Why we love lists

The article-as-numbered-list has several features that make it inherently captivating: the headline catches our eye in a stream of content; it positions its subject within a pre-existing category and classification system, like “talented animals”; it spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that’s finite, whose length has been quantified upfront. Together, these create an easy reading experience, in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption—a bit like sipping green juice instead of munching on a bundle of kale. And there’s little that our brains crave more than effortlessly acquired data.

Whenever we encounter new information, our brains immediately try to make sense of it. Once they figure out what we’re seeing in a physical sense, they work to provide personal context and decide if it’s relevant enough to focus on further. The process is instantaneous: we don’t even realize we’ve made a choice in the time our minds have selected one path or another. Our gaze either stops, or we simply keep scanning. Recall a time when you were spacing out while skimming a stream of content and then, without quite knowing why, found yourself pausing to actually process the words. What made you stop and focus? On a physical level, the answer is often simple: difference. Whenever we’re scanning the environment for nothing in particular, our visual system is arrested by the things that don’t fit—features that suddenly change or somehow stand out from the background. A headline that is graphically salient in some way has a greater chance of capturing our eye, and in an environment where dozens of headlines and stories vie for attention, numerals break up the visual field. Consider the contexts in which we’re most likely to debate which article to read: a publication’s home page, a Twitter feed, or a Facebook feed. Most of what we see is words and images (even though it often seems like Web pages or streams are composed of nothing but lists). In that context, numbers pop.

From Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker. In other words, why is Buzzfeed so popular. At a more general level, it speaks to the power of structuring large blocks of information. An alternative memorable way of implanting information in people's heads is through narrative, but it is not as compact as the list.

One of the dangers of the list is that forcing information to conform to that rigid format can influence how we both perceive and receive it. It's the reason Edward Tufte preaches the dangers of Powerpoint, which can “weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos hated when folks would bring giant Powerpoint decks to present to him. While you'd be speaking to your first slide he'd already flipped to the end of the deck, having absorbed it all, and would start firing questions at you about slide 27. After a while he was so sick of the whole charade he banned Powerpoints and forced everyone to start bringing ideas to him in prose form.

Painful for some, but I love writing and dislike making presentations (usually) so I thought it was a great change. Writing is, to me, still generally the most efficient way to communicate ideas in all their complexity. Of course, for some forms of information, like data, nothing beats a well-constructed chart. But most great thinking is stripped of all substance when compressed into a few bullet points, and the time spent formatting slides for a deck is wasted time that few busy professionals can afford.

From a glass half empty perspective, it's alarming how much of the list's appeal lies in our brain's inherent laziness.

In the current media environment, a list is perfectly designed for our brain. We are drawn to it intuitively, we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort. Faced with a detailed discussion of policies toward China or five insane buildings under construction in Shanghai, we tend to choose the latter bite-sized option, even when we know we will not be entirely satisfied by it. And that’s just fine, as long as we realize that our fast-food information diet is necessarily limited in content and nuance, and thus unlikely to contain the nutritional value of the more in-depth analysis of traditional articles that rely on paragraphs, not bullet points.

Still, this list at Buzzfeed of the 25 best Taylor Swift Audience-Dancing Moments of All Time is undeniably great. Tay-tay be rocking out, yo. Looking forward to Konnikova analyzing the brain appeal of the animated GIF in a future post. [I'm only half joking; the hypnotic looped visual imagery of animated GIFs have a hypnotic effect that must trigger something in our animalistic brain wiring]

Guy Walks Into a Bar

So a guy walks into a bar one day and he can't believe his eyes. There, in the corner, there's this one-foot-tall man, in a little tuxedo, playing a tiny grand piano.

So the guy asks the bartender, “Where'd he come from?”

And the bartender's, like, “There's a genie in the men's room who grants wishes.”

So the guy runs into the men's room and, sure enough, there's this genie. And the genie's, like, “Your wish is my command.” So the guy's, like, “O.K., I wish for world peace.” And there's this big cloud of smoke—and then the room fills up with geese.

So the guy walks out of the men's room and he's, like, “Hey, bartender, I think your genie might be hard of hearing.”

And the bartender's, like, “No kidding. You think I wished for a twelve-inch pianist?”

This piece by Simon Rich is behind the New Yorker paywall, but many of you probably have a subscription, right? The opening excerpt above works as a stand-alone joke, but the piece goes on from there to places unanticipated.

I don't often read the humor pieces in The New Yorker, but when I do, I read the ones by Simon Rich.

How stereotypes persist

Martin and his family may be what politicians and teachers say is the American ideal, but the actual rewards -- the acting jobs, the record deals, the social acceptance, the money -- largely go to the African-Americans who exemplify the N-word, who embrace the suffocating, limiting image of male blackness. The decision to perpetuate this image isn't made solely by the black community but by the white suits who decided long ago how the part is supposed to look and what black behavior they will compensate; think of that LeBron cover again. Corporations seem to doubt the authenticity and marketability of black men who live outside the primal construct.

This represents the ultimate victory of racism: the belief that exists among both whites and blacks that being educated, being articulate, having manners, is the sole province of being white. It is why Jonathan Martin appears so foreign, so threatening, to his teammates, and why a nothing like Richie Incognito makes them feel right at home.

Howard Bryant on how powerfully the stereotype of the angry and primal black man persists, aided by an entertainment industry that packages and resells it.

Cards Against Humanity: Giffen good?

It's rare, but sometimes the demand curve slopes up, the so-called Giffen Paradox. On Black Friday, the creators of the hilarious game Cards Against Humanity decided to raise their price by $5 from $25 to $30. On his Tumblr, creator Max Temkin recapped what happened:

We called our contact at Amazon and explained the idea for the sale to them. They thought it was funny but were also pretty annoyed - apparently monkeying with pricing on the biggest sales day of the year isn’t as funny to Amazon as it is to us.

Reception

The sale made people laugh, it was widely shared on Twitter and Tumblr, and it was the top post on Reddit. The press picked it up, and it was reported in The Guardian, USA Today, Polygon, BuzzFeed, All Things D, Chicagoist, and AdWeek. It was even the top comment onThe Wirecutter’s front page AMA, which had nothing to do with us.

I was pretty sure that our fans would be into the “$5 more” sale, but I had no idea that it would turn a day where we’d normally be totally overlooked into a huge press hit for the game.

Sales

So how did we do? A little better than last year. We kept our position as the best-selling toy or game on Amazon. My guess is that peoples’ buying decisions just weren’t that affected by $5.

The interesting thing to note is that we got a nice lift in our sales the day after Black Friday (“Regret Saturday”). That might be from people who were waiting to buy the game until it came back down in price, or, more likely, those are sales from people who heard about the game after our Black Friday press. Not bad for an ad that paid us to run it.

When they say any PR is good PR, what they mean is that sometimes it's good to just break through the noise, regardless of why, especially if you're a smaller player. In those cases, the economic benefits from increased awareness outweigh any downward sales pressure from the negative PR since not enough people know about you anyhow.

In this case, it worked even better because Cards Against Humanity is already a subversive brand. It's not for nothing their tagline is “a party game for horrible people.” While I don't think this would hold in the long run, it was a fun one-day stunt on a day that was otherwise a torrent of deal spam and indignant tweets complaining about the commercialization of all that is sacred.

The addictive power of first-person shooters

What is it that has made this type of game such a success? It’s not simply the first-person perspective, the three-dimensionality, the violence, or the escape. These are features of many video games today. But the first-person shooter combines them in a distinct way: a virtual environment that maximizes a player’s potential to attain a state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—a condition of absolute presence and happiness.

“Flow,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “is the kind of feeling after which one nostalgically says: ‘that was fun,’ or ‘that was enjoyable.’ ” Put another way, it’s when the rest of the world simply falls away. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is mostly likely to occur during play, whether it’s a gambling bout, a chess match, or a hike in the mountains. Attaining it requires a good match between someone’s skills and the challenges that she faces, an environment where personal identity becomes subsumed in the game and the player attains a strong feeling of control. Flow eventually becomes self-reinforcing: the feeling itself inspires you to keep returning to the activity that caused it.

As it turns out, first-person shooters create precisely this type of absorbing experience. “Video games are essentially about decision-making,” Lennart Nacke, the director of the Games and Media Entertainment Research Laboratory at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told me. “First-person shooters put these tasks on speed. What might be a very simple decision if you have all the time in the world becomes much more attractive and complex when you have to do it split second.” The more realistic the game becomes—technological advances have made the original Doom seem quaint compared with newer war simulators, like the Call of Duty and the Battlefield series—the easier it is to lose your own identity in it.

It isn’t just the first-person experience that helps to create flow; it’s also the shooting. “This deviation from our regular life, the visceral situations we don’t normally have,” Nacke says, “make first-person shooters particularly compelling.” It’s not that we necessarily want to be violent in real life; rather, it’s that we have pent-up emotions and impulses that need to be vented. “If you look at it in terms of our evolution, most of us have office jobs. We’re in front of the computer all day. We don’t have to go out and fight a tiger or a bear to find our dinner. But it’s still hardwired in humans. Our brain craves this kind of interaction, our brain wants to be stimulated. We miss this adrenaline-generating decision-making.”

Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker on the potent grip of first-person shooters. More than casual games which are about problem solving, first-person shooters generate an engagement flow that act on the mind like a drug. That sense of complete control over your environment grants the player a feeling of God-like ability, and damn does it feel good.

More than that, it might be good for you.

Far from isolating us in a virtual world of violence and gore, first-person shooters can create a sense of community and solidarity that some people may be unable to find in their day-to-day lives—and a sense of effectiveness and control that may, in turn, spill over into non-virtual life. In 2009, the psychologist Leonard Reinecke discovered that video games were a surprisingly effective way to combat stress, fatigue, and depression—this proved true for many of the same titles that critics once worried would be isolating, and would negative impact on individual well-being and on society as a whole. In other words, the success of Doom and the games that have followed in its footsteps haven’t sentenced us to a world of violence. On the contrary: for all of their virtual gore, they may, ironically, hold one possible road map for a happier, more fulfilling and more engaged way of life.

I've felt flow most powerfully in a few situations. One is playing videogames, and now that I think about it, they all were first-person shooters. Another is playing non-video games, like poker or blackjack or mah joong, regardless of whether at a casino or at home. Lots of frequent decisions, very immediate feedback on the results. And lastly, it's when I'm editing either video or photos, but especially video as you close in on that final cut that just works. Closing in on final cut feels like you're racing towards solving a mystery, it must be what Sherlock Holmes feels as a mystery unravels into a coherent narrative in his mind.

When I'm in flow, I don't feel tired, I lose all track of time, and I feel as if I could continue indefinitely. Usually it's only the physical discomfort of sitting for such a long period of time that ultimately forces a stop. Is it possible to harness flow in more parts of our life, or are those too devoid of that constant stream of decisions which we fully control?