Why stories matter:
How memories influence your future decisions
This article will tell you how you create stories from what you experience, and how your memories can determine your future behavior. The implications for User Experience Design, Service Design, Design for behavior change and advertisement will be discussed.
Keywords: [Stories, memory, advertising, User Experience, Service Design, Behavior change]
Imagine our early ancestors had evolved no memory. They wake up after a good night’s sleep, walk out of their cave and see red berries hanging from a bush. They eat them but get really sick shortly after. The next morning they wake up, walk out and see those same red berries. Since they have no memory, they completely forgot what happened the previous day. They eat the berries and get really sick….again. This could go on forever.
Luckily we have evolved memory to learn from our past experiences. This prevents us from making the same mistake over and over again. We use our memory to make predictions about future events, allowing us to adjust our behaviour and decisions accordingly.
How we remember things
In past views our memory has been compared to a giant warehouse where information is stored and recollected. This ‘hard disk’ view of memory gives the impression that every piece of knowledge is stored and recollected in its original form. However, the reality of our remembering self is way more complex.
Let’s start from the moment our memory is created. Depending on a combination of high-level cognitive processes (such as attention, goals, needs, etc) and lower-level sensory features of the environment (such as movement, contrast, color, etc) some information will stand out more than the rest and is therefore better processed. When we create a memory, the necessary information is temporarily retained, reprocessed and relocated to a different part in our brain. However, every stage of this process is subservient to bias and error. To complicate this process even more, creating a memory is not only about information. Bodily states, contextual information and emotions all influence it.
Contrary to the belief that our memories are always ‘there’, memories are actually constructed in the moment. When we remember something, our brain collects the different pieces of information, stored in different parts of our brain, to construct that memory.
“When someone looks at me and earnestly says, “I know what I saw,” I am fond of replying: “No you don’t. You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.” (Steven Novella, 2014)
The difference between an experience and a memory of an experience
By ‘the narrative your brain is operating under’ we understand the current experience you’re in. According to Daniel Kahneman there is a difference between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. In a well-known study patients undergoing a colonoscopy are asked to report their pain every 60 seconds during the procedure. Figure 1 shows the pain intensity and the duration of the colonoscopy.
Figure 1 shows that patient B suffered overall more pain than patient A. At the end of the procedure both patients were asked ‘how much pain they had suffered’. Remarkably patient A reported a much worse recollection of the procedure than patient B. The study shows that the pain experienced at the end of the colonoscopy strongly determines the memory of this experience.
So, according to Kahneman, the ‘experiencing self’ had a much worse experience than the ‘remembering self’. Furthermore, it’s the reconstruction of the memory by the remembering self that is going to direct future behavior, e.g. deciding which doctor to contact for the colonoscopy. As Kahneman said: “the experiencing self has no voice in the decision- we do not choose between experiences but between memories of experiences”.
Time is not an issue for our memory
Maybe you will recognize the situation where a colleague asks you on a Monday how your weekend has been. But when you try to remember all the things you have done you come up with nothing… Maybe your weekend was nothing special. Your brain is very economical when it comes to the use of processing power and memory space. There is no use in storing two or more memory traces of a similar event. Storing the ‘gist’ (or essence) of that memory, containing the essential information you can use to predict future events, is sufficient. For instance, there is no use in storing all the times you got sick from eating the same berries. A single memory trace is enough to keep you from eating the same berries in the future.
If we only store the gist of an experience in our memory, that means a lot of information is thrown away. Storing every little detail of an experience has no use at all for future behavior. That information is lost forever, and what is not remembered, never happened.
According to Kahneman, going on a one or two-week vacation is a huge difference for the experiencing self when both weeks are equally good. For the remembering self there is no difference between one or two weeks of holiday. Because no new memories are added, the gist — and therefore the story of the holiday stays the same.
False memories and how we shape the memory of our experience
But are our memories accurate?
A false memory is the recollection of an experience that didn't really occur. Even though it is false, it still has all the characteristics of a real experience. It contains information of the event that took place, and also all the sensory information that comes with the experience. Because of this, it feels as if the memory is in fact very real.
A well-known procedure to study how a false memory originates is ‘The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM)’ test. Participants are asked to study a list of words, e.g. “bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy”. After the list is taken away, the participants need to indicate which words they remember . Participants typically recall related words that were not in the list, such as “Sleep”. This experiment shows that memory recollection isn't perfect. It is in fact a reconstruction of a memory in which non-related, but associated, words to the learned list can easily be incorporated.
Artificial memories
False memories can also be created artificially. Wade et. al. (2005) studies the creation of false memories using photographs. Participants are shown real photographs of their childhood but also manipulated pictures of a hot-air balloon ride that never occurred (see Figure 2).
After a consolidation period in which participants could review the photos during three weeks, they were asked to describe what happened in a collection of childhood photos. Up to 50% of those participants could remember part of the balloon flight, often quite rich in details.
False memories can influence our behavior and decision-making. A study of Geraerts et. al (2008) reflects this perfectly. In this study participants were told repeatedly that they had been sick from eating egg salad in the past. This wasn't true. The false memory implant was successful with about half of the experimental group. After a few weeks, these participants were asked to participate in a non-related study. When invited to a buffet afterwards, they were less likely to eat the egg salad sandwich.
These studies all show that our memory plays a vital role in how the current experience is constructed and used to make future decisions. Furthermore, when done right, it is possible to adjust memory in such a way that the current experience and future decision can be changed deliberately. In the colonoscopy study of Kahneman they changed the memory of the experience of patient A by extending the colonoscopy without any pain inducing activity. While the experiencing self was worse off, the remembering self was better off.
How we create stories from our memories
Stories are an essential aspect of human culture. We use them to communicate, learn, dream, in almost everything we do. To a great extent our own stories of ourselves define who we are, but also who we are going to be. These stories of ourselves are constructions of our memory, knowing who we are is in part what we remember of ourselves.
Since the stories of ourselves rely on constructive properties of our memory, they are also subservient to the same biases and errors. This means that these stories, who we are and what we did can be rewritten. Shaw and Porter (2015) showed that it is not that hard to falsely convince participants that they had committed a crime in their childhood in a matter of hours. Using suggestive memory techniques, false memories were implanted. Results show that false memories are similar to real memories in description and even in rich multisensory components. Once a story is internalized it becomes a part of you.
Memories and UX design
This also has implications for User Experience (UX) design. When we design a user experience we’re mainly focused on the momentary experience. However, it’s worthwhile to gather insights and get a better understanding of how we can design for the memory of an experience. Just as Kahneman shows how the difference between the experiencing and the remembering self can be contradictory, designing for the experiencing and for the remembering self can have different needs and goals as well.
This also has consequences for how we measure the UX following User-Centered Design principles (USD). In user tests we’re solely measuring the current experience, which only influences the design for the experiencing self. Until now there are no USD methods that give insight in how to measure the UX for the remembering self. While insights and understanding how design influences the experiencing and remembering self could be important for the UX and future user decisions.
For instance, in our own research, Bollen, Graus & Willemsen (2012), we investigated the effect of passed time, on the retrieval of movies preferences from our memory. Many recommendation systems rely on explicit preference ratings provided by their users. Often these ratings are provided long after experiencing the item, relying heavily on people’s representation in memory of the quality of the item. We found that over time ratings tend to regress towards the mean. This means that over time its harder to remember how much you liked or disliked a movie. Recommender systems use these ratings to calculate which content a user will like, and therefor which items should be recommended. These finding have implication how preferences are being elicited in the User Interface of recommender systems.
Design and behavioral change
Currently, designing for behavior change has gained a lot of attention within the UX community. A major challenge we face is how we can design products and services that change behavior over a substantial period of time. In the healthcare sector behavior change is a hot topic. Here we are trying to answer questions like ‘how can an app help to support people to go out and running and maintain this behavior’.
A long-term behavior change is hard to achieve and often involves a long and gradual process in which a target behavior needs to be meticulously crafted. For instance, It’s harder to motivate a couch potato to pick up healthy behavior (like running) than a person who is already involved in other sports activities.
Here the stories of ourselves could also play a crucial role. When a system is designed in such a way that it changes or rewrites the story of ourselves, the idea of that behavior becomes internalized. The consequence is that the goals and needs to change behavior are no longer externally imposed by a system, but come from a person’s own internal motivation. Which is a stronger (intrinsic) motivator to change behavior.
Storytelling in advertising
Storytelling is often used in advertising to show who a certain company is and what it stands for. The obvious and maybe most used way to tell a story is by means of an audiovisual narrative. Mostly expressed in the form of a tv-commercial. But sometimes companies put great effort in presenting their brand identity and self perception. The goal in the end is that when brand image and customer perception are perfectly aligned , it evokes a sense of belonging and understanding. This will lead to more loyal customers, and eventually to higher conversion and sales. Nike’s “Better for it” campaign appeals to women who sometimes struggle and feel uncertain when starting to work out.
Nike shows that a good understanding of the goals and needs of their customers is essential in creating a story that addresses the problems and challenges women encounter.
But maybe the most important thing is that a well-crafted story can influence the information in our memory of how we see ourselves in relation to a given brand. When the presentation of brand identity is in line with customer perception, it can easily hijack memory trails and incorporate, just as implanting a false memory, new pieces of information to the original story. When done right, this new information blends in nicely with a coherent story and re-defines the relationship between the brand and the customer.
Apple understands better than any other company how essential it is to influence a customer’s perception using carefully designed stories. Apple’s “what’s your verse” storytelling campaign shows how regular customers do extraordinary things with Apple products. It identifies with its users and projects a lifestyle, it shows how Apple products can be used to inspire, be creative…. that is a story that can easily be internalized.
The omnichannel experience
But storytelling reaches far beyond creating great commercials. The realisation that the story of a brand is more than the typical mono channel in-out experience, is slowly changing advertising agencies. When a customer watches a commercial, he typically enters the experience of a story and leaves it behind when the commercial ends. In contrast, omnichannel storytelling provides a consistent and coherent story and experience over all the different touch points. It unites a brand and its customer. In this case, the commercial is only a part of the whole story. Just like a website, iphone app and even analogue touch points like e.g. a product folder are all part of the bigger story.
This holistic approach of how different touchpoints contribute to the whole story of your brand paves the way for a more complete and long-term relationship between brand and customer.
Where this does not sound like rocket science, the real crux is in how we play the game. In building the story of a brand, our focus will be mainly on crafting the interactions between the different parts (touchpoints) and how they relate to the whole story. This means that agencies should shift to a more service design approach to create a brand story. The promise of this shift is that better stories can provide memory changes, and better memory changes can influence our future decisions.
Thus the question you really want to consider is: What is the story of my brand?
References
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