Is there a connection between how smart you are and the genes you inherits from your parents? Or do social, cultural, and economic factors play a more important role in how well one ranks in intelligence quota than the nature of his make-up?
Malcolm Gladwell adds his perspective to the Race-IQ debate in this weeks New Yorker with his insightful article, None of the Above: What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
Billions and billions of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of new drugs but vanishingly few useful drugs are actually being developed. Dr. Safi Bahcall, the president and C.E.O. of the biotechnology company Synta Pharmaceuticals, and Malcolm Gladwell talk about how mistakes lead to great scientific discoveries and how big drug companies hamper innovation.
Check out their talk, Surrendipity: 2012 from the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
The interesting thing about the claim of a subliminal influence contained within popular music when played backwards is that the messages are very difficult (if not impossible) to discern unless you’ve been primed to hear them on a conscious level.
I’ve been receiving emails wanting to know how this apparent lack of influence ties in with research that demonstrates subliminal messages can coerce unwary buyers into making purchases they would not otherwise have considered?
A short story is in order, (stop me if you’ve heard this one) Fort Lee, N.J., 1957. Unsuspecting film goers are enjoying “Picnic”, with William Holden and Kim Novak. In the projection room, an important marketing experiment is being staged. Researcher James Vicary has installed a tachistoscope, a machine that can inject subliminal images of tiny fractions of a second—far below that of a person’s conscious threshold. Every five seconds and for a duration of just 1/3000th of a second, Vicary alternated two messages. One read, “Drink Coca-cola” and the other, “Hungry? Eat Popcorn”.
Vicary’s results were spectacular! Coca-cola sales jumped 18.1%; popcorn sales 57.8%. Vicary dubbed this “subliminal advertising”, the practise of manipulating consumers to make purchases they might not normally make.
And if you believe that, I’ve got a pet rock I’d like to sell you.
Advertisers and regulators doubted Vicary’s story from the beginning, so another researcher, Dr. Henry Link, duplicated Vicary’s experiment and found no evidence that people reacted to the messages. In a 1962 interview, Mr. Vicary admitted the data was all fabricated to gain attention for his business. Some critics have since expressed doubt that he ever conducted the experiments at all.
However, the legend lives on. To this day a great many people still believe Vicary’s claims and will apparently never be convinced otherwise.
As numerous studies over the last few decades have demonstrated, subliminal advertising doesn’t work; in fact, it never worked, and the whole premise was based on a lie from the very beginning.
According to a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale were able to alter people’s judgments by simply priming them with either hot or cold coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee and asked for a hand with the cup.
That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
As improbable as it may seem, findings like this one have continued to pour forth in psychological research in recent years.
New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
The article goes on to remind readers that, “studies of products promising subliminal improvement, for things like memory and self-esteem, found no effect”.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink—here’s a very short audio snippet from chapter 2 (650k mp3).
Paul Dunay, of Buzz Marketing for Technology has a recap of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent speech at the World Innovation Forum about, what else, innovation.
Paul found an opportunity to speak with Gladwell during the conference and recorded his interview.
Gladwell illustrates some of his points from his book, The Tipping Point, and what I found to be quite interesting, how the “last mile problem of marketing” is still trouble for marketers.
“The last mile in word of mouth marketing is personal relationships. At the end of the day I’m most powerfully influenced by those I know, respect and love,” explains Gladwell. The most complicated marketing scheme in the world won’t have a very strong affect on any given individual if the people that that individual trusts aren’t moved by the product.
Gladwell also talks a little bit about his new book. He says it’s about exceptional performers and high achievers, how they got there, and what we can learn from them.
Listen to the “Buzz Marketing for Technology’s” interview with Malcolm Gladwell.
Cultural phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell gave a talk at the New Yorker Conference 2012: Stories From the Near Future. His talk Genius: 2012 illustrates the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving.
The Design Trust Council held their inaugural event last Wednesday in the Founders Room at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink) was joined by fellow New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik(Through the Children’s Gate, Paris to the Moon), in an entertaining and provocative conversation titled “Gothamitis.”
Gladwell and Gopnik, both keen observers of New York civic life, each relate different perspectives on “Gothamitis” what current development trends mean for the soul of New York City.
Listen to the entire conversation (116.5mb mp3), along with audience questions via Design Trust’s blog, I ♥ Public Space.
Email me if you’d like a copy of the mp3, I still have a copy on my old hard drive
My favorite author goes head to head with Stephen Colbert.
View it on The Colbert Nation site.
A couple of years ago my Seminar for New Media professor showed our class a video about the symbiotic relationship between the media and today’s youth, cool Hunting, and how the network between the five media giants operates. The following embedded video is the same show.
The Merchants of Cool: They spend their days sifting through reams of market research data. They conduct endless surveys and focus groups. They comb the streets, the schools, and the malls, hot on the trail of the “next big thing” that will snare the attention of their prey—a market segment worth an estimated $150 billion a year.
Malcolm Gladwell makes a short interviewee appearance in The Merchants of Cool and reiterates some of his thoughts from his best selling book, “The Tipping Point”.
Hit play or Watch Fullscreen at Google Video.
Find the video on PBS.org.
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Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on predicting box office hits with algorithms relates Hollywood’s efforts to determine the value of a movie when it’s still in script form. The major problem they are facing is that with so many variables it’s hard to tell which elements are helping or hindering box office returns. It seems to boil down to the fact that in the end, “nobody knows anything about anything” or do they? As Gladwell’s works usually are, this one is a tremendously good read.
I’ve been enjoying the TED conference speeches lately. I particularly liked the ones by Malcalm Gladwell and Ze Frank. I haven’t listened to every one, but the ones I have are so good that I think it’s safe to recommend them all so, subscribe here. Update: The site has changed. Try subscribing to this feed in iTunes.