🧠 The Psychology of Faces, Attention, Crowds, and Other People

First off, we look at the science of how we follow crowds. And when we don't.

Does cannabis actually help you come up with better ideas? The science tells us.

We see how faces get attention, even if they're not really faces, and the psychological processes of how we get to know others.

And don't forget we're here to help. From improving your marketing with psychology and data to making your communications more persuasive. Tell us what you're trying to do and we'll show you how we can help.

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Look! But will you?

The famous experiments of Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s showed how we tend to follow the crowd. If a large group of people is looking in one direction, we tend to follow their gaze.

But do we just follow the crowd? Always? When do we do our own thing?

Dr Ulysses Bernardet in the Computer Science Research Group at Aston University, set find out.

Using a special VR experience which showed a group of people, explosions and various other events, they discovered that it’s actually a two-stage process.

“As [respondents] watched the movie, 10 computer-generated ‘spectators’ within the VR simulated street were operated by AI to attempt to influence the direction of the gaze of the individual participants.

“Dr Bernardet, said: “Humans demonstrate an initial tendence to follow others – a reflexive, imitative process. But this is followed by a more deliberate, strategic processes when a person will decide whether to copy others around them, or not.”

This suggests that people can be “sparked” to initially follow the crowd, but they need some sort of “fuel” to keep following.

Photo by Tom Wilto

Faces get attention

There is a specific part of the brain that is dedicated to processing faces.

That explains why we tend to pay more attention to images (and ads) with faces in them.

But we also pay attention to “pareidolian” ads - that is ads with face-like images in them (that are not actually faces).

The two studies, “examined the effects of exposing consumers to print ads containing faces or pareidolian images for short time lapses (0.5, 1, and 3 seconds).

“The results show that both ad types capture viewers’ attention and are more frequently recognized than advertisements that do not feature faces or face-like objects. Moreover, both face ads and pareidolian ads increase brand recognition and ad preference.”

Photo by Pixabay

The psychology of familiarity

How do we get to know others

A new study by an international research team from George Washington University and the University of Heidelberg reveals new insights.

Their framework shows that we get to know others using two concepts. Granularity and Reference Points.

Granularity “refers to how coarse or fine-grained associations are between different types of knowledge. The better we know someone or the more similar someone is to people we know, the more fine-grained our representations become”.

Reference points are “snippets of prior knowledge, initial estimates based on us or our peer group”. These are the starting point when we meet new people.

Then over time, these two concepts allow us to “generalize from specific traits to holistic impressions of people”.

Photo by Helena Lopes

Does cannabis make you more creative?

Need to come up with some ideas? Will being high lead to better ones?

This study, reported in the Harvard Business Review inhales this particular topic and breathes out the result.

Spoiler alert: no, it seems not

Over a series of tests, respondents were given creative tasks which they evaluated themselves and which were then independently evaluated.

Those under the influence of cannabis were, perhaps unsurprisingly, more jovial. And this did lead them to evaluate their own ideas - and those of others - as more creative.

But when the work-related creative ideas were independently evaluated, they were not found to be any more creative than those generated by “sober” teams.

Sorry.

Photo by Kindel Media

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