A Psychologist and Technologist walk into a bar......

Seriously, the foundation of 7 Billion People, Inc. was a conversation between the founders (one of them a behavioral scientist who had spent 30 years working on the science of communication) about the differences between human-to-human communication and communication via the Web. We noticed that people intuitively align their communication to the other party throughout the early stages of a conversation by observing the body language, tone and language (actual words) used by that person and aligning their behavior and language accordingly (that is, if they want to communicate successfully). We also noticed the dangers of mis-alignment or dissonance in the conversation - this almost always results in a 'bad' conversation (we've all had them).

(The professional and amateur Psychologists out there will be nodding their heads at this point and stating that none of this is 'news'. The better ones will be quoting percentages on the importance of body language, tone and language in emotional human communication.)

The simple fact is that human dialogs are a dynamic interaction that involves an amount of alignment and negotiation before any content is transferred. In fact, the credibility of content passed between us is determined in a large part by the rapport developed in the early stages of the dialog.

We also noticed that web communication, and particularly e-commerce communication, lacks this dynamic, personalized approach. We think it's because the website content provider does not know enough about the web visitor. Not their location, browser type, last product purchased etc., but really knowing how that person wants to communicate. How they make decisions, what is motivating them at that time, how they prefer information to be presented, and other 'soft' factors that make us comfortable with the dialog or conversation.

What if we could define a model, based on well-known principles of cognitive and behavioral psychology, that provides that information to websites based on the visitor's behavior on that site.....?