7 ms·

Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience (2021)

43 points by shortcrct 3y ago

gipp 3y ago
"Consumer experience" seems like such a strange way to frame this research, when it's just about the general flattening of pleasurable activities over time as they're repeated.
- subract 3y ago
  Agreed. Having admittedly only read the abstract, I find it odd that it's framed around "consumers" and not just "people."
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I assumed that this is because this research is really intended for the benefit of marketers.
Pixelbrick 3y ago
Another one from the Center for the study of the Blindingly Obvious.
- naltroc 3y ago
  spoken by an expert on consumer reports
- ebiester 3y ago
  And yet, you could have told me the exact opposite was true - that increasing knowledge and experience created increased joy in experiences like wine instead of less, and a large segment of people would have also said it was obvious.
Lariscus 3y ago
This might be one of the reasons why some competitive gaming communities seem so joyless after a while.
- ydnaclementine 3y ago
  >win >feel nothing >lose >day ruined
  - ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
    why is "greentext" such an expressive and iconic way of communicating in online text? win: feel nothing lose: day ruined communicates the same idea but feels less emotionally punchy somehow.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  They're joyless because they become increasingly toxic the higher you get. At least in mainstream games. Do something outside of meta and you're enemy number one.
  - ImHereToVote 3y ago
    It's the fact that the games are geared towards sexed up number crunching. Anything that can't be quantified into a number is ignored by the developers. I don't know why people like this stuff. Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?
    - the_sleaze9 3y ago
      When I became a full time developer, I lost any sense of adventure or accomplishment with regard to video games. VR still has some sense of wonder or competitiveness that I used to feel playing WoW as a kid. Just slowly embracing my inner old man yelling at clouds I suppose, a lot of kids see eSports as a viable future career now.
      - jwells89 3y ago
        For WoW specifically, the appeal melted away as it increasingly pushed instanced competitive endgame (raids, M+, arenas) as the the central pillars of the game. What pulled me in back in 2005 was its world which was not only vast and beautiful, but shared with numerous other players, as well as the more tabletop adventure feel that casual play (and even entry level raiding) entailed back then. Things that are prioritized now like leaderboard chasing and increasingly convoluted boss encounters are not what I logged on for.
benterix 3y ago
In other news, novelty wears off with time.
- XCSme 3y ago
  Is it novelty or truly understanding how something works?
- kevlarrelic 3y ago
  That's not exactly what the paper says: (From Study 5 discussion) These results are consistent with the idea that, while those with low expertise engage with the domain hedonically as a default approach, this is not experts’ default. Second, rather than experts being inevitably numb, these results suggest that it is not the acquisition of knowledge that leads to numbness, but the application of that knowledge. Indeed, when expert’s attention is redirected toward the hedonic aspects of a stimulus they can regain their feelings. So, as I understand it: beginners focus on enjoying the experience by default, and experts engage intellectually by default. And experts who were told to just relax and enjoy the experience had the same emotional experience as beginners.
kojiromike 3y ago
This is the most expensive way to say, "Familiarity breeds contempt," that I've ever heard.
rhyme-boss 3y ago
Just my personal experience, but I would say this does not hold with regard to observing nature. Once I know the name of a new fly, fish, or flower, I care more about it, and I enjoy seeing it, and connecting that knowledge with other ecological knowledge.
- damnesian 3y ago
  I feel the same way. Since the subject of this interest is alive, and endlessly diverse, the more I learn about nature, the more wonder I feel. Definitely not numb. Maybe what needs to be a focus of this study is measuring "numbness" across different subjects of interest.
- frud 3y ago
  Nature? Bah! How do you market nature? People can just get it for free! Get with the program, we need to exploit hedonism-seeking for the widest possible range of consumers to keep our numbers up! Keep them lusting after the next big thing, keep them confused and incompetent for as long as possible so they keep buying new versions of it. From us.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    > How do you market nature? People can just get it for free If you're Booz Allen, you get the rights to run the reservation system for the US national parks and tack on fees for yourself.
  - vctrnk 3y ago
    You cannot market nature, but you CAN market everything around it: Tourism, clothing/footwear, camping gear, even technology (cameras, GPS etc). All of them to give you the "upper hand" over your peers - And of course, you can buy that from us!
- scaradim 3y ago
  It's proved that kids that name their chicken, pig, lamb, rabbit, fish, dog or horse cannot accept them to be killed and cannot eat them. thus numbers on farm cattle.
toss1 3y ago
Seems related to the reason Buddhism seeks to recreate the state of "Beginner's Mind". I've found that the real emotional content is in going beyond your previous experience or comfort zone, regardless of skill level. One thing I noticed after getting to the top international levels of alpine ski racing, was that listening to a novice-intermediate skier enthusiastically exclaim about a cool run or move that they had was nearly indistinguishable from the emotion and content of a fellow top racer telling of an exceptional run. The same enthusiasm, the same energy, and almost the same words, again and again. While there were of course differences in the actual details, the common denominator was always having gone outside their comfort zone and succeeding. Of course achieving this after a decade+ of intense training requires much higher speed, energies, risks, skills, etc., but it still happens very regularly, and to some degree is what we did it for; competition is a continuous deliberate effort to push beyond your comfort zone every week. But the article is right in that I'd have no clue how to achieve that again with wine/beer/food tasting, but then I'm no expert there... edit: punctuation, para breaks, clarity
Chiba-City 3y ago
This article makes sense and explains a great deal. Learning and training trigger dopamine release. Both "learning how" and "learning that." The photography example they use (tool mastery) is a great example. Amateur photographers will regularly change their tools and subject matter to maintain the "sense of wonder." Meanwhile, wedding photographers will be bored with their professions. We can see this with software engineers routinely trying out new languages and tools and hobby projects.
inSenCite 3y ago
Interesting that they take a consumer angle, I see the same when I reflect on my career in the professional services business. Initially I enjoyed the process and feedback of becoming an 'expert' in a specific area, and now it's just mundane. People crave change has been my main lesson learned.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thealienthing 3y ago
Perhaps this holds true more to fields that stem from hedonic experiences themselves like the arts, sports, games etc. I felt this way about music after graduating from music school. I became bored and jaded to music and had to spend several years not consuming music at all. Eventually I regained my love of it. Conversely I don’t think this applies as much to sciences. After I pivoted away from music to become a software engineer, I discovered a world that never ceases to captivate me and elicit curiosity no matter how much I grow. In fact the more expertise I’ve developed, the more intense my interest becomes.
- moshun 3y ago
  I work in tech and the arts and my experience is that some of the most emotionally disengaged people are in STEM, not everyone of course, but comparing the two, it’s not even close. It’s actually pretty rare to find anyone serious in the arts emotionally dimmed, a large part of the job there is dialing into emotion. That said, seems people at the top in STEM (shaping the field) and on the fringes (doing experimental, cutting edge work) are usually experts and highly emotionally engaged. Take it all with a grain of salt, I guess.
- snordgren 3y ago
  Dabbling in gamedev as a teenager definitely numbed my enjoyment of video games as an adult. And I'm really thankful for that, because I spent way too much time on video games growing up, before I saw behind the curtain.
HWR_14 3y ago
This makes sense to me. Watch a movie with someone who took film, especially film production, classes and have them explain it to you afterwards.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Or take writing classes. In every writing class that I've taken, part of the curriculum is to dissect the writing of great authors. You quickly learn to never dissect books that you love, because after you do, you'll never be able to enjoy reading that book again.
- yakubin 3y ago
  Taking up photography as a hobby made me notice and appreciate good shots and colours in films much more. So the opposite effect.
abramN 3y ago
I have noticed that if I learn how to play a song I really really like I don't feel the same about the song afterward - some of the magic is lost.
fiso64 3y ago
It would be far more interesting to see whether this emotional numbness is caused by actual expertise, or if it's just the result of significant amounts of time spent doing a particular activity. I didn't see them differentiate between these two anywhere in the paper, but I only skimmed it.

43 points by shortcrct 3y ago

gipp 3y ago

"Consumer experience" seems like such a strange way to frame this research, when it's just about the general flattening of pleasurable activities over time as they're repeated.

subract 3y ago
Agreed. Having admittedly only read the abstract, I find it odd that it's framed around "consumers" and not just "people."
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I assumed that this is because this research is really intended for the benefit of marketers.

Pixelbrick 3y ago

Another one from the Center for the study of the Blindingly Obvious.

naltroc 3y ago
spoken by an expert on consumer reports
ebiester 3y ago
And yet, you could have told me the exact opposite was true - that increasing knowledge and experience created increased joy in experiences like wine instead of less, and a large segment of people would have also said it was obvious.

Lariscus 3y ago

This might be one of the reasons why some competitive gaming communities seem so joyless after a while.

ydnaclementine 3y ago
>win >feel nothing >lose >day ruined
- ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
  why is "greentext" such an expressive and iconic way of communicating in online text? win: feel nothing lose: day ruined communicates the same idea but feels less emotionally punchy somehow.
wiseowise 3y ago
They're joyless because they become increasingly toxic the higher you get. At least in mainstream games. Do something outside of meta and you're enemy number one.
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  It's the fact that the games are geared towards sexed up number crunching. Anything that can't be quantified into a number is ignored by the developers. I don't know why people like this stuff. Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?
  - the_sleaze9 3y ago
    When I became a full time developer, I lost any sense of adventure or accomplishment with regard to video games. VR still has some sense of wonder or competitiveness that I used to feel playing WoW as a kid. Just slowly embracing my inner old man yelling at clouds I suppose, a lot of kids see eSports as a viable future career now.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      For WoW specifically, the appeal melted away as it increasingly pushed instanced competitive endgame (raids, M+, arenas) as the the central pillars of the game. What pulled me in back in 2005 was its world which was not only vast and beautiful, but shared with numerous other players, as well as the more tabletop adventure feel that casual play (and even entry level raiding) entailed back then. Things that are prioritized now like leaderboard chasing and increasingly convoluted boss encounters are not what I logged on for.

benterix 3y ago

In other news, novelty wears off with time.

XCSme 3y ago
Is it novelty or truly understanding how something works?
kevlarrelic 3y ago
That's not exactly what the paper says: (From Study 5 discussion) These results are consistent with the idea that, while those with low expertise engage with the domain hedonically as a default approach, this is not experts’ default. Second, rather than experts being inevitably numb, these results suggest that it is not the acquisition of knowledge that leads to numbness, but the application of that knowledge. Indeed, when expert’s attention is redirected toward the hedonic aspects of a stimulus they can regain their feelings. So, as I understand it: beginners focus on enjoying the experience by default, and experts engage intellectually by default. And experts who were told to just relax and enjoy the experience had the same emotional experience as beginners.

kojiromike 3y ago

This is the most expensive way to say, "Familiarity breeds contempt," that I've ever heard.

rhyme-boss 3y ago

Just my personal experience, but I would say this does not hold with regard to observing nature. Once I know the name of a new fly, fish, or flower, I care more about it, and I enjoy seeing it, and connecting that knowledge with other ecological knowledge.

damnesian 3y ago
I feel the same way. Since the subject of this interest is alive, and endlessly diverse, the more I learn about nature, the more wonder I feel. Definitely not numb. Maybe what needs to be a focus of this study is measuring "numbness" across different subjects of interest.
frud 3y ago
Nature? Bah! How do you market nature? People can just get it for free! Get with the program, we need to exploit hedonism-seeking for the widest possible range of consumers to keep our numbers up! Keep them lusting after the next big thing, keep them confused and incompetent for as long as possible so they keep buying new versions of it. From us.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  > How do you market nature? People can just get it for free If you're Booz Allen, you get the rights to run the reservation system for the US national parks and tack on fees for yourself.
- vctrnk 3y ago
  You cannot market nature, but you CAN market everything around it: Tourism, clothing/footwear, camping gear, even technology (cameras, GPS etc). All of them to give you the "upper hand" over your peers - And of course, you can buy that from us!
scaradim 3y ago
It's proved that kids that name their chicken, pig, lamb, rabbit, fish, dog or horse cannot accept them to be killed and cannot eat them. thus numbers on farm cattle.

toss1 3y ago

Seems related to the reason Buddhism seeks to recreate the state of "Beginner's Mind". I've found that the real emotional content is in going beyond your previous experience or comfort zone, regardless of skill level. One thing I noticed after getting to the top international levels of alpine ski racing, was that listening to a novice-intermediate skier enthusiastically exclaim about a cool run or move that they had was nearly indistinguishable from the emotion and content of a fellow top racer telling of an exceptional run. The same enthusiasm, the same energy, and almost the same words, again and again. While there were of course differences in the actual details, the common denominator was always having gone outside their comfort zone and succeeding. Of course achieving this after a decade+ of intense training requires much higher speed, energies, risks, skills, etc., but it still happens very regularly, and to some degree is what we did it for; competition is a continuous deliberate effort to push beyond your comfort zone every week. But the article is right in that I'd have no clue how to achieve that again with wine/beer/food tasting, but then I'm no expert there... edit: punctuation, para breaks, clarity

Chiba-City 3y ago

This article makes sense and explains a great deal. Learning and training trigger dopamine release. Both "learning how" and "learning that." The photography example they use (tool mastery) is a great example. Amateur photographers will regularly change their tools and subject matter to maintain the "sense of wonder." Meanwhile, wedding photographers will be bored with their professions. We can see this with software engineers routinely trying out new languages and tools and hobby projects.

inSenCite 3y ago

Interesting that they take a consumer angle, I see the same when I reflect on my career in the professional services business. Initially I enjoyed the process and feedback of becoming an 'expert' in a specific area, and now it's just mundane. People crave change has been my main lesson learned.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thealienthing 3y ago

Perhaps this holds true more to fields that stem from hedonic experiences themselves like the arts, sports, games etc. I felt this way about music after graduating from music school. I became bored and jaded to music and had to spend several years not consuming music at all. Eventually I regained my love of it. Conversely I don’t think this applies as much to sciences. After I pivoted away from music to become a software engineer, I discovered a world that never ceases to captivate me and elicit curiosity no matter how much I grow. In fact the more expertise I’ve developed, the more intense my interest becomes.

moshun 3y ago
I work in tech and the arts and my experience is that some of the most emotionally disengaged people are in STEM, not everyone of course, but comparing the two, it’s not even close. It’s actually pretty rare to find anyone serious in the arts emotionally dimmed, a large part of the job there is dialing into emotion. That said, seems people at the top in STEM (shaping the field) and on the fringes (doing experimental, cutting edge work) are usually experts and highly emotionally engaged. Take it all with a grain of salt, I guess.
snordgren 3y ago
Dabbling in gamedev as a teenager definitely numbed my enjoyment of video games as an adult. And I'm really thankful for that, because I spent way too much time on video games growing up, before I saw behind the curtain.

HWR_14 3y ago

This makes sense to me. Watch a movie with someone who took film, especially film production, classes and have them explain it to you afterwards.

JohnFen 3y ago
Or take writing classes. In every writing class that I've taken, part of the curriculum is to dissect the writing of great authors. You quickly learn to never dissect books that you love, because after you do, you'll never be able to enjoy reading that book again.
yakubin 3y ago
Taking up photography as a hobby made me notice and appreciate good shots and colours in films much more. So the opposite effect.

abramN 3y ago

I have noticed that if I learn how to play a song I really really like I don't feel the same about the song afterward - some of the magic is lost.

fiso64 3y ago

It would be far more interesting to see whether this emotional numbness is caused by actual expertise, or if it's just the result of significant amounts of time spent doing a particular activity. I didn't see them differentiate between these two anywhere in the paper, but I only skimmed it.