In case you ever wondered how African elephants mate:
A female elephant runs around the savanna while a bunch of horny male elephants chase her.
As she’s getting chased, the female emits a noise known as an estrous roar. This roar is meant to get the attention and interest of even more males, who join in the chase.
Eventually, one of the males, if he can get out of the way of his own enormous erection which is hindering his jogging, manages to catch up to the female and slows her down by putting his trunk on her back.
If all goes well, the female stops.
The male elephant then mounts the female and after an immensely satisfying three to four seconds, the act is over. And that’s when all the elephants, male and female, who were alerted by the roaring and the chasing and the sexing, enter a state known as:
Mating pandemonium.
This is the elephant equivalent of all your friends and family bursting into your bedroom immediately after climax and shouting, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you just had sex! That’s great!”
Except elephants do it by making loud pandemonium roars and pandemonium trumpets, flapping their ears rapidly, and maybe urinating or defecating in excitement.
If you’re wondering how I know so much about elephant mating behavior, the answer is I’ve spent the morning on the Elephant Ethogram site.
This is an online video collection of 404 individual elephant behaviors (rapid ear flapping, estrous roar), 109 constellations of behaviors (mating pandemonium) and 23 contexts in which those behaviors are triggered (attraction and mating).
It seems to me that studying elephants in the wild is fun work and needs no further justification. But the elephant scientists who created this site make the following justification anyways:
“African savanna elephants are among the most socially complex non-human species on our planet.”
And that’s my point for you today.
Elephants exhibit hundreds of behaviors, triggered by dozens of complex social contexts. Humans are the same. Probably more so.
As people who want to influence those behaviors, we often try to reduce it all to a single universal principle, such as “acts in self interest” or “makes decisions based on emotions.”
The fact is, there is no central principle, at least as far as I can see.
Instead our lives are a mishmash of different behaviors, which get triggered in different contexts.
Sometimes we’re trying to impress others. Sometimes we’re trying to run away from pain. Sometimes we’re just moving along with the herd, so we don’t have to spend any energy thinking or deciding. Sometimes we’re measured and logical. Sometimes overwhelming greed kicks in.
On and on and on. Hundreds of individual demons all living in each of our heads.
And if you want to eventually produce the simple behavior of a button click followed by a credit card whip-out…
Then you have to catalogue all of those demons… create checklists of the contexts in which they appear… and then practice and test how to summon them, because sometimes the demons are sleeping, and other times they interfere with each other.
One thing is for sure:
If you don’t do this, you’re gonna miss out on a lot of sales.
But if you do it, and you’re successful, then marketing pandemonium erupts. Roaring, trumpeting, cash register ringing. Possibly followed by urinating or defecating in excitement.
And then when the noise settles:
If you want more advice on making the cash register ring, you might like the Human Ethogram available inside my daily email newsletter. Available here, for free.