AS Less Susceptible to Product Manipulation? Possibly..

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https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/07/10/wh ... tic-people

July 10, 2017
Why autistic people may be less susceptible to marketing tricks
By Emma Young

We know from past research that autistic people process the world differently at a perceptual level, including showing reduced sensitivity to context. One consequence is that they’re better than average at finding figures in complex shapes. But does this way of looking at the world also influence their higher-level decision-making? According to a new study in Psychological Science, it does: William Skylark and his University of Cambridge colleagues George Farmer and Simon Baron-Cohen found that people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) – as well as people in the general population with relatively high levels of autistic traits – make more “conventionally rational” decisions, which could influence everything from how they vote to what products they choose to buy.

The team recruited 90 men and women who had been diagnosed with an ASC and 212 neurotypical controls and presented them with ten consecutive pairs of products, which differed in each case on two dimensions (for example, one USB stick (A) had relatively high capacity but low longevity, while the other (B) had low capacity but high longevity). Each pair was also accompanied by a third “decoy” product. In every case, the participants had to choose which product was “best”.

Participants saw each product pair twice. On one occasion, it was accompanied by a decoy that was fractionally inferior compared with product A; on the other occasion, the decoy was fractionally inferior than product B. Earlier work using this kind of challenge has shown that while people rarely choose the decoy, it makes the product that is marginally better seem more attractive than the other option.

While conventional accounts of rational choice dictate that a person’s preference be independent of the other options on offer, this often isn’t actually the case. “If one prefers salmon to steak, this should not change because frogs’ legs are added to the menu,” the researchers explained. However, the thinking of neurotypical people is swayed in exactly this way and what Skylark and his colleagues wanted to know is whether the choices of people with ASC are influenced in this way too?

They found that they were – but to a lesser extent than controls. The autistic participants made more consistent choices about which product was best, showing they were less influenced by the decoys.

When the team repeated the study with people drawn from the general population who scored either relatively high or relatively low on a measure of traits typically associated with autism, they found a similar, though less marked, difference between the two groups.

“These findings suggest that people with autism might be less susceptible to having their choices biased by the way information is presented to them – for instance, by marketing tricks when choosing between consumer products,” says Farmer. Indeed, given that choice consistency is usually seen as rational, autistic people’s reduced sensitivity to context “would provide a new demonstration that autism is not in all respects a ‘disability’,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

However, there is also work finding that in situations where someone isn’t sure about what decision to make, using context and new information about other options may be useful. (“Whereas conventional accounts of rational choice dictate choice consistency, emerging Bayesian frameworks construe preference reversals as an adaptive response to uncertainty about the value of an option,” the team explained.)

So there could be a price to pay for autistic people’s reduced sensitivity to contextual influence – and that “may be a reduction in the potentially adaptive updating of beliefs about optimum choice that comes from using local comparisons to inform decision-making,” the researchers said.


Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

Why not? The tricks are designed to deceive as many people as possible - and, as most of them are NT, they are designed to trick NT minds.
I think it's that simple.

It could have to do with usually making choices by what seems more logical and attention to detail (as opposed to big-picture what looks best choice making). Often I am very picky about what I am buying and don't pay much attention to the added things meant for marketing purposes. Recently I bought something practical and the tag said something akin to "sleek and stylish" and I said, "why would I care if someone thinks it's 'sleek and stylish' it is meant to hold my food." I actually bought the one I liked a bit less visually because it better suited my intended purpose for what I needed.

On the other hand, once I was talking to the person with me in the store saying, "it's funny how marketing actually works on people, especially kids because of the colours they choose and charact- Hey! They have Avengers spaghettios!" *runs off to look at them* (I didn't buy them though, I think spaghettios taste awful, I was just excited that there was Avengers shaped food, well, if you can call speghettios food )

Intriguing article. I think I mostly understand it, but I don't quite understand the "decoy effect," and would appreciate a clarification:

They're saying that if a person prefers salmon to steak, then adding frogs' legs to the menu can affect their decision. Are they saying they might then choose steak instead of their logical preference of salmon, or would they go for the frogs' legs? I think it's the steak, but I can't see any reason, logical or emotional, why anybody would be influenced at all by the addition of the frogs' legs, so I can't think what direction that influence would take.

This is something I've picked up on over the years when watching TV advertising. Quite often I'd think why are they advertising that way it looks so fake and undesirable?

I would tend to think that, given a different way of thinking, it makes perfect sense that NT marketing tricks wouldn't work as well on Aspies.

If one were to actually develop an ad that directly targets the Aspie way of thinking, it would probably work very well. But given that most of the population are Neurotypicals, you'd probably find that this type of ad is very rare.

In my case it is simpler. I get so disgusted with the arrogance of salesmen trying to shovel their opinion down my throat that I immediately seal them out so that I will not be subjected to such garbage. I use a USB tuner (better than the tuner in the TV) connected to a laptop driving the TV with a program to view / record all TV shows. With one click of the mouse I can kill commercials within about a half second and with a slider control can place the viewing point within about a second of the desired real show material. In the mailroom junk mail gets dumped in the trash before it ever enters my apartment. So I never do see or hear any marketing garbage. The absolute worst are those TitleMax ads with that big-mouthed clown working his mouth as wide as it will go. I may see it momentarily but never do hear it. Next worst are the local Atlanta Landmark Dodge ads. I tried to get them to do some recall service once and they didn't have a clue as to what they were doing. No wonder their ratings are so low. As always honesty is the best policy and the customer is always right but all businesses seem to have overlooked that these days out of pure arrogance.

Me too. I don't listen to them and I make a mental note not to buy that product when tv ads scream at me about some wonderful product..

My brain hurt reading that. Too many words I didn't understand.

So...autistics look at the details in supermarkets more than NTs? Help me understand this, using simple words please.

If there is a piece of low quality fruit on a plate alone - it is low quality.
However if there are two plates one has the low quality fruit, the other has fruit with a worm. Then the low quality fruit no longer appears to be as low quality, it could be seen as normal fruit.

For me I ignore advertising in newspapers, and online, unless it's very special tricky ads. And to actually browse the ads takes a massive effort, It's become ingrained in me to tune them out (they mostly all follow a set flashy bold colourful patttern).
As for products, I look at the technical specs, I don't believe the hype.
Is a problem as many junk food producers are reducing the quality of their ingredients (changes the taste) and reducing their packet sizes while increasing the prices. So now I simply stop purchasing those things all together - these idiots are shooting themselves in the foot. Also there is a segmented sales tactic, you will see this with pricing in supermakets - two crates full of the same lettuices - A. $1 each B $3 each - they have simply removed the straggly leaves from the ones in crate B - to appeal to those that are more wealthy.
This can be seen on the shelves too, week 1 chips are $4 each, week 2 chips are on special for $3.50, week 3 buy 3 packets for $6. Rich people buy at any time, medium income buy during week 2 & 3, poor people buy during week 3. In reality Week 3 is not a good deal as you have to purchase more to get the lower rate. At the end of the day the real retail price is about $3 a packet, they increase the price during week 1 to get some more money from the wealthy.

Putting it as simply as I can, reduced to bare bones:

There were three kinds of products used in this experiment. One kind was superior to the other two. Each person in the study had to choose which product group of the three groups they thought was the "best". The ASD people were better at identifying the best group than the NTs. This superior detection on the part of the ASD group was theorised to have been due to the fact that they had a greater ability to make rational decisions than the NTs.

Clear now?

Most ads make me lunge for the remote control to mute the television set. A lot of them have very annoying background music in addition to the annoying jabbering of the advertisers.

This is amazing. I have often wondered who believes anything in advertising and how any of it could work on people.

The absolute most annoying thing lately is when they use high pitched or unusual noises in ads on TV, to get people to look at the ad instead of down at their phones, tablets, or laptops. Sometimes I can't cut the commercials out because the DVRed program is new and doesn't let you fast forward so I have to sit through that "who" sound on the hotel site commercial, that #&*%^* whistling on the Nutisystems commercial, and now there's one with a high pitched dripping sound that made my husband and I both look up.
None of it makes me want to buy the product, it makes me want to slap the people who make ham-handed attempts at manipulation.

I always mute live ads or fast-forward through ads on pre-recorded shows. WHO wants to listen to all that garbage.

Why do BEFORE and AFTER pictures always look different?

So many times you read of people who have given over £££thousands to complete strangers offering future services (holiday homes, investments, business plans etc) only for it to turn out to be a scam.

Then again it was on the (phone app) news that someone had lost best part of £250 by booking a caravan holiday via a facebook page!

Regarding shopping in a supermarket. I do a limited amount (couple of times a year when away on holiday) and I find it really hard to actually tell what most products are. I see the WHOLE shelving unit full of bitty colours and products and really have to look for what I want. Everyone else seems to grab what they want and go.

So an NT would pick up any banana no matter what it looks like, while an Aspie would take the time to pick the freshest banana?

Thanks, that's certainly at the root of the 3-item trick. It interferes with the customer's intuitive sense of calibration. After some hard thinking I figured that the salmon-steak-froglegs trick probably pushes the consumer into choosing the steak, because although they normally would choose the salmon over the steak, they become mindful of the yukky texture of froglegs, and in that mental state they pick the option whose texture least resembles the froglegs, i.e. the steak.

Joe90, I too found the article rather unclear in places. I hope my explanation of the decoy trick above is clearer (and correct). Here's a pictorial explanation of the basic trick (scroll down to no.

https://brightside.me/wonder-curiositie ... to-300010/

One criticism I have about that page is that I think they over-rate the effectiveness of marketing ploys. If I understand this right, they do have some effect but not all that many people are fooled. It's still worth it to a large company because their sales volumes are huge, so a tiny change in percentage sales means a big change in absolute profit, often big enough to decide which company wins and which loses (and goes out of business), in a fiercely competitive market.

Anyway, I think the original article may well be onto something. I think Aspies are probably quite good at cutting through the crap of marketing ploys, though NTs aren't all that much more gullible. I'd like to see a test which was more grounded in real life, e.g. send Aspies and NTs shopping and see who got the best value for money.

Judging the question by looking at myself, I'm the most anti-marketing person I know. I hate the industry to pieces and I advocate a system in which all they're allowed to do is to provide (on request only) plain-text objective data on their products, which would have to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Even the use of an exclamation mark would be illegal.

I don't watch live television. Even if it were free in the UK I wouldn't watch it. I stick to videos which have had the ads removed. On the web I use a good ad blocker and boycott websites that insist I disable it. I block tracking as far as possible, I use cunning filters to kill spam. I'm on the Telephone Preference List and the Mail Preference List (services which reduce unsolicited advertising). I got an article in the local paper to stop one company from pestering me (i.e. I gave them bad publicity). I'm thinking of getting a Call Saint to further block unwanted cold-callers. I'm ashamed to say I've not yet put a "No Junk Mail" sticker on my letterbox, but apparently Royal Mail postal workers are instructed to ignore those. When I do get junk mail, I obliterate my address, mark it Return To Sender, and put it back in the post box. I killed Cortana on Windows 10, and have acquired several old computers so I can use Windows XP forever for offline work (and online work too, until the web ceases to be compatible with it).