'The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them, says Rory Sutherland. At TEDxAthens, he makes a compelling case for how reframing is the key to happiness.' -- "Our perception is leaky."

'Names are nothing; naming is everything. To name a thing is to truly know it. As Ursula Le Guin said, “for magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” It is in fact useful to think of naming an interrogative act that creates what it questions. Demand insistently enough to know the name, rank and number of a thing, and you will eventually find out. Even if your mind has to manufacture an answer. We name to liberate, and we name to imprison. We name to flatter, and we name to insult. We name to own, and we name to be owned. We name to subsume, and have subsumed. We name to frame, and we name to reframe. You name to create, destroy, fragment and churn. You name a product and launch it. You give a dog a bad name and hang it. To name is also to hide and cloak. To switch stories and manufacture realities. This is the world of Don Draper. He dons a mask, and drapes new realities over old ones. Starting with his own life.'

'Meaningful actions exist because we find or impose patterns on the specific behaviours we observe or otherwise learn about. The patterns are constructions, but once generated, they are maintained because they disambiguate reality and thereby provide coherent understanding and a stable platform for subsequent thought and behaviour. Because they are constructions, however, they can admit to tremendous variability across people and contexts. Hence, the certainty of action that exists for each individual embedded in a particular context coexists with the uncertainty of action across individuals and contexts. That said, there is one metric for disambiguating action that seems solid and reflects a shared reality. The multiple act identities for an action tend to be organized in a hierarchical manner. A simple criterion is useful for sorting an action's multiple identities into a hierarchy: One act identity is higher-level than another identity if it makes sense to say that one does the former by doing the latter. -- ...when two or more plausible identities are available, people are inclined to choose the identity that provides the most comprehensive understanding of what they are doing, plan to do, or have done. -- #Social Influence: The influence agent first induces the target to consider the relevant action in concrete, low-level terms. Simply describing the action in terms of its details can induce low-level identification, as can presenting the target with a surplus of concrete information regarding the action. From this low-level state, the target experiences a heightened press for coherence. On his or her own, the target might emerge with a higher-level identity that reflects past perspectives or perhaps one that reflects a new integration. But if the influence agent offers a message that provides the missing integration before the target has demonstrated emergence on his or her own, the target may embrace this message as an avenue of emergent understanding, even if it conflicts with his or her prior conception.'

'Mentalization is the process by which an observer views a target as possessing higher cognitive faculties such as goals, intentions and desires. Mentalization can be assessed using action identification paradigms, in which observers choose mentalistic (goals-focused) or mechanistic (action-focused) descriptions of targets’ actions. Typically, healthy adults mentalize liked others more than disliked others... This discrepancy is reflected in discrepancies in action identification across targets. Liked
targets’ actions are consistently identified at higher levels than disliked targets’... This suggests that mentalization as assessed by action identification tasks varies as a function of the observer’s impression of the actor. Activation in several regions increased when participants considered the actions of disliked targets. These regions included the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral anterior insula and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These are regions consistently associated with negative emotions such as disgust, anger and pain...'

'People change their conceptions of what they are doing either by moving from a higher level to a lower one, or by moving from a lower level to a higher one. This means that in moving from one high-level conception of an action to another, the person must necessarily pass through a transitional state in which the specifics of the action come to mind. This formulation indicates that when people hold a fairly comprehensive and general conception of what they are doing, that conception will serve as an intention to act and will remain unperturbed by suggestions that the act has some alternative general identity. Thus, the theory explains why people are not always willing to believe it when someone suggests to them a new high-level conception of their action. It is only when people come to identify an action in terms of its details that they lose sight of their initial high-level understanding of the act and become susceptible to information indicating that the act can be identified in another high-level way.'

'If successfully enacted, an action tends to be identified at a relatively high level; if unsuccessfully enacted, it tends to be identified in lower-level terms. ...in the face of failure, the actor is likely to think about the action in more mechanistic terms. -- ...the extension of action identification principles to the communication of action allows for a certain "coyness" in self-presentation. Rather than boasting of one's personal competence, a person might nonetheless communicate this image of himself or herself through high-level identities. And rather than admitting failure or explaining it away, one can simply (and honestly) describe what one has done in mechanistic terms, thereby circumventing the presentation of oneself as incompetent. Finally, one can cultivate an image of modesty in the eyes of others by describing action-even successful action-in relatively low-level terms.'

'...people identify the actions they perform at the highest level they can.' -- Links to PDF papers

Action Identification: High/Why vs Low/How: "We have meaning and significance at the high levels of identification... When you focus at low levels there's less self-relevance to what you're doing." -- Being vs Doing

The "depletion effect" from Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow: 'Kahneman's book revolves around his distinction between knee-jerk "System 1" thinking and logical "System 2" thinking. When the costs of cognition rise, we use System 2 less, giving impulsive System 1 freer reign.' -- 'I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another, substitution... Faced with a genuinely difficult question, [people] answer a different, easier question, then conflate the answer to their question with the answer to your question. ...substitution is a plausible explanation of not only the absurdity of many popular views about how the economy works, but people's certainty about these absurdities.'

'I’ve talked more than once in these essays about the immense role that narratives play in our mental and social lives. In what we are pleased to call "primitive societies," a rich body of mythology and legend provides each person with a range of narratives that can be applied to any given situation and make sense of it. Learning the stories, and learning how to apply them to life’s events, is the core of a child’s education in these societies, and a learned person is very often distinguished, more than anything else, by the number of traditional stories he or she knows by heart. More technologically advanced societies often, though not invariably, move away from this, consigning their inheritance of stories to children—think, for example, of the role of fairy tales in nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial societies—while narrowing down the range of stories adults are supposed to think with, until all that’s left are variations on one narrative. Serious thinking in these societies is by definition thinking that follows the accepted narrative.'

'Once we move beyond the simple satisfaction of needs, we move into the complex satisfaction of wants. And wants are hard to measure and difficult to understand. Which makes marketing the fascinating exercise it is. When you are busy telling stories to people who want to hear them, you’ll be tempted to tell stories that just don’t hold up. Lies. Deceptions. The thing is, lying doesn’t pay off any more. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast. -- “What’s your story?” “Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?” “Is it true?” -- If what you’re doing matters, really matters, then I hope you’ll take the time to tell a story. A story that resonates and a story that can become true. When you find a story that works, live that story, make it true, authentic and subject to scrutiny. All marketers are storytellers, only the losers are liars.'

"ANGER, HATE, EXTREMIST, IGNORANT, ANTI-, AMMUNITION, CONSTITUTION, RACIST, VIOLENT, CONSPIRACY..." -- Yo, MSNBC. Imma let u finish but the Soviet Union had the best propagandists of all time. OF ALL TIME!

'Business professor David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form (% of all working/employed tribes): #1. "Life Sucks" (2%) #2. "My Life Sucks" (25%) #3. "I'm Great" (48%) #4. "We're Great" (22%) #5. "Life Is Great" (2%) -- Leaders are fluent in all stages. Those tribes that work at stage five change the world.'

Remembered prediction: "...you don't remember what you actually predicted. But you revise your memory of what you actually predicted continuously to make it consistent with current events. Not only you do that with your prediction, you also do that with your intentions." -- Feedback preference -- 'Confirmation bias: ...like politicians they do tell you what they did for you not what they didn't do for you. -- Psychological bias: Never take advice from someone wearing suit and tie. It works. It liness up perfectly to the Mediocristan (simple, social, observable) vs Extremistan (complex, virtual, unobservable) distinction. -- Our skepticism is domain dependent. -- Rare Events: Elephants are matrimonial; the ladies dominate, and the old ladies are kept around. Guess why, because they remember droughts, they remember what happened in 1906 or where they have to go to find water, so remember rare events. ...these few have a lot of knowledge, they don't have theories.'

'According to psychologist and cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer, cults flourish during periods of social and political turbulence and "during breakdowns in the structure and rules of the prevailing society." Cults were prevalent after the fall of Rome, during the French Revolution, and in England during the Industrial Revolution. Cults arose in Japan after World War II, and in Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Communist regime... -- The self-serving bias [...] leaves us with a dangerous illusion of invulnerability: "I'm not the kind of mindless zombie who joins a cult." But very few mindless zombies join cults. Instead the vast majority of cult recruits are normal, productive people--people confident in their ability to shrug off cult influence tactics. So, if I had to name the single most important defense against cult influence, it is the realization that we are all vulnerable--our friends, our families, and ourselves.'

'"Sandbox" sometimes challenges traditional narrative, but it always puts something new in its place. ...[it] transforms predetermined narrative into dynamic, responsive narrative. ...the sandbox game distinguished itself by making the responses more significant and meaningful. -- ...a common challenge in sandbox design: player commitment to open story. ...that game design is so fun in itself that, if properly packaged, it can well be reinterpreted as gameplay itself. -- Sandbox play is essentially amoral/non-moral, in the sense that real action is often governed by the hypothetical: "What happens if I run this guy over?" ...until GTAIV, the PC personality was something of a narrative problem; the hero was a bi-polar thug for whom nothing was truly out of character. Such a character is not terribly interesting... With GTAIV, however the scarred warrior turned ironical and embittered anarchist justifies much better the peculiar range of action of a GTA hero.'

'Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling... The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person. “What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it.. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. ...new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.'

d'Aquili 's and Newberg's cognitive operators: #1 Holistic: allows us to view reality as a whole or as a gestalt #2 Reductionistr: allows us to look at the whole picture and break it down into an analysis of individual parts #3 Causal: permits reality to be viewed in terms of causal sequences #4 Abstractive: permits the formation of general concepts from the perception of individual facts #5 Binary: allows us to extract meaning from the external world by ordering abstract elements into dyads. A dyad is a group of two elements that are opposed to each other in their meaning. Therefore, dyads include good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, happy and sad, and heaven and hell…each opposite, in some ways, derives its meaning from its contrast with the other opposite #6 Quantitativer: permits the abstraction of quantity from the perception of various elements #7 Emotional Value: permits us to assign a particular emotional value to various elements of perception and cognition

"Evolution is real and science points to the existence of God." You know that spark that set off the Big Bang and all that stuff? Well, that's God, that is. Yeah, I know! Amazing, huh? Like, totally blows my mind, maan! So cool. God. Bang! High-five, dude

"This is a revolutionary moment because so much in the traditional purview of marketing has changed. The old regime has to topple. It has been hollowed out by the new realities. We have no choice. We have to move. "

We dumped the word ‘marketing’... we felt that ‘marketing’ doesn’t really encompass the solutions that people are generating; that ‘marketing’ comes with all the bad baggage and isn’t accessible to a new generation of creative minds."

Story template for presentations: - setting - protagonist - imbalance - balance - solution... file: http://www.rmmlondon.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/Script.doc