On Perception, Attraction and Choice

(Exploring the Depths of Wine Consumers’ Souls)

How marvellous to find a hint at somatic markers in a recent French translation of Aristotle’s book On the Soul, written more than 2300 years before Damasio’s seminal discovery in neuroscience! In it, the Greek philosopher talks about the fact that we are naturally attracted to or repulsed by things we encounter in life.1

Damasio’s view, known as the Somatic Markers Hypothesis, is that ‘affect (i.e. emotions and feelings, both conscious and unconscious) play a significant role in our decisions, just as cool reason and knowledge do’.2 Somatic markers are sometimes called emotional markers because they relay a positive-to-negative emotional association between the present situation and similar past experiences.3

This phenomenon comes in addition to the many unconscious evaluation shortcuts – like loss aversion, anchoring, framing, default bias, endowment effect – that we constantly take whilst making a decision. Those biases in value judgments are seemingly quite predictable, which alone begs the question of how ‘free to choose’ we really are after all.4

Could we be conditioned to buy Chablis or Champagne? When we are pursuing the (un)conscious goal of choosing a wine, what is it that makes us opt for a glass of Prosecco rather than Champagne in a café or a bottle of Californian Chardonnay instead of French Chablis on the (virtual) shelves of a retailer? What drives our eyes, tongues or hands to effect our choices?

Aristotle’s view is that ‘our perception is interpretative and selective. It is inseparable from the way in which we make sense of the world’.5 Heidegger goes further, claiming that ‘our perception is guided by our purpose and action’; ‘we are what we take ourselves to be – how we interpret ourselves in our practices’.6 His thinking had a profound impact on the unconventional psychologist George Kelly.7

For Kelly, ‘there is a real world out there but we can only ever know it through our own (personal and social) constructions of it’.8 We construe (give meaning to) ourselves and the whole world around us, including products and brands, in a complex and evolving system of core constructs (the inner-self and the social self) and various sub-constructs, along many simple, sensible bipolar dimensions, like ‘good-to-bad’, or ‘pleasant-to-unpleasant’.

Most of a wine’s attributes can be positioned along such bipolar dimensions: price (cheap-to-expensive), colour (white-to-red, with rosé in the middle), container (small-to-large), brand (familiar-to-unfamiliar), origin (local-to-distant), grape variety (known-to-unknown), style (bubbly-to-still, sweet-to-dry, fruity-to-tannic, …), alcoholic strength (low-to-high), taste (nice-to-awful) … you name it.9 For wine is, conceivably, nothing but a bundle of attributes.

Some of the attributes (and related cues) we perceive along the mostly unconscious path that leads us to make a decision, may be more effective than others at seducing us, especially when that process has been framed by savvy designers of the commercial environment in which we are evolving: café, shop, or website. Salience may not be the magic formula for catching everyone’s attention, that it was long thought to be.10 Novelty is, and our memory plays a crucial role in detecting it.

According to Ranganath, director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, it is our general knowledge, stored in our memory, that guides the exploration of our visual environment.11 And we also use our memory to make predictions about what to expect in a familiar setting.12 When something fails to match those expectations, we experience a surprise, a prediction error that triggers our curiosity – and further exploration on our part if we feel we can manage it. To help us achieve this, our brain will release dopamine ’that mobilises us to learn and pursue anything we perceive to have value’.13

At that moment, argues Ranganath, there is ‘a fundamental choice we make, consciously or unconsciously, to respond to the unknown with curiosity or anxiety. […] We can mobilise or withdraw, we can avoid the situation by telling ourselves that nothing is amiss, or we can let our motivational circuits energise us to explore and plunge ahead with curiosity and turn and face the strange’.14

In On the Soul, Aristotle’s take on perception and thought is that attraction ‘brings about movement in us’.15 ‘We are a form of motion’, adds Kelly, and ‘always up to something’.16 Neuroscience attests that we never are doing nothing, even when we have decided to do so.17 Our brain remains active when we sleep, and when we are awake, our curiosity is constantly leading us to action ‘infused with perception and purpose’ – to ’construing’.18

‘We act first and reflect on it later’ says Kelly, because we are essentially ‘agents’ and not ‘thinking subjects’ à la Descartes. ‘Rationality is not split off from emotion and feeling’ however, nor is it alien to us continually ‘self-inventing’ (and re-inventing ourselves when necessary). ‘The self is an invention, a construction put together by the person in connection with his social world’.19 We truly are the writers of our lives.

We have free will20 and define ourselves in everything we do: from driving to a discounter to buy cases of Prosecco for chilling out at home (because it’s good value for money) to choosing a fancy bottle of Champagne in a bar in order to please people whose opinion is important to us. We may catch ourselves acting surprisingly sometimes, in our endeavour to position ourselves in the world we have construed around our invented selves.

So, beware of orexis (‘attraction’) at times, for anorexis may well lead (unconsciously) to an even better course of action – to inaction.21

September 1st, 2024

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REFERENCES

Aristote (2009) Traité de l’âme – ou de l’âme et du corps, introduction, traduction et notes par Ingrid Auriol. Paris: Pocket.

Aristotle (2018) On the Soul – and Other Psychological Works, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Fred D. Miller, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bear, Mark F., Connors, Barry W. And Paradiso, Michael A. (2016) Neuroscience – Exploring the Brain (Enhanced 4th ed.). Burlington: Jones and Bartlett Learning.

Butt, Trevor (2008) George Kelly – The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Butt, Trevor and Warren, Bill (2016) ‘Personal Construct Theory and Philosophy’, in The Wiley Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology, edited by David A. Winter and Nick Reed. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Damasio. Antonio (2016) ‘Concepts and Names in Everyday Science’, in Bear M.F., Connors, B.W. and Paradiso, M.A. Neuroscience – Exploring the Brain. Burlington: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Earl, Peter E. (2022) Principles of Behavioral Economics – Bringing Together Old, New and Evolutionary Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Genko, Stephen J. (2019) Intuitive Marketing – What Marketers Can Learn from Brain Science. Sunnyvale: Intuitive Consumer Insights.

Genko, Stepen, Pohlmann, Andrew and Steidl, Peter (2013) Neuromarketing For Dummies. Mississauga: John Wiley & Sons Canada.

Magee, Bryan (1987) The Great Philosophers – An Introduction to Western Philosophy. London: BBC Books.

Pollan, Michael (2019) How To Change Your Mind – The New Science of Psychedelics. London: Penguin.

Ranganath, Charan (2024) Why We Remember – The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us. London: Faber & Faber.

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  1. Livre III, chapitre 7, page 431a, lignes 10-20, according to Auriol’s wonderful translation (and my own rendering into English). Her argumentation for translating ‘orexis’ into the French word ‘attirance’ (‘attraction’ in English) can be found in a footnote on page 117. Fred D. Miller uses the habitual word ‘desire’ throughout his book, that features other works by Aristotle (384-322 BC). ↩︎
  2. Damasio (2016). See Genko (2019, pp 131-7) for more details on Damasio’s 1994 discovery. ↩︎
  3. With varying degrees of intensity. Some marketing people refer to this as affective priming. Genko (2019, pp 135-6). ‘Priming (influencing one’s behaviour without passing through one’s conscious mind) […] occurs quickly, automatically and effortlessly. [It] is one of the main mechanisms by which marketing operates. The drivers of priming are called primes. Advertising is a prime. Product placement in movies is a prime. Images displayed in stores are primes. This process is itself based on associative activation (exposure to one idea automatically activating associated other ideas). When successfully applied, it can bring about affective conditioning – emotions triggered by and associated with a brand’s advertisement becoming an integral part of the brand’s identity.’ Adapted from Genko et al. (2013 pp 82, 185, 372). ↩︎
  4. Genko et al. (2013, pp 127-8). ↩︎
  5. ‘Aristotle – Dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’, in Magee (1987, p 36). Italics are my own. ↩︎
  6. ’Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism – Dialogue with Hubert Dreyfus’, in Magee (1987, p 267). ↩︎
  7. The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vol. 1 & 2, originally published in 1955 by Norton in New York. ↩︎
  8. Butt and Warren (2016, p 20). ↩︎
  9. It’s up to you, really. The giant Californian winery Gallo claims to have over a hundred attributes for each wine they produce and put to market. Consumers are probably able to navigate the wine aisles of a supermarket with just a handful of them, that ‘do the job’. ↩︎
  10. ‘Scientists used to think our eyes ‘fixate’ on things that are salient, such as bright lights. John Henderson, one of my colleagues at UC Davis, who has spent his career studying what is likely to catch your eye, found that these factors actually play a minor role in the real world. Instead, as we go about our day, our eyes are directed by – you guessed it – memory’ Ranganath (2024, p 120). ↩︎
  11. The ability to recall facts or knowledge regardless of where/when it was learned is called ‘semantic memory’, as opposed to ‘episodic memory’ (event-based remembering that requires us to mentally return to a specific place and time). Ranganath (2024, p 33). ↩︎
  12. ‘Memory helps us notice disruptions in familiar patterns’. Ranganath (2024, p 135). ↩︎
  13. Ranganath (2024, Ch. 7). Expectations are ‘schemas based on your past experience’. ‘A schema is a kind of mental framework that allows our minds to process, organise, and interpret a great deal of information with minimal effort […] a blueprint […] that can be reused over and over. […] We all have mental blueprints laying out the sequence of events that are likely to happen in a familiar situation’ (ibid., pp 56-7). ‘Schemas form the backbone of our episodic memories’ (ibid., p 83). ↩︎
  14. Ranganath (2024, pp 134-5). ↩︎
  15. Aristote (2009, p 30) and Aristotle (2018, pp xliv-xlvi). ↩︎
  16. ’People are always doing something or other, and they do not need motives to start them up’; ‘we are not driven to act neurotically, but choose to do so’ Butt (2008, pp 44, 71-2 and 139). ↩︎
  17. The so-called ‘default mode network’ is most active when the brain is in a resting state. Pollan (2019, p 416). ↩︎
  18. So-called ‘enaction’, a term coined by Francisco Varela and his colleagues in their 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. They were drawing on their research in the neuroscience of colour vision. Butt and Warren (2016, pp 19-20). ↩︎
  19. All quotes in this paragraph are from Butt (2008, pp 82-3). ↩︎
  20. Free will – ’the capacity or ability to choose between different courses of action unimpeded’ (Wikipedia) – was acknowledged by the ancient Greeks (notably Aristotle) and rudimentarily defined by Thomas Hobbes in 1651. It is central to the ideas of George Kelly and modern existentialists (e.g. Sartre) but is now imperilled by Surveillance Capital’s application of ‘behavioural modification’ techniques involving the ‘tuning, herding and conditioning of billions of unsuspecting digital users’, according to Shoshana Zuboff’s brilliant book on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight For A Human Future At The Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019. ↩︎
  21. ‘Anorexis’ is the antonym of ‘orexis’; see footnote 1. ↩︎

© 2024 pierre spahni / www.span-e.com

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