Rarely Rational - Humour Effect
This is the third mini-series of the Rarely Rational series on cognitive biases. In this mini-series, we focus on biases that affect our memory and recall.In this episode, Jyothi Sridhar and Madhavi Nadig talk about the Humour Effect, how it affects our perception and how companies and products leverage it to stand out from the crowd.“Hey Google! Tell me a joke.” Even AI Assistants must get humourGuess who had the last laugh when Google launched GMail on April Fools Day!?Humour Effect is a cognitive bias that makes us remember funny things better. Hence it is useful in advertising and learningUsers like brands that are humorous. But leaders don’t consider humour essential for popularizing their brandsAmul has had its humour game on for decades, both in print and online channelsHumour Effect increases attention and improves retentionHumour can reinforce concepts to learners, thus helping them combat the Forgetting CurveProducts use humour to increase user engagement and stickinessAaron Walter’s translation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to products: Products must be functional at least, reliable, usable and pleasurable at their bestPeople look for “delighters” in productsType “askew” in your Google search bar and see what happensFor Deepavali, when users played an Indian song, Spotify replaced the progress bar with a burning sparklerEvoke the humour effect by “surprising” users and making them smileSmartStart is built on humour. Both the learner and the coach are characters in a comic strip. Learning unfurls through their interactionsStorytelling with a dash of humour has been the USP of all our learning productsDelivering a humourous video on Unconscious Bias to train 1 lakh employees of an Indian IT major, in 6 international languagesMadhavi creating memes for a SmartEES course on Mental Health to introduce lighter moments in the midst of teaching a dense topicHumour can soften the impact of unexpected errors in services. E.g. showing fun messages instead of bland HTTP error codesLorem ipsum generators generate humourous content to entertain designersCompanies design good-looking mascots to personify their brandsMicrosoft’s Clippy was both interesting and annoying at the same timeHumour is a double-edged sword—it can backfireMonster India’s fun rebranding campaign of having their employees fake-quit drew the internet’s ire due to bad timingHumour cannot salvage a bad product or bad user experienceUnintentional humour associated with a product may still work to its benefitProgrammers have ensured that Easter Eggs have always been around to entertain, delight and educate usersThe earliest Easter Egg was when you used the command “make love” and it asked you “not war?”Jyothi recommends Earnest Cline’s sci-fi novel “Ready Player One” since it’s full of Easter Eggs and pop culture referencesHumour is a useful tool for persuading and educating peopleAccording to the “Fun Theory”, fun, playfulness and humour can be used to change user behaviourManipal Hospitals replaced the red traffic lights with red hearts to educate Bangaloreans on cardiac healthHow to use humour to “wow” your audience.This podcast is brought to you by Adeptic Creative Labs with support from the team at Clearly Blue Digital.Write to us at podcasts@adepticlabs.com.Follow us on LinkedIn at Adeptic Creative Labs and Clearly Blue Digital.
