Well, this is the end of the line for Conversations 2008.  All around me, people are packing up their bags, pocketing complimentary donuts and heading off in the direction of a fleet of airport-bound shuttle buses.

Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood closed out the convention with a hilarious improv comedy show before a packed house in the Sebastian Ballroom.  I would try to recap the show, but I don’t think I could do it justice.  Let me just say this: I laughed until I cried and there was plenty of audience participation, most notably that of “MC Steve.”

And now, I have to catch a flight back to New York, where reliable sources tell me the weather is lousy and I won’t be able to file news while lounging around in a robe in my bedroom, eating room service and watching Bride of Chucky–a relatively underrated film in terms of the entire “Chucky Canon.”

Goodbye Florida.  Now, don’t let us down on Nov. 4th.

Please.

As promised, we at Speech Tech Blog deliver the goods on the great Keynote by MR. DAN ARIELY:

What follows is a collection of excerpts and summaries from Dan Ariely’s Keynote, “Serving the Irrational Customer: What Drives Consumer Behavior.”  Ariely is the author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden forces that Shape our Decisions and is a Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT.

• Ariely played this video clip of some children passing a basket ball and asked us to count how many times the kids in white passed the ball back and forth.  We all dutifully counted.  He asked us to report back with our pass count.  And then he said: “Now here is the real important question: From the people who did not see this before, how many people saw the gorilla?”  Let me just say, I did not see the gorilla.  I did not see it wander onto the screen.  I did not see it beat its chest.  And I was not alone.  Said Ariely: “Vision is our best sense…What is the chance if we make so many systematic and predicable mistakes with vision, with which we are so good, that we don’t even make more mistakes in other domains, for example financial decision making?…So what I want to propose is that we have decision illusions that are very similar to visual illusions…”

• Ariely pointed out that the difference between organ donor rates in various countries is based not on regional difference or how much people care, but rather on the wording of paperwork:  “It turns out that the secret is the from in the DMV.  Here is how it works.  In some countries the form looks something like this: ‘Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donation program’ and what do people do?  They don’t check and they don’t participate…The countries on the right have a slightly different form.  It says something like ‘Check the box if you don’t want to participate.’  What happens now?  People again don’t check the box, but now they participate.  This is the difference…In a similar way you can think about all the menus you are creating and what are the defaults in those menus and how they are going to influence what people end up doing.”

• “The more complex, difficult, emotional a decision becomes the more likely we are to accept the default.  The less we understand what we should do and we accept the default.”

• “But, if you believe that people are not rational and they’re not maximizing and they’re not in an optimal position, it means we can do something to better things…actually create better mechanisms…”

• “There’s a lot of things that we think we know but we don’t know.  And the moment that we’re made to think about it in a particular way, we’re made to think about it, actually changes [people's] attitudes.  We think about market research as tapping into people’s brains and getting an answer from them.  Instead, every time you ask people questions is an opportunity to not only get what they want but also to get them to think about something in a slightly different way.  And interestingly enough, once people think about something in a certain way and they declare their attitude, as long as they remember their attitude, it lasts with them for longer than they imagined it will.”

• “I walk around MIT and I take pictures of students…two students who are different from each other but kind of similar in their overall attractiveness.  And I ask people, ‘Who do you want to date, Tom or Jerry?’  But for some people I take Photoshop and I introduce an ugly version of Jerry.  So they have Tom, Jerry and Ugly Jerry.  And other people have Tom, Jerry and Ugly Tom…Will Ugly Jerry make Jerry more popular and will Ugly Tom make Tom more popular?  Absolutely.  Yes.  The moment we introduced these decoys we change how people valued Tom and Jerry.  This has, of course, two very clear implications.  The first one is when you go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you…You want somebody similar but slightly less attractive.  And, of course, the other side of the coin is if somebody invites you to come with them, you know how they think about you.”

• “When it comes to the physical domain, when we design chairs and cars or whatever, we understand the physical limitations…When it comes to the mental domain, we have a problem.  We don’t understand the mental constraints.

There was a whole lot more, but those are some of the highlights.

Tomorrow: A full report on the Keynote/Performance by the very talented and funny Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood from the television improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway?