Abstract
Paul Zak brings a novel skill set to understanding human behavior. As a behavioral neuroscientist and professor of economics, psychology, and management at Claremont Graduate University, Zak conducts research measuring brain activity (e.g., levels of the neurochemical oxytocin released in the brain) to understand and predict how people will behave. His work has pioneered the emerging interdisciplinary fields of neuroeconomics, neuromanagement, and neuromarketing to understand how humans respond to a variety of stimuli, such as movie trailers, retail experiences, classroom instruction, and politicians.
His book, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Sources of Happiness, provides an overview of his two decades of lab and field research and consulting for governments and major corporations. During that time, he has measured the brain activity of over 50,000 people to help businesses, governments, and individuals create “extraordinary experiences” (p. 15). Extraordinary experiences “are unexpected, emotionally charged, narrow one's focus to the experience itself, are easy to remember, and provoke actions” (p. 24) that bring happiness to customers, employees, and audiences.
Zak and his colleagues have developed software from his research and consulting, which, according to Zak, has been adopted by hundreds of organizations to improve their marketing, sales, entertainment, customer experiences, and corporate training. Zak says his software platform democratizes neuroscience allowing anyone to measure what the human brain loves. The software, which employs smartwatch and fitness device sensors on subjects, can be used to turn an audience into a real-time neuroscience panel. Given our experience-based economy, people crave the extraordinary, Zak asserts. Knowing what is highly valued by brains enables businesses to avoid offering customers the bleak, monotonous, and uninteresting experiences that typically lead to unhappiness and missed opportunities to influence people to act.
Why do organizations often fall into the trap of monotony and failure? Zak asserts that organizations usually rely on the imperfect tools of intuition or self-report surveys of people rating how much they “like” something when developing content or experiences (e.g., turning dials to report when something is “dull” or “divine” while viewing something). What people say consciously can't compete, however, with the unconscious “brain as predictor” (p. 15) to forecast outcomes. According to Zak, “brain activity predicts with 83 to 97 percent accuracy which movies and TV shows will be hits, why some stores handily outsell others, and which learners will remember details of training weeks later” (p. 15). In sum, Immersion is partly an engaging report of Zak's neuroscientific findings on how to create the “extraordinary” and partly a sales pitch to encourage readers to consider adopting Zak's Immersion software to turn brain activity data into practical business insights.
At the heart of Zak's work is the measuring of oxytocin, a neurochemical “released in the human brain when [interacting with some]one is trusted, and that molecule motivates the person who was trusted to reciprocate by being trustworthy” (p. 28). Zak has found that oxytocin directly motivates prosocial behaviors. For instance, in one of Zak's early experiments oxytocin increased subjects' empathy of people depicted in a charity's public service announcements that, in turn, increased donations. What increased oxytocin levels? Attention and emotional storytelling. Zak explains, “… first get my attention, and then give me a reason to care about what I'm experiencing” (p. 41). This confluence of attention and emotional resonance results in what Zak calls “immersion”—a neural response that seems to transport people to new worlds; when immersion is high, people become absorbed in the experience and get a jolt of joy. Immersive experiences that drive actions (e.g., making a donation) reveal that those incidents were meaningful.
You can think of immersion like tension. If an experience generates high immersion, people's brains are full of tension. Those in such a state want to dissipate neural tension by donating to charity, … purchasing a product or sharing the experience on social media. (pp. 41-42)
Zak's research has found that self-reported liking measures were unrelated to immersion. Thus, by measuring test audiences' brain activity when developing movie trailers or advertising, for example, creators can identify when audiences are reaching “peak immersion” and therefore can craft and edit such stimuli to increase social behaviors to a better degree than relying on intuition or survey data alone. Ideally, movie trailers and advertising should create peak immersion at the end of messages to generate the greatest impact for action.
The book provides chapters on creating persuasive advertising, exceptional entertainment, education and training, compelling retailing and customer service, and building high-performance organizations. In one demonstration of how Immersion is more predictive of behavior than polling or surveys, Zak talks about his research on the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, Zak measured immersion of Republican audiences watching primary debates involving Donald Trump and his Republican rivals as well as Democratic audiences watching debates between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He found that during the primary debates, Mr. Trump produced the most immersion levels among Republicans in a test audience.
By contrast, among a test audience of California Democrats planning to vote in the primary, immersion was 11 percent higher for those listening to Mr. Sanders compared to Mrs. Clinton. Later, in their two-minute closing statements of the debate, Mr. Sanders produced ten times more immersion among Democratic voters than did Mrs. Clinton. While polls showed that voters favored Mrs. Clinton by wide margins in the general election, Zak's immersion data told a different story. Zak's analysis showed that Mrs. Clinton's robotic communication style “did not produce enough of an emotional response to motivate people to get off their couches and vote” (p. 222). Mrs. Clinton's lack of connection with voters was supported by post-election Pew Research Center data that found, among swing voters, 48 percent voted for Mr. Trump while only 42 percent voted for Mrs. Clinton.
Drawing on his immersion insights across the various domains, Zak says that he's been able to “reverse engineer” how to create the extraordinary that facilitates persuasion and action—and even happiness. Specifically, the formula entails: Staging, Immersion, Relevance, Target, and Action (SIRTA).
To create the extraordinary, you start with Staging, which establishes psychological safety prior to the message or stimuli as the precondition for influence. Connection and similarity with others are the foundations of psychological safety. Immersion involves crafting a message so that people's brains identify it as valuable; emotional storytelling is critical here. Relevance determines the amount of neural processing devoted to a message, and it supercharges the effect of an immersive message. Target identifies people who will love a message; Zak recommends seeking out “superfans” who will become deeply immersed in the message and will tell and motivate others. Finally, Action after a message is more likely when the need is urgent, and Zak recommends that calls to action (e.g., making a donation, watching a movie) should come when messages are achieving peak immersion. To provoke action, tell an immersive story that builds tension that can be released with a decision. People crave extraordinary, immersive experiences where they can connect with others.
Zak argues that following this formula (and using the Immersion software to test messages and stimuli) can create those extraordinary experiences for target audiences that enhance their quality of life, lead to greater happiness, and inspire actions.
Zak's findings align with past established research on the power of emotional storytelling (e.g., Aaker, 2018), nudges (Thaler & Sunstein 2021), and social influence (Cialdini, 2021). For example, Zak talks about “social proof” (p. 208), the idea coined by social psychologist Robert Cialdini to describe situations in which people tend to follow and copy the actions of others to display accepted or correct behavior, based on normative social influence (2021). Zak's research suggests that social proof is the most effective method of influence, yet it is only effective when information comes from trustworthy sources (this is where Staging is important as it establishes psychological safety prior to the message as a precondition to influence). Trust can be established by identifying one's similarity with a comparison group, in what he calls the “people like us” approach (p. 208). If people like us are doing something, then we should do it too. Conversely, when the source is perceived as untrustworthy, the message will be ignored. Zak notes this has been the basis for partisan views on “fake news” perpetuated by Donald Trump. Those who don't trust the source, don't accept the message. Measuring immersion can help identify when audiences trust a source.
For readers interested in sustainability, Zak mentions climate change only once (p. 209), noting how difficult it is to persuade some people about the issue. He describes one of his studies comparing fact-based versus story-based public service announcement videos, and unsurprisingly, the story-based videos generated twice the donations for the environmental charity than the fact-based ones. People were more immersed in stories than facts. Further, subjects were offered a subscription to a Greenpeace newsletter and to commit to taking a follow-up survey two weeks later. Those in the story condition agreed to both of these offers twice as often as those in the fact group. Upon testing additional behavioral measures, Zak concludes:
The behavioral data indicated that we changed preferences (i.e., persuaded to be concerned about the environment) for at least several weeks by having people take multiple actions that reinforced the message. This could lead to a permanent preference change if additional information was sent over the following weeks and months that asked participants to continue to take actions to protect the environment. Repetition … not only helps people remember information, but can solidify information in the brain, leading to a preference change. … In order to change preferences about the environment or anything else, the information the brain receives must be immersive and must be repeated” (pp. 209-210).
In short, Zak contributes to the established literature on emotional storytelling, persuasion, and behavior by introducing his SIRTA framework for creating immersive messages and experiences and his arguably more precise and accurate way to test and develop those extraordinary messages and experiences for action.
Zak writes for a general practitioner audience in an engaging and authentic style, applying his extensive immersion insights into his book's narrative. He uses a lot of storytelling, informed by his extensive and diverse lab, field, and consulting research, with self-deprecating comments and humor. For example, Zak admits to openly crying in public at the end of emotionally gripping movies, such as La La Land and Million Dollar Baby (p. 26), and he often calls himself a “nerd” (p. 126) as he relates various personal experiences. Zak clearly loves his vocation, and that energy and zest for curiosity leaps off the page. Immersion is a fun read!
If there is a limitation, however, it is that much of his reported case examples and experiments come from propriety work for clients rather than academic research; consequently, many of Zak's astonishing research outcomes and claims lack academic references. Indeed, some of Zak's stories relate to fun improvised “mini-studies” using himself as a subject. For example, he describes a study with his daughter to compare their immersion levels at his favorite eating place, Panera, versus Opaque, a swank southern California restaurant where the dining experience is completely in the dark! Zak writes amusingly that while Opaque did increase their Immersion scores by 2 percent on average over Panera, given the cost of the meals, Panera's immersion experience was “more cost-effective” (p. 176). These fun personal investigations seem to demonstrate how nimble Zak's software is, and his website does allow readers to test his software for themselves.
The implications of Zak's work for sustainability and climate change are quite clear. Immersion may be a compelling new tool over traditional polling and surveys to craft, frame, and test persuasive stories, public service announcements, policies, greener products, and advertising to shape consumer attitudes and behaviors. For instance, from a sustainable marketing perspective, broad adoption of greener products and behaviors hinges on how personally beneficial they may be to consumers (Stafford & Graul 2020).
One emerging trend is the growing number of electric pickup truck models being offered on the market. Because trucks and SUVs are the most popular vehicles sold today, creating appealing electric versions of these vehicles is necessary to further electrify transportation. It may be interesting to compare potential truck buyer immersion levels regarding Tesla's new darkly futuristic and outlandishly designed Cybertruck (Diaz, 2023) to the more traditional-looking Rivian R1T or Ford F150 Lightening and analyze how immersion levels may impact future sales. Do truck owners want something that stands out or one that blends in with other trucks on the road? Immersion could help automakers determine the best electric vehicle designs and features to accelerate an electrified future.
Likewise, advocacy groups supporting the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides a host of incentives for renewable energy, electric vehicles, induction stoves, and other climate-related products and measures, have launched television ads and outreach to educate the public about its provisions, job opportunities, cost savings, and other benefits (O'Keefe, 2022). Immersion could help frame and identify specific IRA programs and messages that may appeal to various types of voters to garner support and help expedite its roll out.
Thus, while Immersion is clearly aimed at business and marketing practitioners interested in designing compelling stimuli, I highly recommend it for advocates and nonprofit professionals who seek to accelerate climate action. Zack's SIRTA framework and Immersion software platform may be helpful for creating more compelling narratives and immersive experiences to persuade people to support sustainability programs and greener products, such as adopting electric vehicles or induction stoves.
I believe academics and graduate students studying sustainability may also find using Zak's Immersion software useful for testing theories of persuasion and behavior change that are necessary to steer society onto a more sustainable path. In sum, Immersion is a compelling read that opens opportunities to frame sustainability initiatives as extraordinary experiences that may lead to a better quality of life, greater happiness, and saving the planet.