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The Science Behind Fanboyism
crookedvulture writes "We've all encountered fanboys. They lurk on messageboards and in comment threads, ready to trumpet the benefits of their product or brand of choice with Cheeto-stained fingertips. And it's not their fault. This analysis of the scientific research on the subject reveals that our brains unconsciously develop an affinity for products we choose over similarly attractive alternatives. Duh, right? But what's really interesting is that this affinity exists not just among adults, but also children, monkeys, and even amnesic subjects with no memory of their original choices. We're all hard-wired to be fanboys, it seems. Some of us just do a better job of overcoming our subconscious tendencies."
When clearly Doritos are the superior snack food.
Orwell was an optimist.
Is there any research into what turns affinity for a product into to the need to be a dick about it?
I think it's much more than merely developing an affinity for products we choose over alternatives. The mark of a fanboy isn't that they like something better, it's that they've literally coalesced into miniature tribes where their preferred product (Apple being the obvious example) becomes the culture and any alternative culture (say, Windows PCs or Linux) are intruders or the enemy. But that's not really a surprise. Humans love tribes. We've loved them when we were tree-dwelling primates.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Boy was I such a fanboy of such a mediocre game...it was my first MMO (ahhhh, first love, no wonder)...so this study must be true.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
"This analysis of the scientific research on the subject reveals that our brains unconsciously develop an affinity for products we choose over similarly attractive alternatives. "
Elliot Aronson described this in his 1972 textbook Social Animal. (Resolving cognitive dissonance and stuff ...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Aronson
Why would this effect be obvious? That we choose products which we favor seems logical, but that we favor products /after/ having chosen them, even if we have a horrible experience with them after the acquisition, is not "duh".
I mean really, this whole article is just an excuse for the trolls to come out and say how good their fanboyism is versus all the other fanboys.
I've never seen such an obvious pitch for vi, Windows, and Ubuntu
We see it all the time here. There are rabid fans of this or that company and there are rabid haters of the same. Both groups are sick and pathetic and, I believe, doing pretty much the same thing. The problem at slashdot is that people who like or defend a product or company and who are being fairly rational and objective are often dismissed as "fanbois" by the haters. I see a lot more haters at slashdot than I do real fanbois. Most real fanbois are probably more comfortable staying with the sites where their views aren't questioned. I suppose the haters enjoy their group thinking at slashdot.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
What about anti-fanboyism, where someone's irrational hate for a product they attack the product and demonize it's users at every opportunity?
It is probably a protective strategy, to defend our choices. As we choose a mate we will try to protect them as to secure the next generation. Evolution probably went where this over-generalization of the effect was good enough, and it didn't need to be particular down to having to be a mate, just a choice.
Hanging on to the Idea that your OS choice is superior to the others, and the need to protect it against other ideas, falls under the same emotion. Failure to do so may cause other OS's to become more popular then you have wasted your time and resources on that choice. But if you defend it and keep it going then your choice was valid and good and you didn't wast your life on your OS choice.
The same with religion, Religions that expand by converting adults are often have members with more Zeal then people who grew up with a Religion because that was what their family practiced. Or with someone who decided to become an Atheist, they will often be more hateful towards people who believe in religion.
I personalty try to catch myself becoming a fan-boy and make sure I say sensible about it... Although I don't always succeed as it is such a primitive emotion I feel it has helped me keep in good graces with a lot of people.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm sure plenty of us have gone out with someone who we initially thought was ok but not amazing but eventually got to really like them. And it certainly wasn't because their personality or looks had undergone some radical overhaul in that time.
yes, at least I would to warn others to not waste their money on that chunk of crap
Our adherence to products we love causes us to favor our choices over others? Makes perfect sense to me, we all want reasons to love our decisions. Now if only we didn't give so much of a damn about how our decisions compare against those of others, then there would be 100% fewer "fanboyism" fights. And less fighting is good, unless I am a madman and no longer have any idea what I'm talking about. We like being right, but it's not always necessary to show it. Maybe if everyone decided once each day to realize situations, not take flamebait and keep their opinions to themselves, we'd all be friendlier. Go ahead and get angry at me for showing some optimism, but deep down inside y'all know it's true.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
Great observation. I believe we reduce the political field to two parties because we all want to win... So we rally behind those who have the largest chance of winning.
Even if someone follows a third party, they most likely will vote "with the winner" instead of their own party which stands little to no chance of winning.
You're absolutely right, that's par for the course when it comes to your average Joe, but those in the know know the true idiot is the one who cares what others think.
The brain does not use deduction, it uses pattern matching, and therefore, given enough training over the same things, a bias is developed.
At least fanboys are expressing a positive sentiment--haters are losers. Live and let live--somebody smart said that once.
explaining how or why someone thinks or acts a certain way does not remove them from accountability or responsibility
"well see, he is a drug addict, so when he mowed down the family with his car, this is why it is not his fault"
this is obviously tangential, but i want to make sure people understand: there is nothing wrong with explaining why people behave a certain way or say a certain thing. but explaining why they do something doesn't mean they are removed from responsibility or accountability for their actions
i see this kind of thinking about responsibility like in the summary all the time, and it bothers me, as various neurobiological investigations EXPLAIN someone's behavior but it doesn't EXCUSE someone's behavior
some people think explaining=excusing. no: without personal accountability in this world, all sense of morality is destroyed. if it comes out of your mouth or your hands, YOU are responsible for it. no explanation nullfies that. please understand that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I guess that's why I keep coming here, as opposed to switching to reddit.
They get a show on Fox News or MSNBC and pretend they are newscasters.
I'm I the only one who is concerned by the validity of their experiment. The last experiment lets me very dubious.
Imagine you have 3 smileys. They have similar ratings, but for sure there is one you prefer, one you rate 2nd and one you rate 3rd. Now, let's just see the result we would have for each scenario.
Rating of cards 1/2/3 ; 3rd card chosen after initial choice ; 3rd card chosen without initial choice (so just between card 2 and card 3)
1/2/3 ; False (1 chosen on first pass) ; False
1/3/2 ; True (1 chosen on first pass) ; True
2/1/3 ; False (1 chosen on first pass) ; False
2/3/1 ; True (2 chosen on first pass) ; True
3/1/2 ; True (1 chosen on first pass) ; False
3/2/1 ; True (2 chosen on first pass) ; True
Which makes in the first experiment 50% chances of choosing the third card and 66% when we made a previous "preselection". This is approximately the figures children had. Monkeys had lower 3rd card preference, maybe because they prefer to take cards in order.
About the rest of the article, I'm just as dubious. If you choose a product, for sure you rate it better. It's called the cause of you choosing it, not a consequence ...
LOL. But true! ;-)
Will you be buying the new iPenis when it comes out?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Or maybe fanbois develop irrational and emotional attachments to products because they are just average idiots who have been beguiled by marketing. That is after all the whole point of mass marketing -- to beguile the average idiot.
".... Some of us just do a better job of overcoming our subconscious tendencies."
It's called "being a rational, critically thinking person" and ignoring the shininess to look for value.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Cool Ranch is by far the greatest creation ever. Taco was a conspiracy brought on by the global banks investment in the Doritos brand. But they couldn't silence Cool Ranch freedom of choice! I mean, can you even eat Taco with Dr. Pepper and call yourself a lover of freedom? No, it's horrible and eats away at the mind! Cool Ranch and Dr. Pepper will lead to world peace and we will not be silenced!
Down with the Taco Conspiracy!
I8-D
I love Apple because when you use Apple's products you come out as intelligent person. You aren't like a normal person who is only able to use Windows, but neither you are a nerd that uses Linux. With Apple's products you can really just go out with your iPad, sit down at the coffee shop and wait for girls to come talk to you.
we are hardwired to excuse away the faults of something when we are vested in it.
Fanboys are people who go to the extreme end and try to force other people to ignore the same faults that are.
It applies to family, religion, products, everything. The length of the excuse will be correlated to the amount of value and time people put into something
It should be noted that being aware that happens means someone can learn how to recognize and stop making those emotional judgements.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Mod parent up. I have no points right now.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
I reserve the right to violate my tag line.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
It's easy to induce fanboyism; just give the subject a bag of Cheetos, Doritos, or any crunchy snack.
The most extreme fanboys are those who have received little gifts from vendors. A desk trinket or T-shirt goes a long way towards making the prospective fanboy feel "loved", "part of the team", etc. Bigger gifts work even better -- free products for home use, "training", etc. And for the truly resistant fanboy there is some extreme methods that can induce fanboyism: blackjack and strippers.
The other way to induce fanboyism is to prevent the subject from discovering alternatives. If you can make sure the prospective fanboy never drives a car other than Toyota, he or she will probably become a Toyota fanboy with no incentives whatsoever.
In humans, the degree of fanboyism (let's call it the "FB factor") is computed by the number of excuses per hour the person will make to defend the shortcomings of whatever the fanboy is addicted to.
Computing FB for prospective fanboys of Microsoft was hotly disputed until Vista provided a foolproof test case.
"Some of us just do a better job of overcoming our subconscious tendencies."
I've never met any of these people.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
I'm sure that the research has hit upon the primary factor behind fanboyism; however, for certain groups, it goes far beyond those reasons. For many products and technologies, there is a personal investment in time and money that gets wasted if your particular choice falls out of the mainstream. Behind most consumer technology, there is a critical mass that is needed for any sustainment of future relevance. To many fanboys, there is a feeling that it falls to them to make sure that others buy in to the same technology, so that the critical mass can be reached.
and like the religious fanboyism, most do not really chose the _product_ but are marketed the _product_ and lock onto it use only that as the basis of their _choice_. Now, anyone with opposing views is a threat to their decision making even when they really didn't make a choice but had one put into their hand or mind. They'll even become very hypocritical defending it and not see the hypocrisy. This is also _very_ much a political thing too. More so with the US Republican party but not exclusively theirs.
I've figured it was a form of social heuristic.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I think it's more not wanting to feel like you've been cheated. Especially with something that requires more resources or an active investment. For example, if you were to buy a Mac at the hiked up cost, you'd want to convince yourself that it's worth the extra cash. For me, I'm a Ubuntu user, and I invested my time in getting it up and running on my laptop. It took 3 days before I stumbled onto ndiswrapper, about a month to get it to look how I wanted it to look, and as time passed I'd put too much effort into learning how to use/tweak it. A few years later, I love Unity despite the fact that it's generally considered to be a locked down piece of crap. At some point, "not worth it" became too expensive a decision to make - I took the opposite path - convinced myself that it's good, which became a habit; hence, I'll likely view Ubuntu as being good by default.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
All association with a product, person or people, or ideology is a way for people to augment their identity in such a way that they appear to have some level of importance in the social strata of their choosing. Identification with an equally attractive thing risks being ousted from the social strata based on the fanboyism of the original thing or at least being of diminished importance within said fanboy group. This is really just a subset of the social dynamics that exist among peers or in politics. For example, an alpha male does something incredibly asinine, something that anyone outside his group would call him an idiot for. However, within his group, his underlings rally behind his stupidity out of fear of being of less importance in the group, while everyone else who calls him out for his stupidity are instantly shunned.
TL;DR: People tend to make decisions based on how important those decisions make them feel, not so much because of the practicality of those decisions.
of that all-time greatest fan-boy tag line?
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Can't blame the good doctor, he didn't put those lustful thoughts for your mother into your head either. ;-)
Now explain what is this "Windows" I keep hearing about...
Yeah... Nothing new here. Psychologists have understood confirmation bias for decades --if only the unwashed masses had this insight and could turn off Fox News (or Air America?) long enough to consider their own biases. God, what I wouldn't do to get one semester of critical thinking added to the K-12 educational curriculum.
Like Michael Shermer points out in his recent book, giving mental priority to our first impressions and previous experience was critical to our survival back when we were swinging from the trees. Today it's more likely to lead us into making bad political and personal choices.
Ask me about my sig!
From Social Psychology an interesting construct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
La culpa no es del chancho...
Actually I would say Android has the more agressive vocal fanboys. Mention Apple in here and they swarm with claims of Patent Troll, Natzi, Alter of Steve, Homo, Idiot, Turtleneck, fanboi, 'shiny',queerbate, etc. Apple fans tend to defend their products but they don't generally start attacking others choices. They typically say things like "don't like it, then don't buy it". Android fans tend to strike out against others who disagree with such attacks, and often get personal.
Granted this is just a sample from one thread, but I think it's fairly representative of what I see here. I typically find Android fanboy's to be far more juvenile and verbally abusive. This is just searching this thread for the word 'Apple':
PLEASE APPLE!! If you would just let me have an iPhone 5 NOW instead of me having to wait ALL the way until fall, I PROMISE to hold it right!! I'll do ANYTHING! Please!?!? I really don't want to cryogenically freeze myself again :(
Pfft, I laugh at your pathetic iPad. The only Apple product worth taking out in public is an iPad2. Thus says our lord Steve Jobs *Peace be upon Him*
I got here through a series of tubes
Damn..missed the last comment outside of the blockquote. Ah well...
i swear to god man every time i visit slashdot it just get better and better, from the funky green/teal colors to the submissions and the comments are the best! even the anonymous cowards are to be loved!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No, it marks you a fan.
And that's what makes clear you are not a fanboy. A fanboy would claim that you are always better off with his preferred choice.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In Social Web 2.0 some scary things emerge from taking your nice statement and playing musical chairs with the words.
(Modified from Talderas' original)
"People are just products. Mark Zuckerberg defines your worth and thus his own through who he uses via who you associate with."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychologist, and one of the scientists behind the data used in the article, made an excellent talk at TED. Definitely worth viewing. Why are we Happy?
Honestly, I think that calling someone a "fanboy" is just an ad hominem attack that people use when someone else's favorite thing is different from your favorite thing. The fact is, people come to like things, and they enjoy talking about them. Some people won't shut up about football. It's their thing. They enjoy it. They may seem unwilling to admit that basketball is an equally valid sport, from an objective point of view, because to them, football is the best thing. EVERYONE has this kid of narrow perspective on SOMETHING. However, while they may be narrow about it, calling them a fanboy is nothing but a way to completely dismiss every argument they make, even those that may be perfectly valid and useful. Maybe they are wrong that basketball sucks, but they may be equally correct that football is awesome.
Let's try an example. Richard Dawkins is an atheism fanboy. In fact, he's a great scientist and educator. I understand evolutionary biology very well, but this guy could run rings around me when it comes to depth of knowledge and the ability to explain it clearly to others. On the other hand, he's got a bug up his ass about the evils of religion. Many of his complaints are perfectly legitimate, of course, because various religions have been the cause of massive atrocities. Moreover, our scientific understanding has brought us to the point that the vast majority of things that humans once attributed to gods are in fact the result of completely natural processes that follow consistent physical laws. With regard to the vast majorty of the world, it is completely unnecessary and even perhaps inappropriate to evoke "God" as part of the explanation. That being said, an absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence. For all we know, "God" could be inhabitants of a meta universe wherein our universe is a computer simulation, and they have made occasional tweaks to keep the simulation running right. So, Dawkins has taken his lack of evidence for God and taken a leap of faith that there definitly isn't one, and rather than just being a proponent of atheism, he is vehement about it, attempting to persuade people of the "truth" of his belief. He should stick to being a fantastic scientist and picking at specific problems that religions cause (in any case, religions are human constructs), and stop being so forceful about something he can't really prove. He can prove evolution. He can't prove atheism. Evolution is good science. Atheism is a belief, taken on faith, even if it is in fact highly plausible, with the alternatives having very little support. (I am inclined to think that agnosticism is the only belief without faith, because it doesn't assert anything specific, but I could be wrong about that.)
The point I'm making here is that Dawkins has some errors in his reasoning that might make some people dismiss him. If you're religious and he attacks your religion, then you're not going to want to listen to him talk about evolution. But in fact, he's one of the BEST people to listen to if you want to understand evolution.
I was thinking of going on with some other example about Mac fanboys, but I'm running out of time. For me, I'm just getting old and I prefer the fact that a Mac doesn't make me babysit basic things like connecting to wifi or backing up files. But my idiology places usability concerns first, with issues of "free software" coming second. The point is that many Mac fanboys have religious fervor. Nothing can touch the awesomeness of a Mac. But I'm sure you can anticipate what I'm going to say next: Even if their knowledge of Windows and Linux is completely wrong, they know tons about Macs and you might learn something from that.
If your parents didn't think you were wonderful when the rest of the world thought you were an obnoxious brat, you wouldn't be here right now.
People in general have an affinity to belong to groups ... Tribes, religions, sports teams, Coke or Pepsi, vi or emacs, KY or Astroglide ...
People invest their self worth into these things, and they feel threatened when challenged. Sometimes, they feel motivated to tell everybody else how they should also sign up for this exclusive club .. because it further validates their self image.
I think the reverse is also true, some people have invested just as much into disliking something ... oh, for example, the almost irrational hatred of Apple you see here on Slashdot (which, if I remember correctly, is about what it was for Microsoft about 8-10 years ago).
That the 'other guy is a doodie head' is part of the us/them image you build up. He simply has to be a doodie head, because he disagrees with you on a topic on which You Are Right(tm).
I suspect from an evolutionary perspective, this is probably indicative of a broader range of how people have affinities for group membership as a whole.
Or, I'm talking completely out of my ass ... it could go either way really. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Therefore it is good to reply to.
QED
"Some of us just do a better job of overcoming our subconscious tendencies."? More like "some of us convince themselves that their hatred is actually based on reason, and that it is actually proof they are beyond fanboyism" - and they are. Far beyond.
Fandroids hate facts.
I don't find it surprising that slashdot users favor android. I also don't find it surprising that they are a bit antagonistic about iOS. Your study here is akin to going to a secular humanism newsgroup and then concluding based on the posts there that atheists are numerous and more antagonistic than theists.
I don't have any data to back this up, so I'll understand if you decide to disregard my opinion, but my experience is that android users are far better informed about iOS and its advantages and disadvantages, and tend to prefer android on its merits more than out of fanboyism (though surely it is a factor, I suspect it is less of a factor than with apple). As for why they might be antagonistic? I don't know, but it might be at least partly a reaction to apple fans being obnoxious about their products. I'm reminded of Maddox's bit on apple. I've met quite a few apple loyalists who seem unwilling to consider alternatives, and when you consider that the alternatives usually provide more value for your money in all of the quantifiable ways (except number of apps with iOS devices), it comes off as a reaction to cognitive dissonance. You see them rationalizing about how you can't get viruses with apple computers (you can) or how things just work (in my experience, they often don't) or how apple's support might be better (they might be right).
And I know what you're probably thinking. I'm just a fanboy and I don't see it. But it's not quite as simple as that. My first smartphone *was* an iPhone. My initial assumptions about Android were generally negative. Seemed like a copycat and I was skeptical that it could perform as well. I used to come up with any rationalization I could, even when presented with conflicting evidence. "Well surely the iPhone easier to use" or "It's probably more reliable" or "I don't need to run multiple processes" (yes, I know, they fixed that) or "Voice dialing? eh, it's a luxury I don't have any use for". Reading reviews and talking to people, I learned that actually android had a lot to offer that iOS did not, and I got increasingly fed up with the lack of features. What finally did it in for me was when the iOS4 update turned my iPhone 3G into an unreliable useless piece of slag. Apps would autoclose themselves, take forever to load, etc. (some apps, like the dictionary one, would autoclose every time before fully loading). Some of my games became useless. All of my data was deleted by the sync operation. Sure, some of it I synced and got back, like contacts, apps, and music, but most of my app data was gone (including videos I had taken with a 3rd party app since the iPhone 3G didn't have integrated video capture). It was as if I suddenly noticed my apple koolaid was spiked with piss. Yes, I could have gotten an iPhone 4 and most of those issues would have been answered, but by then I no longer thought of apple as any better than anyone else if I could experience all of those issues... so I opened my mind and looked into alternatives, and based on every quantifiable feature, android phones just looked better.
I run a ballroom at Dragoncon every year.
Hardwired or not, seen plenty of fanboy-ism ... from the guy asking Felicia Day for her phone number, to the screaming girls when Tom Felton walked out on stage.
It's just normal hero worship .. or something .. or not ...
Sure there are tons of places where they went a little over the top, but Apple took an open source core and did all the UI work that FOSS folks put off for a decade. It's as simple as that. It's "BSD on the desktop", followed by "2nd derivative of BSD on the phone".
All their recent patent / lawsuits stuff is typical big $ corp games. "FOSS honesty" starts to creak when the dollars flow in. Google managed Not To Be Evil for a couple of years, but then they had to Just Do Stuff against nasty competitors.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If you identify with any of the tools you use: OS's, programming languages, platforms, then an attack on the tool you identify with, is an attack on yourself. You will vehemently defend an attack on your self identity. The only practical way to avoid fanboy-ism is to be a professional and not to identify with your tools, simply realize, that every useful thing is a tool and not 'who you are'. Then you can give a professional opinion on any of your tools, the pluses and minuses, without having to feel threatened emotionally.
Wow did I call that or what.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.