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What’s Neymar worth? A lesson in price psychology.

By All, Customer Behaviour

Behavioural economics has always been fascinated by pricing. Classic economic thinking has taught us that a price is a fair representation of supply and demand. A rational or even objective evaluation of worth. But in practice, nothing holds further from the truth than this assumption. Almost nothing is more subjective or manipulative than the price of things. Our unconsciousness uses price as an irrational shortcut to evaluate the value of things. Driving up prices or value perception without any logical or objective explanation: Something is expensive so it must be good.

Some examples to illustrate this. For most wine buyers the price of a bottle of wine is the only cue on which they base their quality judgment of wine. A bottle of wine that is priced from 9,99 to 5,99 gives you the feeling that within your wanted price range of a table wine you suddenly get access to a high-quality wine. If the same bottle of wine were just priced 5,99, it just would feel like a table wine. Something happens in your value perception by the price indication. Another classic example of irrational value perception is the introduction of the black pearls in the twenties. When the first black pearls were discovered, nobody wanted to have them. People were used to white pearls and had no idea if black pearls were as valuable as white pearls. The distributor of the black pearls than made a genius move. He retracted all black pearls from the market and paid the world famous Tiffany’s New York to expose them in their window next to ridiculously expensive jewelry items. Suddenly everybody had to have the black pearls, and they were willing to pay a price that was a multitude of the original market price of the black pearls. The rest is history. Black pearls are still more expensive than their white sisters and brothers.

One of the key concepts of psychology is called price cluelessness. We don’t have any concept of what the price of something should be. Our brain solves this problem, by unconsciously looking for clues to help us answer a simple question: Is this product a bargain or is it overpriced? And that’s where things go wrong because most mental shortcuts we use aren’t only incorrect, they are also professionally abused by product suppliers.

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A perfect example of this is the recent price escalation in soccer. This summer Neymar was sold by FC Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for a staggering 220 million Euros. The story behind this outrageous price is that Barcelona had put a leaver clause in Neymar’s contract of 200 million Euros to protect themselves from people buying this crucial player from them. They never expected that somebody would be that crazy to pay for such an excessive amount. But that was just peanuts for some wealthy oil sheiks that simply wanted Neymar to play for their Paris club.

The price that paid for Neymar just became the price that someone was prepared to pay for something he wants to own. But the effect was greater than this: What happened next is that the whole soccer transfer world went berserk. The price paid for Neymar became the new price anchor against which the value of all players is measured. In a few days time, the prices that used to be paid for players have been wiped off the table. Lionel Messi got a leaver clause of 300 million Euros in his contract, Ronaldo has to do with a clause of mere one milliard Euros. On the last day of the transfer period, Barcelona paid a 100 million Euros for 20-year-old Dembele, who ‘just’ had an estimated worth of 40 million Euros a few days before. Early summer, Manchester United bought the Belgian player Romelu Lukaku for 85 million from Everton. Jose Mourinho, the coach of Manchester United, actually called this a bargain. One month later, when the whole Neymar price spectacle took place, the transfer of Lukaku could easily have cost the club 115 million Euros.

Markets are irrational. The price paid for Neymar was nothing more than an excess of ultra-rich oil billionaires. But the price paid for Newmar ignited a chain reaction of reactions, tactics, and strategies that caused every player transfer to conform to this new price benchmark. In the end, the soccer market is not that much different from the housing market: It is an artificial bubble that will implode. Behind the game with a ball, there is a game with aggressive investors that will earn crazy amounts of money by blowing up this bubble. When the bubble pops, as it always does eventually, it will be only a few already filthy rich people that will profit while others will have to pay the painful and sometimes lifelong price of having bought something overpriced that has suddenly has lost its value. No billionaire will help you there; they are buying something outrageously new already.

 

Cover image by Leonid Domnitser under Creative Commons license.

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How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

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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3 techniques that will supercharge your team’s creativity

By All, Employee behaviour

This blog post shows you three super-effective techniques rooted in behavioural science to supercharge the creativity of your team. It does require to kill off one creativity habit we all use: the brainstorm. But trust us, the techniques we propose instead are much more effective and fun!

One habit we need to shake: brainstorming

Before we get to the goods of supercharging your team’s creativity, there’s one thing that needs to be taken care of first: we need to say goodbye to the good old brainstorm. For good. Maybe it sounds a bit harsh, but sorry, there’s no pardoning act. Brainstorms should die. The ‘inventor’ of the brainstorm Alex F. Osborn gave birth to brainstorms in 1939. So, it’s about time for a makeover. But let’s not question his intentions. According to Wikipedia Mr. Osborn “Was frustrated by employees’ inability to develop creative ideas individually for ad campaigns, in response, he began hosting group-thinking sessions.” And it still holds true: Solitary creative processes have an entirely different dynamic and output than a process in which great minds collide.

But why, oh why, are we then all still trapped in those everlasting flip-over led sessions that feel like such a waste of time and resources and where great minds tend to collapse instead of connecting?

Looking at brainstorms from a human psychology perspective, there’s a quite simple explanation. When a group engages in a group think process, the leader of the pack prevails. It is just nature. The one who is the loudest is heard the most. And the highest in rank at the table is often followed. The real problem with this is that a group only delivers a fraction of the possible number of ideas in a brainstorm.

 

How to supercharge the creative capital of a group

But there’s an upside to this: Research shows that teams are terrible in coming up with ideas but great in selecting ideas. So, if we fix the ideation part of the process, we can create magic. In fact, three simple behavioural design techniques can have a massive impact on the creative output of a group. They will help you to unlock the creative potential of a group, even of presumed non-creatives.

Research shows that teams are terrible in coming up with ideas but great in selecting ideas.

 

Boosting creativity: How Might We Questions

The first technique has to do with a human psychology principle that’s called the Framing Effect: How information is presented shapes our opinions about it. In this case, it is the question from which you jump-start your creative thinking. You can drive creative output by designing the problem using these three magic words: “How Might We?” Feel how the “Might” instantly liberates you: It urges you to go ahead and explore, to free your mind, be boundary-less, an explorer or pioneer even. Compared to its tight ass brother ‘Can’ it makes a world of difference. Just feel what it does to you when you frame the question as ‘How Can We?”. The ‘Can’ immediately forces you to think about the possibilities and even worse the impossibilities; practicalities also, harshly limiting the number of ideas already at the start of the process.

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Boosting creativity: brainwriting

When getting to the ideation part of the creative process we’ve to keep a few human psychology principles in mind. The first is social proof: People tend to follow the lead of others. Sometimes this manifest itself in the social bias of Authority: We have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Or we adjust our behaviour to reflect positively on how peers see us: The Reputation bias. The job to be done in the ideation phase is to reduce the biases that could potentially reduce the creative output and install a free-flowing non-judgmental exchange and ideation process that sparks everyone’s creative fire.

You’ll be amazed by the number and diversity of ideas you as a group will come up with in such limited time. From everyone. The bold and the timid. The upper rankers and the climbing uppers. The creatives and the presumed non-creatives.

A technique to do so is Brainwriting. Instead of coming up with ideas as a group, you start by thinking about ideas as an individual. The method is simple. Determine a ‘How Might We Question’. Give every person a stack of post-its. Set a timer for a brief period, somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, and then as an individual write down as many ideas as possible, no talking, just go wild by yourself. Write down every idea that pops into your mind on a separate post-it. After time’s up, everyone shares his/her ideas with the group. Stick them on a large piece of paper. Describe them if necessary. But don’t comment on each other’s ideas just yet. All you do is grouping the ideas that seem similar. You’ll be amazed by the number and diversity of ideas you as a group will come up with in such limited time. From everyone. The bold and the timid. The upper rankers and the climbing uppers. The creatives and the presumed non-creatives. Then use the third technique to select the ideas.

 

Boosting creativity: dotmocracy

A fundamental concept in behavioural psychology is making target behaviour easier to do. A well-known psychological phenomenon in groups is social compliance. It’s very challenging for an individual to go against the norm, breaking the rules, to think differently. Social deviance is a hard behaviour to show, as it triggers another psychological principle: Loss Aversion. Humans prefer eliminating the risks of loss over increasing the odds of winning. And the most significant loss in a group process is rubbing against the hairs of the highest ranked person in the group and dealing with the personal retributions. But it’s precisely that kind of social deviance of going up against the top-ranked person in the group that helps to select the best ideas. A simple technique to eliminate this pressure and to fight compliance is called dotmocracy.

Loss aversion: Humans prefer eliminating the risks of loss over increasing the odds of winning.

 

The technique is simple: Everyone gets two same colored dots. Everyone groups around the paper with all ideas and at the same moment, you stick a dot on your two favorite ideas. Could be two dots at the same idea, could be dots on your ideas, could be dots on two different ideas. Just pick the ideas that you think have the most potential. Nobody can follow the lead of others, and you instantly get a clear overview of the best ideas. Usually, as a group, you discuss the selected ideas with two dots or more where people are asked to elaborate on the reason for picking the idea. After the explanation, the second round of dotmocracy should be done, placing dots on the ideas that came out as best in the first round. Although sometimes sticking dots at the same time is sometimes impossible (the best group size is therefore 5/6 people), the process shows people authority is not an issue. Everyone’s vote has the same weight. There are no larger dots. No different colored dots. No order of placing the dots.

 

If you only have 30 seconds, read this:

  • Three techniques rooted in behaviorual science can help you to boost the quality and diversity of your creative output;
  • It can help you make your creative output more qualitative as you can involve stakeholders from very different backgrounds, making your ideas more multi-layered and distinct;
  • It offers you a method to come up with ideas on your own without being distracted or disturbed, but at the same time the process involves interaction with others to make ideas better;
  • Instead of working for days on ideas, you come up with ideas fast, and you already get feedback after 15 minutes. Enabling you to make your ideas better or to kill the ideas that appeared not to be as good as you thought at first;
  • It offers new established multidisciplinary teams, such as scrum teams, easy to apply techniques to come up with creative output.

Cover image by BntOman ♥ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ✿ under Creative Commons license.

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How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

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.

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How To Make an Agile Team Customer-Centric?

By All, Employee behaviour

Digital Transformation, Agile Transformation, and Customer Centricity are the three major challenges that are causing sleep deprivation of managers nowadays.

You could summarise that Digital Transformation is meant to be the driving force to be able to help a client faster, smarter and cheaper. Agile Transformation should give teams the speed and agility to catch up with this ever rapidly changing the client. And Customer-Centric Transformation should enable you to develop better product and services based on better client insights.

Recent research of FD (Financial Daily) and Vlerick Business school exposes all pains of digital and agile transformation projects. And basically, it all comes down to one thing: Where agile, digital and customer-centric transformation are initially started to gain a competitive advantage by becoming truly customer-centered, they turned out to be organizational oriented pitfalls.

Where agile, digital and customer-centric transformation are initially started to gain a competitive advantage by becoming truly customer-centered, they turned out to be organizational oriented pitfalls.

Chief Digital Officers complain they feel sabotaged by the traditional oriented management; managers complain that after investing in expensive SCRUM training, their teams keep doing what that have done before, but mask this by performing some SCRUM rituals; and teams complain that the bi-weekly SCRUM sprints deprive them of time to talk to consumers.

The only way out of this impasse is when you rigorously put the customer first in your Digital, Agile or Customer-Centric transformation.

The only way out of this impasse is when you rigorously put the customer first in your Digital, Agile or Customer-Centric transformation. If you make quantitative and qualitative insights into customer behaviour the starting point of the SCRUM team projects, of the digital innovations and the management team decisions, you’ll put the focus back on the actual purpose of the transformations: Gaining a competitive advantage by becoming customer-centric.

But unfortunately, that’s where things again tend to go sour, as organizations have outsourced this pivotal competence of gaining deep human insights to research agencies and marketing consultancies. The result being nobody in the team is still – literally – in touch with the client. It’s all secondhand information.

Adding a Customer Insight Lead to teams shifts the pain of organizational transformation to getting to knowing the pains of the consumer.

But one intervention could be the solution to all problems. Every SCRUM team, every Digital Transformation team, every Management Team or Board of Directors should get a Customer Insight Lead. Someone who’s responsible for delivering insights into customer behaviour on a continuous basis. This single intervention would shift the pain of organizational transformation to a focus on getting to know the pains of the consumer. Something people can comply with much easier.

Tom

 

 


You might also like to read:

How to create change by design

Lose weight using behavioural design

 


 

Tom is the founder of SUE Amsterdam and The Behavioural Design Academy. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to nudge people into making positive choices in work, life, and play.

In two days of high-end master classes, we train people in unlocking the powerful principles of behavioural psychology and teach them our Behavioural Design Method™ that translates this knowledge into actionable skills to influence personal behaviour or the behaviour of customers, employees, family members or the general public.

Cover image by Birger Kühnel under Creative Commons license.

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How to change behaviour by design

By All, Citizen Behaviour

This blog post shows how we can change behaviour by design. It’s hard denying we as humankind are facing serious problems today, and things need to change. Global warming is happening as we speak, obesity is overtaking smoking as the number one cause of death. And for most of us, it isn’t that we don’t care about these problems. Sometimes we care a great deal. Who wasn’t shocked after seeing Before the Flood, the stunning climate change documentary starring Leonardo DiCaprio? Who wasn’t moved by Jamie Oliver’s quest to start a Food Revolution knowing children didn’t even recognize real food like an ordinary tomato? And even if you weren’t aware of these two specific examples: We all know some serious issues are going on.

 

Behaviour change: It’s a framing game

We are all facing a serious challenge when it comes to the planet we all live on. But the interesting question is why don’t we act? Is it because the issues are too big to comprehend? Or do we feel too powerless to make a change? Might very well be, because they are, at least if you frame them as a problem for humankind or the world.

But if you look at global warming or obesity from a different frame, you come to realize they have one thing in common.

People.

You and me.

We eat sugar. We don’t go to the gym. We save time by buying processed foods in the supermarket. We drive cars. We take flights. We buy loads of packaging and forget to recycle. We love taking long showers and binge watch Netflix on the couch while eating crisps.

This way, you realize that the significant issues we’re facing in the world right now can be brought back to simple daily human behaviour. Things we can comprehend. Things which we could change.

So, why don’t we do it? Why don’t we cook with fresh fruit and vegetables? Why don’t we work out? Why don’t we go out and walk more often, for instance to the recycle container? The answer is simple: Because we don’t. It’s that plain simple. We can play the guilt trip or blame game for a much more extended period, but it isn’t relevant, and it surely doesn’t do us any good. Not us as people. Or us as humankind.

Behaviour change: We’re all just irrational.

The only relevant question to ask ourselves is: How can we help people adjust this daily behaviour? How can we nudge people into making better choices on an everyday basis?

I believe the answer is behavioural design. If you want to change behaviour, you need to understand behaviour. You need to know how people make decisions. Why they do things and why they don’t. You need to understand human psychology.

Recent years the understanding of behavioural psychology has skyrocketed. We now know more about the human brain than ever before. To me, the biggest eye-opener was that we all are entirely irrational. Not just a little bit, but for the most part.

We all think we consciously make decisions, we all believe that we control our thinking. But in fact, most of our decisions are made through shortcuts – such as heuristics and biases – and have nothing to do with a rational or controlled thinking process. As one of the groundbreaking researchers in behavioural psychology Daniel Kahneman has put it:

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it.

That explains why the blame and guilt trip game isn’t beneficial. How can you be blamed or feel guilty if most of the time we’re just doing things automatically without even knowing we’re doing it? Dr. Kahneman says it even more prosaic:

We are blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.

To conclude behavioural psychology has given us powerful insights into the human mind.

Behaviour change: Challenging a commonly accepted assumption

To me, a crucial part of solving the puzzle of making this world a better, healthier, happier place is the realization that behavioural psychology challenges a commonly accepted assumption that people who make poor decisions, made the conscious decision to do so. But science has shown us that’s not true.

Still, millions of euros are invested in campaigns to convince people to act differently, targeting their thinking capacity. That’s just money down the drain.

But what is the answer then? Understanding how the mind works is just one thing. But how do you translate scientific research into practice? How can it stop me from eating pizza? From buying sneakers for comfort instead of running? From buying plastic bottles instead of refilling my own? How can we apply science to daily life?

Want to learn how to use behavioural science to tackle societal challenges?

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Changing behaviour: Behavioural design is the answer

I think a behavioural design is the only answer. I do realize design instantly opens up associations about the visual, about aesthetics. But if you look at design in a broader sense and if you take a closer look at what designers do, you see their job is to find new solutions to problems using creativity. And there are some fascinating things to learn from the way they work:

1. Just as behavioural psychologists, designers have always taken humans as a starting point. When designing a new chair, they want people to be able to sit on it. When designing a new fountain pen, they want people to be able to write correctly.

2. Just as a behavioural psychologist, designers do empirical testing. Designers have always used early testing with prototypes. They build scale models; they make paper cut dresses, they make beta releases. They watch how people interact, react or behave. And then measure, learn and adapt.

A lot is written about design thinking. Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO – one of the leading innovation companies – has written a great book on the subject: Change by Design, if you want to get some more in-depth information.

Behavioural design is the symbioses between two things: behavioural psychology and design thinking.

To me, Behavioural Design is the symbioses between two things: behavioural psychology and design thinking. If you combine those two worlds, you’ll be able to come up with better products, with better ideas and better interventions that will help people make better decisions, as you take people and their irrational decision making into account when developing an idea.

Behaviour change: Change will come!

But to get back to us as humankind tackling the world’s problems, my belief is design thinking is indeed an answer. It will help you:

  • See that obesity, and global warming are both behavioural problems on an individual level, making them comprehensive and tangible;
  • Understand people most of the times aren’t unwilling, but unable to change their behaviour, making you realize you need ideas that enable them to make better decisions;
  • Use design thinking to come up with ideas that influence people’s daily behaviour and get evidence-based results by testing them at an early stage;
  • Experience that change will come;
  • The first step in finding wicked answers to wicked problems is reframing a question to a behavioural challenge.

 

Behavioural design teaches us that the first step in finding a great answer is reframing the question to a behavioural challenge. By doing this, you’ll automatically end up with people. You’ll end up with us. At you. And if all of us make a change on a daily basis, we make an impact. We can change the world. I am convinced.

Astrid Groenewegen

 

 

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How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our Behavioural Design Academy, our officially accredited educational institution that already trained 2500+ people from 45+ countries in applied Behavioural Design. Or book an in-company training or one-day workshop for your team. In our top-notch training, we teach the Behavioural Design Method© and the Influence Framework©. Two powerful tools to make behavioural change happen in practice.

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.

sue behavioural design

Lose weight using behavioural design

By All, Personal Behaviour

Lose weight using behavioural design

Nir Eyal – once said: “Never trust a behavioural designer who’s out of shape.” The reason is that being (or getting) in shape or losing weight is all about showing (or stopping) a particular behaviour. And the secret weapon to successfully losing some extra weight is applying some behavioural design principles on yourself. So, if you want to light up your life and shed some extra you, you simply need to unlock the power of behavioural psychology.

Did I say simply? Yes, I did! The uplifting news is: You can quickly learn how to lose weight by using some simple behavioural design tricks, which you can use to effectively influence your behaviour (and I’m going to share The Golden Tip with you in a moment). Doesn’t that lift some weight off your shoulders already? Or, your bum. Or your belly. Or your second chin. Wherever you’d like. I’m all for it.

The Golden Tip

Okay, I understand you are hungry for The Golden Tip now. I can appreciate this appetite for knowledge. I need to make one more pun about eating before I move on, or are am I overfeeding you with puns already? I get it, so here you go. The Golden Rule is:

Ability eats Motivation for Breakfast

Let me explain what this means and what kind of substantial impact it can have on you realizing your goal to shed some weight. According to BJ Fogg – a Stanford professor who has studied human behaviour for years – there are two dimensions of behaviour: Motivation and Ability. For years we all only used motivation in trying to nudge our behaviour. But, most of the times it is much more effective to work on the ability axis. In plain English, making the desired behaviour easier or the undesired behaviour harder to do.

Let me give you an example. You can be very motivated to lose some weight. Most of us truly do. But most of us also don’t. It often takes the perseverance of a top athlete to stay focused and determined on that goal. Now, I ain’t no Olympic qualifier just yet, and my guess is most of you aren’t either. So, my motivation often goes down the drain, and I often switch to unwanted behaviour, like eating that bag of crisps that happens to be lying there. Or, drink that one (okay four) glasses of wine if you’re with friends. Or heating up that microwave meal after working late. No judgment here, we’ve all been there.

You can’t help your motivation from dropping now and then. But if it happens, ability is your secret weapon to success.

The secret weapon to success

But the key to successfully sticking to your weight loss plan lies exactly here. You can’t help your motivation from dropping now and then. But if it happens, ability is your secret weapon to success. By making your unwanted behaviour hard to do or your wanted behaviour easier to do, you’ll succeed. That’s behavioural design.

It may seem like an open door now, but the best ability intervention is not buying the unhealthy stuff: Don’t have any (not any) in your house, so if your motivation breaks you simply can’t eat something bad for you (making the undesired behaviour harder). Another intervention: Do food prepping. Make a healthy snack staple that will last a week, let’s say a healthy banana cake. If you get the 4 o’clock craving, you have that banana cake ready (making the desired behaviour easier). Bye, bye crisps. Something else: Put a toothbrush and toothpaste on your desk. If you get a snack attack, brush your teeth. See if you like to destroy your sweet minty breezy breath with some sugar or fat now. You won’t (making the undesired behaviour less enjoying aka harder).

These are just some examples of behavioural design by making behaviour harder or examples of making it easier. But I hope you get my point. Motivation is excellent, but the number one secret weapon for losing weight is ability.

Maybe you can come up with some more smart ability ideas yourself. I’d honestly love to hear them. Please post them on our Facebook page so that everyone can take advantage of them. I’ll put a healthy banana cake recipe on there too. To get you started.

How you can start right away

To wrap it up, the things you could do right away:

– Remove all unhealthy food from your house
– Make that banana cake or have someone make it for you
– Get yourself a toothbrush and toothpaste to put on your desk
– Analyse your behaviour: When does your motivation crack and where. And try to come up with some ability interventions for those moments (and please share them with us, ’cause we’re fellow crackers, you’re not alone in this)

Good luck!

Astrid

PS If you know someone who’s struggling to lose some weight, please share this article with him or her.

Astrid is the founder of SUE Amsterdam and The Behavioural Design Academy. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to nudge people into making positive choices in work, life, and play.

In two days of high-end master classes, we train people in unlocking the powerful principles of behavioural psychology and teach them our Behavioural Design Method™ that translates this knowledge into actionable skills to influence personal behaviour or the behaviour of customers, employees, family members or the general public.

Cover photo by Steve Rotman under creative commons license.

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Chief Behavioural Officer: It’s the new ‘must-have’ role

By All, Customer Behaviour

Step by step, behavioural economics, and psychological science have expanded their reach to become an established part of the business, policymaking, and regulation – for anyone seriously interested in both understanding and changing behaviour. And within marketing and market research, behavioural economics has become a required area of expertise and competency. We are now witnessing the next big step – the creation of the role of the Chief Behavioural Officer (CBO). This move will ensure that behavioural science has a voice at the highest level inside companies and institutions, a clear demonstration of the impact and value it is generating.

In this article, we look at how, within the last decade, this has become the new reality. We identify two main drivers and examine how behavioural science is increasingly being factored into everyday business, policy decisions, and common practice. First, though, we take a closer look at the trend of the CBO role and in-house behavioural insight teams.

Read the whole article

Author: Crawford Hollingworth
Published by: The Marketing Society UK
Date: 1 December 2014

 

Cover image by Thomas Angermann under Creative Commons License.

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How to win wars by influencing people’s behaviour

By All, Citizen Behaviour

When terrorism is staged for YouTube, and all sides are media-savvy, the military is turning to the behavioural sciences for help. In 1955 Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the project that developed the first atomic bomb, addressed the American Psychological Association. He warned that both physics and psychology could endanger humanity but that psychology “opens up the most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and how they think.” Despite Oppenheimer’s warning, the idea that you could change human behaviour to win a war, rather than winning a war to change human behaviour, languished as an also-ran in the cold war arms race. But as information technology has begun to globalize and behavioural science has entered the mainstream, there is an increasing move to put psychology at the center of military operations.

Read the whole article

Author: Vaughan Bell
Published in: The Guardian
Publishing date: 16 March 2014

Cover image by DVIDSHUB under Creative Commons License.

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Rediscovering the Unconscious

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

“When you try to answer a question,” said Kahneman, “you sometimes answer a different question.” In a seminal 1979 paper, he and Tversky described a series of experiments that questioned the classical economic assumption of “homo economicus,” a rational actor motivated by self-interest. In its place, they defined what they termed prospect theory, a description of the mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that guide people’s everyday decisions, as well as the systematic biases that could result from them. “A heuristic,” Kahneman explained, “is just answering a difficult question by answering an easy one.” When asked, for instance, the number of divorces at one’s university, one might substitute the question of how easy it is to think of examples of divorces, a heuristic Kahneman and Tversky dubbed “availability.” “Evaluation happens in a fraction of a second,” Kahneman said. Reflecting on this theory’s place in the history of psychology, he noted, “In the last 20 years, [psychologists] have rediscovered the unconscious…but it didn’t come from Freud. It came from experimental psychology.”

Read the whole article here

 

Cover image as published by Harvard Business Review.

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How to write a mission statement that doesn’t suck

By All, Customer Behaviour

Ever been trapped in long strategic sessions to create a mission statement? Why it’s so wrong isn’t even primarily that’s a complete waste of your time, but it is especially an influence failure waiting to happen from a human point of view. Using simple words doesn’t not only increase understanding, but it also increases trustworthiness. This video of Dan Heath is therefore so much more than about writing a mission statement. It’s about understanding how people process information, and how you can convince them.

Lenght of video 3.55 min. Published 16 September 2010.

 

Cover image book by Dan Heath ‘Made to Stick’.

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Rory Sutherland: Sweat the Small Stuff

By All, Customer Behaviour

This is a video we’ve watched over and over again. It’s a TED Talk by a personal hero of ours Rory Sutherland. In his talk, he holds a plea to sweat the small stuff. Quite a refreshing point of view in the marketing and advertising world that’s all about the big idea.

The cover image is taken from the TED. Video length 16.46 min. April 2010.

 

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Master the method and tools to change behaviour in our two-day masterclasses at the Behavioural Design Academy.
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