Psychology of marketing
communication
Learning, attention
Learning
Process of acquiring and passing on the experience, habits,
skills, knowledge, values, etc.
Learning helps people and animals to develop and change
the inborn qualities and behavior patterns in a way that
enables origination of a specific culture, differing from the
culture in other societies.
Learning – part of individual development - maturing +
reproduction of culture
Learning
All we know and can do is either inborn or learnt.
Inborn: coughing, excretion, reflexes
Learnt: how to walk, talk, order meal, school knowledge
Unit: experience
Result/consequence: more or less permanent change in
behaviour (fire-kid).
Learning – closely related with memory that stores the
experience and enables it to be retrieved.
Types
Learning as an activity can be divided into:
• Spontaneous acquisition of own experiences (learning);
• Informal transfer of habits, values and skill within family and
wider community/society;
• Formal learning (schools).
How we learn
• Habituation- we get accustomed to various phenomena
• Senzibilization
• Conditioning – the most simple form of learning of animals and
kids, - adults – limited
• Learning by concept
• Senso- motorical learning – developing motorical skills and
learning by demonstration (walking, manipulation with toys)
• Verbal
• Intellectual – development of skills and abilities to solve difficult,
complex problems
• Social – social communication, interaction and perception, social
skills (how to live with people and among people)
How we learn
• Imprinting – genetically based, in early childhood
(ducklings imprint the image of mother and they follow it,
ball/shoe)
• PRIMING – (subliminal level) – commercials
• Research
How we learn
Conditioning
• Classic conditioning - I.P. Pavlov
• Passive
How we learn
Conditioning
• Operant conditioning – B.F. Skinner
• Active
• Rewards and punishment
• Reinforcement:
• Continous (after every adequate reaction) – pack of
drinks
• Irregular (seasonal sale)
Edward L. Thorndike - 2 important laws related to learning
Excercising low : by reinforce by repetition
The law of effect : what leads to pleasant consequences, we tend
to repeat, what leads to unpleasant consequences, we tend to
leave
The halo effect is a cognitive bias
in which an observer's overall
impression of a person influences
the observer's feelings and
thoughts about that person's
character
In "A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings", Thorndike asked two commanding officers to evaluate their soldiers in terms of physical qualities
(neatness, voice, physique, bearing, and energy), intellect, leadership skills, and personal qualities (including dependability, loyalty, responsibility,
selflessness, and cooperation). His goal was to see how the ratings of one characteristic affected other characteristics.
Thorndike's experiment showed how there was too great a correlation in the commanding officers' responses. In his review he stated: "The
correlations were too high and too even. For example, for the three raters next studied the average correlation for physique with intelligence is 0.31;
for physique with leadership, 0.39; and for physique with character, 0.28".
The ratings of one of the special qualities of an officer, often started a trend in the rating results. If an officer had a particular "negative" attribute given
off to the commanding officer, it would correlate in the rest of that soldier's results.
Role of attractiveness
A person’s attractiveness has also been found to produce a halo effect. Attractiveness provides a valuable aspect of the halo effect to consider because
of its multifaceted nature; attractiveness may be influenced by several specific traits. These perceptions of attractiveness may affect judgments tied to
personality traits. Physical attributes contribute to perceptions of attractiveness (i.e. weight, hair, eye color). For example, someone who is perceived
as attractive, due in part to physical traits, may be more likely to be perceived as kind or intelligent. The role of attractiveness in producing the halo
effect has been illustrated through a number of studies. Recent research, for example, has revealed that attractiveness may affect perceptions tied to
life success and personality.[ In this study, attractiveness was correlated with weight, indicating that attractiveness itself may be influenced by various
specific traits. Included in the personality variables were trustworthiness and friendliness. People perceived as being more attractive were more likely
to be perceived as trustworthy and friendly. What this suggests is that perceptions of attractiveness may influence a variety of other traits, which
supports the concept of the halo effect.
Social learning
Learning by observing –observational learning.
Bobo experiment
Bandura's social cognitive learning theory states that there are four stages involved in observational learning:
• Attention: Observers cannot learn unless they pay attention to what's happening around them. This process is
influenced by characteristics of the model, such as how much one likes or identifies with the model, and by
characteristics of the observer, such as the observer's expectations or level of emotional arousal.
•
Retention/Memory: Observers must not only recognize the observed behavior but also remember it at some later time.
This process depends on the observer's ability to code or structure the information in an easily remembered form or to
mentally or physically rehearse the model's actions.
•
Initiation/Motor: Observers must be physically and/intellectually capable of producing the act. In many cases the
observer possesses the necessary responses. But sometimes, reproducing the model's actions may involve skills the
observer has not yet acquired. It is one thing to carefully watch a circus juggler, but it is quite another to go home and
repeat those acts.
•
Motivation: Unless motivated, a person does not produce learned behavior. This motivation can come from external
reinforcement, such as the experimenter's promise of reward in some of Bandura's studies, or the bribe of a parent. Or
it can come to vicarious reinforcement, based on the observation that models are rewarded. High-status models can
affect performance through motivation. For example, girls aged 11 to 14 performed better on a motor performance task
when they thought it was demonstrated by a high-status cheerleader than by a low-status model.
Observational learning leads to a change in an individual's behaviour along three
dimensions:
• An individuals thinks about a situation in a different way and may have incentive
to react on it.
• The change is a result of a person's direct experiences as opposed to being inborn.
• For the most part, the change an individual has made is permanent
Learning by concept
• Learning by concept – process of creating and adoption of concepts.
• „The search for and listing of attributes that can be used to distinguish
exemplars from non exemplars of various categories."
• Concepts are the mental categories that help us classify objects, events, or
ideas, building on the understanding that each object, event, or idea has a
set of common relevant features. Thus, concept learning is a strategy which
requires a learner to compare and contrast groups or categories that
contain concept-relevant features with groups or categories that do not
contain concept-relevant features.
• Learning by concept – just know
• You adopt the term „learning“ – what it includes etc.
Learning by concept
• Processes of analysis and synthesis
• Generalization (synthesis prevails) – kids – butterfly (bird or insect)
• Differentiation (analysis prevails) – separation of individual differing features
(butterfly is an insect)
Senso- motorical learning
• Learning of various skills and motorical operations
• Learning – driving a car, sport, writing, walking, dancing
• Repetition: decreases the level of mistakes both in trasfer and
performance
• Key importance: feed back and reinforcement
• Motion: needs mutual coordication of movement and coordination of movements
and sensorical information, also cognitive processes are used (tennis – skillfullness +
strategy and tacticts, dancing…
Senzomotorical learning
• Learning by imitation
• Learning by instructions
• Learning by problem solving
• Learning via feed back
• Ideomotoric learning
Sensomotorical learning phases
• 1st hase - Cognitive – introductory orientation – demonstraction, immitation, verbal
explanation and first attempts to perform the activity
• 2nd Performance with conscious control – we adopt the basics, we correct mistakes,
autoregulate and use feed back. Key moment – to adopt the ability of precise control
of that activity to be able to find mistakes. It requires perception, concentration,
motivation and persistence.
• 3rd Repetition, finetuning, automatization – the level of adoption of skill is high,
reduced proportion of consious control. Partly automated, conscisou control only in
case of problematic moments
Transfer and interference
• Transfer – situation when we use the skills learnt before (new sport – old
sport skills)
• Interference –when learning new skills the old one lead to mistakes
• Skis and snowboard; tenis- squash
Verbal learning
• The most widely spread (poems, definitions, languages)
•
•
words = symbols of objects, relations, processes… The word
evokes the meaning, the idea of the subject.
The essence is to create the association between words. The
association is created based on contact.
•
• Foreign language / words
Law of frequency and recency – the less time elapsed from the
time we learn the word and the more we repeated ti the better
we retrieve it
Learning by insight
W. Kohler - WWI – Tenerife
Chimpanzee
•
•
•
Bananas high up on the ceiling
Tools available
Uninstructed
Learning by insight – aha moment
•
Classic and and operant conditioning cannot explain all.
•
How do you explain insight – aha moment?
The eureka effect, also known as the aha! effect, refers to the common human experience of
suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.
The Eureka effect is named after the myth that the Greek polymath Archimedes, having
discovered how to measure the volume of an irregular object, leaped out of a public bath, and
ran home naked shouting "eureka" (I found it).
Insight is a psychological term that attempts to describe the process in problem solving when a
previously unsolvable puzzle becomes suddenly clear and obvious. Often this transition from
not understanding to spontaneous comprehension is accompanied by an exclamation of joy or
satisfaction, an Aha! moment.
Learning by insight – aha moment
Insight can be conceptualized as a two phase process.
•
The first phase of an Aha! experience requires the problem solver to come upon an impasse,
where they become stuck and even though they may seemingly have explored all the
possibilities, are still unable to retrieve or generate a solution.
•
The second phase occurs suddenly and unexpectedly. After a break in mental fixation or reevaluating the problem, the answer is retrieved.
•
Some research suggest that insight problems are difficult to solve because of our mental
fixation on the inappropriate aspects of the problem content. In order to solve insight
problems, one must “think outside the box”.
Learning by insight – aha moment
Currently there are two theories for how people arrive at the solution for insight problems.
Progress monitoring theory.
• The person will analyze the distance from their current state to the goal state. Once a
person realizes that they cannot solve the problem while on their current path, they will
seek alternative solutions. In insight problems this usually occurs late in the puzzle.
Representational change theory.
• The problem solver initially has a low probability for success because they use inappropriate
knowledge as they set unnecessary constraints on the problem. Once the person relaxes his
or her constraints, they can bring previously unavailable knowledge into working memory to
solve the problem.
•
The person also utilizes chunk decomposition, where he or she will separate meaningful
chunks into their component pieces. Both constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition
allow for a change in representation, that is, a change in the distribution of activation across
working memory, at which point they may exclaim "aha!".
How we learn
Learning – „trial and error“
- Lee Thorndike, relation to law of effect
Accumulative learning – by increments
• When learning – increased performance is required.
• High jump : you increase the height
• Improvement of performance is not continuous (depends on condition, motivation…)
+plateau
• Disadvantage: too many information, no structure, good to combine it with learning by
concept (to jump higher – not only to train more but to change training methods)