by GRAHAM BURNETT
Figure 4: The Female Gaze, plotted and quantified
How an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention.
Our eyes are worth money. We know that, now. It has become a commonplace that our “attention economy” is functionally an eyeball economy. But how did eyeballs come to look like dollar signs? Let’s dig into what we might think of as the original Faustian Bargain by which the sciences of human perception (with their sophisticated technologies of precision monitoring and measurement) cut a deal with those who move the money around. And I propose that we start here:
Figure 1: The face that wants to be seen (and to watch)
This puzzling totem face (with its adjacent mini-me) greeted pedestrians on 125th street in Harlem back in the summer of 1925. The curious who meandered over to the shop window for a closer look were, quite without their knowledge, lab rats in an elaborate experiment being conducted by one Howard K. Nixon, a recent Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University and a pioneer in the new field of “attention science” — specifically as it could be applied to the business of advertising. 1
Indeed, depending on the day, it might be Howard K. Nixon himself peering out from behind the opaque cloth that constituted the nose, which was in fact a mask for what we might think of as the original “old school” surveillance capitalism. Here’s what was going on behind the scene:
Figure 2: Behind those eyes — the psychologist’s booth
What we are looking at is the hidden booth where the experimenter sat watching the pedestrians. But not just watching. Also “baiting,” since Nixon had developed various techniques for luring pedestrians to take a closer look at his little “trap window” (bracket these for now; they were goofy). When someone approached the window, the operator threw a lever that dropped a pair of magazine ads into place as the “eyes” in the “face.” Then a recording protocol went into effect, with the observer keeping track, by means of switches in a modified teletype device, of which advertisement held the eyes, and for how long.
There is much to observe about this experimental set-up, and the series of investigations Nixon and his collaborators undertook with it. For instance, his use of the term “bait” to describe his efforts to get passersby to approach his experiment testifies to the crossing lines of ad-world tactics and behaviorist animal testing. It is impossible not to be struck — at least, if one happens to be a historian of the behavioral sciences — by the similarity between his recording apparatus (a vibrating “time reed,” continuously dipping in and out of a dish of mercury) and the core “kit” developed in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt, the progenitor of laboratory psychology in the late nineteenth century.
At the same time, it is uncanny and odd that Nixon would build the front-facing display to look like a face and place the ads he wished to see people see in the position of the eyes. Nixon manifestly grapples, in laying out his experimental ambitions, with the awkward proximity of his science to the actual low-brow business of trying to advertise new products to a generally indifferent populace.
After all, mostly, the busy people walking up and down 125th street (about 18 per minute, on average) did not stop to look at his puzzling window display, and hence did not stop to be experimented on. Nixon was reduced to sticking that rather absurd manikin in the window (it can be discerned in the lower right of the first image, its face a scale reduction of that of the window display itself). “This mannikin held a placard which announced in very small type that this was ‘The Mystery Man,’ with some ambiguous remarks as to the purpose of the display,” Nixon explained in his publication on the experiments.
Upshot: being an advertising experimentalist required learning to advertise for your experimentalism. And that could be a rather demoralizing business. Nixon eventually even tried putting a picture of the Polish silent-screen bombshell Pola Negri in the window. Even so, most people still hustled past. And while the small number of folks who did stop and look did tend to get a bit more interested when the hidden experimenter threw the lever and dropped into view the two ads to be tested, this led Nixon to other worries: yes, testing people in a lab meant they knew they were being tested, but doing street-corner window displays with unusual changing placards probably left many of the onlookers thinking, as Nixon put it, “this is just another advertising stunt.”
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