Moral Tribes / Us and Them

Understanding the mysterious intensity of conflict in American politics today. Rights and Rules … Tribal moralities in conflict in e pluribus unum … “In this chapter, we’ve considered six psychological tendencies that exacerbate intertribal conflict. First, human tribes are tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Second, tribes have genuine disagreements about how societies should be organized, emphasizing, to different extents, the rights of individuals versus the greater good of the group.

How People Really Make Decisions

Some of the international research we build upon won a Nobel Prize – in Economics. We are constantly studying the latest in the exciting field of cognitive research and applying whatever we feel works to expand our context. Below is a link to a BBC story on some of this research about some of the factors involved – and the remarkable notion of someone winning a Nobel Prize for Economics

To Press the “Right Buttons,” You Have to Find Out What They Are

When most folks talk about “targeting,” they mean selecting who they are aiming their messaging at. When Emotional Context talks about targeting, we mean defining what it is that really matters to your customers. (If you get this right, they will find you!) One example was a pharma research, with a new pediatric antibiotic. The clients defined five different “features” (or attributes) of the medication, so we went looking into

WYSIATI

The conscious mind requires effort, but the unconscious mind is constantly at work to make sense of the world and to be prepared for instant decisions. When a saber-toothed cat appeared in early man’s peripheral vision, he did not spend a lot of time contemplating his best options. He instantly reacted with the best information he had at that point from all his past experiences that might relate to the

What we KNOW ain’t necessarily so.

Look at the two lines above and ignore the chevron – arrow shapes connected to them. Which is longer? Take a moment to be sure. Okay, now measure them. Which is longer? So now you KNOW which is longer, right? Neither. They are the same. This is a famous optical illusion that you have doubtless seen before. So you REALLY know they are the same. But … how do they