captology ...

... or how Facebook persuaded its users to click on ads.




Captology at wikipedia
Captology at Stanford
Psychology of Facebook

5 comments:

Lee said...

If I understand hot triggers correctly, it seems to me like they should work. I'm not curious enough to open a Facebook account to find out though. Whatever Google uses doesn't seem to me to be very effective. I've never opened a Google ad.

I wonder why we haven't evolved better persuasion abilities than most of us at least seem to have? I think it's probably pretty important to survival of the species.

wolfgang said...

I don't know about Google, but one of the co-founders of Instagram was a student of B.J.Fogg and supposedly captology was an important ingredient of Instagram's success.

>> why we haven't evolved better persuasion abilities
I think some people (e.g. salesmen, politicians) have a natural talent for persuasion ...
Scott Adams thinks that your current president is a "master of persuasion".

Lee said...

>> a "master of persuasion".

Well of course if Scott Adams thinks that, it must be true! Anyway, Trump was evidently good enough at it to get elected.

I guess Goebbels must have been a master of it too. I think the trick is probably to say things with conviction that a lot of people are already inclined to, or want to believe. Something similar seems to be the basis for captology.

I've never been able to figure out why people want to believe that sucrose is good and high fructose corn syrup is bad. I guess the advertising agencies that work for the sugar beet industry must be a lot better at persuading than the advertising agencies that work for the corn industry.

wolfgang said...

Scott Adams has persuaded a lot of people that Dilbert is funny, so perhaps he really
knows something about that, but I remain skeptical.

The main skills of your president seem to be: i) calling people names, ii) a complete lack of any understanding of anything, which sometimes confuses his opponents and iii) an amazing ego and shamelessness.
Somehow this is sufficient ...

But I would not compare him with Goebbels, who was smart and pure evil.
I think Trump is neither smart nor evil.

Lee said...

>> your president

I find a solipsistic view especially pleasing on that issue.

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