One thing I’m interested in, in the area of consumer behavior, is consumer mis-behavior.  By studying misbehavior I feel that we can come to better understand the process of how people respond to commercial (as in business, not ad)  messages and also how people respond to the commercial culture we live in.

Of note in this area:

Alan Abel is the media prankster!  Here’s the trailer for the documentary about his career:

You should watch the Abel movie, to see how media manipulation is done (Abel is the pain in the ass from the title of this entry).

The Yes Men are currently active and their base of operation is NYC!

Take a look at this video:

It’s great that a corporation took responsibility for its actions.

No, that didn’t happen.  That interview was a Yes Men hoax.  Dow Chemical’s stock went down Two Billions Dollars after that news story aired!

And finally, this recent story from earlier this week:

The browser wars are getting personal. A new study gave IQ tests to more than 100,000 English-speaking Internet users from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. Those results were then compared to what browser each person was using to take the test.

If you’re reading this using Internet Explorer, you may want to navigate away, because the “psychometric consulting company” AptiQuant found, IE users were on average not as bright as those who use Firefox and especially not as bright as those who use Chrome and Opera. link

which received a great deal of press — was a hoax!

It turns out the ones with a below average IQ are a number of people in the news media — including us — who were fooled by an elaborate hoax that claimed users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser were slow. We fell for it and so did others like the BBC, CNN, Forbes as well as the IT publication The Register, which we quoted. link

I read it, myself, and didn’t notice that the story said that the average IE user’s IQ was 80.  I would scold my class if they didn’t recognize what an IQ of 80 means.   But, the power which commercial messages has on us (me included) causes us to suspend our critical faculties.