Goncharenko centre 2025-5-25: Decision making and the influence of advertising

Post event notes: See farther down on this page.

Translation: auto translation of this page into Ukrainian

If you did not attend and want to sharpen your ability to analyse, then after each question below prepare your answer and continue reading only after that:

Decision making and the influence of advertising

Question 1: Have you had problems making decisions at some time, on what to go do, on what to eat drink, perhaps on what clothes to wear to a party in the evening?

I will tell you something about clothes. The following conversation is from a film called "The fly", 1986.

I don't recall when I first watched this film, or partially watched it as it is a rather disgusting and not a very good film, but this part I remember well and later (not sure when, a video on youtube, perhaps much earlier on some website?) I saw someone state that doing this takes away a decision per day and it helps you as you can only make a certain number of decisions per day.

For me selecting clothes takes zero effort, except for when I prepare for going out on a date, but I realised that this statement that you can only make a limited number of decisions per day, is correct. This is because making decisions is (psychologically) tiring. When you think about your own thinking, this is clear almost immediately when you are in such a process or have made a decision and think about that process.

So does having the same clothes really make you able to decide more in a day? I think it depends on how important clothes are for you. For me I do not think it changes anything.

I thought of a way to work around decisions making you (mentally) tired, well, 1 or so, more won't work, see further: It should work, and actually I realised after thinking about this solution, that a lot of people already do this, but they do it for another reason, to have enough time for other things in the morning and to not have to hurry: Prepare the clothes that you are going to wear the next day, just before going to sleep, instead of deciding it in the morning. For men this will be easy, for women perhaps less so to actually keep to the decision that you made the day before (and not think about changing your mind, this is what multiple sets of the same clothes and the habit of always using those, will prevent). Making the decision just before going to sleep means you not only have more time in the morning for other matters (such as to eat breakfast without needing to hurry) but you also get rid of any psychological and physiological tiredness (these are different), by sleeping after making the decision.

It could work for all decisions, but note that big decisions require thought/time and you just cannot make many, so putting them all at the end of the day doesn't work. It can work with something small like which clothes to wear, but otherwise you will probably not sleep in time due to having to think/process the decision making.

Does advertising influence you? What do you think advertising does, how does it influence you?

I watched a little bit of a video that stated that advertising does not work on emotions and makes you desire certain things. I didn't watch it further because I wanted to analyse this myself.

Question 2: What do you think, what does advertising do? Did you ever buy something that you saw in advertisements and where you felt you were influenced by the advertising? Why did you think you were influenced, and in what way exactly? What sort of thing was it, food, a mobile phone, a game, something else?

I will tell you something that is possibly interesting about the effects of advertising:
1. About my hobbies, such as model building (this was long ago), computers: I never saw advertising as anything other than something that gives me some information, but information that I would (have to, for myself) check, analyse, to then decide what to buy. So advertising never influenced me in hobbies. My analysis was using advertising as one source of information, reviews in magazines or on the internet were another source, books yet another etc.
2. About non-hobbies: I mentioned some years ago to my sister when I visited her. The TV was on, there was advertising for a certain type of liquorice (candy). I said: "This advertising must have been on TV for 10 years and I have never bought any of it...
What I do when I want to try something new in food or cookies or candies is to look on the packaging and decide where taking the risk to try something new could be worth it (instead of buying something that I already know).

How does advertising work?

I think advertising caters to what you (=what most people) already want such as quality, brand name, and/or low price, or some group feeling (like being a fan of a certain sport) so it does not give an emotional desire, but it links what you already want in general, to this product or to this whole brand.

Influences and results:

Post event notes (2025-5-26)

Choosing food seems a problem! Several attendees mentioned it. I have it too in some way but only when walking in a supermarket. Then I walk past most things and I don't see anything I like. When I am back at home then I usually end up making something that I already know. I don't like most food/cookies/candies that I see in stores, but I can always fall back to eat muesli :)

Disappointments with products: Mentioned were for example Beauty products, food, that they doesn't work as well or looks as good as portrayed in ads. I mentioned that the colours on paint cans are very different from reality [ Addition: Some paint cans have a spot of the real paint and thus the real colour on the lid, but this is only done for paint for metal, not for paint for wood, and I find the spot is a bit small to properly judge the colour. ], and I used some small pieces of wood painted with those colours to show the actual colours.

Another disappointment was with the performance of something that was called a spinner, I think these are the coloured things that fly up into the air and gradually go down again or are those different? I saw those some years ago at a few places, in front of the train station of Odessa for example.

Is advertising needed, even for products from known brands? (see also from my "List of life v2", point 6.7, Assertiveness) Well, yes, I think, and several attendees mentioned it too, that it is 'needed' to get people to know what you make, otherwise other brands could get into the attention of people. So ads will be not necessarily trying to portray a life style and manipulate you that way to buy products, but at least to give information about what is available (from that brand). With a lot of ads you do have to wonder about whether there is real point, why not give more information. Such as a people driving in a car through some landscape. What is that about? Trying emotional manipulation I think. But does it work?

Not discussed: Getting influenced by time limited offers. I wanted to tell about this that for me this does not work. I feel, similar to hurrying in other aspects in life, that "if it's too late then it's too late". I only order when I want to, which is when I feel I made the right choice, and when I think I need the product. I have shopping baskets on some sites that have items in them for ages (much longer than months), I remove things, add things, some things are no longer available and are thus removed. Until I place the order, what I order can change...

A few other topics at the end: Some talk about horror movies (Evil dead 2, I had mentioned that a while before), and about advertising, namely that some people got annoyed that when writing messages about some topic you would get advertisements based on keywords from the messages (so these apps are 'reading' your messages). Apps mentioned: Tiktok, instagram. I only installed Instagram to see postings by the makers of the polba bread sticks in Kharkov, I avoid google as much as possible (for search I use: Duckduckgo), I don't use the youtube app to watch videos and in general I avoid ads even though they don't influence me at all. I mentioned that I know the influence of ads simply by being aware of my thinking and of why I want to buy something. I also remember ads, if they pop up in my mind then I will disregard that influence and probably not buy that product. Someone then mentioned that ads do influence me by not buying something: Well, not really, unless it is an annoying ad, then I will not buy something because of that, but I base buying on my own wishes to try something new or what I feel like.
Watching ads is a waste of time, so I watch youtube on Android via:
1) the Revanced app (install the manager first), Newpipe
[ Note: from Revanced you can download videos from youtube by selecting 'share', then select 'other', then 'Newpipe', then 'Download' to download the video and/or auto-generated subtitles ]
and:
2) Brave browser.
I never get to see any ads on youtube either way. Someone mentioned youtube premium, and that he got banned for something (for a short time?) and that money was wasted [ So there was no return of premium status after that period? ]. I said that I don't want to give google any money so I use revanced and Brave browser [ and on the PC/FreeBSD: Firefox with ad blocker. Brave browser is not available as a package for FreeBSD. ]...

There is also a modified tik-tok app for those who use that app, which you can download/install using the revanced manager. For instagram there doesn't seem to be a modified app, but maybe using the instagram website using Brave browser works to block all ads, I haven't tried that yet.

[ Note 1: I mentioned at the place when I got the recommendation to contact the Goncharenko centre for my talk about my "List of life" to someone who asked me about some things like Dutch pronunciation of names, we got talking about ads, revanced: "Ads don't influence me, so why would I watch them?". They are not useful for me, they are just wasting my time. Of course if they do influence you then you should also not watch them :) (unless ads are useful for you to get ideas, as mentioned earlier. I don't mind missing that, I will see what is interesting in due course somewhere else, for example news about tools (for house renovations). I showed there that I use 'revanced' and Brave browser on Android to watch youtube ]

Programming and humour: I mentioned that with the Emacs text editor, you learn it every day as stated in the video "Interview with an Emacs enthusiast", and a comment that someone made that makes this more clear is: The earlier you start, the longer it will take you to learn Emacs :) [ literal quote: "Emacs takes a lifetime to learn. So the sooner you start, the longer it will take" ] Some attendees mentioned using some microsoft junk for programming, I use Emacs + clang (or gcc, or avr-gcc for microcontrollers).