Great story

[libertango]

Evelyn Rodriguez has a post that talks a lot about authenticity. She quotes a long-ish story from Tom Asacker's book, A Clear Eye for Branding. The story is good enough that I'm going to quote it and my posted comment as well.


Luckily for you, I'm putting it behind a cut.

Here's the story:

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In the [psychological] study two people, A and B, were seated on opposite sides of the dividing wall, looking at a screen. Each person was instructed to learn by trial and error how to recognize the difference between slides of healthy cells and sick cells. For each slidee,  they had to push one of two buttons in front of them, "Healthy" or "Sick," at which point one of two lamps, labeled "Right" or "Wrong," would light up.

Person A received true feedback, meaning that his "Right" lamp would light up when he was correct and his "Wrong" lamp would light up when he was incorrect. These people - the A's - learned to tell the difference between healthy and sick cells with a high level of accuracy. Person B's situation was quite different. His right or wrong lamps lit up based not on his own guesses but on Person A's guesses. He didn't know it, but he was searching  for an order where none could possibly exist.

A and B were then asked to work together to establish the rules for determining healthy vs. sick cells. The A's told the B's what they had learned and what simple characteristics they had looked for to tell
the difference. B's explanations, by necessity, were subtle and quite complex - and completely bogus.

Here's the amazing part. After the collaboration, all B's and nearly all A's came to believe that the delusional B had a much better understanding of healthy vs. sick cells. In fact, A's were impressed with B's sophisticated brilliance, and felt inferior because of the pedestrian simplicity of their assumptions. In a follow-up test, the B's showed almost no improvement, but the A's scores dropped because the A's had incorporated some B's completely baseless ideas.

This study teaches us two important aspects with regards to branding or, for that matter, any business concept. [Or for that matter anything, says Evelyn.] First, once an explanation for something has taken hold in our minds, information that should refute that explanation may produce not an appropriate change of mind but rather an elaboration of the flawed explanation. It also teaches us to beware (be aware) of abstuse ideas, no matter how convincing the presentation or how brilliant the so-called expert.

- Tom Asacker, A Clear Eye for Branding

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Here's my reply:

I'll tell you the truth. Not unlike the way I read Cluetrain Manifesto and thought of it as a book about politics and public life (rather than "only" business as such)... I read the story of the As and Bs, and think that would explain a lot about our politics of late.

Regardless of where one stands ideologically, I point out:

* Our rationale for being in Iraq is complicated (and changing).

* Our rationale for not being able to find Osama bin Laden is complicated (and changing).

* Our rationale for the existence of Guantanamo is complicated.

Etc., etc., etc.

It's possible that these are complicated stories, and they're being told as simply as possible.

It's also possible they're not.

Here are some more ideas, and think about how complicated the answers tend to be:

* Why doesn't our press report more on substantive issues, rather than, "If it bleeds, it leads"?

* Why don't people care more about the deterioration of public life?

* Why do developers continue to build primarily suburbs ("primarily" by acres developed), even though multiuse downtowns provide much higher returns per square foot of property?

* Why are Americans so scared, when so many indicators show we have less and less to be frightened of?

Again... Those types of questions tend to have conventional wisdom stories for their answers. How complicated are they? How much do they sound like Bs rationalizing to As?