But what is attractive to us as children and later as adults?
First, repeated studies show that we love symmetry. As one example, we prefer faces whose left and right sides are closest to mirror images. The less the two sides of someone’s face match, the less attractive we find it.
As babies, we stare longest at photographs of the people with the smoothest skin, just as we wisely prefer smooth surfaces for our toys. Smooth, seamless surfaces feel good, and rough ones hurt. Rough wood gives us splinters, and we learn.
Consider how we use the word “rough,” and you see our bias: “They went through rough times.” “Man, that’s rough.” “The edge looks a little rough; be sure you sand it.” “Rough” estimates aren’t accurate. In golf, you want to stay on the fairway and avoid the mess on either side of it: It’s called the rough.
We love the smooth, and not just because it glows or sparkles. Perfectly smooth objects—the perfectly polished floors of our childhood, for example—appear spotless to us, and we hate spots. It’s almost certain that we hate them because we link them to things that are unhealthy, even dangerous. We know to avoid people with measles or chicken pox, for example, and that even a small skin imperfection can be a warning sign of cancer or of something else that may need medical attention.
The spots we see often are specks of dirt, which breeds bacteria; spots make us sick. That realization is what drove Ray Kroc to not just create hamburgers and french fries that were identical in every McDonald’s restaurant but to insist on spotless floors and antiseptic restrooms. McDonald’s triumphed over a spotty institution that Americans everywhere called “the greasy spoon.”
We see spotless and think healthy, and what appears healthy appears beautiful to us. We love rosy cheeks, red lips, full, shining hair: They look healthy.
In the mid-1990s, radio station producers had learned that for most American listeners, jazz was too random and unfamiliar, too spontaneous, not quite pretty enough. The producers knew that we would embrace something more melodic, something more flowing and seamless, too. They called it “smooth jazz.”
In 1963, State Mutual Life Assurance of America—now Allmerica—needed help. The company had just acquired another insurance company and was concerned about the morale of the employees. So its marketing executives called Harvey Ball, the co-owner of its advertising and public relations firm in Worcester, Massachusetts, and asked if he could help.
It sounded like a mundane assignment, but Ball said he’d think on it. That afternoon, he returned to his drawing board and within minutes found himself drawing a perfect yellow circle with two circles and a semicircle inside: the now-famous smiley face. Thirty days later Ball received from his client a check for the entire amount he would make from his creation, $45.
Over the following years, his $45 creation would become a U.S. postage stamp, a symbol for Wal-Mart, a button that in 1971 alone sold over 50 million copies, and an illustration of our love of simplicity and of the shape to which we are drawn from childhood: the circle.
The Lion King reminds us we are part of something special: the circle of life. We speak lovingly of our circle of friends. Our universe itself comprises circles within circles forming circles: the spherical planets, including ours, moving around the spherical sun in circular orbits.
Think of water, which we need to survive. How do we draw this very thing which gives us life? Asked to draw a picture of a source of water, we draw a circle.
We call a person we think is complete “well rounded.” By telling contrast, someone behind the times was once called “square.” Boxes are traps; when our thinking is stuck, we need to think “outside the box.” If we break the law, we may be confined to a cell, another box. When we die, many of us are consigned to a box: “They put him in a box and buried him.” The working space we most deplore is called a cube.
A woman with an appealing figure has curves. We do not use “curves” to describe a healthy-looking man, but the most appealing male shape has curves: the arced peaks of the biceps, the shoulder muscles and calves. What some call a nice butt and others a great booty isn’t flat; it’s rounded. The objects of special male fascination, the female breasts, are two circles: two orbs, each with a circle inside. The center of a male’s fertility is rounded on the end, and the organs responsible for fertility are rounded, like balls.
The world’s best designers realize this love of ours. Among the logos most often ranked as the world’s twenty-five favorite, we find five circles (BMW, Mercedes, Firefox, Xbox 360, and Paramount Pictures), a stretched circle (Batman), a panda in an almost perfect circle shape (World Wildlife Federation), and three perfect circles (the symbol for Mickey Mouse). The five-circle symbol of the Olympic Games and the circular symbols of Starbucks and Target all rank with the most memorable and effective symbols of our time.
What about squares and rectangle? None of the logos among the world’s twenty-five favorite logos employs a rectangle, much less a box. (Major League Baseball’s comes closest, but its four edges are rounded.)
We love the curve and dislike the edge. Why might that be?
Again, look back to our childhoods and our ancestors. What are the first things that we see, the signals to us that we are safe and loved? The circle of a mother’s eye, a circle within a circle—followed soon, as mentioned above, by the life-giving milk of a mother’s breast, another circle within a circle.
Soon, what did we learn was safe and what was not? A rounded surface is smooth to the touch; an edge is not. The first great weapons and objects of our ancestors’ fears were spears. When humans started making more lethal spears by shaping rocks into spear points, their deadly feature was a sharp edge: a point.
Points and sharp edges symbolize danger and evil. The devil in Christian tradition carries a trident: a spear with not just one point but three. The devil has pointed ears, not rounded ones. (By contrast once again, our symbol of belovedness, Mickey Mouse, has a perfectly round face and perfect circles for ears.) Verbal attacks are “pointed,” and abrasive people “have an edge.” The Lone Ranger’s sidekick Tonto noticed the sharp edges of evil, too. “Kemosabe,” he famously advised, “that man speak with forked tongue.”
Contrast these sharp-edged symbols with those of Jesus and angels. What is an angel’s signal characteristic? Wings, of course, with well-rounded ends—interesting, because not all birds have rounded wings. The other holy symbol is a circle: the halo. Jesus appears with one, but Christians are not alone in equating the circle with holiness. The ancient Egyptians depicted their gods Ra and Hathor with halos; so do the Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan Buddhists, and Hindus.
We love the circle and the curve and dislike the square and the edge.
In 2008, Philips Electronics conducted a study intended to measure the cost to American businesses of returned products. Their conclusion startled many people: The cost was $100 billion a year.
In years past, this news would have clearly signaled that America’s quality movement had miles to go, that for all the talk about quality circles and Six Sigma, American business was still failing.
But in 2008, people reacted differently to the news, because it appeared the quality movement had shown some effect. Only half of the cost of the products we returned—$50 billion—could be attributed to defects in the products.
So what was wrong with the other $50 billion worth of products?
Nothing. We just couldn’t figure out how to use them. They were too complicated.
Now, we might assume that our fellow consumers tried hard to learn about all those products before they returned them. We assume wrong again. These disgruntled buyers didn’t spend days or even hours reading the manuals and tinkering with the product. They spent just minutes—twenty minutes on average. Then they surrendered.
Now, if a person disappeared into the rain forest in 1965 and only returned to America in time to read this Philips study, she wouldn’t understand. She would remember the most complicated electronic product of the year, the 1965 RCA color television. It had an on-off switch, a color-control adjustment, a volume control, a channel changer, and the now-obsolete horizontal hold dial, to fix your picture when it started fluttering horizontally.
In 2008, our naive returnee from her forty years in tropical exile would discover a phenomenon of our time: feature creep. That’s the clever expression for the tendency of manufacturers to add features to a product, in part so they can proclaim that it is new and improved. (Feature creep may have found its highlight in Microsoft’s Word 2003 program; it featured 31 toolbars and more than 1,500 commands.)
Do we want better phones, or does that “better” just have thirty-five more functions we would never figure out, even if we could find a use for them?
We never figured out our VCRs before we had to replace them with DVD players, which we still haven’t figured out. What chance do we have with a more fully functioned phone?
It seems obvious that the manufacturers believe they need to make complex phones to satisfy the tech heads. Are they just focusing on the Steve Wozniaks of this world, the tech wizard who created the first Apple computers and who probably owns a phone that can rotate his tires, feed his goldfish, and compose symphonies?
If they are, they’re wrong. When asked about his relatively simple phone, the immortal Wozniak sounds like most of us: “I find my phone terrifying.”
Even today’s geeks feel overwhelmed by today’s complexity.
As of this writing, these are the five best-selling books on Amazon:
Food Rules
The Help
Game Change
Dear John
The Kind Diet
These are the top five movies:
Avatar
Edge of Darkness
When in Rome
Tooth Fairy
The Book of Eli
These are the four most talked about products:
iPhone
BlackBerry
iPad
iPod
It’s hard to look at those ten titles and four names and not be struck by their common trait: their brevity. The five top books average just 9 letters and just 2.2 syllables; the top movies average 10.4 letters and 3.4 syllables; the top products average 6 characters and 2.25 syllables.
Not one of these products has a name as long as Federal Express, which is “cognitively long” to our ears because it has five beats—five syllables—to pronounce. Only Edge of Darkness and The Kind Diet take as many as four beats, and half of those fourteen products have names with just two syllables. In 2000, Federal Express decided its name was too long and reduced it to the two-syllable FedEx, then took the added step of making it appear to be a single five-letter word. FedEx turned itself into an Apple.
Is something bigger going on here? Compare those five movies to the top-grossing movies of 1960, and you discover the 1960 titles used over 20 percent more letters and over 50 percent more syllables.
The move to brevity seems obvious. Is it deliberate, and is there a sound psychological reason for it? That is, are we more apt to buy a book or attend a movie with a short title or purchase a product with a short name? Is it that simple is beautiful to us?
The golf swing that today’s golf fans find most beautiful is that of the South African player Ernie Els, whose nickname reflects the swing they love: They call him “The Big Easy.” Fittingly, we use that adjective to describe an attractive woman’s face; she is “easy on the eyes.” Her face requires little effort to process, and that pleases and comforts us.
We love easy. In the early 1980s, popular music stations realized that aging Baby Boomers were tired of hard music; it sounded loud, strident. Fittingly, the radio producers called the offensive sound “hard” and labeled their more pleasing solution “easy listening.” Easy is beautiful.
Our love of the simple is likely closely related to another of our traits: impatience. We are famous for being in a hurry. We might never think about this until we sit down to our first dinner in Italy, the country whose most famous classical writer, Baldassare Castiglione, insisted that one of the signs of personal greatness was sprezzatura—in our language, nonchalance. A nonchalant person does not rush or worry about time, and if the Olympics ever adds a nonchalance event, Italy’s restaurant employees should be the early favorites.
In Italy, diners follow this routine: Arrive at 7:00; get a menu at 8; the waiter comes to take the order at 9 and delivers it at 10; he gets the dishes and dessert order at 11; brings the check at midnight; and returns the credit card receipt what seems like most of the night later.
We hurry; others don’t. Procter & Gamble learned this when they introduced their popular time-saving Swiffer dusting products to Italy. Italian women wouldn’t buy them. They think that a person should devote time to cleaning and dusting to get the best results; that cleaning means effort. Italians are hard to sell on dishwashers, too, for a similar reason—washing by hand is viewed as superior—and on washing machines, which they believe are hard on clothes. In the end, we see a cultural difference at work here. Americans trust machines and technology; Italians believe that humans are far superior. (Perhaps if our country had produced Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, and Michelangelo, we might view humans as superior to machines, too.)
Seeing this, P&G in 2009 repositioned Swiffer in Italy as products to use for the final touchups after cleaning and dusting. And as we probably guessed, Swiffer sales finally took off.
Time matters immensely to us. We invented the concept of own it now and pay later, thinner thighs in seconds a day, real-time Internet connections, the Indianapolis 500, land speed records and the Bonneville Salt Flats, the focus on new cars’ 0 to 60 times rather than other traits, speed dialing, jaywalking and sane lanes, and microwaves. We don’t even want to wait for brown skin; we flock to tanning booths and tanning sprays. And of course, we’re the country that created fast food.
And simple means faster. Isn’t our impatience, then, among the likely explanations for our love of simplicity?
Look at the names of these four companies, and guess which two performed best—that is, which two experienced the greatest increase in the price of their stock over a one-year period.
Moughan
Cripta
Coumor
First, there’s a very good chance that you got the right answers: Assume and Cripta. And the reason you got it right is that you looked at these companies the same way that prospective investors would. Subconsciously, at least, you decided that Assume and Cripta were better investments because the ease with which you could pronounce them made you more comfortable with them and confident in them.
Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer in a June 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported just that: Companies with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed those with harder-to-pronounce names. It actually went beyond that; Alter and Oppenheimer discovered that the companies with easier-to-pronounce ticker symbols also outperformed those with those with harder-to-pronounce symbols.
Once again, we are not always a thinking animal but an assuming one. We assume traits of a company from its name; we shortcut.
This Case of the Ticker Symbol isn’t isolated. There’s also the Case of the Exercise Programs.
Imagine that you decide to start a new exercise program and are handed two program descriptions. The first is printed in the simple Arial typeface, the other in BRUSH font.
How long would you decide that each program would take? How easy and interesting would each program appear? Which one would you be most likely to start and continue?
Assuming you are like the people who were administered this test by Yale graduate student Hyunjin Song and Michigan professor Norbert Schwarz, your answer would be the Arial exercise program. It would seem shorter, easier, and more interesting even though—as you have guessed—it was identical to the Brush font program. The students estimated that the Brush font exercises would take almost twice as long to finish.
This once again shows that we often don’t think; we assume. We somehow assume that an easy-to-read exercise program is easier to perform. We constantly take shortcuts, and the Looks or Sounds Easier is among our favorites. That is why the marketers of everything—and most obviously books, movies, and electronic products—are moving so clearly to shorter and simpler, and why Lars and the Real Girl sounds like a mouthful to us today, when less than fifty years ago we flocked to mouthfuls like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the high-grossing 1965 comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
Psychologists refer to these as examples of cognitive fluency, an odd expression because it lacks the precise quality it tries to describe: something that is easily understood. But despite that, their examples strongly suggest something deep within us: We take easiness as evidence of quality, simplicity as evidence of truth, and complexity as evidence that something is wrong.
In contrast to feature-creep products, which literally cost tens of billions of dollars, consider the stunning success of their polar opposite.
The iPod Shuffle can claim the distinction of being simpler than a 1965 television—indeed, simpler than any electronic product ever made. This is what you can do with an iPod Shuffle:
You can turn it on and off.
You can turn the volume up or down.
You can skip to the next song or back to the previous one.
And you can set it to play songs in sequence or choose them randomly.
That’s it. That’s all this thing does. And as one mirthful observer noted, it sells like the wheel did when it first came out, and for the same reason. All the wheel did was roll, and all the Shuffle does is play songs at different volumes.
What does this tell us about what Americans want? Last year, we returned $50 billion worth of products because, after just twenty minutes, we decided they were too complex. And we spent millions on iPod Shuffles, and more on the entire line of Apple products that adhere to Apple’s brand platform: technology for people who don’t like technology and who don’t want to spend more than twenty minutes figuring theirs out.
Like the iPod, the FedEx name, and the simple standard package offered on a Toyota Scion, Häagen-Dazs simplified. It reduced all its ingredients to a simple five and introduced Häagen-Dazs Five.
Chipotle simplifies (and cleverly; by reducing its burrito options, it moves the ordering lines faster, thus turning over more customers). Its menu lists just a few options, but the ingredients are so fresh that customers are happy to have their choices reduced.
Costco simplifies; it’s Costco’s essence. Its competitor Wal-Mart carries sixty sizes and brands of toothpastes; Costco carries four. Another rising star in retailing, ALDI, offers only 1,300 products total, a third of what Wal-Mart offers.
BoltBus simplifies. “A bus for a buck” could hardly be simpler, and that’s the fare we can get if we’re among the first reservers. Its loyalty program could not be simpler: Take eight trips, and the ninth is free.
Nintendo’s Wii is so simple that analysts feared people wouldn’t like it, with its simple motion-controlled wand and simple, childlike graphics. In an age when we love the simple, the Wii easily outsells the Xbox 360 and PS3. As happens at Chipotle, simplicity also adds profit. Wii games cost only $1.5 to $4 million to develop, compared to the $10 to $12 million cost of developing a game for the Xbox or PlayStation, and can go from concept to shipping at least twice as quickly.
But for sheer simplicity, does anything top Google? (And why don’t more marketers learn from that and make their home pages simple and quick?) What do we see there? A logo, a box to type in, and two boxes, one of which reads “Google Search” and the other “I’m Feeling Lucky,” giving us the chance to play.
If a company doesn’t simplify, we do it for them. We learn there’s “an app for that,” and at this moment, there are 140,000 apps for smart phones. With all that power at our disposal, how many does the average person use? According to the research firm Flurry, the answer is seven—the same number of digits we can remember in a phone number.
The wizards at Google, Nintendo, Apple, Costco, and Chipotle get it: We love the simple.