THE STORY OF FAMILIARITY

We have Google and Facebook

For 1000’s of years some of the smartest people in the world have been asking the same version?of the same questions- Why do we like what we like? Is there a formula for beauty, for human popularity? The ancient Greeks said it is the Golden Ratio. And then the enlightenment thinkers said yes, of course, there is — its Theory of aesthetics. But today we don’t have the golden ratio, we don’t have philosophers. We have Google and Facebook, we have Advertisers and in the advertisers’ formula, the first variable is always Novelty. This is actually a scientific fact. They actually went through several decades ago all of the words they could possibly find in all the advertisements that were out there and the most common words in all of those ads wasn’t ‘buy’, wasn’t ‘now’ wasn’t ‘risk-free warranty’.

It was ‘New’.

Familiarity good

We are living in a cult of Novelty. Companies want us to like new things, to buy new things, to crave new things but the truth is that we don’t like novelty. In fact, we hate it. According to the Mere-exposure effect (one of the oldest and most robust theories in the history of psychology), the mere exposure of any stimulus to you over time will bias you towards that stimulus- In hindi 'Jo dikhta hai woh bikta hai' (What you see is what sells).

When you think about it we seek out new songs but the songs we most reliably enjoy are those with familiar chord structures and timbers, we seek out new movies but every year this century a majority of the top ten films have been sequels, adaptions or reboots — familiar, familiar, familiar.

In fact, the best proof of the power of familiarity is that thing that is so familiar to you, your own face. It turns out people prefer the face they see in mirrors to the face they see in photographs. Maybe you have a friend who complains constantly about how he or she looks in Facebook photos but is often constantly admiring himself or herself in the mirror. Well, this is not pure vanity, this is a mere exposure effect.

The face is asymmetric. We see different versions when we see a reflection versus a photo. You prefer the mirror version of your face not because it’s you at your most beautiful but because it’s you at your most familiar. The evolutionary theory for the preference for the familiar is that if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you’re hiking the jungles of Western Ghats and you see a plant or an animal and you recognise it, that’s a very good sign that the plant or animal has not killed you yet. So of course, you should prefer it.

The man who designed the 21st Century

But this creates an enormous problem for creators, for creative types because people only like new things if they’re just like old things. So the question before us today is — How do you balance familiarity and surprise in such a way as to design hits, to design things that people love. Is it possible to engineer a similar surprise?

And to begin to answer this question I want to tell you a story about a man who designed the Raymond Loewy. He designed the most famous car of the 20th century, he designed the most famous locomotive of the 20th century, the modern bus (Greyhound), the modern tractor to the modern coca-cola fountain, he designed that pencil sharpener that looks like an egg with a little spindle coming out of it that you’ve seen in your classrooms. He designed for Exxon and Air Force One planes. He basically designed all of the 1950s.

MAYA- Most Advanced Yet Acceptable

So the question is what did this man possibly understand of the human psychology that he knew what we wanted from planes to trains to the pencil sharpener. This man was like Dhoni meet Raghuram Rajan for the 21st century. He understood everything. Unfortunately for us, Lowe had a grand theory of everything, called MAYA- Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Raymond Lowe said human preference is torn between two opposing forces. On one hand, there is neophilia- love of new things and on the other hand, there is neophobia- fear of anything that is too new. And in order to make hits, you need to make products that live right at that intersection of the familiar surprise. To sell something familiar you have to make it surprising. But to sell something surprising you have to make it familiar.

Lowe was not a scientist but this theory has been proved and validated by scores of studies and meta-studies since he died. Its been used to explain hits in technology, in academics, in culture and even in politics. Like-

Academics- I’d imagine most academics don’t think of themselves as hitmakers. They don’t think of themselves as operating in a cultural marketplace. But in order to become a star in your discipline, you often need to be published by the most famous publishers and therefore you are essentially giving up your research, proposing your research to people who are essentially your audience.

So in 2014 a group of researchers from Harvard University wanted to figure out what is the formula for a hit research paper. They wanted to figure out what sort of paper was most likely to be accepted by the NIH. Was it really novel proposals or was it extremely familiar ones? So they created a dummy list of 150 papers and they coded each of them for novelty and they delivered those papers to a group of researchers who scored their favourites. The graph of that score looks like an upside-down ‘U’.

On one side you have utmost familiarity and on the other, you have utmost novelty. But it turned out the researchers who were evaluating these proposals, they too called optimally familiar- advanced yet acceptable, MAYA.

Culture- Shahrukh Khan really wants you to watch his movie but there is no advertisement in his films that ever says after you watch his movie to name your baby child Rahul. It’s never happened. Yet we saw a rise in the number of babies being named Rahul after his movie hits especially in northern India. One of the interesting specific taste for popularity is that siblings tend to have similar common or uncommon names and this is intuitively true. If you meet siblings Rahul, Nandini, Ajith (it will be a little bit strange if they say) and they say this our sister Penelope. How weird, you’d think! Parents tend to name their children with cultures they are similar to.

The Storyteller

The last story I wanna tell takes us back to Raymond Loewy and it takes us back to his last assignment as an industrial designer. Raymond Loewy Was told to design the first interior habitat for the first NASA space orbital. Loewy conducted a bunch of habitability studies and he made some tweaks here and there but his most famous contribution to space history is that he cut a hole in the side of the NASA Space orbital, placed a sheet of glass there and created a viewing portal. The viewing portal that you have seen in all of those space movies that too was Raymond Loewy’s innovation. And I cannot think of a more perfect illustration for MAYA or a more beautiful inspiration to educators everywhere because it says-

“A window to a new world can also show you home”