Astrid Groenewegen

Make the desirable behaviour easy

Have you ever had good resolutions? Exercise more, eat healthy, or work harder. Yet you quickly fall back into your old behaviour. Why does this happen anyway?

Relying on self-discipline to achieve the desired behaviour is overrated. In fact, only top athletes usually succeed. This is because self-discipline requires cognitive action. But the part of the brain you need for this has only a limited capacity.

If you start with the best intentions at the beginning of your day, you will still fail at the end of the day because your cognitive capacities will be depleted by then. As a result, you start snacking or slacking off. So this is not a weakness but human nature. Your automatic brain takes over, and you fall back into your old behaviour.

Behaviour that is familiar and doesn’t require too much attention.
But you can change your behaviour. The solution is to make the behaviour very easy to perform. This will allow your automatic brain to execute the new behaviour. For example, slice some cucumber in the afternoon and put it in a bowl on your desk. It is then much easier to eat than a bag of chips still in the cupboard.

Our tip: To stick with new behaviour, focus on making the behaviour easy to perform rather than relying on self-discipline.

Improving fundraising 

How do you get a lot by asking a little? That’s what they did in an experiment to raise money for charities. That sounds very contradictory. You fear you will also get less money when you ask for a small amount. Yet this works slightly differently.

The size of the donation should be taken into account, as well as how many people give to a charity. At the American Cancer Society, they did an experiment. In this, they went door to door with two alternating questions.

1. I raise money for the American Cancer Society. Would you like to help by giving a donation?
2. I raise money for the American Cancer Society. Would you like to help by giving a donation? Even a penny would help.

It had a significant effect to highlight that even a small donation can help. The number of people who donated something went from 20% to 50%. In addition, adding this sentence did not affect the donation size. So more people donated, and they did not give a lower amount than before.

This is also known as the legitimising effect: making it okay to give only a small amount. So don’t be afraid to ask for something small. It can work out great.

Our tip: By making it okay to give a little, people are more likely to give something. Often even more than you had asked for.

Show the impact of actions.

Many companies set goals or missions that often don’t work. They expect that when managers set a new goal, it will automatically stimulate employees’ willingness to change or contribute to the company. What they often forget is to inject actual behaviour into these goals.

What is crucial to increase willingness to cooperate is giving employees the opportunity and time to see the impact of their actions. It is very nice to see how your services or products help people. For doctors, this is very easy; people were sick and are now getting better. But even when you sell products, employees need to see the positive impact of their work. For example, how a savings app made them save money which made them have less stress or can do fun things.

Here’s our tip: translate your goals into real behaviours to boost motivation. Being able to see how your projects or products have helped other people is great.

Loss aversion

You can significantly improve your sales figures by using a powerful principle from Behavioural Design: Loss aversion.

Losing something hits us 1,5 times harder compared to winning something of the exact same value.

We hate to lose something. We can put this tendency not to lose anything to good use in sales. After all, you can present your offer in a certain way. Take selling solar panels, for example. You can do this in 2 ways:

• Buy new solar panels now and save €250 every year.
• If you don’t install solar panels now, you lose €250 every year.

Research shows that the second offer turns out to be much more efficient. This is because we find it worse to lose €250 than to gain.

You can also use this in your daily life. Incorporate loss aversion into your sales pitches. What you have to keep in mind is that you have to present something in a loss frame rather than a gain frame to stimulate the willingness to perform behaviour.

Simplicity is key

Perhaps the solution seems very simple. But the language we use is one of the strongest factors influencing behaviour. That is why it is important to think about communication when developing behavioural interventions.

Humans process a lot of information in a day. Our brain often suffers from cognitive overload. That is why we like simplicity: easy signals we can quickly grasp. It is our survival mechanism to take the easy route.

We can use this trick the brain does to our advantage. By using easy language in your communication, you will come across as much more convincing. Use language that a fourth grader understands. This does not only apply to low-educated people. Simple language also works very well with a highly educated target group. This is also how elections are won!

So to encourage the desired behaviour, we need to use easy language. We process this faster, which makes you look more persuasive and attractive. This is how you get people to do what you want them to do.

Comparison isn’t the thief of joy

If you want to influence other people’s behaviour, comparison can be a powerful technique. We are constantly trying to compare ourselves to other people. Consciously but also unconsciously. This is because people like to belong to a group. By paying attention to other people, you will quickly adapt your behaviour to that of the group norms. This happens especially often with people who are close to us or with people whose behavior or opinion is important to us.

Did you know that people waste less water at home if they can see the water consumption of their neighbors? This is a good example of how you can use social comparison to positively influence behaviour.

An experiment showed that this also works for doctors. When they were informed about how often colleagues prescribed drugs, the number of unnecessary drugs prescribed by these doctors was also reduced.

How can you apply this yourself? Maybe you have the idea to go for a walk during your lunch break. Often this plan fails. Even if you count your daily steps online, it often won’t motivate you enough to go outside. This is because this is about individual feedback. In an experiment it was investigated if feedback from other people that you can use to compare your own actions to would solve this problem. There were two groups. Group 1 only received individual feedback on the number of steps they took in a day. Group 2 also received feedback on the number of steps colleagues had taken. The result was clear. Through social comparison, group 2 took 1020 more steps per day than group 1.

Comparison can therefore put us humans into action. Especially if we recognize ourselves in the behaviour of others.

Anxieties

When developing interventions, it’s essential that you don’t forget about anxieties.

“Anxieties: Everything that drives people away from the desired behaviour”

Only when you know why people don’t display the desired behaviour can you make interventions to remove these barriers.

Many companies focus too much on positive points. Take for examples gyms. They want more people who are not yet exercising to come to their gym to get fit. To achieve this, you will see many messages such as ‘you can run a 10K soon’ and ‘get a six pack’. But when people have too many fears about going to the gym, these rewards won’t win them over.

Instead, it would help if you get rid of people’s anxieties. Do you have clients who are intimidated by other muscular people at the gym? Remove the mirrors in some areas. Do you have customers who still find it too scary to independently step on the oblique machines? Changed the name to a six-pack wonder. Or start beginner classes so they don’t have to worry about not being good enough.

Anxieties are often forgotten but are always present. So focus on what’s stopping someone from engaging in the behaviour and remove those barriers first.

Uncertainty vs choice freedom

We all want more control in life. We, as humans, don’t like uncertainty. That is why we all think we enjoy the freedom of choice. We believe that it will make us happier if we have control over our decisions. But behavioural research revealed that it doesn’t work like this.

‘More choice often leads to more doubt, less satisfaction and worse decision making‘.

Practical examples

Do you have children yourself? Then you probably have problems with getting them to eat vegetables. That’s why it’s time to start using behavioural design. What we often say is: ‘eat your peas’. But it is better to formulate the option to eat vegetables differently. Make your kids feel like they have control over what they eat by saying, “Would you like to eat your carrots or peas first?” As a result, you have given them an option while giving them so little autonomy that they have to eat vegetables anyway.

You can also apply this during salary negotiations as an employer. Often it comes down to the employee wanting a higher salary. How can you give them options without paying the highest price yourself? You can do this, for example, by offering a higher salary but attaching a condition to this. For example, include fewer days off in the contract.

So start using limited options to give people a sense of control and promote the desired behaviour unconsciously.

Beat your phone addiction

Do you sometimes have trouble focusing on your work? Your phone is one of the most disruptive signals that distracts your attention from a task at hand. It has even been investigated that the development of smartphones has gone so fast that we have not had time to adjust our behavior accordingly. So we literally do not know how to deal with all the distractions and information flows.

That is why you need a Behavioral Design intervention to change your behavior. I want to show you how to regain focus. The most important advice I have for you is to make the unwanted behavior as difficult as possible. For this I have two concrete tips that you can use right away.

1. Turn off all your app notifications: They are little dopamine shots you constantly get that you don’t need. You become addicted to constantly checking what is new on your screen.

2. Install a pomodoro app: This is a timer that prompts you to get to work. It helps you to work periods of 25 minutes. Your phone transforms into a countdown clock, without seeing all the other distracting apps and messages. It’s a nudge to stick to your pre-set time that you wanted to work.

So remember, the best way to stop certain behaviors is to make the unwanted behavior as difficult as possible to perform.

Good luck beating your mobile addiction. With the help of Behavioral Design you will be cured in no time.