Branding Bias

We all know how imperfect our brains are. Even so, it’s still very easy to underestimate just how many flaws our brains have — without looking at some of the research in the area. One flaw most of us have been aware of thanks to the Pepsi Taste Test ads is branding bias. If you prefer brand A to brand B, you’ll probably find brand A’s product to be superior even when brand B’s product is the one that you intrinsically prefer in a blinded test. Thus, more people preferred the taste of Pepsi over Coke when they didn’t know which drink is which. But when the labels are placed back on (ie. in a supermarket) Coke wins hands down. Of course this is just one of a huge body of results which show how much context and expectations guide our preference:

• Placebo effect investigations show that a placebo that costs more or has fancier packaging works better than a low cost or cheaply-packaged placebo. (Source)
• The same wine gives more drinkin’ pleasure when it costs $90 than when it costs $10. (Source)
• Slapping Google branding on search results from, say Yahoo, did not decrease consumer satisfaction with the search results. (Source)

I decided to try out that last one, especially since Microsoft recently released Bing, a new search brand. We tried a few searches at work and laughed at how stupid the results were — but this is easily explained by our natural disdain for anything Microsoft. But how would my preferences fare in a real blinded test? Luckily a kind soul has developed a handy tool that lets you try the 3 major search engines blind and see which one you really prefer. Here are the terms I used and the winner I picked out:

1. NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magesteria) – Google
2. Ibn Ezra – Google
3. tapeworm – Google
4. Bhutan happiness index – Yahoo
5. online Swahili phrasebook – Bing
6. download public domain audiobooks – Bing
7. I like turtles – Bing
8. the morning star – Google
9. buy samovar (I want one dammit!) – Google
10. advice for travel to Scotland – Yahoo

The results: Google=5, Bing=3, Yahoo=2. Google still won but not nearly as much as I might have thought. Several times I looked at one of the 3 columns thinking “what a stupid set of search results!” only to find it was in fact Google when I clicked the button. Turns out I have branding bias. This also shows the importance of being aware of cognitive bias within yourself at all times. For many people (eg. me) googling something is so ubiquitous and so commonly used in trying to find the “unbiased facts” about something that it’s easy to miss that the whole exercise is biased.

Finally cognitive biases are always deeper than we think. Google may have won 5/10 times in my case. But even this doesn’t mean its results are better. My conception of “better” might already be so tangled up with Google results that when I pick the best result I’m just picking something that matches what I think Google would have displayed. For example, Google has a high preference for .edu and .gov websites. So perhaps because of all those branded searches I’ve seen with a .gov at the top I’ve grown to associate .gov with quality results as an indirect result of branding. Then even if I pick Google it will be because of the .gov/Google bias.

I heartily recommend trying the test yourself — did you get any results that surprised you?