Getting Past the Lizard Brain: The Key to Building Products People Love
The following is adapted from Loops by J Cornelius.
In order to understand what people want, we first have to understand how they make decisions. Understanding how people make decisions requires a little brain science. Don’t worry. This won’t hurt.
Analysis Paralysis
Have you ever fallen victim to analysis paralysis? I bet you have. Not sure what that is? Here’s an example:
You’re in the condiments aisle of your local grocer looking at thirty different jars of jelly. Some say “Organic” on the label, while others have obscene amounts of sugar. You narrow your search for the perfect jelly down to the ones that are organic, then toss out the overpriced options. Now you have eleven choices that all seem equally good — how do you decide which one to pick?
If you’re like most people, you might get frustrated and walk away without jelly because you have no good way of choosing between the final eleven options. Or you might get frustrated and just grab the jar with the most attractive label or lowest price, disregarding the quality of ingredients. After all, why devote that much time, effort, and attention to a choice that has very little impact on your life?
The same thing happens when you’re on the pricing page for some online service and are trying to decide which plan to subscribe to. Having too many options or not being able to clearly tell the difference between them will leave you paralyzed. Not signing up today!
When our brains are forced to make too many tiny decisions, it can shut us down. This is analysis paralysis, and it happens all the time. When people don’t have clear and compelling information to base decisions on, they will choose not to decide and just walk away.
Making Decisions Based in Fear
Let’s look at another stumbling block to decision-making: fear.
It’s generally pretty easy to choose which pair of socks to wear in the morning because there’s not much risk involved in that choice. Nobody really cares if you wear the blue socks or the green socks (unless you’re the type who matches socks to the rest of your outfit).
But when it comes to changing your bank, there’s a high level of fear involved. You might be incredibly frustrated with your bank, but you won’t switch because the process is too complex and there’s a chance something could go wrong. Most people, especially those living paycheck to paycheck, can’t risk having something go wrong and losing money.
The rewards of such a move also don’t outweigh the risks. An extra 1 percent interest on a savings account is not worth the pain and aggravation of doing all the paperwork.
So people hardly ever change banks…and banks know that.
The Lizard Brain at Work
These are just two simple examples of how people make decisions, rational or not, based on basic brain science. We start our discussion of human-centered business design here because making products that people love to use begins with understanding the human brain.
As we just saw, our brains can put up barriers that keep us from acting. If your product makes customers think too much or sparks fear or uncertainty, it’s dead on arrival.
The fear response comes from the low-functioning part of our brain, lovingly referred to as the “lizard brain.” This part of the brain only understands two things: fear and desire.
The lizard brain first evaluates everything you see, every time you see it. Here’s how:
FEAR: Is this safe? Should I be afraid of this thing? Is it going to hurt me?
Get past the fear gatekeeper, and you’ve got a chance. The next hurdle is this:
DESIRE: If it’s not dangerous, is it desirable?
If I desire it, how? Do I want to eat it? Mate with it? Own it?
This all stems from our evolutionary survival instincts, and we can’t avoid it no matter how hard we try. Think about this: if someone you trust points a gun at your head, you’re going to be uncomfortable. Your more developed brain — the one that trusts that person — can’t override the fear response coming from the lizard brain. You’re probably a little uncomfortable even thinking about that situation. That’s how powerful the lizard brain is. We can’t ignore the lizard brain, but we can figure out how to get past it.
Getting Past the Lizard Brain
If you check those first two boxes, the decision will go up to your more developed brain, which has two distinct parts: the slow-thinking brain and the fast-thinking brain.
The slow brain is where we do more long-term and complicated thinking. It’s what most of us would call our subconscious. When you have that idea that comes out of nowhere in the shower, that’s your slow brain feeding something it’s been working on up to your fast brain. Also, you know when you want to “sleep on it”? That’s your fast brain handing something off to the slow brain for processing.
The fast brain is what you’re using right now to process the words on this page and turn them into thoughts inside your head. It’s what you use to talk, do math, drive a car, play sports (to some degree), and many people agree this is where most decisions get made.
For more about the fast and slow brains, I recommend you read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton.
Back to making that decision. After something gets past the lizard brain, it moves up to the high-functioning brain where we make “educated” decisions. But if your product gets slapped down by the lizard brain customers won’t — scratch that — can’t buy it because the decision to purchase never reached their high-functioning brain!
Fear and Desire
Remember, the lizard brain only understands two things: fear and desire, in that order. So to get past the lizard brain, we have to avoid triggering fear. Some fears are primal and universal: fear of being hurt or dying, fear of running out of food (see fear of dying), fear of losing something we value, like money, status, friends, or love.
There are many great books about all the things people are afraid of, so I won’t go into more detail here. Just know there are a lot of things people fear, and knowing what the people in your target market fear will help you avoid being discarded by the lizard brain. If all you do is focus on the fear of loss (in all the ways it presents itself), you’ll be far ahead of your competitors who aren’t thinking this way at all.
For more advice on building products people love, you can find Loops on Amazon.
J Cornelius has been building digital products since 1996 and has helped countless startups and corporate product teams create products and services you probably use today. He is the founder and president of Nine Labs, a digital product strategy, design, and experience consultancy operating in Atlanta and New York City. He speaks at conferences and leads workshops around the world, and serves on the advisory board of multiple venture capital groups, accelerator programs, and private companies. A serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, J started his first business in high school and never looked back. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, three kids, and two dogs.
