How Niko Tinbergen Reverse Engineered the Seagull

First, I'm really intrigued by the design choices made on the page - the red line and the fact that the page is a good 1280 px wide (I have a 1280x800 pixel monitor and had a horizontal scrollbar). There's something absolutely brilliant about how the red line on the left reinforces the key insight of the research. (And it exactly matches up with the part of the text that would maximize that reinforcement.) The page width, I don't get - but Dustin's a design stud and I'm not a stud of any sort.

Second, I suppose we could end up at optimal designs for what we wanted through iterative A/B testing. Given enough time, enough variations, and enough traffic, you could conceivably come to the ideal webpage for conversion (of whatever metric you wanted). Of course, as people change, the page would have to change as well. The Gladwell article posted earlier today is a good companion read to this piece, I thought.

Robert Cialdini covers a similar experiment with turkeys in his excellent book, "Influence - The Psychology of persuasion"

For example, mother turkeys, who are known to be caring parents (as far as birds go), tend to respond only to the "cheep-cheep" sound of their chicks.

"Hearing the cheep-cheep, the mother turkey coddles and cares for the young turkey chick. It is a short-cut response that nature has given turkeys to know how to behave. It tends to work well in nature. But, tricky scientists recorded the cheep-cheep sound and placed the recording into a stuffed Polecat, the natural enemy of the turkey, and found that the mother turkeys adopted the stuffed polecat. Coddled it and cared for it."

Human babies have similar innate behaviors (a quickly growing shape, say a circle, will cause a fear reaction in a newborn baby).*

* Chomsky - Language and Responsibility - p52

Good stuff. Brings to mind classic Hubel & Wiesel work on receptive field structure of single neurons in the visual system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw5PKV9Rj3o&feature=relat...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJSnJ2cIFc

http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/b18.htm

[edit: Wiesel, not Weisel]

Physical ident is more efficient and flexible than construct ident, eh? That's always made intuitive sense to me (eg the ident mechanism of the mousetrap), but I've never seen it explained so clearly.

(cue pun about "duck typing")

I think you are right that this has implications for a lot of things, not least graphic design. If you have a good grasp of how people respond to different elements you could guide their actions even more than now.

cite your sources? :)