{"id":976,"date":"2008-12-26T09:23:57","date_gmt":"2008-12-26T17:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/?p=976"},"modified":"2008-12-26T09:36:56","modified_gmt":"2008-12-26T17:36:56","slug":"personization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/26\/personization\/","title":{"rendered":"Personization"},"content":{"rendered":"

I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting up, they’d really appreciate it.” I leaned over to my sister, and said that such an appeal would never work, as I’d seen it fail on a couple other flights. My sister said she’d seen it work several times, and, in fact, the first 13 rows did stay seated until the couple got to the front of the plane.<\/p>\n

I was trying to figure out what was different about this time versus the other times I’d seen it fail, and realized that it was the specificity of the appeal. On the other flights I remember, the flight attendant said “We have several people trying to make close connections, please let them through”, and that appeal had no effect, as everybody considered themselves to have close connections, so everybody got up. What was effective this time was that the flight attendant had framed it as a story<\/a> – the one-line story of the couple trying to get to Amsterdam reified them in our brains as “real” people. The story also invoked our social sense, and made us defer to them as we would for any member of our community. <\/p>\n

To give more background on my thinking, my post on the ultimatum game<\/a> explores how our brains react differently when we have a one-off transaction with somebody (where we try to get all that we can from that transaction) versus how we react when we are part of a community (where fairness becomes a factor as we’ll have to interact with them again in the future). I also argue in the following post<\/a> that we can use stories to expand our “monkeysphere”, the number of people that we consider to be “real” people as opposed to strangers who we distrust and\/or take advantage of.<\/p>\n

Making people persons<\/em> by associating stories with them comes up in many different situations that I can think of: <\/p>\n