Hey, You're a Lot Like Me! (Except Nothing Like Me!)
the connections between us
Posted Jun 23, 06:46 am in business, business models, consumerism, experiences, marketing, postmodernism, social networking
Recently, a friend of mine told me that he had been able to score a job interview with a company on the basis of having gone to the same alma mater as the interviewer. Judging from the context of this interaction, it is likely that there was at least a few of decades removal between their respective graduations, but that’s no matter. It’s easy to see the logic here: anyone who graduated from University of ABC, where you graduated from, must be a decent fellow. After all, that’s where you went, right? What else do you need to know?
The Granfalloon
In his 1963 book Cat’s Cradle, author Kurt Vonnegut coined a rather interesting term that might be applicable here: “granfalloon.” This odd expression describes a proud but meaningless connection between people.
An example: let’s say that you are thrust into a room full of strangers, and you know nothing about anyone except their birthdays— and amazingly, there’s a guy there who has the same birthday as you! Chances are, you will be able to form a more instantaneous bond with this individual than anyone else in the room on this basis alone. Surprising?
Based on my own observations, I don’t find it so surprising. When I think about this concept the first image that comes to my mind are Mac users.
Mac users make up a rather small percentage of computer users (between 5% and 8%). Perhaps it’s for this reason that I’ve noticed that Mac users tend to trust each other and form weird, superficial bonds based on their choice of computer brand. It’s really strange to observe, there’s a sense of ease that seems to develop when one Mac user meets another.
Finally. Another Mac user. You’re like me, a member of the elite coterie of beings who are devoted to high quality and aesthetics. An evolved individual who is light-years beyond those Windows-using plebians. Someone I can relate to!
I apologize if I came off as too mocking there; as a current Windows user, I have my own granfalloons to maintain.
You might have witnessed this same attitude when owners of the same car wave to each other on the street. Hey look, it’s another Blue 2007 BMW 5 Series. I’m going to wave now.
Often other bicyclists wave to me for no apparent reason. I return the wave out of courtesy. Interestingly, I’ve found that people wearing the spandex biking outfits wave at others who are wearing the outfits much more often than they do to cyclists who aren’t. I would wager that if the other individual’s colors were similar, there would be even more of a positive attitude.
The Minimum Group Paradigm
This is all due to to what social scientists call the minimum group paradigm, a manner in which people instinctively find ways to divide themselves into “us and thems” in social settings. This was initially noted by British psychologist Henri Tajfel. In a pretty stunning experiment, Tajfel ostensibly assigned subjects tags of whether they preferred paintings by Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee based on their supposed picture preferences beforehand. The subjects, incidentally, had never heard of these painters before. What followed was a bizarre situation in which the “Klee-lovers” treated other “Klee-lovers” like close friends, and “Kandinsky-lovers” treated “Kandinsky-lovers” like close friends. They even suggested that other people who shared their meaningless label were more likely to have a pleasant personality and be better workers. But here’s the kicker:
They also doled out rewards to fellow group members in a more generous and competitive manner. They preferred to give people who shared their labels $2 and give members of the “competing” group $1, instead of giving their own members $3 and members of the other group $4. Note that the latter of these two would have favored their group monetarily over the former, but also implicitly suggested that the “competing” group was somehow superior.
The meaningless label clouded judgment, and allowed people with nothing in common but an empty label to suddenly trust each other and connect.
The So-What Moment
Think about how marketers are constantly using this to get you to buy things. It happens much more than you realize.
Remember the Be Like Mike campaign, which suggested that you too could be the world’s greatest basketball player if only you drank Gatorade? Technically it’s true that if you drink Gatorade, you’re more like Michael Jordan than if you don’t (assuming he actually drinks it), but seriously— how obscure a connection are you willing to accept to be like Mike? If I really wanted to be like Mike, I’d think about working on my jump shot.
Interestingly, this particular marketing execution might not have worked in the somewhat distant past, if we are to believe what David Foster Wallace has to say about our fixation on images vs. belief systems. More on that here.
Sources:
(1) Age of Propaganda, by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson. 2000.
(2) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace. 1997.
(3) Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet, New York Times.