This is part of the Persuasion series. Find the previous article here.
Time for a deep dive on why the public service feed matters.
Let’s start with the gorilla experiment. Here is how it works: participants view a short clip in which players wearing jerseys pass a ball between each other. The players wear two different colors. The administrators instruct participants to count the number of passes between players of a certain jersey. It’s an easy task, but requires concentration. The clip features these aforementioned passers, along with an oddity.
That oddity is a man who, wearing a gorilla suit, walks from the right side of the screen into the middle of the passers, beats his chest momentarily, then walks off the left side of the screen. Here’s the fun part of the experiment. The vast majority of the participants never notice the gorilla man. They are so ensconced in their focus towards the task of pass-counting that they literally never perceive his presence.
The most important takeaway I think you should get from this study is the absolute primacy of goal orientation in human behavior and action. Humans are very good at focusing in on a target. In an evolutionary biology framework we can understand this as a consequence of aeons of hunter behavior. The only species with more finely crafted and capable eyes are flighted raptors, a creature even more aligned with hunting than we. Humans focus. It’s very important that you understand this.
Now, prehistorically, men hunt and women do not, so I’m not sure how well this generalizes across the sex divide. Lobster Finance is predominately male and we can only speak to our own experience. It may be that this feature of people applies only to men.
However, if you have seen how girls orient themselves in a room which contains a desired male, I think you will agree that female humans also have an attribute wherein they focus, razor-sharp, on a tasty target. It just so happens that the beast they seek to skewer is a more, well, human beast.
Enough about such pleasantries. Let’s make sure to appreciate the magnitude of what the gorilla study tells us about how goal orientation affects us physiologically. What I want to emphasize is the fact that, by altering a study participant’s goal orientation, the researchers successfully created a drastic difference in the participant’s perception of the video. An arbitrary person seeing the video with no particular goal sees the man in the gorilla suit. The study participant does not.
It’s the same video. But these two people do not perceive the same video. They perceive substantially different videos. All because of what they seek. They see a different video than each other. One way I could phrase it is: by altering goal orientation the researcher has placed two people in an identical environment but they see and perceive a substantially different world.
Some of you are starting to see where I am going with this. People with dramatically different goal orientations live in different worlds. You may have heard people talk about this with hokey woo-woo terms of phrase about “creating your own reality” and “manifesting things into being” and written it off as silly and unscientific. The point of this essay is to explain these ideas to you in a way that is boringly, and thus convincingly, scientific.
The gorilla study is scientific. It demonstrates to us the fact that goal orientation modulates perception, and therefore cannot help but modulate our action. If somebody is on the baseball field and sees the ball, he can catch it. If he cannot see the ball, it might hit him in the face. Perception modulates action, and goal orientation modulates perception.
People with differing goal orientation live in different worlds. What determines a person’s goal orientation? I submit to you that you understand your own goal orientation much less well than you would like. People tend not to understand themselves very well. Maybe almost all clinical psychologists are fraud cranks but to the degree any of them aren’t, it’s because they are capable of helping other people understand themselves through dialogue.
It’s easier to see an attribute of someone else than an attribute of yourself. This is partly a consequence of ego defense mechanisms: a person who is conscious of a flaw in himself enters a state of discomfort. Discomfort is stressful and disequilibrating to the human organism. To relieve the stress the human must solve the flaw in himself. If this is impossible then a perpetual state of self-loathing anxiety is quite suboptimal from an energetic perspective. Better to just “not notice” such things. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are all to a significant degree opaque to ourselves.
However, we can consider certain features of human life that are likely to have a large impact on overall goal orientation. The one I want to focus on here is matters of so-called identity. From a naive perspective identity is simply a label that allows us to distinguish people from each other but in reality it’s more than that. If you say a person is a firefighter and that person actually works in a corporate office all day that would be an unsuitable label. Labels connote behavior, thus identity signifies and connotes behavior.
One of the things I learned to pay much more attention to while studying a master persuader is how much care he put into crafting words that created phrases oriented around the words “you” and “I.” What’s striking about such phrases is that they are delimiters of identity. As I have broken down, identity is not just a label, it connotes action. Action connotes goal orientation. And goal orientation changes the very world you live in by the manner in which it modulates your perception (as in the gorilla video).
This is all quite abstract so I will now present a simple example. Imagine two analogous 8-year old children who differ in one simple manner by their self-perceived identity. One child has the habit of thinking and saying, “I am smart.” The other child has the habit of thinking and saying, “I am stupid.” Let’s go into more detail about how this feature of identity alters goal orientation and behavior thus altering the very world in which these two children live.
As said before a phrase like “I am smart” indicates an identity: the label “smart” is applied to the child in question. As with the “firefighter,” the label is not some abstruse language game with no bearing in reality: we only give it credence if it is in accord with an assortment of appropriate behaviors. Identities connote behaviors. What behaviors are connoted by the label of a “smart child”?
A smart child solves problems that other children do not. A smart child acts and thinks quickly. A smart child achieves a high level of performance. A smart child makes mistakes like everybody else but doesn’t get flustered by them because that doesn’t happen often and fluke events are not a reason to worry.
How does that affect this child’s goal orientation? Part of his identity connotes that he solves problems that other children do not. Suppose the child enters an environment where he is presented with a problem. His goal orientation is immediately aligned towards a goal of successfully and rapidly achieving a solution.
Why? Because that’s a part of his identity. That’s what a smart child does. Identity is not some abstract detached cloud that has no impact on the real world. Identity connotes goal orientation and goal orientation drives perception and behavior. So this child locks into that particular goal orientation. What sorts of elements of the world will the child now perceive as a result of this goal orientation?
He will observe all sorts of data that his unthinking self considers plausibly useful to solving the problem. His thinking self will immediately get to considering pieces of this data and figuring out if they can be used to solve this problem. Is he guaranteed to solve the problem? No, but his physiology is at least taking concrete steps to do so. His body is establishing the necessary prerequisites to solve the problem.
Let us contrast the child who is “stupid.” Part of the behavior that this identity connotes is that he does not solve problems that other children do solve. Suppose that child enters an environment where he is presented with a problem. How does his identity impact his goal orientation and therefore his perception and action?
Well, a “stupid child” tends not to solve problems. There is no need for him to solve the problem. Being near a problem and doing nothing about it is just what stupid children do. That’s the goal orientation connoted by the identity of being a stupid child. What world will that child see in this environment?
Well, he could focus in on all sorts of data that is not helpful to solving the problem. Having taught kids in my day I can describe some of the patterns. Some kids become intensely interested in any person moving nearby. Perhaps they have an identity that is suited to a goal orientation of studying and learning about other people. I don’t know. I’m not them. Whatever their identity is, it doesn’t align them with a goal orientation of solving problems rapidly and effectively once encountered.
Another, and worse pattern, is the child who simply stares off into space and does nothing. After all, he is a “stupid child” and nobody has any expectations of a stupid child. If he simply stares off into space and does nothing for 10 minutes nobody will think anything of it. It perfectly corresponds to his identity, and identity connotes behavior. For these kids the necessary data to solve the problem could be right in front of their face. But just like with the gorilla experiment, since they are not oriented to solving the problem of seeing the gorilla, they literally do not see the relevant data that allows them to solve the problem.
This is all the data I was talking about before that the child with the “smart” identity starts processing instantly. Just like with the gorilla experiment, the smart child is taking in all the data that could help him to solve the problem. For the experiment he would be highly focused on the passers. There’s no chance he will miss a data point right in front of his face that will help him solve the problem. He will see it. He will use it to solve the problem.
The smart child and the stupid child literally live in the same world. At the same time, the smart child and the stupid child live in entirely different worlds from the perspective of their perception. It is in living in a different world, a world where he can see the relevant data, that the smart child fulfills the prerequisite to solve the problem whereas the stupid child does not.
As I said before, perhaps the smart child is capable of converting the data into a solution and the stupid child is not. In which case this doesn’t matter. But in a meaningful percentage of scenarios, both children are capable of converting that data into a solution and the distinguishing factor is that one sees the data and the other does not. Purely because they live in different worlds.
Identity connotes behavior. Behavior influences goal orientation. Goal orientation modulates perception. Action is a function of perception and therefore perception alters outcomes.
It’s not hokey imaginary magic. There is a real and concrete physiological mechanism that changes the future of the man who thinks he is “rich” (regardless of his current net worth) compared to the man who thinks he is “poor.” They live in different worlds. They perceive and therefore capitalize upon different opportunities. Similarly with a man who directs his goal orientation by saying “I want to learn” versus a man whose goal orientation is directed by a father figure who often tells him “you’ll forget.”
Since “I” and “you” statements are effective at altering personal identities, we should care a lot about the “I” and “you” statements we utter, hear, write, and read. They will alter our identity. Which matters a lot. Because by altering goal orientation it changes our perception and therefore the very world we live in. What world would you like to observe?