Art & Commerce: Where's The Meat?

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For much of the last half of the 20th century, experimental psychologists timed rats as they ran mazes and observed pigeons as they pecked keys because they believed the best way to understand behavior was to map the relation between a stimulus and an organism’s response to that stimulus.

This, according to author and psychologist Daniel Gilbert, was a wild goose chase because organisms “respond to the meanings of stimuli and not to the stimuli themselves.”

I can’t help but compare this with the often-shallow instances and analysis of humans “pecking” at viral campaigns and scuttling around brand experiences.



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