The Florida Effect

This is tiny improvements. I'm Mike Bifulco. I want to use the space as. A vehicle to explore thought and influence and psychology and cognition and all of the things that affect us in our day-to-day life I've had a few conversations recently that have reminded me that the mind is a very fascinating machine. That there's quite a bit we do with this thing in our head, this very complicated chemical structure and. Physical structure that we don't really understand how it works, but. In some instances, in some circumstances we have a grapple on how some parts of the mind work. I don't want to talk a little bit about that. I'm fascinated by that. I studied. Human computer interaction early in my career I worked through a master's degree program at DePaul university in Chicago. Although I was remote at the time, living in Charlotte and traveling around the U S working for Microsoft. I learned quite a bit that surprised me [00:01:00] about cognitive science and psychology. It was surprising to me that there's so many things that we can prove sort of mathematically that are. Phenomena of human behavior. That. At first glance, maybe seem like something that's sort of unprovable or a little out there. Today. I want to talk about the Florida effect. You may have heard this before under a couple of different names. It's a phenomenon. Also referred to sometimes as priming. And basically it has to do with the way that your behavior can be influenced by things that you see and read and perceive in the real world. The name comes from a study that was conducted years ago, I think in 1996, by a group of cognitive psychologists who were conducting an experiment at a university where they had a bunch of. Subjects come into a building and take quiz. And the purpose of the quiz was to unscramble some words and put them into a sentence. And they had about, I think it was 50 people do this. They unscrambled words in a sentence and [00:02:00] completed the quiz and were told they were being part of an experiment, but they weren't told what the experiment was about. And what gets interesting is that the accuracy of the quiz, wasn't the challenge in the experiment. They wanted to see the effect of the contents of the quiz on the behavior of the people taking it. So, in other words, in some cases, they were asked to unscramble a sentence that had words that were just sort of innocuous and not really purposeful. It might be something like I walked the dog today or today is Friday, something like that. In some of the cases though, some of the participants were given a version of that unscrambling task where the words that were in their unscrambling thing. We're related to, but not directly about aging. So words like gray and Florida, which is where the name of the the nickname for the experiment comes from. Wrinkle. Age, retirement, some of those sorts of things. And the scientists who are conducting this study wanted to see their behavior would change based on the fact that they were reading words that had [00:03:00] to do with age. Well, lo and behold. As it works out, the folks who were given. Tasks that had the sort of aged words in them behaved differently after the experiment, as a result of reading those things and the way that they proved this was on the way into the study, the subjects of the study were actually being filmed and measured. And they're being timed for how long it took them essentially to walk from one end of a hallway to the other, where they were going to take the examination that they were given. And before the study, they were timed as sort of their baseline speed of like, this is how fast Mike walks down the hallway, for example. And then after the study, when they were then primed with all of those words about age and older sounding words. They handed their exam to the Proctor. Walked out of the room and they were timed walking back down the hallway, headed to where they were going. And essentially what was observed was that the folks who were given these older words, Were walking out of the room more slowly. Yeah, sit with that for a second. Think about that. So, They read a bunch of words. They did a bunch of tasks. They [00:04:00] solved some puzzles that had to do with words that sounded older. And their body physically responded to that by acting older, by walking more slowly on their way out. And of course, there's a lot of things that are uncontrollable here. Right? You don't know like what's going on in the person's day and how they're feeling and all these other things, whether they're injured or whatnot, but the things that they did control for. Helped to alleviate some of the chance of this being a Better than random occurrence. One of the things you do in a study like this is you have it with so many people that you can show sort of a higher likelihood of Correlation of your results being true. So, you know, having 50 people do this is probably a good way to start that. And of course, because it's such a simple study, it's a repeatable thing. As long as your subjects don't know what the study is about and what we're expecting to observe. So that's kind of the long and short of it. The, the folks who had the innocuous words, the, the sort of innocent puzzle that didn't have any, anything to do with aging in them, walked out of the room about the same speed as they walked in. And the ones who were given older words, walked [00:05:00] out measurably slower. And that's really, really interesting. And I think the thing to think about with that is that. It's interesting that the things you surround yourself with, whether intentionally or unintentionally can affect your behavior. This goes for you setting up your own day in your commute to work, you might be seeing ads on billboards. You might be reading the newspaper with positive or negative words in it. Those things can actually affect your perception and experience in the world. Likewise the way that you interact with other people and communicate with them and send your messages to others also has that effect on them, whether you intend for it to do it or not. There's a heck of a lot of responsibility that comes with that. You have the ability to positively influence people, whether they realize it or not. Just as well as you can positively influence yourself. And that's kind of an interesting thing. As somebody who makes software things it's interesting to think that the way that we structure conversation around building software or structure the words within a piece of software or. Set up an ad [00:06:00] campaign or write a blog post or film, a tutorial video about building something can really affect how people perceive it. If you talk about your thing with a positive message, it's more likely to be received positively just as well. If you talk about your thing with a negative message, it can be received negatively. There are also insidious flavors of this where I can. Select words that are going to make you more inclined to pay more for my thing or two. Have more attachment to my brand and right. All of those things are. Phenomena that I think we all have some. Gut feeling that they're real. But it's another thing to put that into words and to put it into a study and to start to feel like your experience is something that can be measured. For better or worse. It's fascinating. It's really interesting. There's a lot you can do with that. And there's a lot of responsibility that, that bear is understanding. So. Yeah, that's the Florida effect. It's all around us. And I suspect that after. , hearing about it. You may see and [00:07:00] perceive the Florida effect around you. There are many other things like this as well. And I'm curious to get into more of them. Yeah. If this is something th...