What Is Projection Bias And How Can It Help My Marketing?
Our world is complicated. Just think about driving. You have to monitor the speed of the car, watch for the speed limit (that changes), listen to the radio, talk to the person in the passenger seat, watch the cars ahead of yo, watch the cars behind you, watch out for any stop lights or stop signs—it’s a lot we’re juggling all at once! If we had to sit and think slowly and rationally through every decision we had to make while driving, we might never get where we were going. Instead, the human mind relies on heuristics—general “fast and frugal” rules that guide how we think and act.
Because these heuristics are “fast and frugal”—that is, they don’t take a lot of time or cognitive resources—they can easily go awry. With the wrong information, these heuristics can change the way we think or act ultimately leading to undesirable outcomes. Simply put, they bias or skew our thinking.
Behavioral science has made its mark in the discipline of psychology by cataloguing the different types of heuristics and the different ways our thinking becomes “biased” or skewed. Some behavioral science publications estimate there are over 100 different heuristics and cognitive biases. Here’s a small list we put together:
NUDGES, CHOICE ARCHITECTURE, AND ADVERTISING
Advertisers have taken notice to the recent popularity of behavioral science. After all, if there’s a catalogue of general rules that guide how we think and act, then marketers can use that to their advantage. Marketers can “reframe” prices to make product offers seem more valuable, or they can make their product seem better through “halo effects” of brand partnerships or sponsorships. The uses are endless. Using this knowledge to create behavioral change in consumers is called “nudging”. You’re not forcing customers to do anything, but you’re guiding them towards the “right” behavior—purchasing your client’s product.
With the knowledge of so many heuristics, biases, and other hidden cognitive mechanisms, marketers can create environments that strings a series of nudges and behaviors together. This series of nudges is called “choice architecture”—literally creating an environment to optimize a particular behavioral response (like purchasing behavior).
PROJECTION AND PROJECTION BIAS
One example of a heuristic which can lead us astray is anchoring. Anchoring is when our mind creates psychological benchmarks. For example, asking you “if you would buy a new high definition TV for $500” gets a much different response than “if I asked you if you would buy a new high definition TV marked down from $2500 to $500.” By “benchmarking” is typical value, it makes the TV seem like a better deal.
However, anchoring as a heuristic can easily lead us astray. One example of this is Projection Bias. Projection bias is the tendency to anchor based on our current state. So, think about those times when you haven’t eaten all day and you go to order food at a restaurant. Many times in this situation, you end up over-order what you can really eat. Everyone knows the saying “your eyes are bigger than your stomach”—this is precisely because we have a hard time thinking outside our anchored current state. Said differently, we have a hard time thinking about how we might be feeling in a future state. Instead, we project the current state out to the future, assuming that how we feel now is how we’ll feel then.
This “projection” is conceptually similar to other instances of projection in psychology. For example, projection was originally published as a defense mechanism by Sigmund Freud, the act of projecting your own through’s and feeling onto someone or something else. However, in Freud’s case, you were projecting to protect yourself against anxiety-provoking thoughts and feelings. In the case of behavioral science, projection bias is still about projecting your own thoughts and feelings, but it’s not motivated by anxiety. It’s just motivated by an inability to see outside of our own perspectives in the here-and-now without trying hard to do so.
While projection bias has focused on the projection from present to future self, the same bias can occur when projecting to other people—inappropriately thinking that others share the same thoughts or feelings that we do in a certain situation. Whether it’s projecting on to your future self or projecting on to other people, it does beg the question as to whether or not there is still an important value in projective tests. Because of phenomena like projection bias, our sister-company Inkblot Analytics has created their own projective testing platform, merging older psychological testing with more recent artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. You can see more here.
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE IN MARKETING
It is heuristics and biases like projection bias that are forcing brands to stop and think about how to implement a scientific approach to creating their marketing strategies and ad campaigns. By applying what we know from behavioral science, we can how to best serve the right content to the right audience. And doing so has been extremely useful in creating lasting brand loyalty and brand engagement.