Anyone involved with marketing on a daily basis tends to become a student of psychology. And those of us buried in the deeper levels of direct response marketing tend to be serious students of psychology.<\/p>\n
In my experience (and opinion) psychology gets broken down into two categories; clinical psychology<\/strong> and street psychology<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Clinical psychology is the health services field. It deals with how to fix what’s wrong in our heads. Street psychology is the marketing field. It deals with getting people to do what you want them to.<\/p>\n Cold reading<\/strong> is a perfect example of street psychology. If you’re not familiar with cold reading, it’s the centuries-old practice that “psychics” have used to extract money from people’s wallets. Ian Rowland<\/strong> is considered one of the master’s of cold reading (i.e he teaches you how it works and how to do it). If you want to find out more, you can get his book here<\/strong><\/a> (note: his web site was experiencing technical difficulties at the time of this post).<\/p>\n But more visual (and entertaining) examples of street psychology have come from Professor<\/strong> Richard Wiseman<\/strong> of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK.\u00a0 He has performed numerous mass experiments that show not only how our brains react, universally, but how our brains can trick us into taking actions or forming beliefs…correct or not.<\/p>\n Here’s a perfect example of how video can do this.\u00a0 Take a look at the video Richard Wiseman did below.\u00a0 You’ll immediately think you know the “secret” to his trick.\u00a0 Trust me, you’ll be wrong:<\/p>\n