In the age of the short attention span, emotion trumps reason
21 November 2019
In a guest column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, Founder and Managing Director of Stone Junction – the first ever PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution – asks if it’s even true for engineers that, in the age of the short attention span, emotion trumps reason?
In late 2019, this argument has been made so many times that it's now a cliché. I always stay apolitical in the pieces I write for Connectivity, but it's clear that the evidence presented by the political world over the last few years, from Trump to Brexit, suggests that fact is now the less important sibling of evidence.
But how does this truth play out in the technical marketing arena? Is it effecting the decisions that engineers make when buying products and services?
Surely, such decisions are above and beyond the scope of emotion? The levels of expenditure involved are high and the people doing the buying are scientific, technical thinkers who value evidence based, ladder-like logic.
Furthermore, the perceived levels of risk in buying an expensive piece of equipment as part of your job are higher than those we perceive when voting. It’s all too easy to believe that our single vote will be lost in an ocean of crowd sourced choices.
I think the answer can be found in the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning and in accepting that both play a clear part in influencing the opinion of an engineer. This is particularly true in an era in which the media we are presented with, and the medium it is presented in, encourages us to linger on it for a shorter amount of time than we once would have.
Deductive reasoning starts with a statement or hypothesis and then tests to see if it's true through observation, while inductive reasoning starts with observations and moves backward towards generalisations and theories.
Daniel Miessler, a noted academic suggests that this phrase:
"All men are mortal. Harold is a man. Therefore, Harold is mortal."
illustrates deductive reasoning perfectly, while this one, "I have a bag of many coins, and I’ve pulled ten at random and they’ve all been pennies, therefore this is probably a bag full of pennies," is a perfect example of induction.
Are engineers human?
I believe that technical professionals are first people, and people tend to think inductively. They are secondly engineers, scientists or technologists, who learn to think deductively during their careers.
In other words, we are hardwired to think emotionally, reacting quickly to the evidence presented to us by the bag of coins and only waking up our inductive brains when we are asked to – either by ourselves or a third party. This is not unlike the lizard brain idea, originated by neuroanatomists in 1954, which argues that the limbic cortex is the part of the brain that governs flight or fight, instinctive decision making.
The perfect weight
Unless you are the perfect weight, having logically decided to lose a few pounds and actually done so, or a tea total non-smoker, having logically decided to give up and then really given up, I would argue that you are a regular user of your lizard brain, and inductive thinker, just like me.
I think this is true, even if you believe passionately that you aren’t a lizard brain user because you regularly apply deductive reasoning at work. And I believe you do apply this form of reasoning in a professional context. For instance, I’m guessing there’s a strong chance that you’ve already either Googled the limbic cortex, to establish if such old research is still relevant, or at least given it some thought.
My point is that, despite being logical deductive reasoners, who assess data before deciding on a course of action, technical people such as engineers, still respond first on an emotional level. And, given the volume of information we are now expected to absorb, there is an increased likelihood that we will respond to this information without extensive consideration more regularly and more quickly, minus the levels of research we might have once considered essential.
Neither am I convinced that this is a bad thing. In his 2005 book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that quick marketing decisions can be as effective as extensively researched marketing decisions. For instance, Coca Cola comprehensively planned and analysed the launch of Diet Coke and New Coke, and both were failures in their own way – either cannibalising sales of Coca-Cola or simply falling flat.
There is a real value in thinking and acting quickly, because it makes things happen. Even in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the author argues that structured but simple and quick formulas are the best method of decision making, despite his core argument against instinct.
But is there any data led evidence that engineers are reacting more often, more quickly? Well, according to John Hayes, the former president of Engineering.com, 42 percent of engineers use social feeds to find work related articles and 40 percent use social media as a source of engineering information. There is no medium that demands quicker thinking than social media.
Emotional and technical
So, how can technical marketeers take advantage of this change? I would argue that the first step is to provide information for our audiences to use when making decisions in both inductive and deductive modes. This means creating content that appeals on an emotional level as well as technical level.
For example, at last year’s Vision show in Stuttgart the Stone Junction team, in partnership with our client Inspekto, an Israeli-DACH start up, launched the world’s first autonomous machine vision system, using heavily emotional language.
As visitors entered the show, they were exposed to an outdoor and floor advertising campaign, lifting samples of technical specifications from the brochures of machine vision providers, and crossing them out, graffiti style – replacing the text with the phrase ‘Just plug and inspect’. The campaign was designed to communicate that there is now a new entrant to the market that can offer automated parts inspection without complex lighting, software, lenses and cameras and, crucially, without systems integration.
It was also intended to ruffle a few feathers and get more people acting on emotion.
The second step should be to provide easy methodologies that allow your audience to choose you, using deductive reasoning – inspired by Kahneman’s idea of using simple and effective formulas. Providing your stakeholders with those formulas, so they can make decisions in your favour, or not in your favour if that’s in the customer’s best interest, is a very rewarding process.
In the case of Inspekto, we literally provided the audience with the formula that allowed them to prove to themselves that the product costs one tenth of a system integrated solution. Simple decisions, based on data, propelled by emotion.
In the age of the short attention span, emotion definitely does trump reason. If all you want to do is get elected or win a referendum, that’s all you need to know. But if you want to achieve the much harder goal of selling something to an engineer, you will have to first trump reason with emotion and then provide a royal flush of logic.
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, the first PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies.
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