Experience Matters / Mar 13, 2023

(Recap - This is a newsletter for anyone interested in all things related to ‘Experience’ – customer experience, innovation, consumer behaviour, design, culture, etc. The links I share below are a collection of links or articles I found inspiring, insightful or thought provoking from the above topics).

1. The Difference Between Speaking and Thinking (via Shivani Gupta )

Although ChatGPT can generate fluent and sometimes elegant prose, easily passing the Turing-test benchmark that has haunted the field of AI for more than 70 years, it can also seem incredibly dumb, even dangerous. It gets math wrong, fails to give the most basic cooking instructions, and displays shocking biases. In a new paper, cognitive scientists and linguists address this dissonance by?separating communication via language from the act of thinking: Capacity for one does not imply the other.

2. MBTI, If You Want Me Back, You Need To Change Too

3. AI Isn't a Human-Like Machine; It's a Machine-Like Child.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is riding an ebullient wave of innovation, investment and popularity. Across a range of revenue technology categories, AI has permeated predictive analytics, sales automation and customer engagement — and that’s for starters. But, it’s easy to forget that AI as we know it is still young. My daughter was born the same year that Alexa was launched in the US just 8 years ago. I remember being briefed on Einstein Analytics while pregnant with my son just 6 years ago. My children, very much like AI, offer endless amusement and constantly astonish me with their new skills. They also worry me with their limited reasoning power due to still-developing frontal lobes and susceptibility to external manipulation. AI worries me for that very same reason.

4. Marie Kondo is messy now -- and it's actually expanding her brand!

At first, it looked like Marie Kondo had deeply undermined one of the most successful personal-brand stories of the past decade. According to a Washington Post article, the author, Netflix star, business owner, and all-around maven of life-affirming tidiness conceded, in an online discussion with members of the media to promote her latest book, that since giving birth to her third child, she had “kind of given up” on keeping her own home tidy. To many, this sounded almost catastrophically off-brand. It was like Patagonia announcing it had “kind of given up” on the environment, or Nike declaring that competition isn’t everything, and sometimes it’s better to just not do it.

5. Why We Usually Can't Tell When A Review Is Fake

Human beings have always loved reviews: word of mouth has long been regarded as one of the most valuable marketing tools available to a company. But the internet has made us all review mad. We love giving reviews, and we have grown to depend on them, too. The internet has expanded our product offerings a dizzying amount, and we need information about the mountain of goods and services before we buy them. Reviews are an obvious solution. The problem is that a lot of those reviews are fake. And, worse, we humans are not very good at spotting which ones are real and which are bogus.

Thanks,

Param

In case you missed the previous edition of the newsletter , here it is:

Experience Matters / Feb 24, 2023

1. How Indian health-care workers use WhatsApp to save pregnant women

2. The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are (via?Kesar Majethia )

3. Who Should You Trust? Psychologists Have a Surprising Answer

Can you ever really know who to trust at the office? While there’s tons of research on the actions and behaviors that create trust, few studies have successfully identified what makes some people more trustworthy than others to begin with. New research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology does just that, showing that “guilt proneness”—a person’s tendency to anticipate feeling guilty—is a surprisingly powerful indicator of trustworthiness.

4. When Is The Best Time To Ask Customers For A Review?

Customers often need time to evaluate a product or think about their experience with it before they decide to post a review. If they’re asked to provide a review too early, they can feel pressured and rushed. But when is the right time to do it? The authors conducted experiments in an attempt to answer this question — and found, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that immediate review reminders (sent the next day) lower the likelihood that customers will post reviews, whereas delayed reminders (13 days later) increase the likelihood. Against that backdrop, in this article they suggest a set of best practices for companies trying to figure out when to send out review reminders to customers.

5. How Do You Design A Better Hospital? Start With The Light

Just as medical care has evolved from bloodletting to germ theory, the medical spaces patients inhabit have transformed too. Today, architects and designers are trying to find ways to make hospitals more comfortable, in the hopes that relaxing spaces will lead to better recovery. But building for healing involves just as much empathy as it does synthesizing cold, hard data.