Interview: Adam Alter, NYU marketing professor and author of Irresistible, on nine-enders, fluency, and naming that sells

This week we’re joined by Adam Alter to explore the behavioral forces that drive decision-making. From the psychology of getting unstuck to the power of fluency, labeling, and context, Adam shares practical insights for marketers looking to change minds - and behavior.

Transcript

MichaelAaron Flicker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Behavioral Science for
Brands, a podcast where we bridge the gap between academics and practical
marketing. Every week we sit down and go deep behind the science of some of
America's most successful brands. I'm Michael Aaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And today we're sitting with Adam Alter professor of
marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business, and author of three bestselling
books, Drunk Tank Pink, Irresistible, and Anatomy of a Breakthrough.
Let's get into it.
So, Adam, welcome to Behavioral Science for Brands. Richard and I have made
it our little mission to be on the hunt, to learn about behavioral science, share
behavioral science with our listeners, and really try to help improve marketing
advertising.
And the world of consumer psychology. And we're thrilled to have you on the
show today and to talk and to learn together. But before we get into our
[00:01:00] conversation, if you'll indulge me, let me give our listeners a little bit
of background on you and then we'll get into it. So Adam, you are, as we said,
you are a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business with an
affiliated appointment in psychology.
And from all the research that you've talked about Richard and I were talking, it
kind of, it sits at this intersection of psychology, behavioral economics, thinking
about what affects people and your three books give everybody a little bit of
insight into each one, and then we can talk more about them throughout today.

Drunk Tank Pink explores how unexpected forces think, how we shape how we
think, feel, and behave. Irresistible dives into the hidden forces behind
technology. And in my opinion, it's a super fascinating early look at how
products are engineered to hijack our attention. I, I think in, it was probably at
the very beginning of being concerned [00:02:00] about screen time and that's
really changed the national conversation.
And then in our, your latest book, anatomy of a Breakthrough, you tackle this
science of how to get unstuck, providing strategies for how to overcome
creative and professional ruts beyond your writing. Your TED Talk born out of
irresistible and why screens make us less happy has been viewed on TED over
4.7 million times, and you are a generous thought leader.
You regularly share your thoughts in national publications, come on podcasts,
and we're just thrilled to have you on the show today. Thanks for coming.
Adam Alter: Appreciate it.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. Well yes, of course. And it and it, and it, you
know, for us. You have listeners that come to the show because they don't know
what they'll find.
And and part of this, the helping them think about how to uncover it is giving
them the context and then also telling stories as we go. [00:03:00] So one of the
stories that we always start with is just how did it all start for you? How did you
get interested in consumer behavior? How did you get interested in the
psychology behind decision making?
Like where does this begin for you in your life story?
Adam Alter: So I actually talked about this in, in the third of the books you
mentioned in Anatomy of a Breakthrough, which is about getting unstuck
because I was profoundly stuck as an undergrad at university and I was studying
actuarial science, which is not something that I saw myself doing for the rest of
my life.
But I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was interested in a lot of things. And so
I spent three months sitting in as many first level or intro level courses as I
could at the University of New South Wales and Sydney. The two courses that
that struck me were law and psychology. I sat in on two lectures that I thought
were really interesting, and so I did both of those in parallel.

You could do two degrees at the same time as an undergrad. And at the end of it
all, I did an honors year and wrote a thesis in psychology, and I, I loved the
research process and I ended [00:04:00] up applying to PhD programs in the us.
One of them accepted me and here I am, 21 years later.
MichaelAaron Flicker: That love of, do you, as you look back on it, do you
think those early interests in law and psychology kind of paved the way for
research?
To me, knowing little about law, a little more about psychology, but thinking
about those, the academic research and then turning that into something usable,
that's a, that's a skillset to do. But you, do you think that those early interest
paved the way for it?
Adam Alter: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there's, there's doing research for
theory development, which is what you're supposed to do if you wanna get
tenure at a university.
And that's what basic science is all about. And it's, it's a pretty insular process.
It's not really designed to be shared beyond the academic community
necessarily. And then I think at some point a lot of people get itchy feet and say,
I want this to be about more than just the paper that's being published.
And that's getting. Read four times for all four by my mother. You know, that
sort of thing that happens to a lot of academics. And so [00:05:00] that
happened to me fairly early on and I wanted to study something that I thought
would have reach and importance beyond just. The journal where it was written
and that no one would read it.
And so I always had an eye on, I wanted to do solid sound research, but I
always had an eye on, on research that, that, at least to me, felt like it was in
some way important
MichaelAaron Flicker: and choosing to get unstuck. It's your third book, it's
your most recent book, but it was an experience you had much earlier. So what
took you from that first experience there to then writing Drunk Tank Pink?
What was the, what was the story of how you got to that first book?
Adam Alter: Yeah, I think a lot of academics in the last maybe 15 years in my
field have written books, and that first book is often a sort of summary of what

your career has been up to that point. And that's really what Drunk Tank Pink
was for me.
It summarized a lot of the research I'd been doing through my grad school
career and then a little bit of my, my career as a professor, because I wrote it
fairly early on in that, in that process. And. I had been [00:06:00] studying, I
realized when I look back on my body of work, I'd been studying how these sort
of unexpected forces shaped how we think, feel, and behave.
And that's what I turned the book into that first book. And I, I think that's
common. And then what happens is if you really enjoy the book writing process
and you feel you've got more to give and you wanna write another book, then
you have to figure out what comes next. Now you could try to do a sequel,
which a lot of people have done with some success.
I didn't really want to do that. I wanted to do something quite different. And so
then the second book became. Almost more of a journalistic exercise. It was a
combination of my own research, but also figuring out some things that I didn't
know rather than just a brain dump directly from what's in here down onto the
page.
And I, I love that process of combining the journalistic aspects with the, the
original research.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Thank you for sharing that. So if we think about drum
tank pink. You know, if you look at the cover of the book, you got three
swatches of pink on it, and I think the middle one is the name Drunk Tank Pink,
that is the name of [00:07:00] the color.
But it starts to get into this discussion of how things that you don't think affect
behavior actually do. Do you want to tell us the story behind the name of the
book and that name of that color Pink?
Adam Alter: Yeah, the, the term drunk tank pink became an emblem for the
kinds of effects that I found fascinating and that I wanted to study.
So it was a color that was used in the late seventies and early eighties.
Psychologists discovered that as they described it, you could paint the inside of
a drunk tank or a jail cell. This pink color, and it would pacify whoever was
thrown in there. So you'd get a rowdy drunk or aggressive person, you'd put
them in there and 15 minutes later the color had had this amazing effect on
them, sapping their energy, making them much more compliant and.

I was less concerned with whether that was true about the color than the fact
that sometimes we don't realize that certain features in the world have an effect
much greater than you would imagine. And that's what the book became about.
It was an attempt to catalog some of [00:08:00] these effects that that are, I
think, quite, quite surprising to lay people who don't recognize that they're out
there having, having constant little pushes and pulls on the way we, we
experience the world.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Richard and I have often referred to the concept of
nine enders in co in different discussions we've had at different shows we've had
and some one of your most famous studies covers this, so, so talking about
things you don't think affect a, your decision making process, could you first
explain the concept of nine enders and then what your study found in this?
Adam Alter: Yeah, this is some work I did with my colleague and, and very
good friend Hal Hirschfield, who's at UCLA. We started doing this research
maybe 2012 or 2013, and I remember we sat down in Hal's office. He was at
NYU at the time before he moved to UCLA and, and I said to him, I remember
when I ran a marathon, I've only run one marathon.
I will probably only ever run one [00:09:00] marathon. But I remember what
spurred me to run it was I was 29 and I felt like. I was staring at this new decade
that was about to begin and I needed to do something. I needed to create some
sort of meaning in my life to show myself that I was. Kind of vibrant, alive,
engaged.
I felt the passage of time and it changed how I felt and thought and behaved in
that year and I'm, I remember thinking about that and wondering whether that
was an unusual experience. And if you think about it, there should be no real
difference materially between 29, 28, 30, 27, 31, like they're all sort of a year
within each other.
And that as you tick over to a new year, there shouldn't be a good reason why.
Aging should be different or the experience of aging should be different
between say 28, 29 versus 29 and 30. But there is something very pressing
about being 29 39, 49 59, and Hal and I discussed it and we realized that
seemed true to us, to both of us.
And so what we wanted to do is to examine whether people, when they are
these nine ending [00:10:00] ages, as we call them, ages, where you're an adult,
where you're about to hit a new decade, whether that might spur different ways
of thinking about the world. And it, it, it seems that it does. So we, we have

evidence and there's actually been some replication of, of these effects in other
papers.
Showing, for example, that if you, if you track how much people consider the
meaningfulness of their lives across time, there is a little spike in the nine
ending years, which indicates that people kind of do an audit of their lives. They
zoom back during these years and try to figure out, has my life been
meaningful?
Has this, this sense of the passage of time is spurring me to think about my life
in a much more abstract, broad way, and that can lead to good things and bad
things. You can conclude that yes, my life is meaningful. I'm happy where I am.
Perhaps I just wanna remind myself of what's important to me. Or you could
have a crisis of meaning where you feel that perhaps life hasn't been all you
want it to be.
And so we found. Based on my initial example that there is a big spike in
people who run marathons at nine and then nine [00:11:00] ending ages, and
actually at zero ending and eight ending as well. There's a little sort of peak of a
wave, a kind of crescendo. And then it declines again in the middle of the
decade.
So people running, first time marathons, running their fastest marathons. That
tends to happen at those ages. But then on the negative side, you see we got data
from a, an online dating site that, it's for people who are looking for extramarital
affairs. Ashley Madison, I think Ashley Madison. Yeah. You see a big spike in
nine ending ages on that site too.
Part of the reason that might be happening is because people are lying about
their ages, which you can't be sure is not true, but also there is a notable spike in
these nine ending ages. Then you also, this, this is obviously a much graver
statistic, but you see a spike in, in suicide rates as well at the nine ending ages,
which is obviously the sort of the greatest version of a crisis of meaning that
you might have in, in life.
And so some of these effects are funny, trivial, some of them are [00:12:00]
obviously not at all. They've, they're pretty serious. But all of this reflects this
idea that at this nine ending age, you've noticed the passage of time and it makes
you much more thoughtful and introspective about the nature of your life.
Richard Shotton: I don't think it's an absolute fascinating study, and I think the
creativity of those data sets you analyzed I is amazing. Have you found the

companies or businesses or, or you know, people trying to change behavior,
have, have you seen practical uses of, of, of your in house principle?
Adam Alter: Yes, I have actually a, a few times, and if you think about it, if
you think what the, about what the mechanism is, there are some businesses that
want you to do what seems to happen quite naturally at that nine ending age.
They want you to think about the passage of time. They want you to feel the
time is slipping away perhaps as you get higher up in age and nine ending ages.
And they want you to be more thoughtful about meaningfulness. And where
you see this in particular is businesses that are focused on, on sacrificing.
What's going on now for the greater good in the long run? [00:13:00] And so
I've seen it most with insurance companies and with investment companies. So
these two, these are two organizations where I'm telling you that you have a
certain amount of money today, and I'd like you to not spend that money,
although I'm sure there are lots of things you could do with it today.
I'd like you to put it aside. And it's gonna be for your legacy, or it's gonna be for
when you've retired or it's gonna be for your kids after you're gone or whatever.
But in each case, there's something bigger than just you here now today. And I
think that happens naturally at those nine ending ages. So those are the
companies that pay attention to that.
But there's another way to use it. It's not just going up to people who are 29, 39,
49, 59, if you understand the psychological mechanism at play there. All that's
doing is sort of tipping you more into the realm of saying. Who am I? Where
am I, what's life like? How, how is, how do I feel about my life across time?
And so what that does is I, I've seen this used by insurance companies where
they have a sort of script and also by, by investment companies, retirement,
investment companies, and [00:14:00] they turn it into a kind of script where
you put people in the mindset that we naturally seem to adopt at these nine
ending ages.
So you basically say you know, what's, what's the most important thing to you?
Who are you gonna be in 20 years? How do you feel about. Like, if I had to ask
you to sum up in one sentence, what is the meaning of your life or what are the
most sort of meaningful aspects of your life or what do you think you'll be
doing the first five years after you retire?

Anything that makes you think in this very grand, big way transports you
forward and makes you think more abstractly and more broadly, and I think
leads to the same kinds of outcomes
Richard Shotton: With the that first example you talked about was this a case
of insurance companies targeting. 29, 39, 49 year olds?
Or was it both a combination of messaging and, and and targeting?
Adam Alter: Yeah, it's a combination of both. So what they, what they told me
they were doing was. You obviously know one of the first things you know
about someone when you're talking to them as an [00:15:00] insurance agent is
what their age is. So what they started to do was if the person's age was, I think
they were using eight, nine, and zero.
So you don't have to only focus on nine enders. I know that's what we focus on,
but it's the same idea. Some people get that same feeling when they're
approaching the end of the decade. At 38, 48, 58. Some people, it actually only
happens once you tip over into the next decade. So when you're, you're 40, 50,
60.
And so when they found people who are of those ages, they would ask certain
questions like, I noticed that you are approaching a new decade or you've just
entered a new decade. Has that, what has that made you think about your life?
Did you think more deeply about your life? So it was just a little sort of lever to
push them in that direction, but you don't need that, right?
You could take a 34-year-old and say. You're 34, you are not in your twenties
anymore and you're not yet 40, but I'm sure you think a little bit about
occasionally what would it like to be like to be 40 and perhaps even one day to
retire. So it's just, it's the first sentence or [00:16:00] two in a conversation. I
think it just kind of makes a very natural, natural jump into that kind of
conversation.
Richard Shotton: Nine Enders was a, you know, very famous bit of research
that you and Hal Hirschfield did. And another area that an awful lot of research
on is about the way that the label that we give a behavior can change people's
interpretation of it. And you've got this amazing Nat for brilliant phrase in one
of your New Yorker articles, you talk about the linguistic Heisenberg principle.
Do you talk about what you mean by with that? By that.

Adam Alter: So, so the basic idea, the Heisenberg principle, I, I'm not a
physicist, but my understanding is that basically you can, I think it's, you can
only measure the speed of an object or know its location at any moment in time.
And once you sort of fix it down to figure out where it is, you can't see how fast
it's traveling because it's fixed.
And the linguistic Heisenberg principle is this idea that. Concepts in the world,
objects, ideas are not fixed in the [00:17:00] same way as an object that you can
pin down. You're trying to figure out its speed is not fixed. It's, it's it's kind of,
it's ely and difficult to get your hands on. And this is what I, I noticed about the
way labeling worked that, we, we sort of have this idea that there is a true state
or form of a thing, but once you change what you call it and how you refer to it,
you change the thing. There are some great examples of this. Much of this is
based on the work of Le Bosky at Stanford. And she talks in one of her papers
about the fact that the word for bridge, like a bridge that spans across, you
know, two.
Parts across the side of a river. The, the word for bridge in Spanish is masculine.
And the word for bridge in German is feminine. And if you ask German
speakers and Spanish speakers, tell me, if you imagine a bridge in your mind
and tell me what words come to mind. Because in German bridge is a feminine
word, German speakers will tell you that the bridge is elegant.
They'll use words that are [00:18:00] typically feminine. When you ask a
Spanish speaker. Just naturally describe a bridge they'll use robust, strong, and
they'll use much more typically masculine words. And the, the argument there is
obviously that. There is no such thing as a masculine bridge or a feminine
bridge, but the way you think of the bridge is through a lens that's shaped by, by
your language, by whatever terms you give it.
And if it's a masculine term, you think of it as masculine. If it's feminine, you
think of it as feminine. And there are lots of other examples of this. There's this
very, very famous study looking at eyewitness memory, where you're asked
how fast a car was going and if, if the two cars in this shot you, you see this
very brief video clip, which you can find on YouTube, and it's two cars
colliding.
A car collides into some other object. I can't even remember. Speaking of the
fallibility of memory this car has a, has a collision and you are either asked how
fast was the car going when it collided, or how fast was the car going when it
smashed? [00:19:00] And various other words that, that vary in intensity.

Now, if, if you're in a courtroom and you're asking an eyewitness, how fast was
the car going? And you use the word collided, that sounds pretty tame, but if
you say smashed, there's an image of broken glass and it's a sort of violent
word, and people imagine that the car was going much faster. When they're
asked how fast it was going, when it smashed, they saw exactly the same.
Video footage, but that word changes what they saw and how they perceive that
same event. And so that's this Heisenberg principle that, that nothing is actually
truly fixed. It's it's largely governed by how you refer to it and what you say
when you are, when you're talking about it.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And your original interest in this, maybe even colored
by your background, is in law.
And this could have a big difference on how the jury thinks of this, of, of, of
this situation. Even though it was all the car collision was happening at the same
speed, it was only the adjective that changed. Have you seen this [00:20:00]
applied commercially? Like where brands have used language to, to be more
persuasive or practical ways?
Communicators have used this to convince people of things.
Adam Alter: Everywhere. I mean, any copy there is, I think you'll, you'll find
the way a real estate listings are a perfect example of this. You know, a home,
when you see a home and you're trying to sell a home for millions of dollars, if
it's a luxury home, everything in there is gloss, essentially.
You know, you're trying to imagine if, if I walk into a home and you're trying to
sell it to me and it's an expensive home, I have to imagine. Lots of things
simultaneously and very quickly, I have to imagine myself living there. I have
to imagine that it's mine. I have to imagine enjoying it with people I love, but I
also have to feel that it's special and it's a luxury home and it's different from
what else is out there, and it's unique and.
So all of the, the language that you see in listings, and I, I do this constantly. I
comb the listings in the United States in various areas just to [00:21:00] see the
way real estate agents are now describing homes. And I first got very interested
in this, in the real estate context when I, I was selling an apartment that I had in
New York City and I was working with my real estate agent to craft what was
gonna be online as the, the description.

And I watched that process and it was alchemy. It was amazing. I was like, but
this. It's a shoebox in Manhattan. She's like, it's not a shoebox, it's a palace. I
was like, oh, it's a palace. And she's like, you could have been in a much smaller
place. It could have been 200 square feet, but look at your 300 square foot
palace.
I was like, 50% more than 200 square feet. You're right. It is a palace. So, so,
so, yeah, I, I think brands use this all the time. If you think about packaged
goods, it's on the label almost all the time as well. And, and brand naming as
well is the same. So, yeah.
Richard Shotton: The most extreme category I've seen doing this again and
again and again is bizarrely fish fish salesman.
So there are examples of [00:22:00] the Patagonian tooth fish. No one, one to
buy it in the 1970s. Lee Lance calls it the Chilian Sea bass. The dolphin fish. No
ones will eat it 'cause you know who wants to eat. So it reminds you of flipper
became mahi mahi. There's mud bugs. I think were renamed as, is it crawfish?
Is that how you say it in America? Yeah. And it's a such an extreme change
again and again.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And for the listeners, I think the, the, the application
takeaway of this part of the conversation is do you have a vision of what you
want your buyer to, to, to, to imagine it being The Richard and I often find in
our conversations.
Sometimes small businesses or real estate agents who are on the street are more
used to doing these psychology principles than corporate marketers, because
you know, if you are a brand manager of a Fortune 100, a Fortune 1000
company, you've got a few, barriers to you and the customer. But if you are
selling real estate every day, [00:23:00] very quickly you start to say, how can I
imagine this shoebox as a palace?
And you start to apply these principles. So I think one of the takeaways is just
how do we help? How do you as a marketer, an advertiser, a brand owner,
envision what the best state to sell it would be? Or imagine the best way to get
people to. Live a healthier life. It doesn't just have to be selling marketers and
advertisers do health campaigns.

We do lots of things to make the world a better place. So how can we help them
imagine that? Best state, I think is is one of the takeaways we can, we can think
about.
Adam Alter: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think, these ideas, often they're
not that surprising on their face. Like the idea that what you call something is
important.
I think a lot of people would say, yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking
about the name I wanted to give my child. 'cause I realize it's an important thing
to do. I, I think where it becomes interesting and really. Valuable and practically
important is, is to how you [00:24:00] instantiate it, how you use it, and what
you do with it.
And there are some people who are very good at that. They translate the ideas
into something practical. I think the, the example Richard gave with the fish is,
is a perfect one. That these, these fish all look the same when they come to you
on the, you know, they're raw fish. You are in the fish shop and you're like, I
don't know, this is a whole lot of different fish.
I dunno what I'm looking at. But that instantiation has made maybe millions or
billions of dollars for, for fisheries everywhere. So I, I think that's exactly right.
The process is how do you turn this insight into something valuable and, and
there is a whole way of doing it, the brainstorming process, discussing it with
other people, figuring out what the end state should be, what is the goal I'm
trying to achieve with it.
I think that's exactly right.
Richard Shotton: So with, within the. World of, of language. One of the areas
you've done an awful lot of research on is this principle of fluency. Could you
describe what you mean by that and, and why? Businesses should be interested.
Adam Alter: Yeah. This is the subject of probably more of my research than
any other topic.
Fluency is essentially how easy it [00:25:00] is to make sense of a piece of
information. And it could be written information, it could be visual, it could be
something that you're thinking about in memory, and every single time your
brain tries to make sense of information in the world, it falls along a continuum
from very, very easy or very fluent to very, very difficult or very disfluent.

So if you are just learning to speak a new language. Every single word that you
bring to mind will be disfluent. It'll be difficult, it will require considerable
attention. But if you are speaking the language you spoke when you were first
learning language, it's very fluent. You don't even think about it.
It's borderline automatic. And that's very fluent. And what, what I've studied
with, mostly with my colleague Danny Oppenheimer, who was one of my
advisors when I was doing my PhD, is. What does this matter, what does the
fluency or disfluency of a particular instance of communication matter? We
found in one of our early studies, this was published almost 20 years ago now,
that if you look at the performance of stocks on the stock [00:26:00] market or
shares on the share market, depending on which part of the world you're in
when the, the share is first released at IPO.
If you can pronounce its name fluently or if it has a ticket code that is
pronounceable as an English word, if it's in an English speaking country, it will
get a much bigger IPO pop or bounce over the first day to week of its trading,
which will then revert back to a sort of mean level or after six to 12 months.
But people feel a sense of comfort. They feel like the stock is less risky when
they feel they understand it, they can pronounce it, it feels familiar and fluent.
And, and fluency therefore matters a lot in a lot of domains where you're
essentially trying to sell something new to people who are trying to figure it out
from, from zero acquaintance.
They dunno anything about it and they're like, what is this thing? And so
fluency helps you get over that initial hump.
Richard Shotton: When you say that it does strike me as crazy. Pharma
companies who spend billions of pounds on launching medication, often the
names are a collection of consonants. You know, it's [00:27:00] very, very hard
to, to pronounce.
You would've thought that they would be all over this research and giving, you
know, simple, fluent names to reduce the perception of, of risk.
Adam Alter: Pharma naming is a huge business. So in the United States,
there's. There are all the kind of consonant filled ZA lab or something, and
you're like, I have no idea how to deal with that, but, but that's, that's the generic
name.

But then when you look at the actual, the branded name will be both very fluent,
largely fluent. Or if it's Disfluent, it's Disfluent with a purpose. And so it's trying
to tell you that there's an attribute associated with this product. You're not
allowed to use a real word 'cause that's not allowed in the naming conventions
legally.
But you can make it sort of evoke. Ideas that are associated with whatever
concepts you want people to think about with that drug. So if it's a drug that's
supposed to calm you versus a drug that's supposed to excite you and make you
alert, you're gonna have a completely different set of names that are gonna work
in those contexts.
So there's, there are two aspects to naming. [00:28:00] There's the fluency, but
then the other aspect is semantics. What meaning is inspired by the name. And
you can play those two together and kind of separately and involves a lot of
that. It's a very, very complex process.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I worked on an asthma brand, and Allegra was one of
the competitors and always in forever.
Allegra had an A at the start of its name and Allegra felt airy. It felt like it was
relieving your, your asthma symptoms. And so it for, yeah, just to double down
on this, on, on your concept working on the teams that were working on it, that
was the name really made, meant a lot.
Richard Shotton: Although that example does show the variance by culture,
because I think there was a, there was a car of not particularly fancy attributes
called the Allegra in Britain.
So I think a Brit sing it would've thought, why have they named it after this kind
of mid-market, old fashioned car? So the danger of. Different fluencies across d
or different semantic [00:29:00] associations across different cultures.
MichaelAaron Flicker: To the beginning of your point, Adam, that's I think
exactly like what's, what's fluent in English is if it's my, my first language, if it
takes a lot of effort, it may be totally different.
And so cultural relevance, and again, to the pharma space, they use different
brand names in different, in different countries. So the same drug gets a
different brand name depending on where it is. So let's break apart the idea of
fluency and disfluency. 'cause I think there's probably interesting things to talk
about on both sides.

So we, we, we, let's take the initial learning as fact. If we can have more
fluency, it's gives you more comfort, it's more believable. You're more likely to
buy the stock. You're more likely to feel comfort with the brand. So how can
communicators increase their fluency? What are tactics they can use to be more
fluent with their target audiences?
Adam Alter: I think there's [00:30:00] some obvious low hanging fruit for
everyone. You know, you, you're in an industry and there's a gap of knowledge
between whatever you are doing and whatever. The receiver knows the receiver
of that information or the audience. So jargon is obviously a problem. You don't
want any jargon.
You wanna be as straightforward as possible. A lot of fluency is about.
Stripping down the language so that it's as as simple as possible. So I think
that's a good first place to begin is, is simple copy editing. You know, if you
have a script or something that approximates a script, make it as simple and
straightforward as possible.
I think in the world of, of sales I, I've talked quite a lot with people who. Who
try to automate as much as possible. So fluency can also be about just requiring
people to make fewer decisions and to take fewer actions. So if you have a
process and you, you know, a, a lot of, again, going back to insurance or
financial services, you might have 10 things that need to be worked through
with any customer, potential customer.
Are they all essential in that first conversation? Are there some that you
[00:31:00] can gather information behind the scenes? So what's your age?
What's your date of birth? If people are gonna be filling that out elsewhere, can
you just pipe that in? And even stripping down the whole process so that it's,
you know, 50% quicker and involves 50% fewer questions, that has, has a huge
effect on on the fluency of the interaction.
I think also a lot of it is about curation. So when you present options to people.
Really, really smart salespeople will curate the options. They won't just present
them in a sort of totally objective way. They'll either suggest that something is
the most common option that people choose, or for someone like you, these are
the reasons why this might make the most sense, but perhaps you've got other
considerations, in which case this other option would be valuable to you.
And so I think a lot of it is in, is in the way you curate and present the
information and stripping it down and making it as simple as possible for people
is is great. Now in the United States, we really privilege this idea of kind of

liberty and freedom, and there's this assumption that people want infinite
decisions so that they [00:32:00] can really tailor the world to whatever they
specifically need.
But you will absolutely overwhelm people if you don't make things more
streamlined, narrower funnel them. And so you, you really have to do that, I
think, and that's where fluency comes from.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. I mean that last point, as marketers to not just
give three great options, but to label them and curate them so that even though
you can look at all the benefits, even though you can compare on price, this is
what's most common in your area.
This is what's most common for people at your life stage or however you label
them. Helps just ease that burden of thinking through it and increases fluency.
It's super helpful. But not always. Is it best to increase fluency? And you have a,
a paper entitled The Benefit of Cognitive Disfluency. So what the is where we
don't wanna actually remove all the friction, where we don't want to have like
as, as most fluent communication as possible.
Adam Alter: [00:33:00] Yeah, so I, I think with a lot of areas of research, you
get, you know, a couple of decades of people showing in 50 different ways that
one thing is good. And then at some point people say, but, well, what are the
boundaries? Where does that end? And when, when is that not true? And so I,
again, with Danny Oppenheimer, we started doing some research on this again
about 20 years ago, looking at, well actually surely there are times when it's
good to be disfluent.
When might that be? And one of the things Disfluency does is it signals to you
that you need more resources. To make sense of the situation. You know, like if
I'm learning a new language, my brain automatically works much harder to to to
do that process. To go through that process. And so if I want you to pay great
attention to the thing I'm about to say now, if I hit you with a little burst of
disfluency, then you are gonna be, your brain will say, well, hang on,
something's going on here.
And it's going to engage deeper resources. So we have a series of studies
showing that. When you present people with say something that's written in a
font that's hard to read, they do much better if after that they're asked [00:34:00]
some intellectual questions. They do better at those questions. They get them
right more often.

And so essentially what you're doing is you're slowing the brain down. You're
saying you've gotta recruit additional resources. Now you don't wanna do that
all the time because people will be overwhelmed and they'll be exhausted by it.
But strategically, if you place these moments of disfluency and you punctuate
otherwise fluent conversation with disfluency, those are the moments when the
person will kind of perk up and say, oh, this is something I really need to pay
attention to.
So that's one example of a benefit
Richard Shotton: that that idea, that a little bit of effort. Gets information, you
know, stuck in, in the mind is interesting. 'cause if you think the, one of the big
changes the last year is chat, GT which removes friction in terms of researching
topics. I think there's, there's early studies not, you know, replicated yet, but
suggest, you know, people researching with chat gpt remember less than if
they've had to Google 'em or go to a book and, and, and find things out
themselves.
So that idea of. [00:35:00] Friction not always being a a a negative is, is
fascinating.
Adam Alter: Yeah. I This idea of cognitive alarm bells is, is really interesting
to me. This idea that disfluency is essentially a kind of alarm bell that says it's
time to pay more attention. So your, your cognitive skills need to, need to be at
their best.
And you know, it's funny you mentioned GPT, there are some examples now of,
for example, lawyers who will file briefs. With made up citations and then, you
know, they won't check what they're doing because the whole process is so
fluent. You say chat, GPT. Tell me, here's what I'm, my case is about. Can you
give me 10 cases that are relevant?
Maybe some literature, some articles have been written in journals. You lift
that, you paste it in and it all looks right. You even recognize some of the names
there, the titles of the papers make sense to you. You can almost remember
having read some of them, but essentially they're fabricated, they're
hallucinations.
And so I think this is what happens when you have arch fluency. You have so
much fluency that you stop being critical of anything and then you run into a lot
of [00:36:00] trouble. And there are lawyers who've been disbarred as a result
of, of submitting briefs that are basically wholly made up.

MichaelAaron Flicker: It's a, it's an amazing moment we're in because the
technology has as you say, they could have sworn they read it.
They're almost certain they knew that study. And so I heard somebody speak
recently about like human hallucinate too. So before we give like a ton of
critique to the AI. Humans are fallible and so is the ai. And so when you have
that overlapping of it's too high fluency, too high of the sense of confidence that
the data's right.
So as you call it arch fluency, you stop being critical and you have a
hallucination or the data's not right. It's a dangerous, it's a dangerous end of the
pool to be in.
Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly.
Richard Shotton: A while ago you did a series of pieces for the, the, the New
Yorker, and in one of them you start with this amazing anecdote about
[00:37:00] a salesperson selling genuine banks', but not being able to get any
cash.
And it leads you to this idea that there are certain products that are, in your
words, inherently invaluable. C could you take us through maybe that anecdote
and then the underlying thinking behind it?
Adam Alter: Yeah, absolutely. So this, this work is work that was originally
done by Chris. She, the term inherently invaluable is Chris.
She's work. And I was applying it to this, this fascinating case. This was, I think
the summer of 2013 and Banksy the. The performance slash street slash
political artist. I, I assume Banksys one person who really knows Banksy was,
was doing essentially what was called a residency in New York City for the
month of July of 2013, I think it was.
So for every day in July, 2013, a new Banksy would be revealed overnight
somewhere in the five boroughs of New York. And I remember chasing them
around and I liked Banksy a lot. And so I would go look and some of them
happened to be fairly near where I [00:38:00] was. One of the works, the one
that had the biggest impact on me was that Banksy had wanted to sort of
critique the art world and the way the art world worked.
And so what, what he, she it they did, who knows what we're dealing with here.
Was to, to have these genuine Banksy works that were worth, you know, tens of

thousands of dollars each sold on the side of Central Park. Now there's a whole
line of artists and artisans who sell various things there, and one of the stalls
was these genuine Banksy works and there was a, an elderly gentleman who'd
been paid to stand there from, I think 10 to five or something like that, and
someone was filming this whole process and people would walk by.
These works were advertisers being sold for 40 to $60 each. And I think the first
sale took three hours to happen and someone bought two of these works. Now,
if you think about what that person did, this person spent, I think they, they
bargained them down from 60 bucks a work to 40 [00:39:00] bucks a work. So
they spent something like $80 walking away with a hundred thousand dollars of
value, something like that.
At the end of the day, this guy had sold a few of the works, and actually some
people had said, I walked by and I realized that someone was ripping off
Banksies. And this person, clearly as, as a lover of Banksy, couldn't distinguish
between the real thing and not the real thing. And the commentary here from
Banksy was.
Someone somewhere has decided that these things were worth a hundred
thousand dollars each on the open market, on the art market, because they're
genuine banksies, but also regular people seeing the very same thing could not
perceive $40 of value in them. So what's going on here? What is art? It's just.
It's a confection. It's just nonsense. And he was basically saying, this world that
we've created for ourselves, you know, some things like the value of a, of a loaf
of bread to a hungry person, there's something very grounded about that, that's
inherently evaluable. When I'm hungry, when I'm thirsty, when I'm too hot,
when I'm too cold.
But actually, so much of the value [00:40:00] we see in the world, especially in
the developed world, is essentially just nonsense. It's hot air. And he was just
showing that in a very extreme way by showing that these same works. It could
be worth at the same time simultaneously less than $40, but also more than a
hundred thousand dollars.
Richard Shotton: And is that something, I mean there's the art world, which is
quite an, an extreme. And then you say on the other end there is kind of
commodities like bread or grain. Is there a a, a zone in between where, you
know, big consumer goods can, can apply this principle? I think you, you know,
you might have even talked about beer as being inherently invaluable.

Adam Alter: I think 99% of the things sold today are inherently invaluable. I
don't think there is a true canonical value to almost everything that's sold today.
And so the act of selling is turning your. Artwork into the Banksy, the genuine
Banksy, rather than the $40 one that sits on the side of the street and isn't sold.
So, so, yes beer is a great example of this. People will pay huge amounts for,
[00:41:00] for certain kinds of beers. And the, the labeling is part of it, and the
breweries a part of it. Certainly, you know, there are people who are able to
distinguish the taste of a good beer from a bad beer and the same for wine, but
most of us have no idea.
And, and so. We are paying attention to all the wrong cues, and I think this is
true in so many domains. It's true about political decision making as well. You
know, we, we are very superficially swayed by cues that have almost nothing to
do with policy making and what will actually end up affecting us.
And so it's whether it's a human that you're trying to sell, whether it's policies,
whether it's. Packaged goods, whether it's luxury goods, it doesn't really matter.
I think almost everything is susceptible to these kind of framing effects that
change how valuable you think the thing is.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And I think an idea I've heard you speak about in
other, in other podcasts and other places, less fluent brand names, like premium
products, you know Lamborghini Sports car, hard to pronounce, doesn't feel
[00:42:00] like English.
How does that connect to this conversation that we're having? How does
sometimes Disfluency increase perceived value?
Adam Alter: Yeah, so fluency feels familiar. It feels comfortable, it feels easy,
which is all to all the opposite of what luxury should be. So if I'm selling an
everyday thing and I want you to feel comfortable about it, I want you to think
it's not very risky, then I'm gonna use fluent language.
But if I want you to think this thing is exotic and it's special and it's out of the
realm of what's ordinary, then especially disfluency, that's tied to foreignness.
When it, when the foreignness is, is a, it's a place that's aspirational, that works
very well. So in fashion that might be France, it might be Italy and wine, it
might be France or Spain or Italy.
It can be made up. I mean, the classic example of this is, is the, the Brooklyn
based ice cream company, Hargan Does, which a lot of people have probably

heard that story, but it's the perfect example of this because Hargan does,
[00:43:00] is when you ask people what, what's the origin of the name Hargan
does? They all say something like, it's vaguely European.
And then you, you say, so in ice cream from Europe, why would Europeans
know a lot about ice cream? It's a place that's generally colder than other places.
And then they say, that's a fair point, but they know their ice, right? So maybe
they know their ice cream too. They know cold stuff. And so it's, it's not clear
exactly what the value of it is, but, but it sounds like a luxury brand.
But actually the way that name is constructed, there is no language in the world
that uses those letters in that order. So it was just made up to say this is a luxury
ice cream. It's meant to make you think generically of Northern Europe perhaps,
or Eastern Europe. I'm not sure exactly what it, what it implies, it's different
things to different people, but but yes, it's the name has that effect in that case.
Richard Shotton: Well, the, the original packaging that that, that they put
together had a little map of Denmark in, so they were, they were,
Adam Alter: oh, it was Danish. Okay.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. They had never been to Denmark. They had no
[00:44:00] idea about Denmark, supposedly. I think it was Reuben Mattis was
the, the, the founder.
He him and his wife were both Jewish and he thought that Denmark had a
particularly positive record during World War II of helping the Jewish
population of va the Nazis. So there was some kind of love of the country from
that way. And then I think thought the European values in the 1940s sounded
quite exotic to, to New Yorkers.
So, as you say, just completely made up this word with fake umlauts and a little
map to, to bemuse people.
Adam Alter: And this was a case where he could have chosen the most fluent
name in the world. He could have found a name that was very fluent and instead
added, as you say, the umla and the, it obviously was designed to look foreign
and different and disfluent.
And so there, I think you do, you do get the value of of Disfluency implying
luxury. I

Richard Shotton: think the, you know, we've seen here already from like the
Banksy and oth other stories. You've got this great gift of finding an anecdote
that explains a psychological [00:45:00] finding of all the anecdotes across your
three books, the one that I found kind of most shocking was around heroin
heroine addiction during the Vietnam War.
Could, could you run through that finding and then how that relates to, to, to
habits?
Adam Alter: Yeah. This is study that I think, or a phenomenon that I think
illustrates the power of field experiments that so often we as researchers go out
and do these very careful experiments in the lab and there's huge value in doing
those kind of gold standard experiments where you're very carefully
manipulating factors and you're seeing what the outcome of that manipulation is
on some sort of measured variable.
But this is a really interesting case. There was a lot of research done on, on
heroin addiction in the early part of the 20th century, and the research generally
found that relapse rates among people who were trying to stop using heroin
were very, very high. That if you had been a heroin user and then you managed
to detox, there was about a 90% [00:46:00] plus chance.
So nine more than nine in 10 heroin users would go back to heroin. So not only
was it very difficult to detox, but then once you detoxed, you were very likely to
return to it. Now during the Vietnam War a lot of American troops would have
a lot of downtime and a lot of people don't recog, recognize or realize this about
the experience, but there would be months and months where sometimes
nothing was happening.
It was an incredibly boring experience, and so they'd go out and try to find
something to do to entertain themselves. And there were a lot of drugs available
to them, a lot of opioids, and there was a lot of heroin available. So a lot of
these troops, when they were stationed in Vietnam and, and were not back in the
United States, developed very, very serious heroin addictions and dependencies.
And so there was this big worry in the United States that when they returned,
there'd be this huge public health crisis. You know, you'd be landing these
people with a heroin addiction back in the States that'd have to figure out how
they were gonna deal with this. And then, of course, given the 90% relapse
rate.[00:47:00]

You were gonna be in a lot of trouble because most of them would have these
very long-term problems that would follow. But what actually happened was
when they returned to the United States, the relapse rates were less than 10%.
So this is an incredible gulf, right? Most heroin users, 90% relapse rate, heroin
users coming back from the Vietnam War, less than 10%.
And so the question then becomes backward engineering this. What is the
difference between these? Soldiers in Vietnam who are getting addicted to
heroin, and most people who get addicted to heroin, who have high relapse
rates. And what they, what they realized was that you don't inherently return to
heroin.
What happens is you reinstate the context where you did it. So if you are in a
city and you use heroin and then you learn how not to use it, you, you detox.
You probably spend time with the same people when you used to use it, who
you used to spend time. When you use it, you probably spend time in the same
places.
Your life hasn't changed in material ways. You're essentially, it is exactly the
same [00:48:00] life minus the heroin, and so you're constantly being reminded
of it and it's being inspired for you and all the problems and complexities of
your life that may have led you in the direction of using heroin is still present.
And so you see a lot of that. You see that 90% relapse rate. For these soldiers in
Vietnam, the context in which they used heroin, they were bored. They had not
much to do. They didn't have a lot of social support. They were far away from
family, from friends, from loved ones, from a steady job, and so on. But once
they landed back in the US, nothing was the same.
The context was entirely, entirely different. And so there was no context
reinstatement. So the, this, the study basically showed that it wasn't, that
humans are just inherently susceptible to heroin, relapsing, or, or reuse. It's that
if you put someone in a context where you have everything but this one
ingredient that was such a big part of their lives, that ingredient will be a part of
their lives again, very, very quickly.
But if you change the context dramatically. You're much less likely to relapse.
And so it changed the way people treated [00:49:00] drug addiction. It basically
meant that the best thing you could do was to. Move in different circles, spend
time with different people to the extent possible, move to a new place. If you
could get a new job, if you could just change as much about your life as you

can, that has nothing to do with the heroin and then the addiction relapse rates
will be much lower.
Absolutely
Richard Shotton: fascinating because I think there's so much you can apply
outside of that specific situation, maybe ironically of, of heroin addiction. That
there is a, a misnomer, a misbelief, that if you want to change behavior, it's all
about motivation. Whereas this suggests, alongside that, you've gotta think
about.
Environmental cues and triggers and changing that should go alongside any acts
of, of motivation building.
Adam Alter: Yeah, I think the narrow, the narrow response to that is context
matters a lot. And the broad response is it's, it's just sometimes very, very
difficult to figure out what's, what's driving any effect.
[00:50:00] And, sometimes it takes these natural experiments, these natural
shifts where it just so happens that certain people experience different outcomes
having been exposed to different situations, to realize the power of a particular
cue on, on behavior.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And you need people willing to look broadly at what
occurred to decode it because it would be very easy.
There's a lot of different rationale that could be applied to why returning
soldiers from Vietnam didn't relapse. But it requires a broad view of what's
going on to evaluate it, which is a big takeaway for all of the listeners here. You
know, particularly for brand marketers and brand advertisers, they're thinking
only about their brands, only about their buyer, only about the moment they
wanna purchase or they want a behavior to be different.
Stop smoking, you know, better safe driving, wear seat belts and actually.
There's a whole lot more context, Adam, to your, to your narrow point. There's
a whole lot more else going on. And so how can [00:51:00] we, how can we
understand the wider world that we play in to make sure that we can be
effective? So this has been a lovely conversation.
We've covered a lot of topics, but before we come to a close, we wanted to ask
you one final question from all of your research and all of your thinking to date,
is there one concept that you wish more marketers understood more, or you a

concept that you wished you saw applied more in commer in commercial
applications?
And maybe, and maybe why?
Adam Alter: I think the single. Most powerful idea that cuts across a lot of
context is that when you are selling a product or it doesn't matter what the
product is, it can be a service, a good an idea, it doesn't matter what it is. I think
we try to sell the thing, the actual thing, and forget that everything you are
selling is.
Essentially if it's gonna be sold, it's because it's, it has a, a sort of [00:52:00]
core to that product that is a psychological need that is met by that product. And
we often try to sell the flashy car 'cause it looks nice and it's got a good engine
and all this sort of stuff that's extraneous to the actual reason why the person's
buying it.
I think the thing to figure out first with every single product, and this really
should begin before you design and think about trying to even market or make a
product. Is what psychological need is it meeting? And how do you describe it
in a way that aligns with that psychological need? And it's not about flashiness,
it's not about luxury, it's not about any of that stuff.
It's what are the kind of deep either insecurities or values or attitudes or beliefs
or needs that a person has. If you can figure that out, you're like 90% the way to
selling the thing. And I think a lot of people bypass that process and that's, that
is old school psychology. We don't buy or use anything unless it's meeting some
psychological need.
And I think Apple, for example, has, has historically done a very good job of
this. Some other brands have done a good job, but Apple's been especially good
at figuring out what are [00:53:00] those psychological needs and how do you
make products that, that scratch those itches.
MichaelAaron Flicker: It's a lovely final message to leave everybody on
because it it's a challenge and a call for us to all think more about.
Thank you, Adam, for, for the conversation like we do each week, all of the big
topics and, and studies and concepts that we discussed in this week's show.
We'll be in the show notes if you like. The conversation that you had, please
leave a comment, share an idea or share this video with others that are
passionate about psychology and marketing.

And until next time, I'm Michael Aaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Adam, thanks so much for being with us.
Adam Alter: Thank you for having me. This is fun.
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