along with other dark prospects such as nuclear Armageddon, global warming and the cost of sending one’s children to university .
A recent paper (Kitchen , Kerr, Schultz, McColl, & Pals, 2014) reviewing the current status of the ELM model suggests that the dominant presence of online marketing and consumption did not easily accommodate the ELM model. However the model grew and developed over a long period of time and is still used in advertising research and the central and peripheral routes to persuasion and attitude change are a core part of it. The basic dynamics still remain with central processing and peripheral processing as two routes and the likelihood of elaboration and going down the central road reflecting the cognitive effort you will put into the job which depends on your interest, engagement , understanding and involvement which is reflected as motivation and ability as the drivers. So to return to my example of the BREXIT referendum: The Remain campaign was ripe for central processing as it was heavy with financial information about potential losses and few gains if we chose to leave. I had the ability to process this but certainly did not have the motivation. The Leave campaign was crying out for peripheral processing with the evocative imagery and strong sound-bites and pervasive 6 marketing but I was more motivated to look at them critically because of my interests in media psychology and hence I was motivated and capable of processing that stuff centrally. I read the imagery as deliberate and my central processing was involved with finding answers to the question ‘why?’
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Another model of thinking is called System 1 and System 2 , and was popularised by Kahneman in his book Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman , 2011). System 1 is fast, automatic and the processing is relatively effortless. We can recognise basic emotions, use visual cues for three-dimensional perception, understand simple sentences, and recognise aggression in a voice. And we recognise them rapidly and effortlessly. These are examples of System 1 functioning. But comparing two cars for value for money, looking for a man with a red carnation in his buttonhole holding a copy of The Times, and appreciating Hamlet’s soliloquy by Shakespeare on life and death are certainly effortful and can take time—maybe years in the case of ‘To be or not to be…’. That’s System 2 at work. When System 2 is implemented then often attention is required and this is a finite resource. Consequently attention to other events coming in from your environment is limited and you won’t process a lot of the information especially if it is predictable and you already have knowledge and experience. The term cognitive miser is a metaphor that is often used to emphasise and dramatise the extent to which we, as we grow up cope with the problem of there being just too much information out there. It can also be seen as anthropomorphisation of limited capacity in human information processing. The best way is describe it is to say that it is more efficient not to waste valuable attention time and spend too much attention on stuff that provides no extra information. This is not to say that spending time letting attention drift over the beauty of a landscape or the joy of being totally relaxed with
others is time wasted and the benefits of other ways of mindfulness is discussed in this chapter below. The cognitive miser is just a description of how our minds work and it has emerged as we have evolved over many millennia. The metaphor has to some extent entered our language when we talk about time-rich and time-poor for example (see Bellezza , Paharia, & Keinan, 2017).
Evolutionary Origins of Two Systems
Where do these systems come from? Our minds have evolved over a long period of time, on a millennial time-scale and I wanted to find out how where our thinking came from historically as a species. It’s also an opportunity to introduce very gently 7 the idea that we are all products of our genetic history to some extent as well as being affected by our life experiences and what we have learnt from them. It’s safe to say though that in the vast majority of examples of our everyday life as consumers our genetic heritage is inextricably linked with our experiences in different environments as most behaviour is only affected by genetic inheritance if the environment affords that kind of action. The interaction between heredity and environment is the important part rather than the genes or environment looked at in isolation.
When we look at the genetic part of this interaction with our behaviour in different environments then we are looking into the past, both the recent past when our parents and their parents were born and also at our history as a member of the species Homo sapiens . Consequently research into how human thinking emerged as Homo sapiens evolved over millennia has its own literature and we’ll look at some of the findings here as they might inform your understanding of dual process theory. The most recent and accessible approach for non-specialists is probably the proceedings of a symposium on the evolution of human cognition published by the Royal Society in 2012. I have cherry-picked some findings and arguments from this and the interested reader should start with Heyes (2012). Her basic argument is that there are two schools of thought on how our thinking developed about 1.8 Mya 8 at the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch. One school sees the mind as modular with various different ways of thinking that our Stone Age ancestors possessed. These emerged by natural selection to solve problems the particular ecology posed such as communicating with others, stalking prey, avoiding disease, mate choice and group formation for mutual benefit (after Heyes , op. cit., p. 2092). What coordinates all of these modules? The sources I have read have been a bit vague about the actual role of any controller in the mind and that could be another module. 9 Heyes (op. cit.) argued that this model can be improved by assuming continuity between Homo sapiens and other species and thus massively extending the time base during which natural selection can occur and potentially influence the models of minds of people today. The details of these arguments between one school and the other would be beyond my remit and in any case I don’t have the scope of both knowledge and understanding to do them justice. However making an assumption that there is continuity between animal and human would appear to fit in with the zeitgeist of many cultures today. Consideration and concern for animal husbandry and the role of animals in their natural habitats, as well as exploration of living organisms with more sophisticated technology, and generally a lessening of the influence of some religions that elevate humanity to a status unattainable by animals all contribute to the climate of the times.
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