Our final keynote speaker at Behavioural Design Week 2021 was Baptiste Tougeron. As a Google Research Manager, he is responsible for ad effectiveness. During his session, he presented the most read whitepaper of Google worldwide: Decoding decisions. He talked about the messy decision process and how behavioural science can supercharge the attractiveness of brands. A must-see if you work in branding, marketing and advertising.
Behavioural Design Week: Baptiste Tougeron
Purchase decision-making is not a linear process. Between the purchase trigger and the purchase, customers are exposed to much information, like reviews or social media. The Google research team tried to uncover how customers process all this information and make decisions between the purchase trigger and the purchase itself. The call it “The messy middle”.
Behavioural Design for Advertising Effectiveness Behavioural Design Week 2021
Baptiste Tougeron: Our key take-aways
Key-take away 1: Organise the messy middle:
Between the purchase trigger and the purchase, we can identify two ’mental modes’. The Exploration Mode and the Evaluation Mode.
While the Exploration Mode expands our consideration set, the Evaluation Mode narrows down our options. People oscillate through these two mental modes, repeating them as often as they need to make a purchase decision. These two mental processes can run simultaneously or apart, but they are two distinctive processes.
Key Take-Away 2: Supercharge the brand with cognitive biases
Now that there is some order in the messy middle, we need to know how shoppers process the information. During the process of Exploration and Evaluation, cognitive biases shape their behaviour and influence their choice. In the research, six cognitive biases are prioritised:
The Power of Free
Social Norms
Authority Bias
The Power of Now
Category Heuristics
Security Bias
Important conclusions to keep in mind:
Ensure brand presence, simply showing up can impact customer decision making when they are exploring and evaluating. (This is called the Mere Exposure Effect)
Intelligently (and responsibly) employ behavioural science principles to influence the decision-making process
Close the gap between trigger and purchase.
Baptiste Tougeron: Quotes to remember
“Purchase decision-making is not a linear process”.
“I would like to think of the messy middle as a big spaghetti plate”.
“The cool thing about behavioural science, if you put the theory into practice in different countries, the brain remains to work very similarly.”
“We are not done. We still have to explore ‘exposure’ and ‘experience’, so lookout for new research and results in 2022”.
“Playing with the six cognitive biases is not easy. You cannot choose to supercharge your brand just like that. Some biases you can influence yourself, others need to be acquired”.
Baptiste Tougeron: Further reading
Want to know more about untangling the messy middle? Make sure to read the white paper by Google, which can be found here.
Hungry for more Behavioural Design Fest?
Please make sure to check out our other videos of other 2021 Keynote speakers on Behavioural Design Week: Tim Versnel on designing behaviour for sustainability and Matt Wallaert who shares his experience in setting up a Behavioural Change Project within an organisation.
Then our two-day Fundamentals Course is the perfect training for you. You will learn the latest insights from behavioural science and get easy-to-use tools and templates to apply these in practice right away!
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
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Can we design a choice? In most societies, if there is one value we hold dear, it is our freedom of choice. Having autonomy is a concept that directly speaks to our core as human being. Suppliers of goods and services understand this and have submerged us in an economy of choice that can match everyone’s individual needs. It fits our need for autonomy like a glove. It allows us to be in the driver seat of our own lives. But is it? Is it true? Does abundance help us make better decisions? Does more choice equal more satisfaction? The answer is no. So, the question is: How we can master the subtle art of choosing to shape better decisions and positive behaviours?
How to design a choice: The paradox of choice
Something interesting is going on which choice. It is a paradox, a concept cornered by Barry Schwartz. He describes the paradox of choice as follows:
So, what does this implicate? Is less indeed more? Well, yes and no. In most cases, too many options to choose from isn’t in our best interest. This has to do with our bounded rationality. We, as human beings, cannot make every decision in our daily lives wholly rational or, better put, with focused attention. There are too many decisions for us to deal with to do so.
Just think about your morning. From the moment you heard your alarm go off, you had to decide to turn it off or snooze. You had to decide to stretch or do another roll-over on your side right into that comfy spot that has the perfect temperature; You had to decide to get up or sleep in for just a little bit longer. You had to decide to get dressed right away or get your first coffee in PJ’s first. You had to decide to have coffee indeed, or did you decide to have something else? Or did you decide to go pee first? I have not even begun to talk about the decision to check your phone, turn on the radio, heating or toaster yet. Or the decision to combine all of these with checking your to-dos of the day. And your day has only just started.
These examples all may seem trivial, but they’re not. It is estimated that your brain has to compute about 35.000 decisions a day, from minor ones to bigger ones. Your brain cannot process all of them consciously or with extensive thought; It would simply crash. Therefore, a lot of our decisions are made automatically and unconscious. As Nobel laureates Kahneman and Tversky have discovered, we have two operating systems in our brain: A deliberate and an automatic one. And the automatic one has the upper hand, which is a good thing. It simply shows our brain is wired to help us navigate as with as little effort as possible through life.
How to design a choice: The phenomenon of choice overload
Now back to too many options to choose from. Why does it work against us?
First of all, having too many options causes apathy simply as it requires too much cognitive activity. This can lead to decision fatigue or even not making any decision at all. This phenomenon is called choice paralysis (also referred to as choice deferral).
There is a cognitive bias related to this phenomenon called regret aversion. When people anticipate regret from a choice, they tend to not act at all. This can have severe consequences. A meta-analysis has shown that people’s behaviour to accept medical treatments is influenced more to avoid regretting making the wrong choice than it is influenced by other kinds of anticipated negative emotions. Therefore, when designing a choice, you have to be aware that the number of options you present to someone also enhances the probability of choice regret. Which in return enhances inertia. In the mentioned example, this has shown to seriously impact behaviour concerning health.
Secondly, when we have more options to choose from, we tend to make worse decisions as we tend to rely even more on our system 1 cues, which can be biased. Examples are our tendency to stick to defaults, recommendations, or reliance on peer choices. Have you ever said in a restaurant: I am having what he/she is having’? Well, probably this was caused by option overload on the menu. Research showed what happens if there are either six or thirty food options on a menu. In the first case, people tend to choose for themselves. In the second case, they choose what their partner chooses.
Thirdly, we tend to make more conservative choices to minimise the potential for regret.
And finally, the more options to choose from we have, the less satisfied we are with the choice we did make. The more options, the more we feel we ‘missed out on.’ In his book, Schwartz described two experiments. One in which people had to choose between 20 varieties of jams and another could choose between six models of jeans. The experiment showed that the more choices people had, the less satisfied they were with their final choice. This matches Sheena Iyengar’s research, professor at the Columbia Business School and author of ‘The Art of Choosing’, which taught us that:
‘The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.‘
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So, what works then to design choice in a way it shapes positive behaviours? Next to the concept of bounded rationality, there is the concept of bounded choice (which I prefer to call bounded options as you may have guessed). Let’s look back at the paradox of choice again. It shows that having too many choices has been associated with feelings of unhappiness.
A greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.’
But on the other hand, it works the other way around too, and on the more positive side of things:
Limiting the number of options can lead to more satisfying choices.
Researchers did a meta-analysis comparing 99 scientific studies on choice overload. They found that choice reduction is most effective when:
When people want to make a quick and easy choice
When the product is complex
When it’s difficult to compare alternatives
When consumers don’t have clear preferences
Before we design a choice: Ethical considerations
From an ethical point of view, it is good to make a distinction between options and choice. We feel it can be a very effective Behavioural Design to help someone make better decisions by limiting an option, but you shouldn’t forbid a choice. So, in fact, you design choice by working with options. This is the essence of nudging. Let me illustrate the difference with an example.
Limiting the number of options or take out some options altogether has, for example, proven to be very beneficial in helping people who are struggling with being overweight. One very effective way to fight this is to change eating habits. A lot of interventions have been developed and tested to help people change their eating patterns. From adapting food labels to more affective nudges, for example, by promoting the taste instead of a particular food’s healthiness. From a meta-analysis, aggregating data from almost 96 behavioural experiments on successfully promoting healthy eating, the most effective intervention turned out to change the plate and cup size Taking an option (in this case, large 16 oz. cups) helped people eat less and still feel satisfied. Although you take away options with this intervention, you don’t take away the freedom of choice. People always have the choice to go for a refill or buy a second portion. Only, it turned out not many people do. By simply reducing options, you make it easier for people to change their behaviour.
Just one more argument against limiting freedom of choice (instead of options). We, as humans, are wired to want a sense of control and closely tied to this sense of control is our need for freedom and autonomy. If you do forbid a choice, you may, therefore, very well encounter adverse effects. People might start avoiding, ignoring or counterarguing. This is also why warnings backfire. We don’t like to be told what to do. It crosses our innate need for freedom. And if people are pushed into doing something, they push back. How many times did you change your mind or behaviour in your adult life because someone demanded you to do so? My parents and teachers still had that influence on me, but in daily life when we want to influence people, we need to allow for agency.
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Designing a choice: Behavioural change interventions
Time to turn human understanding into practice. What can we do to help people make better decisions and be more satisfied? I want to show you five behavioural intervention strategies to design for better choices:
Limit or remove options
Terminate products or services that are not doing well.
Organise options
Make categories or ease people into choosing from more options.
Frame options
Present information to someone in a way choosing becomes easy.
Help people to understand their personal preferences
Helping them limit options to the ones that fit them.
Offerexpert advice
This way, people can ask a specialist to help them choose, outsourcing the decision.
Limit or remove options How far you should limit options depends on the behaviour you are designing. If you want someone to click on a button on your website, it is better to have one clear option. If you want someone to pick a health regimen, it works to have three options, with your preferred option positioned in the centre, as people tend to gravitate to the middle. If you want someone to buy a specific product, it works to show two options of which the left product (in Western countries) is a decoy that is priced much higher than your target product. This higher-priced product will act as a mental anchor that makes people feel your product is a perfect deal. These are best practices from behavioural science, but it is always a matter of experimenting with what works best in your situation. One thing remains the same for every situation: Less is always more when shaping decisions and behaviour.
Organise options However, you can make people more capable of choosing from more options. You just have to do it gradually. A research team at a German car manufacturer ran an experiment with the manufacturer’s online car configurator. Potential clients using the configurator had to choose from 60 different options to configure their entire car. Every option again consisted of sub-options. For instance, to pick your car colour, you had 56 colours to choose from, picking your engine also four options and so on. It seemed logical to have people select an ‘easy option first. For example, colour is something that most people have a set preference for. And then move to the ‘harder’ options like the engine. The experiment made half of the customers go through the configurator from many options (e.g., colour) to fewer options (e.g., engine type). The other half from fewer options to many options. The researchers found that they ‘lost’ the second group: They kept hitting the default button or aborted the process. The first group hung in there. They had the same information and the same number of options, only the order in which the information was presented varied.
If you start someone off easy, you can teach them how to choose.
Frame Options Sometimes option reduction is a matter of framing. In other words, thinking about how to present information to someone. Maybe you have kids, and well, most kids aren’t big on eating veggies. Mine isn’t, anyway. We, as parents, often tell our kids: ‘Eat your peas’. You’ll probably have more success if you give your kids a sense of control, designing the options a different way. ‘Do you want to eat your peas or carrots first?’ It can also work in our professional life. Let’s say you are in negotiation with a talent you like to attract your team or organisation. Make sure you frame your negations in a way options are limited but still allow for autonomy. To make it more real: Often, negotiations come down to challenging the salary offer. Suppose you give someone the option to get awarded a higher salary, but you tie a condition to it. For example, sure, you can have a higher salary X, but it implies X fewer days off. Your candidate still has freedom of choice, but at the same time, you framed your offer as bounded options. Thus, prevented setting the stage for a limitless salary/bonus battle, nitpicking over secondary employment conditions. ‘It’s either this or that kind of framing.
Identify personal preferences We have seen that when we experience option overload, we tend to rely on system 1 cues such as following the choices of others. If you can help someone identify their personal preferences, you can rule out a lot of options. This is why shopping bots or online filters really help us navigate through options. Once you have set your preference, you only get to see a selection of all available options.
Offer expert advice A different way to reduce options is to outsource the decision process to an expert. In this case, we can learn from the healthcare domain. If you have a condition that can be solved with treatment A, B or C, most people follow their doctor’s advice for a specific treatment. He rules out some options for you. What if we could also provide trusted experts in other domains? If you know, you can rely on an exercise, nutrition, finance, education expert? That would save you a lot of option researching and go down a rabbit hole of endless possibilities. You could simply follow the lead of a trusted specialist.
To conclude, there is, in fact, an art to choosing. If you start to understand a bit more about the workings of the human mind this will give you far more control over successful outcomes. You can choose to be more successful, in fact. How’s that for a change? Doesn’t it spark your sense of freedom?
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You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
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We all are influencing people every day. On a small scale (could you pass me the salt) and on a larger scale (choose me, my business or sales proposition). But how do you get people on your side who happen to believe the exact opposite of what you’re trying to convince them of? Or how do you get people to engage in behaviour that is better for them, communities or the planet if they don’t believe that behaviour is the right thing to do or too hard to perform?
Often, we resort to convincing people with information, arguments and reasons. However, behavioural science sheds an attractive light on how we, as humans process information and, foremost:
How you can make people not just willing to change but also willing to consider what you have to say needed for that change?
We first have to understand the information context of the people we are trying to influence. What do we need to take into account when we want to get our information across? To say the least, we live in an interesting information age. News and messages come to us in many ways, but not all ways are created equal. This is the day and age we all are trapped in filter bubbles [1]. The digital ecosystem and algorithms tailor our information supply to our existing views with a preference to extremist viewpoints, creating more and more distance between different perspectives and a greater social divide.
Confirmation Bias: The godmother of information processing
Before we can understand how information is processed, we have to realise that we as human beings all suffer from so-called confirmation bias. We process information to confirm what we already think or believe. In other words, we assign greater value to evidence that favourites our beliefs than we value new points of view. Whether that information or evidence is true or false doesn’t matter, the post-rationalisation capacity of our brain helps us feel good about our viewpoints.
We, as humans, are champions in justification after the occasion.
However, the tailored information technology and confirmation bias combined can cause systemic effects that can be pretty troublesome. People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant evidence in a biased way. This can cause us to be firmly entrenched in our beliefs. We are creating polarised societies that show little willingness for cooperation or empathy instead of narrowing disagreements which is so much needed to solve society’s challenges of today.
Let me give you an example of how strong confirmation bias can be. An experiment [2] run by researchers at Stanford University proved that even scientific facts would be dismissed if they don’t match our existing beliefs. The researchers invited both opponents and proponents of the death penalty. Both groups were divided into two, getting a different conclusion from scientific research on the death penalty’s effectiveness. Opponents reached either a research conclusion favouring the death penalty or a judgment opposing the death penalty. Proponents also got either the in favour or against decision. These research conclusions were as follows:
Research conclusion in favour of the death penalty:
Kroner and Phillips compared murder rates for the year before and the year after adoption of capital punishment in 14 states. In 11 of the 14 states, murder rates were lower after adoption of the death penalty. This research supports the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
Research conclusion opposing the death penalty:
Palmer and Crandall compared murder rates in 10 pairs of neighbouring states with different capital punishment laws. In 8 of the 10 pairs, murder rates were higher in the state with capital punishment. This research opposes the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
Opponents of the death penalty have read the first message were strengthened in their belief: “The experiment was well thought out, the data collected was valid, and they were able to come up with responses to all criticisms.” but after having read the second message they didn’t shift beliefs but dismissed the study: “The evidence given is relatively meaningless without data about how the overall crime rate went up in those years“, “There were too many flaws in the picking of the states and too many variables involved in the experiment as a whole to change my opinion.”
It worked the same way around. Opponents of dismissing the death penalty who read the conclusions against the death penalty agreed: “It shows a good direct comparison between contrasting death penalty effectiveness. Using neighbouring states helps to make the experiment more accurate by using similar locations.”. Whereas the evidence in favour of the death penalty was dismissed: “I don’t think they have complete enough collection of data. Also, as suggested, the murder rates should be expressed as percentages, not as straight figures.” The research showed that:
People can come to different conclusions after being exposed to the same evidence depending on their pre-existing beliefs.
This bias is so strong that prior beliefs (also known as the prior attitude effect) made people even dismiss scientific proof; the evidence only strengthened their beliefs and caused further polarization. Other research [3] found an interesting addition to this conclusion:
People accept ‘confirming’ evidence more easily and evaluate disconfirming information far more critically. It’s not a fair game.
Confirmation bias in interpretation and memory
We know now that confirmation bias steers how we interpret information: What we focus on, what we value and favour. But it also influences what we remember. We all suffer from selective memory or memory bias [4]. For instance, schema theory has shown that information confirming our prior beliefs is stored in our memory while contradictory evidence is not [5]. This is also where stereotyping has its roots.
People also tend to remember better expectancy‐confirming (versus expectancy‐disconfirming) information about social groups [6]. It is also good to know that:
Confirmation bias does not only affect our individual decision-making; it also affects groups. We, as humans, are social animals, we interact, and we want to belong. However, our need to fit in makes us adapt our views to the views of the group.
We seek recognition by streamlining our position. This creates a tendency to produce groupthink. Our need for conformity shuts out the consideration of different points of view and rules out exploratory thought [7], which, in return, can negatively influence the quality of group decisions.
Why does confirmation bias happen?
Confirmation bias happens as it helps us. Our brain is constantly trying to lower our cognitive load. It does so by using short-cuts, also known as heuristics, to interpret the information we are faced with, for example, by using our past experiences, the social norms or our instinct. Taking in new information, evidence, facts and figures use energy. Confirmation bias is a perfect way to scan through information more easily.
This means that we as humans never take a fully informed decision; we automatically choose the path of least resistance and rely on short-cuts.
But there is more. If you have a firmly held belief, it is part of your identity. Sticking to that belief helps us in maintaining our identity or self-esteem even [8].
Switching almost feels we didn’t make an intelligent decision the first time, so we’d better stick to what we hold true before. I guess we have all experienced it ourselves that it can be rather painful to admit your strongly held belief was mistaken. Switching hurts; admitting we were wrong is not one of our favourite things to do. This doesn’t mean we can never convince someone that has different beliefs than us. We simply have to take confirmation bias into account.
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What we can learn from this is that if we want to convince someone who holds strong beliefs or doesn’t share the same beliefs about desired behaviour just yet, we have to consider two things:
First, we have to know where we are positioned. Looking at the decision we want someone to make or the behaviour we want someone to perform, do we find ourselves in someone’s zone of acceptance or rejection? In other words, how much distance is there between you and them?
A key to convincing people is to close the belief distance between you and them.
Second, we need to know is how strong are these beliefs? Feeling strongly about something narrows our zone of acceptance and widens our zone of rejection. In short, if you want someone to go along with you, you need to get a clear view of where you are at on the influence playing field.
Thirdly, identify the movable middle. Jonah Berger cornered this concept [9]. You have to realize (or accept) that getting everyone on your side is a tough battle to win. Haters will be haters. Or, differently put, people who are really on the belief extremes are extremely hard to budge. If possible, at all. People who are fiercely against abortion, climate deniers who think climate change is a hoax or conspiracy thinkers who are convinced Covid doesn’t exist, well, don’t waste your energy on them. The truth is, in every issue, there is a vast majority of people that aren’t sure yet. People whose zone of acceptance and rejection are somewhat balanced out. Think about swing voters, often a large group of people who decide on election day on who to vote. Often this group flips the coin. Therefore, these are the best people to target. The trick is not trying to influence everyone but those with moveable minds.
Our job is to decrease the distance between the people we are trying to change or convince and us.
Not by giving people more evidence or information. That will only activate confirmation bias; it will make people dig in their heels much deeper. We have to use behavioural psychology. So, how can we do this?
Bypassing confirmation bias (1): Find common ground
First of all, we have to see if we can find common ground. Let say you want people to actively engage in behaviour promoting sustainability. You might encounter sceptics, people who believe climate change isn’t all that bad. Instead of counterarguing with facts, first, find a belief you may both have in common. For instance, the belief that family is important. Beliefs in return are closely linked to motivations. The belief that family is important could be a stronger motivator for someone to do everything to ensure his/her children have the most carefree life possible.
This is what we call a job-to-be-done: A deeper-lying motivation that drives behaviour. Something people want to achieve in their lives and for which they’re willing to take action, make decisions or engage in a behaviour. I might not like to make extra payments on my mortgage (behaviour), but I do want to take financial action to make sure I can still live in my beloved family home after retirement (JTBD). If that takes extra payments, so be it. It is pretty fascinating that even people with very different beliefs can have similar jobs to be done. It is there where you can find common ground and start building a bridge to close the distance between you. You could, for instance, use a principle from behavioural psychology called question substitution.
Let’s go back to the sceptics of climate change. Instead of asking them: ‘Do you want to engage in sustainable behaviour?’, you could instead ask them a different question: ‘Do you want to help build a healthy community for your children?’ That’s a far easier question for them to answer as it fits their beliefs about the importance of family. That to help create that family-friendly community, it (also) takes sustainable behaviours such as preventing littering in local parks, limiting car usage in the neighbourhood, buying locally grown produce, planting flowers that attract bees and so on, is the behavioural side-effect we were aiming for. This is how you can stretch the zone of acceptance of sceptics.
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Bypassing confirmation bias (2): Provide proof not evidence
Let’s add on to the previous example. You are still dealing with climate change sceptics, and let’s say you need to design recycling behaviour. In short, you can say that people with strong beliefs need more proof before they are willing to change. However, proof isn’t evidence, nor are they facts, figures or arguments. Proof is what other people are doing.
We humans have a strong need for certainty. When designing a choice or behaviour, you have to realize that engaging in a new behaviour or making a new decision comes with uncertainty. It is new, so different, so uncertain. This makes our status quo bias and inclination to loss aversion kick in. We are simply afraid of losing what we have right now and take our current state (status quo) as our baseline or reference point for future decisions. Any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Inertia being the result. We really on short-cuts to see if a given behaviour or decision makes sense.
One of the strongest short-cuts our brain takes is looking at what other people are doing. We are wired as social animals. As children, we learn by watching others; we prefer belonging to the in-group, and as we have seen, we even adapt our beliefs to conform to a group. We addressed the possible dysfunctional decision-making capacities of a group; we can also leverage this human tendency to follow the beliefs and behaviour of others more positively. Simply by showing more people are showing recycling behaviour. We are providing social proof and activating the bandwagoneffect [10].
We adapt our beliefs and behaviour because many other people do the same.
If you want this behavioural intervention to work, it is best to show more people showing the desired behaviour. If you only showcase one person, you might run into what is called a translation problem: ‘That person is not like me or someone I aspire to be, so why following his/her behaviour?’ We preferably follow similar others. That’s why when you are booking a hotel room online, you value reviews of people like you more than random others. If you’re a young couple, reviews of families with several kids are less relevant to you. However, in the absence of another you, quantity counts. Simply because it is harder to argue against more people.
Adding on to this, the more (different) sources say the same thing, the more social proof it provides. People need to hear from multiple sources to switch beliefs. Social proof also can work in our favour another way: It creates network effects. If we can get more people to change their minds, people around them may change their minds as well.
The question remains, how many people do you need to create network effects? The answer is; it depends. If you are dealing with weaker attitudes and beliefs, people don’t need proof from many sources. However, if you are dealing with more strong opinions, you need more sources to prove your point. How does this work in practice? Jonah Berger differentiates a sprinkler and a fire hose strategy. Or, differently put, a scarcity or concentration approach.
If you are trying to convince people to engage in sustainable behaviour on the outer sides of the moveable middle (so, more strongly leaning towards the zone of rejection), a concentration strategy is more effective. That is to say, focusing on a smaller group of people that you confront with proof in a short period, multiple times (the more time sits between proof, the less impact it will have). However, if you are dealing with people leaning towards the zone of acceptance, one or two people will be enough proof to others to shift their beliefs and mimic behaviour. In this case, you can provide less social proof and can focus on influencing more people at once.
Bypassing confirmation bias (3): Don’t ask too much
A final intervention from behavioural science is to tone it down a bit. Rome wasn’t built in one day; the same goes for behaviour change. We have seen that hard-wired, even often unconscious human tendencies instead make us favour inertia over change. So, getting someone to change overnight is hard if not undoable. Are we as humans not capable of change? We absolutely can! We change all the time (or are you still sporting your nineties hairdo and outfits?) Almost everyone has something they want to change. Only often the threshold for change is too high. When we want to convince someone to show a new behaviour, we often tend to ask too much at once. We underestimate that a new behaviour takes time, money, effort or energy. To lower the threshold for change, we should cut up end-goals into more minor, specific behaviours. What’s the difference? For example, an end goal can be living a healthy life. Specific behaviours that will help achieve this end goal are, for instance, drinking six glasses of water each day, buying vegetables on Saturday, doing two 20-minute workouts each week. These specific behaviours together will add up to the end goal. Furthermore, we need to understand that:
Behaviour is a process; if you can make someone commit to the process, change will happen.
There is a magical word in the sentence above: commit. Our brain loves simplicity. If you can make people commit to a first ask, they are likely to follow up on it. If you said yes to A, doing A is the easiest thing to do. It simply feels logical and requires no further cognitive effort. This is known in behavioural science as the commitment/consistency principle. The trick is to start with a small ask instead of a big question. To link back to what we’ve learned before, start with a small ask on common ground. Find that place of agreement that helps you build an initial connection.
Let’s go back to the climate change sceptic who holds his family so very dear: Don’t ask them to live more sustainably as of now. For instance, ask them to hand in their old paper at their children’s school. Put a recycling container next to the school playground. Make it easy (they are there to pick up their children anyway). Make it relevant for them (their motivation is to give their children the best living conditions, so putting away paper in a container next to the playground is an unconscious reminder of a way to keep their children’s playground clean).
But most importantly, by doing so, you have them commit to a first small ask. From this initial ask, you can then build on, slowly opening their zone of acceptance. Maybe even pivoting their initial beliefs on sustainability, giving you the manoeuvre space to provide them with more information on sustainable behaviour. Differently put: You have used Behavioural Design to prep their brain to be susceptible to both change and the information needed for that change.
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Confirmation bias is the human tendency only to seek, focus on or favour information that confirms our existing beliefs. It is a strong bias as it operates pretty unconsciously in our brain and is catered by the filter bubbles we all find ourselves in. Confirmation bias strengthens our prior beliefs and makes societies more polarised. If you want to change the behaviour of people who do not share the same opinions, you don’t achieve this by giving more information, evidence, fact or figures. You accomplish this by closing the distance between you and the people you are trying to influence using Behavioural Design, taking human psychology and deep human understanding as a starting point. If you want someone to change, you first need to make people willing to listen to the information required for this change.
BONUS: free ebook 'Confirmation Bias: how to convince someone who believes the opposite'
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[7] Tetlock & Lerner (2002) in Schneider, ed. by Sandra L.; Shanteau, James (2003). Emerging perspectives on judgment and decision research. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press. pp. 438–9.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
If there is one thing we as humans all want more control over, it is our own happiness. Thousands of self-help books have been written, bought and earmarked. Maybe one of the pieces of advice you have come across is this quote: ‘You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with’. From a behavioural science point of view, this is intriguing, as behaviour is strongly influenced by context. We all act and react to what happens around us. Can we learn from behavioural science what kind of people we must surround ourselves with? How can we influence our context to trigger behaviours that make us flourish as human beings? Or to go beyond this: How do these insights transfer to a business context? Can it help create better performing teams and more motivated talent? This blog post will give some answers from a Behavioural Design point of view.
Happiness: The five people you hang around with
You probably have heard or read it before that we as humans are hard-wired as social animals. When we grow up, we learn the values, norms, and desired behaviours by looking at others and adapting to them. We feel better when we fit in a group. We prefer inertia, but one of the key motivators for us to spring into action is when our group is threatened by another group. That’s why the ‘creating an enemy’ tactic is so vital in getting people on your side in, for instance, winning political votes. At one point or another, we all have been influenced by social proof to buy, book or belief something. From a happiness point of view, this also has a strong effect on us. You could say that:
Our quality of life equals our quality of relationships.
However, there is this interesting paradox. At the same time, we all live in an identity economy. We are constantly searching to answer that one question: ‘Who am I?’ and we repeatedly do and say things to establish our identity. This is not surprising as most of us were raised for autonomy. It is a merit to be independent, make our own decisions, have self-motivation, and have high expectations of our ability to direct our own lives. Happiness isn’t an option anymore; it is a mandate or almost a right to be.
You probably have been looking for ways to be happy yourself once or twice. If that’s the case, I better put it to you straight: behavioural research has shown that looking for happiness has no use at all. Reading all those self-help books, turning inwards, and searching for your inner purpose: Won’t do the trick. This doesn’t mean we cannot be happy; we simply must first understand ourselves a bit better. We need to understand the psychology of happiness.
Designing happiness: predicting our happiness
If we want to be happy, one of the first things we need to look into is our ability to predict what makes us happy. Let me ask you a question: Suppose you won a lottery, and 1 million euros are transferred to your checking account. Now imagine a completely different scenario. This time you had the unfortunate experience to be involved in a traffic accident that made you paralysed from the hips down. After a year, if I ask you what is your level of happiness? Is it the same in both scenarios or is one higher than the other? I suppose, you think your happiness level will look something like this: as a fortunate lottery winner you picture yourself being far happier than as a unfortunate paraplegic.
What if I tell you these are the wrong data? Daniel Gilbert PhD, professor at the Harvard Department of Psychology, researched this, and these were the correct data:
There was hardly any difference in happiness levels after a year. This was a profound insight into the psychology of happiness. Daniel Gilbert discovered that we all have a psychological immune system that helps us handle setbacks and prevents our happiness from being negatively influenced. It shelters us from the worst effects of misfortune.
This is important as this study has shown that we are not good at forecasting our responses to emotional incidents. We typically overestimate how long we will be unhappy after a negative incident, which, in turn, affects our behaviour and decision-making. According to Daniel Gilbert, PhD:
We underestimate how quickly our feelings are going to change in part because we underestimate our ability to change them; this can lead us to make decisions that don’t maximise our potential for satisfaction.
You can see how this may affect our happiness, or as Daniel Kahneman, PhD, who conducts research on decision-making and wellbeing, said:
What people tend to do is either avoid decisions, or they build in securities by over-relying on freedom of choice. If you have more options, this gives us the feeling of having more room to escape. However, behavioural research has also shown that having more options tends to have adverse effects on the quality of our decision-making. We often tend to pay more for more options, but this is a waste of money from a happiness point of view.
Designing happiness: what makes us happy?
But there is more. We now know that we are not good at predicting our happiness, but that doesn’t tell us what makes us happy. Behavioural science has something fascinating to say about this, too, as we have another psychological mechanism know as hedonic adaptation, also known as the hedonic treadmill. It refers to the human inclination to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.
You can compare it to a treadmill as even if a runner is running, he (or she) stays at the same place. If you do something you love or like the joy you get from it levels out. We all return to our happiness baseline. The mechanism helps us cope with unpleasant experiences but it also is a killer for joy. Happiness doesn’t last.
Maybe, you are now a bit discouraged if you can indeed design a happy life. You can. If there is one element that drives our happiness that researchers found repeatedly, it is curiosity. When we are open to new experiences, when we cherish the unknown, when we are inquisitive, it has been shown that we tend to hover above the happiness baseline for a more extended period. We can even shift our baseline a bit upwards.
Designing happiness: the freedom security paradox
This brings us back to the paradox we started out with our innate need to be socially connected and independent. This paradox starts to make sense when we want to design our happiness. Esther Perel once said we all have two human needs: security and freedom. You could say we all balance between change and stability all the time. You need your freedom as it drives that so much needed imagination, playfulness, curiosity. However, it is much easier to change if you can jump of a stable foundation of people who are committed to your wellbeing.
It is also much easier to be curious if you are inspired by interesting people. In fact, if we get disconnected from people, we can experience all forms of stress: despair, sadness, exhaustion, confusion. Just think back at the Covid lockdown; these were all emotions people have genuinely experienced and suffered from. This leads up to a fascinating Behavioural Design challenge:
How can we design behaviour that makes us feel connected, curious, and playful?
This is also where our personal happiness and work happiness come together: the same behavioural interventions can work for both. In both situations, you are a human in a relationship with other humans. Losing the other is losing yourself.
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Designing happiness advice 1: Create an interdependent context.
Maybe the most critical shift we need to make is a shift in our context. We need to design a context that is shaped for inter-reliance or inter-dependence. Make it okay to be dependent on each other. You can be playful and imaginative if you are not afraid that you will be judged. If you can rely on each other this creates collective resilience sparking the willingness to try new things. To accomplish this, you need to design for psychological safety. This is a shared belief held by team members (or partners) that it is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.
Research has shown that this builds team efficacy, learning and performance. But psychological safety also helps to establish stable relationships. It creates the courage to speak up no matter how you feel about yourself, you will open up about your struggles, and it helps you take a step toward what you want. It also helps you propose new plans and experiment together. Some tangible behaviours that lead up to psychological safety:
Be understanding: Summarise, use language like ‘Do I understand it correctly that you want.
Avoid blaming: Don’t say: ‘Why did this happen?’ or ‘Why did you do this?’, but ‘How can we make sure to make this better next time?’
Avoid negative: Don’t use negative words; it creates an interpersonal culture of rejection.
Manage speaking time: Making sure everyone can speak in an equal amount.
Explain decisions: you don’t need to have a democracy in everything, but it helps to explain a decision.
Be engaged: Make eye contact, don’t use phones in conversations, be present.
Designing happiness advice 2: Surround yourself with complementarity.
This is where the five people that you surround yourself comes in. If you look back at the first intervention, you can imagine that:
Interdepend roles create strength.
So, look around those five people. Are they different from you? Do they complete you? Do you get energy from them, or do they suck the living daylights out of you? It maybe feels safer to hang out with like-minded people, but it can be very inspirational to talk and meet with people with different experiences and opinions. Some tangible behaviours:
Plan a meeting with someone who has a different opinion.
Make a list of the five people who could compliment you and schedule meetings with them.
Designing happiness advice 3: Have a prototyping mindset.
What holds us back from being curious is the lack of courage to do new things. We know from behavioural science that it is crucial to believe in yourself. If you don’t have confidence, you struggle in your relationships, and you don’t feel very happy at work, you don’t cope well with stress, which causes you to lack motivation or energy. On the other hand, research has shown that having confidence can help you set boundaries, find balance in your work and private life, improve performance at work through better concentration and commitment to tasks.
This again affects whether we dare to engage in experiences that might feel uncertain or can be risky. Expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behaviour will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. A great behavioural design intervention is to build confidence is to establish a prototyping mindset.
If you look at everything you do as an experiment, you cannot fail only learn.
Everything new is not likely to give us courage but approaching life, and new ventures as one big experiment builds trust in yourself. It’s the fuel for our curiosity engine.
Designing happiness advice 4: Build respect and recognition.
Most relationships start to fail, both in your work and private life when you don’t feel valued anymore. We all have an innate need for respect and recognition. When we have the feeling we are not valued anymore, we cut ourselves loose. There is a straightforward behavioural intervention to make people feel valued. It is giving compliments.
There is more to it: a study from 2012 suggests that receiving praise helps our brain remember and repeat the skill when we try out a new skill. One-third of participants received compliments for their own performance, one third received for another participant’s performance, and the others received no compliments. The next day, the group that received praise for their own performance performed better on the task than the others.
Another benefit of giving compliments is that it can affirm desired behaviours, which can be helpful not only in your work but also in maintaining stable friendships or romantic relationships.
Designing happiness advice 5: Be as pleasant at home as you are with your clients.
It may seem like an open door but be honest, have you have ever caught yourself changing your behaviour as soon as you got home? Whereas you could be interested, caring and curious in client conversations at home, you stop asking genuine questions to find out how your life partner is doing. You probably have heard about the seven-year itch. Well, in fact, research has shown you are actually dealing with a three-year itch. After three years, we think we know everything about our partner: what he she/likes, what he she/does. But do you? You’re not together for the most part of the day, so your partner does have new experiences, thoughts and dreams, perhaps. A simple behavioural intervention is to keep asking questions. Be interested. Do you have your phone in your hand when you’re talking to an important client or your boss? No. Treat your life partner or teammate with the same respect.
Designing happiness advice 6: Leave your devices behind.
This makes an easy cross-over to this behavioural intervention. If you want to build a meaningful relationship with someone, both at work and at home, make sure you are engaged. Make eye contact, turn off that phone, don’t look at your laptop when you are in a conversation. This builds trust and respect that is needed to get playful, curious and experimental. Looking to improving your sex life? Leave the communication devices out of the bedroom!
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Pursuing happiness is not an abstract matter and, most of all, not a matter of heavy, introspective labour. By using behavioural science, we can carefully design a context that balances our need for freedom and security. Both essential ingredients for a happy life. Our job is to make sure that the pendulum between the two doesn’t snap. We thrive and feel alive in social connection that sparks curiosity. These are the main drivers of our happiness. We need to rely more on each other. If we can stay connected, curious and playful, all our relationships will thrive. Some very simple behavioural interventions can help us design a context that helps us do so. And remember, you cannot always be happy, but you can always be curious.
BONUS: free ebook 'Six Rules for Designing your Happiness'
Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'Designing Happiness'. For you to to easily keep the insights in this blog post at hand and use them at will—a little gift from us to you.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
We all have been situations in which we wanted a behavioural change. It could be you want your children to behave politely. It could be you wanted your client to approve a budget. It could be you want your manager to grant you extra time to work on a project. It could be you need community members to contribute to preventing littering actively. It could be you wanted employees to embrace organisational change. No matter what situation you were ever in, we have all experienced once or twice that getting someone to do things is hard. At least, the way we often approach it. There is a more effective approach to change. This is what this blog post is all about.
Behavioural change; from pushing to easing
Now, think back to a situation you had to influence someone. Tell me, was it easy to get people to change their behaviour in the direction you wanted them to move? Did they say ‘yes’ right away, or do you remember it took some persuasion? Maybe it was heavy lifting even? I remember I sometimes even used some force: ‘If you don’t eat dinner, you won’t get dessert.’ Or, for example, have you ever tried to convince a client by first giving them a stellar presentation and by following this up by emails or phone calls, making sure you gave them all reasons to make them realise your offer is one they can’t refuse?
It might have worked. But it takes quite some effort, right? It is hard work pushing someone into the direction you want them to move. Change is hard. We as humans can change, but we are pretty risk-averse and rather accept our suboptimal situation than moving in an unknown direction. In behavioural science, two potent forces that keep people in current behaviour are status quo bias and loss aversion. We are simply afraid of losing what we have right now and take our current state (status quo) as our baseline or reference point for future decisions. Any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Inertia being the result. So, no wonder it takes effort to change people.
What if I tell you there is a better way to generate change? That takes far less effort. That steps away from our natural inclination to push people into doing things but takes a different approach. Because that’s what we often do, we use some form of pushing to move people. We do follow-up calls; we give arguments, provide extra information, deliver facts and figures, show results, send reminders, etc. I call this pushing as it starts at ‘us’. We make the calls, write documents, round up reasons and then deliver them to the persons we want to convince or influence. I love this quote from Jonah Berger. He says:
‘The intuition [of pushing] comes from physics. Imagine there’s a chair in your office, and you want to move that chair. We often push it. Want it to get it to go in a particular direction? If we push in that direction, it goes. The chair moves across the floor just like we want. But when it comes to the social world, when it comes to applying this intuition to others, changing minds, action, and organisations, there’s an important difference. Because when we push people, they don’t just go along as the chair does. When we push people, they often push back‘.
Behavioural change; a matter of psychology, not physics
So, the message is clear:
When we have to convince people, it is not a matter of physics but psychology.
It helps you to fight your assumptions. We all assume we know our clients, employees, partners, citizens think or need, but we often don’t. It’s another bias we need to fight: The expert fallacy. As most of us are paid professionals, we are assumed to be experts in our job. It becomes false authority when it is assumed that the opinions of a recognised expert in one area should be taken to heart in another area. So, if you are an expert in human psychology, your appeal to authority to have an opinion on what moves people’s choices and behaviours is valid. When you are an expert in a different domain, you might be fooled by your own of someone’s else’s opinion.
How to avoid this fallacy is quite simple. It takes two things: unbounded curiosity and interviewing six people. By interviewing, I mean talking to six people and genuinely listening to them, observing them, stepping into their shoes and turning your empathy radar way up. With this, you’ll be making the shift from focusing on ‘us’ that makes us forget the person to concentrate on ‘them’ that helps us move away from persuading by pushing.
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Behavioural change: Willingness and capability
However, human insight is one thing; you need to translate it into tangible interventions. If you want to change behaviour, you have two strategies: You can make someone want to change (boosting their willingness to change), or make sure someone can change (improving their capability to change). You can imagine that willingness to change requires some form of cognitive action. It has to do with motivation. However, it can be pretty daunting to stay motivated to us humans to set our minds on doing things for a more extended period. When we find ourselves in uncertain situations and new things (thus also new behaviours) are uncertain. As we discussed earlier, we are often okay with the status quo, even if it is not optimal. We often overvalue what we have.
Maybe you have ever experienced such a motivation wave yourself. Let’s say you genuinely wanted to eat healthy all day. You did great at breakfast (smoothie), coped at lunch (homemade salad), pecked away at some almonds in between, but then it becomes four in the afternoon. You are tired, you worked hard, and someone puts a bag of potato chips at arm’s reach. You truly have to push yourself hard to persevere in your new, healthy behaviour. Often, we lose this internal battle. Even more so, we can come up with outstanding arguments why we are deserving of some potato chips (if you want to understand why our human brain works this magic read this blog on the work of Kahneman). To make the point, you might see already that if we don’t want to rely on pushing as an influence strategy, working on willingness may not be our best option. So, what is?
The key to behavioural change: Take away bottlenecks
If you want to change behaviour there is one place where you need to start and what you need to consider. To successfully change behaviour we need to:
Start with taking away behavioural bottlenecks, the barriers.
We can do this by coming up with capability interventions: Focusing on taking away friction and lowering hurdles and making the desired behaviour easier to perform. Or as Berger states in his book ‘The Catalyst – How to change anyone’s mind‘: ‘The easier it is to try something, the more people will use it, and the faster it catches on’. We can easily replace ‘try’ with ‘do’, as the same goes for behaviour. The easier is it to do something, the faster it will catch on. The secret ingredient to change behaviour therefore is:
Not pushing someone in desired behaviour but easing them into it.
The actual name of the game we are in is removing obstacles.
To do so, you need to understand which behavioural bottlenecks your target group is experiencing. It would be best if you shifted your focus from us to them. So, whenever you catch yourself giving more arguments, sending over more information, coming up with reasons to buy, stating facts or sending reminders, put yourself on hold. And remember, there is a different approach to change minds, behaviour, and action with a simple reminder: If it were easy, everyone would do it.
I bet you never thought of a quote that glorifies hardship and discipline to make perfect sense to help us human beings to accomplish more by, in fact, taking motivation out of the equation. Life can be immensely satisfying, don’t you think?
BONUS: free ebook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?'
Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?' For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
The know-how of behavioural science can be a powerful tool to shape choices and behaviour. Therefore in Behavioural Design, thinking about ethics and acting upon them is not just relevant – it is indispensable. In this blog post, you can read all about our vision, mission and behaviours to safeguard ethics in our Behavioural Design. It comes with a Behavioural Design Toolkit. Everything, to make sure we (and others) leverage this incredible power of behavioural science to do good.
The ethics of Behavioural Design
This post is a long-read about a subject that is very close to our hearts: the ethics of Behavioural Design. It will shed a light unto how we incorporate ethics in our way of working. It will also provide you with practical tools to help you pinpoint the considerations you need to make to safeguard the ethics in Behavioural Design. It is our take on things. It isn’t perfect yet. It is ever-evolving work-in-progress, but it is a solid start. I would love for you to read the whole post, but you can also jumpstart to specific parts right way:
Manipulation or positive influence?
Behavioural Design ethics: The Organisation Level
Behavioural Design ethics: The Personal and Team Level
Behavioural Design ethics: The Project Level
How Behavioural Design ethics make both human and business sense
Manipulation or positive influence?
When engaging in Behavioural Design, there is one critical question to ask ourselves: Are we in the manipulation business or are we designing positive influence? It is vital to address the ethics of Behavioural Design. Know-how of behavioural science can be a potent tool to influence choices and shape decisions. It can be a very dark art. It can, for example, be (and is) used to get people hooked to phones or unhealthy foods, to manipulate voting behaviours or create division in society. It can be used to exploit peoples’ fears and anxieties.
However, it can also be applied to help people engage in healthier habits such as exercising or eating healthy food or to create a better world by for example helping people to recycle, to act against climate change or to help others in need. Therefore, behavioural science in itself isn’t dark art as such; it is what you do with it. It is all comes down to intention.
However, it can also be applied to help people engage in healthier habits such as exercising or eating healthy food or to create a better world by for example helping people to recycle, to act against climate change or to help people in need. Therefore, behavioural science in itself isn’t dark wisdom as such; it is what you do with it. It is all comes down to intention.
If your intention is not the progress or the improvement of the person(s) you are trying to influence, then you are manipulating. If your intention is to help people make better decisions that will improve their life, work or living environment, that’s positive influence.
At SUE | Behavioural Design, we are very much concerned about the ethics of applied behavioural science. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life and play. As we are in the business of designing interventions that will influence choice and shape behaviour, we need to have a clear vision of the ethics of Behavioural Design and code of conduct. As mentioned earlier, the know-how of how people make decisions and how behaviour is shaped can be very dark art. Unfortunately, the people who are now really using behavioural science at scale often don’t have good intentions. And that, to us, is manipulation. It is meant for personal advancement or meant to benefit a privileged few.
That’s why we at SUE are on a crusade to introduce more people to the know-how of behavioural science and provide them with the practical tools to use it in their daily lifes.
So, our company mission implies that we should walk the talk. We simply have to have a clear vision of the ethics of Behavioural Design and we have to abide by that vision in practice. Unfortunately, there isn’t already a commonly accepted code of conduct in the behavioural science field. However, there are some interesting resources out there of organisations and people who want to use this powerful know-how for good. In this article, we want to provide you with insights and tools that we use as our ethical compass. Which can be applied on three levels:
The Organisational level
The Personal and Team level
The Project level
We hope it will give you some practical guidelines on how to use Behavioural Design for positive influence. It isn’t perfect yet. We are prototyping and learning every day. It is constant work in progress that we will keep sharing with you. Our goal is to be very open and transparent about how we try to safeguard the ethics of Behavioural Design and how sometimes we struggle with it. We hope you in this for the sake of progress, improvement, better decision-making and positive behaviour, and you will embrace our tools and best practices. Let’s create a positive countermovement by together applying Behavioural Design for good. Counterbalancing and exposing those who use it with evil or selfish intentions.
Behavioural Design ethics: Organisation Level
Mission and company culture At an organisation level, it all starts with having an actionable mission that has progress in its DNA and is backed up by the willingness and capability within the organisation to act upon it. This requires a mandate from management but also a company culture that attracts talent and clients who fit and believe in this mission and that rejects those who don’t. It also requires a company culture that is open to discussions. Our mission is:
We live by our Behavioural Ethics Principles, which are:
Selection of clients and projects Next to the mission and principles, we also safeguard our Behavioural Design ethics by carefully selecting the projects we engage in and the people with whom we work. Both at SUE and our Academy, we aren’t one-size-fits-all. Even in the days when we still were a small-scale company with not much money in the bank, we decided always to put our mission first and be selective in who we work for and who can enrol in our training.
We will never work for or train people working in industries that harm people, animals, the planet or neglect social and equality rights (if you want to find out more check out our Terms & Conditions). We will not sell our souls to the devil, not for a million. Or more. However, sometimes the world isn’t as black and white, and we find ourselves in shades of grey. This sometimes results in difficult decisions. Decisions which we always genuinely try to make based on our moral compass, and which are still open to discussion for anyone within our company.
Ongoing discussions That being said: We do have ongoing conversations in our team about projects we work on. Not working for the fur, tobacco or weapon industry is an easy decision to make. But should you work for an alcoholic beer brand or only for their 0% beers? Or milk? Or the oil industry, if they want you to work on their transition to sustainable energy? There aren’t always clear-cut answers to this and they alway s lead to different points-of-view. This is one way we try to safeguard our ethics: by actively and purposefully keeping the ethical discussion alive in our team. This code of ethics you are reading right now and the tools that come with it help us define the boundaries. Sometimes boundaries change because we learn.
And there are, of course, always loopholes. We had someone who ‘slipped’ into our Academy by applying via a Gmail address and faking his employer details. And we failed to do a sufficient background check. He turned out to work for a cigarette brand. That was not one of our finest moments, and our background checks are far more thorough now – trust me. But we don’t have and will never have a complete sense of control over who reads our blogs, sees our Keynotes, uses our tools, watches our videos or will buy our books. We know this, and we are aware of it.
We as SUE want to give more tools to these masses to help them make better decisions. Will we also reach the 2% asshole population? Maybe. If you recognise yourself as being an asshole, go away now. Our services and tools aren’t meant for you. Black-out what we have written, burn our writings, shred our tools. We don’t care, whatever makes your black heart tick. But leave. Now.
So apart from the framework helping you to become radically human-centred and discovering the human behind your client, employee, citizen or whomever you are trying to influence, it also is a revelation as it shows that having a positive perspective on human nature is indeed not just touchy-feely but a a methodical process.
Design for large scale impact What is a work in progress to us, is making the shift from more individualistic (or small group) behavioural interventions to influencing collective behaviour.
To have a genuinely positive impact, you need to reach a certain point of adoption. Coming up with system interventions and creating network effects is a way we can design for good on a larger scale.
Do you want to learn how to design for better decisions and behaviours?
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When it comes down to you, you also have a significant role to play. I guess the most important thing is always to be honest with yourself and to have a learning mindset. What I mean by this is that you have to accept that sometimes you will engage in activities that may feel right at the moment, but you won’t be happy with afterwards. And sometimes it is the other way around. That’s okay. The most important thing is that you learn from your experiences. We are firm believers of habits, automatic behaviours, that will help you shape your choices and behaviour without it taking too much cognitive effort. To activate this ethical learning effect, we have installed the ethical retrospective habit.
The ethical retrospective habit Try to make it a routine, after every project, to ask yourself these five questions[2] (or do it as a team):
What happened during the project that triggered emotions within yourself?
How did I feel (positive or negative) and what were my reactions?
What insights or conclusions can I draw from the experience? What did I learn?
How can I (or we as a team) apply what I learned to improve the future experience?
What actions can I (or we as a team) take based on what I learned?
We often do project evaluations or retrospectives, but by adding these five questions, you also add an ethical assessment.
Learn what matters to you and how to express this If you want to do some more self-exploration, check out this download by Alistair Sommerville, called the Little Book of Me[3]. It helps you pinpoint your values and enables you to get the conversation going within your team. This is very important when it comes to ethics. You need to understand which effect you have on other people. You also need to learn how to express your opinions within a group.
Shared understanding, empathy and self-awareness are the driving forces of making an ethical culture come to life.
A useful tool is the so-called Johari Window. It is also explained in the mentioned booklet, and we also made a download to explain the Johari Window[4]. It gives insight into your blind spots, which facades you pull up and what is usually out in the open or unknown to both you and others. It can be a handy team exercise to create mutual understanding and also apply outside-in thinking in your team discussions. See if you find it a useful tool (or parts of it).
Behavioural Design ethics: The project level
What we are trying to do at the project level is to try to lower the risk of unintended consequences. We genuinely have good intentions, and we are stirred by our company mission to use Behavioural Design to improve human decision-making. But sometimes we don’t see the complete project picture at the start of a project. And we are all influenced by our biases and mental mistakes. So, we try to design behavioural interventions to solve these challenges. Although we know 100% perfection might be an illusion, you should always have the ambition to lead your projects as ethical as possible.
Behavioural Design Ethics Checklist & Cards At the project level, you can add three behavioural interventions to safeguard the ethic relevant to your project. First of all, we work with our Behavioural Design Ethics Checklist and Behavioural Design Ethics Cards[5]. These help us ask the right questions at the right moment in three project stages; the Project Intake, the Project Preparation and the Intervention Evaluation.
These questions help us become aware of ethical considerations we need to keep in mind both before we even start a project. But they also allow us to address (unintentional) side-effects of our behavioural interventions. Feel free to use these tools and adjust them to your mission statement. Just as long as your mission is to design for good, we are perfectly fine with that!
Cognitive Biases Checklist The second way we safeguard our behavioural design ethics is to be aware of our own cognitive biases. We all are a slave to our system one and make (unconscious) mental mistakes or judgements of error based on the short-cuts our brain makes. However, no-one can ever completely override his/her system one thinking and decision-making process. Kahneman once stated that people could improve their decision-making by forcing themselves to think more deeply. So, even your initial reactions will be modified[6].
We have created such a forcing function by making a short Cognitive Biases Checklist that we keep at hand during projects. It does help to force yourself to think more deeply about possible mental mistakes by literally reading the checklist with the most common cognitive biases. For example, before you start a meeting, do an interview or even as the first thing you do as the start of your workday.
It both helps us to address the cognitive biases we as project team are dealing with and the biases the people for whom we are designing a behavioural intervention might have (and we need to consider). By searching for biases (even as organisations or institutions), you can try to reduce the impact biases have on decisions. Kahneman calls this a process of self-critique or quality control over decisions, which is feasible within reason.
You don’t want too much of it, to avoid what Kahneman calls ‘paralysis by analysis’. But within reason, there is room to improve what you as a team do within a project by a form of quality control. To make your reading-the-checklist behaviour easier to perform, make sure you print the checklist and keep it at a spot where you can easily see it. Stick it on your wall or make a blow-up to hang up in your team meeting room. Just one remark: This is in no means a complete overview of cognitive biases, far from it. If you want to know more about cognitive biases, we warmly recommend reading this blogpost of Buster Benson. If you wish to find out more about system one and system two thinking or in other words how human-decision making works, please read this blog post, and you’re up-to-speed in no time.
Is it true: no lying, whitewashing or sugar-coating?
Is it achievable?
If not all of these questions can be answered with ‘yes’, it is time to abort the mission. The intervention leads you in the wrong direction. Back to the drawing table. As said, this is a quick check. For more thorough ethical considerations, we use our Behavioural Ethics Checklist & Cards.
Would you like to leverage behavioural science to crack your thorny strategic challenges?
You can do this in our fast-paced and evidence-based Behavioural Design Sprint. We have created a brochure telling you all about the details of this approach. Such as the added value, the deliverables, the set up, and more. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help!
How behavioural design ethics make both human and business sense
Ethics in Behavioural Design is not just a relevant but indispensable topic to think about and act upon. Know-how of behavioural psychology can be a powerful tool to shape choices and behaviour. We have created this toolkit for Behavioural Design ethics to make sure we leverage this power to do good.
It is our attempt to create a ‘army’ of fellow crusaders that will turn the tables and use Behavioural Design for collective progress in the world.
I am deeply concerned about the way the world is taking a turn right now. The consumerism sparked by corporates. The lack of privacy. The extreme right-winged political wave all over the world. The ecological destruction (let’s not even call it climate change anymore, climate deniers please leave this website right now, you are not getting it). The lack of tolerance of people with a different race, colour, sexual preference or religion. The fearmongering. The lack of empathy and compassion for people even living close to us.
But there are answers to all these problems. The solutions can be found. I believe we need another system of thinking and decision-making that is more human-focused and less shareholder-focused. We need an innovative approach to solving problems that puts empathy and compassion first. We need more people, like you and me, to get the tools to be successful. Not just the people in power or the filthy rich.
I believe that Behavioural Design will give people the tools to gain more control over successful outcomes, which is vital to fight nationalism, fear and egocentrism. Give people back control, you give him back self-worth, and you give them back the power to provide for themselves and their families. I think this shift in focus can start a grass-roots movement that will move things forward from the bottom up. The more people learn how to be more effective in changing behaviour, the faster we can accelerate coming up with solutions that spark positive behaviours. Of people, of communities, of teams, of organisations and nations. Our underlying objective is:
More success for everyone.
By teaching people which forces drive behaviour. By giving them insight into how decision-making works. By showing how they can come up with products and services that people genuinely need and are willing to pay for over and over again. How they can help people make better, healthier, happier choices. How with the know-how of Behavioural Design, we can all gain more welfare: For ourselves, for the ones we love, for the planet, we live on.
This may sound too grand or too philanthropic for your taste, but don’t leave this website just yet. SUE hasn’t been founded for those who want to save the world as an out-set. We are here for those who want to learn how people can make better decisions daily. For those who want to get better at creating and selling better products, services, and experiences. Those can be profitable, don’t get me wrong. But they can start with a human (or should I say humane) frame in mind. You will know why and how people buy or buy in things. But you will also have insight into what products are unneeded or what will trigger undesirable behaviour.
You can have the power to combine profits with better choices.
In doing so, you will help your business grow; you can provide stable income or jobs, create better living environments, promote healthy living and will help economies prosper. And very significantly: Your satisfaction and pleasure of doing what you’re doing will grow. You will start to experience success on different levels.
I genuinely believe that all positive change starts with behaviour. And I also think change is not something we cannot control or cannot do ourselves. We can all take small steps, steps that in return, can be contagious because of their positive results. Steps that can spread like a friendly virus. You just need the right recipe. And the recipe is Behavioural Design. Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his brilliant book ‘Sapiens’[7] that:
‘Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries, we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture’.
So, let’s create a new culture. A human-centred culture. And let’s get some sense of community back again while at the same time you’re experiencing business and personal success. It can be done.
Our company’s mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life, and play.
So, our take on Behavioural Design Ethics is for those people who will use Behavioural Design for the sake of good. If your intentions are no good, go away now. We need people who are curious-minded and forward-thinking who want to solve wicked problems to embrace this knowledge. If you’re one of the right kind – and I bet you are – you’ll find you’ll not only use this front running know-how in your work, but you’ll experience you will also start applying it to yourself.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
Of all ‘wicked design problems’, motivating people for climate action and designing for sustainable behavioural change are topics many people at SUE are passionate about. When Tom recently suggested Futerra’s paper Sizzle to me, I dove right in, eager to find additions to our toolbox. It’s an excellent read and it makes a persuasive case for a new way of ‘selling’ climate action: instead of selling the negative necessity, we have to sell the positive results of action. Not the hunger, not even the sausage, but the sizzle. Being half-German it invoked lots of appealing memories of grilling bratwurst, so I was all aboard.
We know what dystopias look like, but we lack images of a green utopia.
Lame jokes aside (it’s a cultural thing), it reminded us of a podcast we made some time last year (sorry, Dutch only), in which we discussed climate inaction and stumbled upon the realization that we badly lack utopian visions of the future in popular culture for behavioural change in sustainability. I really don’t know of any book, film, game or piece of art from the last couple of decades that plays out in a positive future. Albeit in many different variations, it’s pretty much all cyberpunk or otherwise dystopian and apocalyptic visions and the message is simple: one way or another, in the not-to-distant future we’re gonna fuck it up. Big time.
That is a symptom of a lack of positive imagination within our cultural avant-garde and a serious problem for the rest of us. Why invest in a future that’s doomed? Why take part in process of change if you don’t have any mental pictures of the exciting and bright future that it could lead to? It’s hardly a surprise that indeed many people simply don’t: compared to where they fear change will lead them, they like where they are just fine, and inaction or worse is the result. So yes: I think Futerra makes a meritorious point. Climate action must be framed in a far more positive way if we are to motivate people for behavioural change.
Yet, for some reason it didn’t sit with me well.
Aren’t we just yet again preaching to the choir?
Isn’t this all a – granted, greatly – improved version of a still fundamentally flawed approach, which is that through communication we should try to achieve a level of aspirational motivation among the population to contribute to a sustainable way of life, and that behavioural change will follow from that? And won’t it, when that inevitably yields limited results, still turn out as a way of preaching to the converted, but with a nicer preach? Isn’t it therefore essentially still focused on fulfilling the emotional and social jobs-to-be-done of the activist, rather than purposefully designing large scale behavioural change? In other words, use behavioural psychology to drive real behavioural change?
Now, I don’t mean this to feel harsh. In fact, the authors explicitly invite a behavioural perspective on their approach. Here it comes.
Would you like to leverage behavioural science to crack your thorny strategic challenges?
You can do this in our fast-paced and evidence-based Behavioural Design Sprint. We have created a brochure telling you all about the details of this approach. Such as the added value, the deliverables, the set up, and more. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help!
Intention is a bad recipe for motivating people for climate action.
One concept from behavioural psychology that’s particularly interesting in this regard to behavioural change is the intention-action gap. As a rule, people have a hard time acting up on their intentions. More than often, people even behave in a way that directly contradicts them. This happens at the level of individual behaviour (just think back to everything you’ve intended to do to live more healthily and reflect on how much of it you’ve actually accomplished), and definitely at the level of collective behaviour as well.
We love our local shops, but with every purchase on Amazon, we give them the finger.
A good example is the struggle that local retailers have in their competition with the big webshops. Both individually and collectively, we all want flourishing city and town centers, with lots of locally owned shops and cozy restaurants and such, but with every passing day we buy more of our stuff at a small number of big webshops. With every purchase at Amazon, BOL or Zalando, we’re tightening the rope around those local entrepreneur’s necks, and yet we keep doing it – even employees of the local shops.
Why? Because it’s simply easier and cheaper. Individually it’s the better decision.
Even when motivation to support local entrepreneurs peaked during the first COVID-lockdown, Dutch online giants BOL and Coolblue did better than ever and Amazon managed to very successfully enter the Dutch market. We heedlessly make choices that completely contradict our intentions, let alone our larger aspirations. Behavioural psychology at work?
In other words, even when exactly the right messaging manages to build up peoples’ intention to contribute to climate action, it’s not at all likely that this will lead to matching behaviour. That’s a sobering insight which, especially when it comes to climate action, we must be very clear-eyed about. The stakes are too big.
How might we break this behavioural pattern?
Apparently, many behaviours emerge, even if they lead to an outcome that people aren’t motivated to achieve – in fact even if it’s an outcome they’re motivated to prevent. Current consumer behaviour will lead to a web-only retail sector, dominated by a handful of giants. Nobody wants it, but it’s the outcome of our daily choices, which are heavily determined by convenience and costs.
This can work to our advantage.
Many of the most fundamental changes in our way of life have occurred over time, without people having some clear end goal in mind, or even an expectation of what the end result of the road they were on could be, or even a desire to look further than the immediate short-term. When steam machines and electric light bulbs were first put to use, nobody had the ermergence of the industrialised welfare state in mind. When people ordered their first modem, nobody had their sights on the cyborg-like relationship we have with our smartphones a couple decades later. What kind of a way of life these first behaviours would eventually lead simply to didn’t matter. What mattered was that that machine, that lightbulb, that modem, and every small steps that followed, made those peoples’ lifes a little bit easier, more convenient, or in another way humanly more pleasing, in that moment.
Developing a climate neutral way of life is a fundamental change of a similar order, and for the population at large, climate neutrality will similarly be an emerging property: the outcome of their choices, rather than the goal of their choices. This is the only way forward is to influence group behaviour for climate change.
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The solution: Make sustainable choices more desirable.
Hence to motivate people for climate action, we shouldn’t put too much of our collective creative energy into convincing people of the larger goal and building up their motivation to contribute to climate action, and put nearly all of it into simply designing those incrementally better everyday choices. If we want to design for genuine behaviour change, it means innovating on sustainable products, services and behaviours, so that they’re increasingly convenient or in many other possible ways the more fulfilling choice.
Tesla doesn’t want you to drive electric for the environment, but because they offer an exciting driving experience. Beyond Meat doesn’t want you to go vegan on your hamburgers, they want you to eat the juiciest hamburger in the world, which happen to be vegan.
That requires above all ruthless, methodical empathy for those humans whose behaviours and choices we want to change. Don’t wash away their anxieties, comforts, pains and deep-rooted human needs and desires in service of climate neutrality – start with them. In fact, I’d put it even stronger:
The only way to achieve climate neutrality in time is to be ruthlessly empathetic with the people whose behaviour we need to change.
Tim is a Behavioural Design Lead at SUE. In his spare time, he’s a councillor for the Dutch Liberal Party at the City of Rotterdam
He recently co-authored a book with Klaas Dijkhoff, Group Chairman of the Dutch Liberal, in which they plead for an optimistic renaissance based on the fresh liberal concept.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
Or ‘Using the power of repetition not just to build memory, but also trust.’
Behavioural science is fascinating. Understanding some of the fundamentals of human decision-making will give you far more control over successful outcomes of personal and professional goals than you might have ever expected. But how do you turn this science into practice? This is a blog series highlighting the best insights from behavioural science translated into how to make them work for you daily. Behavioural economics applied. To help you make better decisions that will help you improve your wellbeing, work and society.
Behavioural psychology: The power of mere exposure
Don’t you wish you could remember things better? Every interesting article you’ve ever read, everything you’ve learned in school, wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could recite them by heart? Well, you know what you have got to do then right? Eat, sleep, and repeat. That’s the traditional approach to recognising and remembering. And it does work— sort of. If you repeatedly see or read things, you tend to remember them. Or put differently, the number of times you are exposed to something helps something to be captured in the memory structures of our brain.
But the truth is our memories are not infallible. As Kahneman and Tversky have proven, our brain operates on two decision systems: system 1 and system 2. System 2 is a slave to our system 1, which is our automatic, unconscious operating system that uses cues and shortcuts (called heuristics) to form judgments and opinions. Judgments and opinions that our system 2 then turns into beliefs. As Kahneman puts it:
‘Very quickly, you form an impression, and then you spend most of your time confirming it instead of collecting evidence.’
People rewrite and reshape their memories, often to fit with their existing beliefs. I read this quote from Caroline Webb that summarises it perfectly: ‘The startling truth is that we don’t experience the world as it is; we’re always experiencing an edited, simplified version’. What has this got to do with your memory? We tend to see our memory as a recording device that captures facts, observations and information with accuracy. The truth is, our memory is highly subjective.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
That subjectivity of our brain also makes it very interesting though. As it brings one of my all-time favourite mental laws into play: The ‘Law of Unintended Consequences’ also known as second-order effects. Yes, you can use repetition or exposure to capture information, but this is only an immediate consequence of the action (repeat-remember). There is a subsequent effect of our repetition action as well. Behavioural science adds on a fascinating second-order effect on the concept of repetition that explains why using repetition can help you be more influential.
If you repeat something, it doesn’t only activate memory; it also triggers trust and liking.
So, if you repeat things, you become trust worthier, hence more influential. In behavioural science, this is called the mere exposure effect, also known as the familiarity principle. It describes a phenomenon that causes humans to rate or feel positively about things to which they are frequently and consistently exposed, including other people.
Just think about when you hear a new song on the radio. At first, you may not like it, but after hearing it a couple of times it starts growing on you, and you start loving it. As you grow more familiar with the tune and lyrics, you can even get quite fond of the song. It like the saying: ‘something grows on you’.
The first scientific study on the relationship between exposure and appreciation goes way back to 1960. Researchers first asked participants to rate several nonsense words on a good-bad scale. They were then notified that they were in an experiment measuring the effectiveness of repetition in learning to pronounce strange words correctly. Some of these words were shown once, others twice, five times, or ten times. Participants had to take a look at the words, and then pronounce them every time they were presented to them. Following this ‘training’, they had to rate the words again on the good-bad scale. A significant repetition (or exposure) effect was seen, with the words shown frequently increasing in positive evaluation.
Strangely, however, words which were seen only once in training were judged afterwards not quite as ‘good’ as before the start of the training. Thus, as a result of 2, 5, and 10 exposures words improved in meaning, and as a result of but one exposure, they worsened. The study revealed the same effect with Chinese characters that people didn’t understand.
So, even when you talk bullocks like Trump (sorry, I could not let that one pass), but repeat it enough people may trust you anyway. But let’s leave the roaring research sixties behind and let us see this principle a bit more in the light of the present.
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Using the mere exposure effect to create brand loyalty
I guess the most discussed application of the mere exposure effect can be found in marketing and communication. If you expose someone to a brand logo, slogan or communication vehicle often enough, it boosts recognition. People will even recognise brands with the brand name removed.
Familiar stimuli require less cognitive effort.
We don’t have to go to the trouble of reading brand names, but we recognise the colours, shape of the logo and font types that we were exposed to many times before. Just do a little test yourself. I guess you can tell me which soft drinks these are even if you aren’t fluent in Arabic:
Visual source: Google.
Studies have shown that recognition, whether correct or mistaken, enhances the likelihood of preference.
Therefore, mere repetition can boost brand liking and brand loyalty. I guess we have all been there. If you ask me why I buy a particular brand of toothpaste, I buy it because I am used to buying it. I couldn’t give you a clear-cut answer to the benefits of my toothpaste or on which features it outperforms other toothpaste brands. I just like it (or have grown to like it because of familiarity). It again all links back to the fact that:
Our brain is continually trying to lower our cognitive overload and repetition helps us make autopilot decisions.
There is all kind of tactics to use mere exposure in marketing and communication. Depicting familiar situations in your communication, presenting ads several times, developing a distinctive identity, playing by the sector rules (ever wondered why all hotel booking sites look the same? Now you know), and so on. To me, however, the far more impressive effect of mere exposure is the impact it can have on decision-making.
Using mere exposure to make better decisions
It is essential to realise that the mere exposure effect substantially impacts human decision-making. People apply for schools, pick restaurants, favour people of which they heard the names more often or which they saw more frequently. So, if you commute by train to work every day and you see the same person making the same journey day in day out, you start to trust this person. The same goes for colleagues: the ones you see or interact with more often you tend to like more.
Liking people is one thing, but what if this mere exposure favouring affects your decision-making? To give you an example. If people apply for secondary education, they may consider a school, after reading the school curriculum and the school brochure, to be the perfect match but still apply for a school with a lesser fit because they have heard of it more often. Have you ever wondered why that blend, uniform looking global hotel chains are still in business? It is again the mere exposure effect at work. People may spend hours browsing hotel booking sites, checking out pictures and reviews of luxurious or boutique hotels. But often they tend to book a hotel which they are familiar with. Hence, settling with they already know. This is also known as satisficing instead of maximising. Most of us are satisficers.
Well-known brands give people comfort, especially in uncertain situations such as travelling to new surroundings. It’s like seeing your national air carrier on an airport across the world. It feels a bit like home in a strange kind of way. It is one of the pillars of success for fast food chains such as McDonald’s. Because you are exposed to them everywhere, all across the world, McD becomes familiar to you, and it makes many people tend to feel more secure to eat there instead of at the food stalls on the streets of Bangkok, which is a major mistake! Nothing, nothing beats eating Thai street food. I almost can’t make a better case than this that mere exposure sometimes makes you make worse decisions.
This flaw in decision-making has to do with a cognitive bias: ambiguity or uncertainty aversion. This is the human tendency to favour the known over the unknown, including known risks over unknown risks. This is why stockbrokers tend to invest in domestic companies more often, even though international companies are showing better numbers. But it also prevents people like me and you to invest in stock markets because it has risks that we cannot conceive of understanding. Even more severe is the fact that people choose to withhold from medical treatments if the risks are unknown.
If you want to help people to make better decisions, you, therefore, need to be very aware of their anxieties.
You can also minimise risk perception by again using the mere exposure effect itself. We, as humans are social animals. We want to be liked, we want to be like others, and we want to belong to a group. This is an innate human desire: we all want to be part of something bigger and want to feel respected and accepted. This is the reason why people tend to favour but also trust people who are similar to them.
It will reduce someone’s uncertainty when you expose them to a similar other.
Preferably several times. Let me illustrate this with an example. We worked for an institution that provided a debt relief program for youngsters with serious debts. The program was free of charge, but the attendance rate was meagre. When we conducted Behavioural Research, we revealed that the youngsters had extreme anxiety. They didn’t feel the debt advisors were people like them. When we communicated and showed, truthfully, that the advisors were all people like them that used to have debts themselves, the willingness to attend the program skyrocketed. We merely exposed them (at several touchpoints) with similar and familiar others which reduced the uncertainty aversion and boosted the desired behaviour.
What do you think after reading this text? Do you think we have a problem or not? And do you believe it is a minor problem or one that could harm us? Unfortunately, this rhetoric works. But we can learn from it. Not only how we can influence someone (please don’t turn into a Trump) but also how we are influenced on a system 1 level by the mere exposure effect ourselves.
But there is another way to make this mere exposure work for you without you having to turn into a Dumb.
You can also try to be visible yourself around the people you want to influence. Be repetitive exposure in person.
In his book ‘How Brands Grow’. Byron Sharp delivers scientific evidence that brands grow not by positioning or differentiation, but by salience. He introduces the concept of ‘mental and physical availability’. The more people see a brand or the more it is evoked in people’s memory; the more people will trust and buy that brand. Again, it shows that:
Familiarity breeds liking.
I believe the same goes for you being influential, as the findings of Sharp make sense and connect with the mere exposure effect. So, know that you’re the brand called you. Make yourself familiar by merely being around and make it easy as possible for people to reach, see or talk to you. And use repetition in your communication.
Be careful not to overexpose.
Not in words, visibility or advertising. Overexposure maybe makes up for arty pictures, but it is an art that is only appreciated by a few. Just a small but essential side-note repeating is not the same as copying. To be perfectly clear. Some people kind of misunderstand what repetition is about and are more in the business of stealing. And not even as an artist I may add.
Visual source: CNBC
Using mere exposure to build better relationships
Now that you are familiar with the mere exposure effect, you can also use it to build better relationships with people. Familiarity is the foundation of every relationship. You share more with people you have seen more. Mere exposure builds interpersonal trust. So, whether you want to earn the trust of a friend or your partner’s friends, your family or your colleagues you need to show up more. Invite them over for drinks, talk to them more often, go to get-togethers or send them a message now and then. It’s how salespeople or the best account managers operate by nature. They remember birthdays, make house calls, and keep in touch regularly. In the end, the unconscious decision-making part of people’s brain will prefer who they are comfortable with.
Using mere exposure to help solve societal problems
I briefly touched upon the relationship between anxiety and mere exposure. However, anxiety doesn’t always have to be a bad thing; you can also use it to your advantage. The mere exposure effect can help people become more aware and more willing to take action for severe problems. Researchers exposed participants to images of environmental risks and directed their attention repeatedly to a subset of these risks. When the participants were asked about those risk they were exposed to more often, they indicated to judge these risks to be more severe, more frightening, higher priority and more distinctive than risks they were exposed to fewer times. The researchers, therefore, suggest that mere exposure can increase the perceived severity of environmental risks because it increases the fear and distinctiveness of those risks.
I wouldn’t promote fear-mongering by the way, but this research does show that you need to expose people more often to a message to have an effect on memory and action. As we are facing some serious international issues today, it could be beneficial to see if we can leverage the effect of mere exposure. Sometimes people need to be shaken up a bit to care; I don’t know what the right balance is of the amount of fear. Just like a photograph can turn out wrong because of overexposure, the same goes here. Given is, you shouldn’t overdo it.
Mere exposure: don’t overdo it
Not all exposure is good exposure. Too much exposure can lead to conflicting feelings. Whether it is a person you see too much, or a brand or a communication. It can cause indifference, or something called ‘audience fatigue’. People reach a saturation point. So, you have to find a balance in the number of exposures. But also, the quality of exposures matters. Take a look at this social thread on Tide adds that people seem to dislike much.
Visual source: Reddit
When following Byron Sharp’s thinking, you could argue that the quality doesn’t matter and at least Tide has built mental availability. There’s certainly truth in that. But the fact is, too much exposure can decrease liking. Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt discovered that:
People’s enjoyment rises when an idea, experience or product is new, but when it becomes overly familiar, the joy will drop.
Visual source: the Wundt Curve (see resources below)
The lesson we can learn from this is that yes, we want to build familiarity. But we can build sustainable relationships by changing a familiar product, service or even yourself just enough to make the experience new again. This is why making incremental changes can be a tactic to keep benefiting from the mere exposure effect. And by the way, Wundt also discovered this is the way arousal works. So, if you want your partner to keep longing for you need to get out that familiarity comfort zone. Time to dust of those worn-out habits and find some new excitement.
Using mere exposure to study and remember
Next to the fact that exposing people to something multiple times is what will activate the exposure effect, there is also the question of timing. When do you expose someone? I guess we have all grown up with the habit to repeat, repeat, repeat to learn new stuff, remember it and reproduce it in tests. What we did back then (and maybe still are doing now) is using repetition to help us remember. But what we were never taught is how to apply this mere exposure effect on ourselves to get a maximum result. And this all has to do with the timings of the exposure.
The best learning experience comes from so-called spaced repetition.
It is one of the most powerful techniques to help your brain recall information (also check out my post about chunking). It would be digging a hole here to dive into the Behavioural Design of learning right now, but to bring you up-to-speed quickly. The benefit of spaced repetition is based on the research of Ebbinghaus who has discovered the Forgetting Curve. This curve shows we forget things over time.
Visual source: Farnham Street blog
But we can change the curve by adding space between the repetition. Or as Ebbinghaus said himself:
With any considerable number of repetitions, a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.
Visual source: Farnham Street blog
I will dedicate a particular blog to the way you can boost your learning experience using spacing and achieve memory mastery by using repeated exposure. For now, this quote of John Medina, author of ‘Brain Rules’ wraps it up nicely:
How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information in specifically timed intervals provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain. …Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid, it can be. Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once.”
Conclusion: mere exposure is applied behavioural design
To conclude, mere exposure provides people with a shortcut that lowers their cognitive overload in deciding something is valuable or not. By repeatedly exposing someone to something or someone, you can build liking, trust and memory. And it can help people to make better decisions and to shape desired behaviours. How’s that for making behavioural economics work in practice? Not bad, not bad at all.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Academy brochure here, contact us here or subscribe to Behavioural Design Digest at the bottom of this page. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
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Behavioural science is fascinating. Understanding some of the fundamentals of human decision-making will give you far more control over successful outcomes of personal and professional goals than you might have ever expected. But how do you turn this science into practice? This is a blog series highlighting the best insights from behavioural science translated into how to make them work for you daily. Behavioural science applied. To help you make better decisions that will help you improve your wellbeing, work and society. This is part 1 of this applied behavioural science series: the power of chunking. Or, How to improve your capability to remember and learn.
Behavioural science: The power of chunking
One thing we all want more of in life is simplicity. In fact, mostly, our brain loves simplicity. We all have a very ingenious decision-making system in between our ears that helps us make decisions with as little effort as possible. Even now, your brain is continuously working hard for you to do as little thinking as possible. Most of the choices we make are based on automatic shortcuts. To save brain bandwidth for the decisions, we do have to contemplate rationally.
This so-called two systems thinking, that was discovered by Kahneman and Tversky, is actually a lifesaver if you imagine an average person is making 35.000 choices a day. Varying from minor decisions, such as should I step to the right? To decisions that have a greater impact, such as should I hire this person? Making all these decisions consciously would go beyond our cognitive abilities, so we need our subconscious mind.
So, let’s get back to learning and remembering. How can we make it easier for you to learn and remember? If you take the way our brain operates as a starting point, we need to start at the notion that our brain loves simplicity. By chunking or grouping separate pieces of information into chunks, this is exactly what you will be doing. Let me give you an example. Read these three sentences once and then say them out loud by heart:
Remember far is to information easier
Pieces is divided into up it if
Our logical are head that patterns in
Quite hard, right? Now, try these three sentences:
Information is far easier to remember
If it is divided up into pieces
That are logical patterns in our head
I bet; this time it was no problem at all. Fact is, it was exactly the same information only represented in another way.
Our brain is a pattern-making machine, as soon as we can discover patterns it is much easier to make decisions or to remember things.
I read this very interesting book by David Epstein called Range. In one of the first chapters, he dives into what makes up for a savant. Those chess players or piano virtuosos that stun everyone from the age of 3 with their talent. You probably have heard of the 10.000-hour rule: you need to practice something for 10.000 hours to become really good at it. Only that way you can reach the savant or elite level.
Kahneman and Klein found this only holds true for domains that are characterized by predictable patterns and logic. Like playing golf, playing classical music or a game of chess: ‘There are rules, and boundaries and patterns repeat over and over, feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid’. Now, you probably don’t have the ambition or are a tat late age-wise, to become a savant, but still, something very interesting was discovered with savants that can be relevant to you and it has everything to do with chunking; The plot thickens George Villiers would say.
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Change in perception: you don’t need 10.000 hours.
It was often thought that next to the 10.000 hours of repetitive exercise, savants had another characteristic. Savants must have a photographic memory. A logical conclusion if you witness young children who play symphonies by heart or four-year-olds that beat chess players ten times their age with impressive high-pace gameplays. But the truth is, savants in the predictable domains are masters at chunking.
Several savants were put to the test by different researches. Epstein refers to an experiment National Geographic TV did with Susan Polgar, the world’s first female chess grandmaster; they printed a mid-game chess play with 28 pieces on the side of a truck. Susan glanced at the truck and then recreated the game flawlessly. When they printed a random play with fewer chess pieces on the truck, she could barely recreate the play. It lacked existing chess patterns.
Chess players don’t have photographic memories and remember every single chess piece; they chunk meaningful pieces together that form familiar patterns.
Chunking may seem like magic, but it comes from the patterns savants have locked into their memory in those 10.000-hour repetitive study. Interested to know more about how to optimise your learning experience? Here’swere you can read sone more on spaced repetition. A variety of chunking applied to learning.
Chunking is all about presenting information in a way that it is easier to process for people.
So, the good news is: you don’t need a photographic memory to remember things. Better news still, you don’t need to put in 10.000 hours to be a chunking master. The world we live in is often far less familiar and predictable than golf, chess or classical music. ‘Our rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate or both’. So, focusing for 10.000 hours on patterns in daily life is less relevant.
Chunking can help people make sense of the complex world they live in.
You can use chunking to help someone make sense of what you are offering them or what you want them to do. But chunking is more than just providing someone with a logical pattern. If you chunk information or to do’s or goals, you are breaking-up a larger whole. Chess players don’t remember a whole game strategy; they remember parts of the tactics. So, when looking at behaviour:
Chunking can work as a way to break-up a harder to perform behaviour into smaller, manageable steps.
How to change habits using chunking
Some practical examples that may help you boost your sales, change the attitude in consumer behaviour or effectively design a customer experience or user experience. Let me start by telling you how to change habits using chunking: If you want someone to quit smoking, a sticky habit, that CAN be very difficult to change.
You can make it simpler by breaking up the quit-smoking-behaviour behaviour into chunks. The NHS has introduced a perfect example of this thinking. They help people stop smoking by not by focussing on quitting smoking at once but by helping someone step-by-step. First, you can apply for a free ‘stop smoking kit’. It contains things like nicotine patches and a squeezy toy to give you something in hand to replace your cigarette. But they guide you towards the end-goal of quitting smoking easily. By for example, first sticking on the patches and sending you motivational emails.
Visual: NHS
If you break down a goal into smaller steps, people feel more confident that they can reach the end-goal.
Therefore, chunking is also very effective in helping someone reach their goals. But also consider using chunking if you are trying to achieve a goal. Don’t focus on running the marathon at once, but start at 1K, 5K, 10K. You will get there in the end (and if not, running is just not your thing which I can relate to completely but that’s a different story).
How to improve sales conversion using chunking
Let’s check out some more examples of companies who do a good job adding chunking to their offering and who combine this technique from behavioural economics in marketing or advertising. The first example is the blogging platform Ghost which shows that chunking may help you improve your sales conversion and get you more online sales. Maybe you have ever heard of the ‘aha moment’ describing that point that people start to get value from a product and keep on using it. Ghost introduced a simple five-step process to guide users to the essential steps to get value out of the platform. These steps are laid out for users, and they see a satisfying green check mark and a strikethrough for tasks they’ve completed.
The only challenge with having someone takes steps on your website is that they have to be online to see the site. This was solved by Ghost by sending users who had left the online set-up process conditional emails depending on where they left off in the process.
Visuals: ghost.com
These emails gave clear guidance on how to finish the step. Eventually, they were able to boost the efficiency of their conversion rates with 370%, only by chunking the behaviour into smaller steps and guiding people through them.
How to shape behaviour using chunking
Another company who helps people develop good financial behaviour by chunking tasks is HelloWallet. They do this via a weekly Sunday email that contains just one small manageable financial task for users to focus on – perhaps merely setting up a holiday savings fund, and no more. HelloWallet points out that it takes just three minutes to set up, and by dividing up savings behaviour into smaller weekly chunks, people begin to develop better financial habits and are more likely to meet their goals. HelloWallet’s research shows that success in these small tasks builds people’s confidence and make them feel more able to tackle their finances.
Visual: HelloWallet
How chunking helps us remember things top of mind
Another upside of chunking is that our capability to receive and retain information improves.
You probably have experienced it yourself: have you ever better remembered a phone number by chucking it? For instance, the SUE | Behavioural Design phone number is (+31)202234626. But I remember it by chunking it: 223 4626 (the country and area code are in my automatic brain already so I don’t have to chunk those). This is why our phone number is also displayed in chunks on our website: To make it easier for visitors to remember it.
Why chunking works psychologically is that the chunks are seen as one ‘unit’ of information.
So, instead of remembering all separate digits, I just have to remember four chunks. Making the cognitive steps smaller. There now maybe is a question that comes to your mind. Is there anything known about the optimal number of chunks? Well, this has been researched. Early behavioural research revealed that humans best recall seven pieces of information plus or minus two. However, more recent studies show that chunking is most effective when four to six chunks (or steps) are created.
Conclusion: chunking is applied behavioural design
To conclude, chunking is a practical user-centred design approach that helps people to make hard behaviour easier to do.
By limiting steps or units of information, someone has to do or remember you help them lower their cognitive needs. At the same time, you boost their confidence, memory and capability to perform the desired behaviour. How’s that for making behavioural economics work in practice? Not bad, not bad at all.
www.mixergy.com, Andrew Warner “Interview: HelloWallet: 0 to 300,000 Paid Subscribers In 5 Months – with Matt Fellowes”, 29th November 2011; http://hrpost.hellowallet.com/engagement/webinar-recording-tips-for-effective-employee-emails/
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Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?'. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
Today we published a report called “Leading Distributed Teams”. The report is the output of a behavioural research project did in April 2020. We wanted to learn how working as distributed teams affect team behaviour in terms of productivity, creativity and wellbeing. From a scientific point of view, the COVID-19 crisis is a god gift. It’s nothing more than a gigantic A/B test that offers us a unique opportunity to learn how office-work and home-work have an impact on team behaviour.
What the Covid crisis can teach us
The Corona-Crisis provides us with a unique learning opportunity for designing the ultimate gratifying work, combined with the perfect work-life balance. This report offers a deep understanding of how distributed working contributes to this. More importantly, it gives managers and leaders lots of practical insights into how they can coach their team to benefit the most from distributed working.
The essential idea from the report is that if you want to understand team behaviour, you need to take the human behind the professional or manager as your point of departure.
If you want to understand the humans in professional teams, you need to understand their deeper needs and desires they wish to see fulfilled and their more deep-seated fears and anxieties they want to be tackled.
That’s why the question “Is working from home better than working in the office?” is not the right question. It’s much more interesting to turn this question outside-in and ask ourselves:
How might ‘distant working’ or ‘working in the office’ help people to
Be more successful in achieving their goals?
Overcome bad habits like being distracted?
Take away fears and uncertainty about their performance?
The answer to this question can pave the path to a very near future in which we can experience the joy of being part of a high-performance team. At the same time, having more than enough time left to pursue our personal goals, instead of wasting too much time in our lives on traffic jams, pointless meetings, highly distracting office spaces and patronising managers.
What you will learn in the report
The big challenge for the managers and leaders who need to manage their teams will be to promote the positive behaviours that contribute to high-performance output and wellbeing while suppressing the behaviours and habits that stand in the way of achieving these outcomes.
This research paper will give you a deep understanding of:
The behavioural forces that make or break team success.
How offices both promote and kill high-performance team behaviour.
How working from home solves some negative office dynamics.
How working from home create new challenges that need to be solved.
How managers can lead distributed teams successfully.
There are two ways to download the report
We understand that reading this report requires a bit of a time investment (probably 30-45 minutes). But I promise you will learn a lot if you do. You will have a more profound understanding of the problem if you take the time to read the quotes that people gave to express their feelings and thoughts.
Executive Summary
Read theexecutive summary if you want to pick up the most critical insights and recommendations.
There are several ways in which you leverage Behavioural Design to boost your team’s performance and your talent’s personal development. Contact us for more information or click on the links below to find out more right away.
ONE-DAY TEAM WORKSHOP
We can help boost your team’s collaboration, motivation and development. Our one-day in-company ‘Habits of High-Performance Teams’ workshop is a great opportunity to get you team together again and have them reinvent working together.
BEHAVIOURAL DESIGN SPRINT
We can help you innovate and grow your team in a Behavioural Design Sprint: a fast-paced, evidence-based approach to leverage behavioural science to achieve operational excellence.
BEHAVIOURAL INSIGHT SPRINT
We can help you unlock the behavioural barriers and boosters that can help transform your team to a high-performance team in a Behavioural Insight Sprint.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
There is a cognitive bias related to this phenomenon called 
Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our 
How to convince someone with different beliefs
Bypassing confirmation bias (2): Provide proof not evidence
Behavioural psychology: The power of mere exposure
Behavioural science: The power of chunking
Visual: NHS
The only challenge with having someone takes steps on your website is that they have to be online to see the site. This was solved by Ghost by sending users who had left the online set-up process conditional emails depending on where they left off in the process.
Visuals: ghost.com
Visual: HelloWallet
Why chunking works psychologically is that the chunks are seen as one ‘unit’ of information.
