What agencies can learn from a Las Vegas doorman
·By Sam McNerney
At the entrance to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, doormen stand beside revolving doors. A cost-cutting consultant might call that redundant and fire the doormen. Rory Sutherland calls this the Doorman Fallacy: replacing a person with a machine that performs the same task, while losing much of what made the person valuable. The doors get guests inside. The doormen make them feel welcome.
The Bellagio offers a useful model for how strategists and creatives can use AI: automate tasks without losing what the person brings to the work.
But what, exactly, is our equivalent of making guests feel welcome?
Last week, I tested a small part of what a good doorman does: figuring out how a stranger is feeling. I gave people and AI a guessing game. No faces or conversations, just written memories and a list of emotions to choose from.
To build the game, I recruited 136 people to an online survey, asked them to spin a wheel with 21 emotions on it, and then share a memory of a time they’d felt whichever emotion it landed on.
One person landed on Hurt: I had a girlfriend and I found out that she was seeing another guy behind my back.
Another landed on Accepted: The first time I went to band camp in highschool. I was really nervous but the tuba section took me in and told me we were tuba buddies for life.
I removed the emotion labels and redacted any words in the memories that mentioned the emotion. Then, through a second online survey, I asked another group of people (n=119) to read five randomly selected memories each and guess which emotion the writer had been given.
Their guesses matched the assigned emotion 52% of the time.
Five memories. Five guesses.
Read five real memories. Pick the emotion you think each person was asked to describe by choosing a slice of the wheel.
Some emotion words are hidden until you guess.
What feeling belongs to this memory?
Click the slice for the emotion you think the participant was given.
Your results
Then the machines took their turn. I gave ChatGPT and Claude the same 21 emotions and all 136 redacted memories at once.
Neither of them has ever been cheated on, or been to bandcamp. Yet ChatGPT was right 81% of the time and Claude was right 78%.
Below, choose an emotion to compare readers, ChatGPT and Claude. Click a percentage card, then open a memory to see what each guessed.
Click an emotion to explore
Selected emotion
| Memory | Readers |
|---|
I wasn’t surprised.
These models have been trained on more accounts of heartbreak and acceptance than any of us could read in a lifetime. They don’t need to have lived through an experience to recognize how people describe it.
But the results measure one task within a larger project. Before anyone made a guess, I’d heard Sutherland’s doorman story on a podcast, wondered what it meant for my work, and built an experiment to explore the question. Now I’m trying to make the results worth your time.
The models helped. They could have suggested the experiment or drafted this newsletter. I can’t say that any individual step belongs exclusively to humans.
What I do have is a reason to bring those steps together. I write this newsletter because I’m curious about people, and because I want to give you something interesting to think about each week. That means choosing a question worth exploring, finding a way to let you participate, and figuring out what story the results have to tell.
That’s my equivalent of welcoming the guest: making you glad you stopped by, and curious enough to return.
I survey strangers about everyday life.
Most weeks, I run a small survey about everyday life and turn the answers into a story and interactive charts.
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