Cut & Paste into your own notes

Think about a product that you use in your daily life. What are its main competitors (i.e., other options you might choose)?
Are they within each other's zone of ambiguity? For you? For others?
What beliefs do you have about it (and competitors) that you may be assimilating into your judgments of it? (try to be specific here)
If your answer to the above is "none", then think about it a lot more carefully - keep in mind that you are unlikely to be aware of these influences because you don't realize they are happening, even when they are. Really try to sketch out everything you know about this product, and question yourself whether it might assimilate even a little into your perception of it
 

Perception pt 2 (evaluate & act)

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  • Apparent reality is what happens within our working-memory. Whatever ‘vectors’ model we make of the world we perceive, we experience this as the truth (whether or not a truly objective deity who was watching might agree).
  • Assimilation is what happens when we combine two ideas into one. This happens a lot in perception when top-down ideas are merged into bottom-up information from our senses, and we use this to create an apparent reality within our working memory that we feel is the truth. This causes our bottom-up perceptions to be ‘tidied up’ in the directon of our top-down beliefs (i.e., we expect it to be funny, so are more likely to interpret it as actually funny).
  • Contrast is what happens when we notice that our bottom-up perceptions are far from what we expected, and so we perceive the thing as even further away from expectations than it objectively might be. We are expecting it to be funny and it isn’t, so we think it’s REALLY dull. This seems to be relatively rare in CB contexts.
  • Assimilation and contrast can only really happen when there is sufficient ambiguity in the stimuli being examined. When something clearly tastes good and something else is clearly bad, then branding doesn’t have much room to matter. But when two things taste similar, and one of those options assimilates to an expectation of being extra delicious, then that might strongly push a consumer to prefer it over its rivals. This is arguably common in marketing.
  • When we see a thing, it can connect very directly to goals that tell us what we might do with that thing. This is called ‘affordances’. A keyboard affords typing, because when you look at one your mind automatically suggests that you can put your fingers on it and make letters come out. This is a useful idea, especially to designers. But it is useful to look at any commercial thing, and think about how different types of people are going to naturally gravitate to interacting with it. Think about affordances to make sure it is easy for them to order your drinks, or read your page, or whatever else they are supposed to be able to do.