#Communication
Cognitive bias refers to systematic errors that our brain makes and that influence our judgement and decision-making. They are small mental shortcuts that allow us to save time and act according to irrational mechanical patterns. Basically, their origin is to be found in a set of ancestral rules, social factors and past experiences that have always helped Homo Sapiens in his evolutionary journey, enabling him to react immediately to certain situations – such as those of danger – where he could not afford the luxury of time to implement a strategic decision-making approach.
These mechanisms, with the passage of time, have settled into the human brain to the point of shaping many of its behaviours.
Cognitive biases are many and listing them all would be impossible. However, Andrea Seletti has grouped them into four macro-categories.
This category includes all those biases that help us take a number of scattered pieces of information and input and link them together with the aim of bridging information gaps and bringing them under a logical sense.
Since our brain is constantly bombarded by inputs and stimuli, it implements an automatic information filtering mechanism. In this sense, our brain focuses on particularly impactful information or events that stick out.
The biases that fall into this category are, instead, all those that help our brain to decide which information to remember because it might be useful to us in the future and which, instead, to forget because it is superfluous. According to some studies, humans tend to remember generalisations more than details.
To the last category belong, finally, all those mechanisms that our brain performs to help us make a decision or act even when we do not have enough information to know that we are making the right choice.
For those who work in the world of Marketing and Communication, it is essential to know these mechanisms. Understanding how people react to a given stimulus, visual or verbal, allows us to predict how our interlocutor will act or make decisions.
In particular, for those who deal with Ux Writing ( a subject we have already discussed in depth in the past) and with the design of texts and micro-texts for digital products, an in-depth knowledge of cognitive biases becomes fundamental in order to increase the chances of converting a potential user/visitor into a real customer, for example by pushing him/her to complete a purchase in an online shop.
Below we show you some of these mechanisms and which strategies to implement in Copywriting and Ux Writing.
Seletti states:
“The feeling of loss caused by limited resources, available for a limited time and whose attempt to possess puts us in competition with others, is capable of causing a very high cognitive tension.”
This bias falls into the category of those trying to make sense of the world and consists of the human being’s fear of losing something and the strong pressure he feels when he has to compete for an object of interest with a fellow human being.
For ecommerce managers, it can be very useful to leverage this bias and people’s fear of losing an opportunity by structuring micro-texts that aim to awaken this feeling in the user.
Let’s take a concrete example: we want to buy a shampoo on Amazon, before proceeding with the purchase the platform tells us the price, shipping time and other information. If we analyse the micro-texts, we see exactly that they want to appeal to loss aversion and, in fact, we find some recurring items such as:
The humour effect belongs to the category of biases that help us filter information. In this sense, information that is funny, ironic or otherwise unusually pleasant is more easily remembered.
At the level of copywriting, knowing this systematic brain error is useful in the construction of texts and messages that aim to break through to users’ attention. An example can be Yelp, a platform for reviewing exercises and activities, which adds to the classic stars some ironic accompanying micro-texts that already offer an anticipation of the review, giving it a more humanised form and exerting a positive effect on users.
This particular effect falls into the category of biases that help us decide what to remember and what to forget. Basically, our brains tend to remember the information we find within a list differently; some cognitive studies have shown that people memorise items at the beginning and end of a list more, quickly forgetting the items in between.
This mechanism is very useful in organising navigation menus, placing the items that interest us most at the beginning or end of the list.
The last effect falls into the category of bias that helps us to act when we do not have enough information, or when we have too much. The paradox of choice was studied and presented in the book of the same name by the well-known American psychologist Barry Schwartz.
This effect consists in that condition of decision blockage we find ourselves in when we are confronted with an excess of input, i.e. when the information exceeds our ability to process it, effectively forcing us not to make a decision.
This is one of the major problems faced by video streaming platforms such as Netflix, whose users, stuck in the labyrinth of too many options, come to perceive the platform’s content as boring.
At the level of Ux Writing, keeping this paradox in mind can help us when we have to study the presentation of different subscriptions of a digital product such as a website or an app.
The best practice would be not to exceed the 4 possible options and to resort to the use of “gentle nudges” for the subscriptions we want to promote the most. If we take the packages offered by Mailchimp as an example, we see that the ‘Standard’ package is highlighted with two gentle nudges:
These are just 4 cognitive biases that can be useful for those involved in Marketing and Communication, it is clear that the more they are known, the easier it is to come up with strategies and messages that really generate conversions.
