All Archives - Page 4 of 11 - SUE | Behavioural Design Academy

Our first Behavioural Design Hackathon

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Behavioural Science Insights

If we put five teams of Behavioural Design Academy alumni in a room together for five hours, could they create a solution for a problem that governments have been struggling with for years? That was the question on our mind when we kicked off our very first Behavioural Design Hackathon, last Friday. We’ll have to wait for the real results, but we’re convinced they got remarkably far.

Flip those tiles

Here is the problem, which was provided to us by the great City of Rotterdam.

“how do we get people to replace concrete tiles in their garden with grass or plants, to support climate adaptation and biodiversity in the city?”

Sounds straightforward, but the solution, the city has learned, is not. But it’s not for lack of trying. The City of Rotterdam has been really active. They’re providing one-off subsidies, there’s a ‘Tile-taxi’ to help people get rid of their discarded tiles, and there’s even a Dutch tile lifting championship, pitting the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam against each other. Not bad at all! Although there certainly has been a lot of progress, the city needs more acceleration to meet critical policy goals.

Solve it efficiently while you can

Big organisations such as governments can let problems like these float around for years. They are stuck in limbo between doing some good actions to tackle the problem but not going all-in and deliberately designing and executing a strategy to solve it.

It’s basically waiting for either a lucky eureka-moment by an involved professional or a sudden boost of urgency caused by some external event. To make matters worse, this usually results in an inefficient solution because it is only put into action to signal to angry voters (or customers) that it is being taken seriously. This results in spending an amount of money on an issue proportionate to the inflated problem perception.

So why wait till this external event shakes up the public and causes a rushed and inefficient solution? It is way smarter to deliberately design effective and efficient strategies while you can. We want to stay ahead of everybody else and tackle this problem right now.

New Formats

At SUE, we’re constantly experimenting with new ways to use our SUE | Behavioural Design Method© for the best way to effectively and efficiently solve wicked behavioural challenges. In many cases, that’s one of our Sprint propositions. Still, we’re increasingly discovering the potential of smaller formats such as a hackathon to serve as an accelerator of ongoing innovation processes. We’re getting great feedback on it from alumni of the Behavioural Design Academy who are experimenting with it in their organisations as well.

Getting it done

We firmly believe that being a behavioural designer is about a lot more than understanding the scientific theory and models that describe human behaviour – although that is an essential part of it. It is about developing the practical know-how to be able to navigate the reality of your organisation or business and design real-world interventions to real-world problems. It is about not just knowing what should be done, but about being able to actually get it done. Designing and leading the right process is a key part of that.

Get more detailed information.

Download our Behavioural design Sprint brochure telling you all about the ins and outs of the sprint in detail. Please feel free to contact us suppose you would like some more information. We gladly tell you all about the possibilities.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Little time, big yield

During the hackathon, the five teams were each able to very positively surprise the vice-mayor of Rotterdam Vincent Karremans. He took part as a jury member to judge how well the solutions could be applied in practice. With their solid analysis of the human perspective of the desired behaviour and the truly human-centered solutions they were able to come up with, each group did a great job presenting their behavioural design solution.

In conclusion

We could not be happier with the results of our first Hackathon. We will repeat this event every year to give our alumni’s the chance to keep their knowledge up-to-date and work on a solution to a real-life problem!

Vice mayor Vincent Karremans was also very impressed by the results the candidates made in such a short time.

“Although many of the ideas need further work in order to be successfully guided through the decision-making process of the city government, the breadth and cleverness of the yield of these mere five hours were fantastic.”

See you next year!

Tim Versnel

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.

10/11/2021

How to double hand washing in the office and stay friends

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Behavioural Science Insights

If there would be an easy and friendly way to significantly improve how well people in your office wash their hands between touching all of the common surfaces such as doorknobs, the coffee machine, and the fridge, would you want to have it? Then right on and get it. With compliments of the Dutch government.

The rules are back

You’ve heard it: the basic hygiene rules have been reintroduced by the government to suppress the spread of the virus. Two years ago people would’ve laughed uncomfortably at such a sentence. Right now, we all know what it means. Get tested and stay at home if you have symptoms, work from home if you can, wear a face mask in public places, keep your distance, cough in your elbow, and wash your hands. We can dream it, and the vast majority of us support and will conform to these norms – mostly.

Saying isn’t doing

Throughout the pandemic, the Dutch public health institute RIVM has kept track of public support of and compliance with the various norms. Its insightful dashboard shows that for most norms, support and compliance have differed significantly. For instance, 84 percent supports staying at home when having symptoms, but only 55 percent reports actually doing it. That’s a noteworthy difference, yet for behavioural designers, such a gap between intention and action would have been expected.

There’s one such disparity on the dashboard, however, that will take even the most experienced old fox among you by surprise.

“83 percent support washing hands in accordance with the guidelines, and a mere 32 percent actually do it.”

They just don’t

What makes this even more remarkable, is that none of the explanations which typically help us understand intent-action gaps are applicable. There are no obvious conflicting motivations, like when social jobs-to-be-done supersede the intention to stay at home with symptoms. There are no overwhelming practical problems: hands can be washed in every bathroom, toilet or pantry at no cost to the individual involved. And it doesn’t really involve resisting any kind of conflicting temptation.

People support it. They want to do it. They can do it. But they just don’t.

So – how do we change that?

The challenge

This is the challenge we were approached with by Majka van Doorn (who by the way happens to be an alumnus of our Behavioural Design Academy) and her team at DGSC-19, a Rijksoverheid-directorate focused on medium-term measures to suppress the spread of the virus, together with the RIVM. Hand washing is incredibly effective in reducing the spread of pathogens and is particularly important in office environments, where people touch many of the same surfaces. Whether elevator buttons, doorknobs, phones, coffee machines, fridges, food in the cafeteria, or copy machines; they’re all great for the spread of viruses when hand washing discipline is low. It’s obvious why the government would want to come up with an effective intervention, especially now more and more people have begun working at the office again. And boy, did we deliver.

In a custom Sprint that was set up to start creating and testing and get practical as quick as possible, we first rapidly worked our way through a truckload of reports on attempts in other countries to tackle the same behavioural challenge, dived in the available data on the Dutch situation, and filled up the Behavioural Design Canvas. In two creative sessions we then designed five intervention strategies that we thought should work, and with our partners from the Rijksoverheid we selected three of them to prototype with the target group. With some adjustments, the combination of the three appeared to be a comprehensive intervention strategy, and merited a full-scale field test to measure real effect on behaviour.

Download the SUE hand washing guide

The name SUE comes from the song 'a boy named SUE'. Sing the song while washing your hands the correct way!

Download the guide

Behavioural interventions

1. Reframing. The first element is to reframe hand washing. The framing that occurs naturally through the current public discourse is that hand washing is something you do to prevent becoming ill or spreading illness. If you’re not fearful of that, you might still consciously support the measure in general, but you won’t subconsciously be triggered to wash hands enough throughout a day yourself. And as most behaviour occurs automatic, this then simply won’t.

Using a tool that’s great to instantly test framing effects, we designed a set of thirteen posters that in a friendly way reframe hand washing and connect it with food and other peoples’ hands, and the simple message: nicer with clean hands. Each poster visualises a specific situation and should be placed contextually relevant.

2. Visual cues. The second element is to provide simple and clear visual cues, in the form of colourful stickers, that toilets are not just a place where you relieve yourself, but where you can also wash hands. If motivation and ability are high enough, then sometimes all that’s needed is a well designed and placed spark.

Morover, with another set of visual interventions we attempted to insert hand washing into the arriving-at-the-office sequence that for most people is very habitual. When you’re in the pantry to get coffee, first wash your hands. You’re there anyway.

Astoundingly effective

The field-test, which we set up in partnership with our partners from DGSC-19 and RIVM, in a government office building in Rotterdam consisted of a weeklong measurement before interventions were placed, and then a weeklong measurement within four testing conditions. Soap usage was used as a proxy for hand washing. And the results were astounding: hand washing increased with up to 165 percent, going from an average of 2,8 times hand washing per day to 7,4 times a day. And what’s more: test persons did not experience the interventions as annoying. In fact they found them very useful for other people. Great!

Get more detailed information.

Download our Behavioural design Sprint brochure telling you all about the ins and outs of the sprint in detail. Please feel free to contact us suppose you would like some more information. We gladly tell you all about the possibilities.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

In conclusion

These interventions clearly make a huge difference, and that just goes to show that don’t always need a big flashy campaign to change behaviour. You just need to find and hit the right nerve as simple as you can. And here’s the best thing: you’ll have to print ‘m yourself, but the posters and stickers are free for you to use.

One last thing: do make sure that there’s enough soap available. Your colleagues are gonna want it.

Tim Versnel

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.

03/11/2021

Conspiracy theories and the human psyche

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Behavioural Science Insights

Conspiracy theories are a puzzling testimony to several peculiarities of our brain and the inner workings of the human psyche. However, they are omnipresent and have accompanied us throughout history. Whether it is 9/11, moon landings, the murder of Kennedy, or Covid-19, key societal events have rarely escaped a certain ‘conspiracy appeal’. Although they have been around for centuries, the ease with which we can share them today has given conspiracy theories incredible traction. So, what makes conspiracy theories so appealing to some, why do people believe them, and is there a way to protect us from their potentially detrimental effects?

Misinformation or conspiracy?

Let’s clarify first, conspiracy theories might easily -but wrongly- be equated with misinformation. This however is not the same thing. Believing a Covid vaccine doesn’t work isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just being misinformed. For something to be a conspiracy there need to be two things. First, there need to be two or more people involved (conspirators) and second, they need to have a secret or hidden plot (the conspiracy). For instance, stating the Chinese government launched the covid-19 virus to be able to inject bio trackers in the population or claiming that the CIA was directly involved in the murder of Kennedy ‘is’ a conspiracy theory.

Such theories trigger numerous questions. Where do they come from, who benefits, which people are prone to fall for them and why do they do so? And even more importantly, how should we deal with these theories and their followers.

Evolution made us skeptical

Before we go into the psychology of conspiracy theories let’s look at this phenomenon through the lens of evolution theory. Evolution hardwired us to be at least a bit skeptic and doubtful. There is a very logical explanation for this: it is called natural selection. During our evolution as a species, we were confronted with many dangers. Now consider the effects of a false negative versus a false positive assessment. Imagine I wrongfully think there is a predator (false positive): in that case, my prudence wasn’t really needed but it didn’t do any harm either. Now consider the reverse situation. A false negative, thinking there wasn’t any danger, while there was a predator: this imprudent assessment got you killed. It therefore seems fair to presume that an overly naïve community that always gave it the benefit of the doubt would be rapidly decimated.

“As a species it seems, a certain level of distrust and skepticism pays off.”

It translates into an ongoing inclination to be on the lookout for hidden dangers or plots. It seems, at least biologically, sound. In addition, there HAVE been many exposed conspiracies. The abundant proof throughout history of conspiracy ploys adds support to the notion that the ‘idea’ IS plausible. After all, didn’t we learn afterwards that America had a weapon deal with Iran, that the Belgian government did impose false testimony on its journalists during the Chernobyl disaster or that Nixon did commit the Watergate fraud? History shows some skepticism is merited.

BONUS: free ebook 'Confirmation Bias: how to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'Confirmation Bias: how to convince someone who believes the 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.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Three forces that drive conspiracy theories

1. Cognitive bias

To complicate matters further our human psyche adds three additional forces that trigger us to take conspiracies seriously. The first component has to do with our desire -but limited ability– to understand the world we live in. We have developed several psychological short cuts to help us makes some sense of the world around us, but these mechanisms can bias our reasoning too. Some of our shortcuts lead us to fall far conspiracy ploys.

For instance, our proportionality bias makes us believe that big events need to have big causes. And our intentionality bias leads us to look for cause, meaning, and intent, also when it isn’t there.

To make things worse, our species is particularly tuned to look for patterns: it’s all connected, man! This desire to understand, pushes us towards narratives that provide meaning. An interesting narrative that satisfies our inner need to grasp the complexity of our lives is too attractive to ignore.

2. Group psychology

Group psychology adds another layer of appeal. Having something interesting to share within the in-group makes a person more valued and prominent. This attention-seeking behavior has been linked with an inclination towards narcissism (both on the individual as on collective levels). Clearly, social motives play a big part in the distribution of conspiracy ploys: remember for instance the appeal of the (false) proposition that there weren’t any Jews killed in the 9/11 attacks, a conspiracy rationale that was particularly prominent in Muslim communities.

3. The need to belong

And finally, several existential anxieties drive people to believe conspiracy ploys. We have a strong need to belong and feel at home. We define the world in terms of similarities and differences, in-crowds, and foreigners. Low-status groups tend to believe their position is a direct consequence of conspiracies of other groups. They regularly attribute their lesser position to a master plan of the outgroup to keep them oppressed.

“People that feel disconnected from society or experience a lack of agency and power, therefore, tend to be particularly sensitive for conspiracy thinking.”

In that respect, it is likely that the Qanon followers and the ‘deplorables’ that voted on Trump all shared a sense of loss of control over their lives and prosperity. Conspiracy theories have therefore also been called ‘the theories of the losers’ and it is indeed the case that many conspiracy theories focus on the ‘adversaries’ that happen to be in power.

How to debunk conspiracies?

Having now established that we have existential, social, complex, historical, and biological reasons to at least consider conspiracies it is no wonder they are so difficult to deal with. In fact, we still haven’t figured out how to counter them successfully. For now, we must satisfice with understanding what doesn’t work.

A route that has been often tried and failed, is the route of confrontational counter-argumentation. This route can even be counterproductive. For the believers, it only strengthens their belief in cover-ups. They only see the conspiracy at work. To make things worse their doubt and skepticism gets widened public coverage and exposure which more likely fuels the appeal of the group even more as well as that it serves as an ego-booster for (narcissistic) members that smelled a stage and fifteen seconds of fame. The public domain is the perfect yeast for a conspiracy theory and counter-argumentation in the public debate will prove of little avail.

It, therefore, seems better to tackle the problem from within. To debate and question the proof and facts within the believers’ community, to join their platforms, and to debate on their ground. That isn’t so easy. It requires at least a minimal amount of empathy for the conspiracy believers and a genuine interest in their facts, data, and rationale.

Want to learn how to apply behavioural science in practice?

Then the Fundamentals Course is perfect for you! You'll catch up on the latest behavioural science insights and will be handed tools and templates to translate these to your daily work right away. Learning by doing. We have created a brochure that explains all the ins and outs of the Fundamentals Course; feel free to download it here.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

In conclusion

Clearly, it will not be a route with fast results. But in my opinion, it is one of a few feasible routes that have some chance of success. Meet them on their ground, empathize with their case and gradually probe and question their facts. You might even be surprised! Sometimes, as history has proven, … they could be right…!

Yves Plees

As managing director of Sue Behavioural Design, it is my firm belief that solutions for the world’s challenges can’t solely come from technological innovation but need to take human psychology and social behaviors into account. With my work and writings, I hope to contribute to this view.

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.

29/10/2021

The forces that shape behaviour change

By Tom de BruyneAll, Behavioural Science Insights

In this blog, I want to explore the different forces that shape behaviour change. Whenever you want to design a strategy that aims at changing behaviour, you have to ask yourself three questions:

Macro-forces: What are the trends I can tap into?
Meso-forces: What are the needs I can tap into?
Micro-forces: What are the biases I can tap into?

1. The macro forces: What are the trends I can tap into?

The world is changing at an accelerating speed. It took only 66 years between the first flight of the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong, setting the first step on the moon in 1969. It only took 30 years for China to transform from a developing country into the biggest economy in the world. The iPhone is only 14 years old, kickstarting an era of ubiquitous access to knowledge, services, social capital and radical new ideas for commerce, creating companies like Uber, Netflix and Amazon.com. Over the past few decades, China alone has lifted hundreds of millions of citizens to become part of the middle class. And middle-class people want stability and want to consume, travel and be entertained.

These macro forces have an enormous impact on behaviour change.

If you want to introduce an innovative offering into the market, it matters a lot if you’re able to tap into these trends.

If you are Carsharing company Sharenow, it matters a lot if you can tap into a big inner-city market of people who don’t own a car and feel perfectly comfortable hiring and unlocking one with their smartphone. What seemed unfamiliar five years makes perfect sense today. We’ve seen an interesting trend in the Netherlands during COVID of families leaving the metropolitan cities and moving into the countryside or smaller communities. This trend is an exciting opportunity to tap into e-bikes and electric cars. Another emerging trend that COVID accelerates is that every entrepreneur is thinking hard about designing the optimal environment for combining physical presence with distributed working.

When you think about introducing a new product or service into the market, it’s vital to understand the trends. Successful innovators understand that demographic, technological, cultural and economic trends generate new opportunities.

2. Meso-Forces: What are the needs I can tap into?

The second category of forces that shape behaviour are needs and motivations. They drive behaviour in unconscious yet essential ways. All of us have deeply rooted desires: The desire for love, recognition, competence, social status, belonging, adventure, purpose, protection and excitement. Every brand in the world taps into these deeper needs:

BMW taps into the desire to project masculinity and social status
Volvo taps into the desire for security and protection
Beer brands all tap into the desire for friendship and connection
Business schools tap into the desire for competence and social status.

There’s a saying in Silicon valley that every successful tech company taps into one of the seven deadly sins. Understanding these drivers, motivations or Jobs-to-be-Done is essential for designing interventions for behavioural change. If you can’t tap into an existing desire, your intervention will probably fail. The Behavioural Design Canvas is a great tool to uncover these forces.

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

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!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

3. Micro-Forces: What are the biases I can tap into?

The third category of behavioural forces is micro-forces. Let’s suppose you uncovered a behavioural trend (say: middle classes flock to cities in hordes and can’t afford a car). You also crafted a proposition that taps into a deep desire (e.g. you offer luxury electric vans to go on weekend trips in the countryside to fulfil the desire for adventure and social status).

The big question from a behavioural change perspective is now: How do I trigger people to buy what I’m offering?

To become successful, you will need to find ways to get people to see the message, boost the motivation to try it, reduce doubts and uncertainties and make it as easy and frictionless as possible to order it. In the case of our electric van, you will boost motivation through social proof, reduce anxiety by demonstrating the comfort of sleeping in the vehicle in a demo video or guaranteeing 24/7 support, including insurance. You might want to look for hot trigger moments and advertise on billboards near busy roads, where traffic jams increase people’s motivation for escapism.

For this layer, a great tool to think about designing interventions is our SWAC-tool. In the SWAC-model you will find many principles from the science of influence to spark behaviour (S), to boost the desire to want (W) something, to help people to be able, so they can do it (C), and make them do it again and again (A).

Summary

Designing a strategy for behavioural change requires you to think in three layers. True innovators tap into emerging trends. They see where the puck is going. They also understand the psychological needs that drive behavioural change. And they take great detail in figuring out the details to get people actually to change their behaviour.

Tom De Bruyne

Cover visual by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

BONUS: free ebook 'How to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to convince someone who believes the 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.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

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.

07/10/2021

How to convince more people to get vaccinated

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Citizen Behaviour

Suppose that the national government comes to you and asks you to devise a campaign to encourage unvaccinated people to get their jab: How would you go about it? For many agencies, this would be a dream job. I think the current “I’m doing it for” campaign is fine: “I’m doing it so we can party again”, “I’m doing it so I can visit my grandmother again”. The campaign tries to provide people with arguments to overcome their doubts about the jab by replacing the abstract long-term effect of vaccination with a practical and relevant short-term benefit. Textbook behavioural economics.

Persuading someone is not rational

But what do you do with the last group that we cannot persuade to cross the finish line? I have interviewed several people over the past few weeks. A first striking observation is that most of these people have perfectly reasonable arguments not to do it. They have made a choice not to trust the vaccine for now. They do not deny the danger of COVID-19, but they are quite confident that the chances of them getting very ill themselves are small. Each of them has their concerns about the possible adverse effects of the vaccine.

What they are not interested in are people who try to convince them with counter-arguments. Attacking their arguments feels like a personal attack against them. And since so many people have already tried, they have had plenty of practice setting up a line of defence to explain and defend their choices. The harder you push them, the more they become defensive. This, by the way, is the most important lesson in the psychology of behavioural change.

You cannot convince someone with rational arguments if they have not yet decided to be convinced.

BONUS: free ebook 'How to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to convince someone who believes the 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.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Context can justify decision making

Another golden rule in behavioural change is that motivation follows convenience. I eat vegetarian, but I make exceptions very easily at restaurants because the vegetarian options sometimes require too much sacrifice in terms of culinary enjoyment. Put me in this choice context, and I can justify my behavioural change without blinking an eye.

We see the same thing happening everywhere concerning vaccination. More and more people who were very sceptical about the jab have ended up taking it because they no longer want to deal with the hassle involving travelling, going out and everything else that makes life fun. Did that change their minds? Not at all. They still have grave doubts. But all the hassle has altered the question they unconsciously answer: Are my objections worth that much that I am willing to make my life that difficult? For some people, the answer is a resounding yes. They are prepared to bear the consequences of their choices, and we must respect that. But for many others, this change of context is reason enough to gamble with their objections and have the jab.

To conclude, there are different reasons why certain people will not get vaccinated. However, the way we approach these individuals should not be with rational arguments to change their minds. Those who are sceptical should not be motivated to change their point of view. But perhaps the hassle of upcoming restrictions for those who are not vaccinated can be motivation enough for people to get their jab.

Tom De Bruyne

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.

23/09/2021

What is Behavioural Design

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Behavioural Science Insights, Citizen Behaviour, Customer Behaviour, Employee behaviour, Personal Behaviour

This blog post is an extended introduction to Behavioural Design. You will get a clear idea about what it is, how you can use it in your professional and personal life to influence minds and shape behaviour, and what you could do to learn more about it. Moreover, this blog post is the perfect entry to most other blogposts we published on the SUE Behavioural Design website.

1. Behavioural Design is about influence

How do you influence minds and shape behaviours? How do you change other people’s, as well as your behaviours? How do you help people to make better decisions? Isn’t it strange that the majority of all of our behaviours and communication aims at influencing other people? Yet, at the same time, we have no clue about the principles and laws that govern influence?

Behavioural Design is a systematic understanding of how people think and how they make decisions. This understanding forms the basis of thinking about interventions that lead to behavioural change. Maybe you want to influence the behaviour of your partner or children. You might want to influence your colleagues or managers. Some people like to develop a healthy habit for themselves or want to live a more sustainable life. Maybe you want to influence customer behaviour or win elections. No matter what the subject is, you can all think of them as a behavioural design challenge.

So what is Behavioural Design? The most pragmatic definition of Behavioural Design we came up with so far is the following:

Behavioural Designers combine Psychology, Design, Technology, and Creative Methods to find out why people do the things they do and to figure out through experimentation how to activate them to change their behaviour.

2. Behavioural Design is a method

The best way to think about Behavioural Design is to think of it as the combination of Design Thinking with the Science of Influence. Design Thinking is the method through which designers solve problems. Designers start with empathy. Through interviews and observations, they try to “fall in love with the problem”: Why do people do what they do and where could we spot opportunities for improvement? This insight phase forms the groundwork for creativity. First, designers develop as many ideas as possible, and then they prototype the most promising ones. They take the prototypes back to the real world and test them with real people to learn and observe how the prototype influences the targeted behaviour. Design Consultancy Ideo, the godfathers of Design Thinking, explain the process like this:

When you combine the method of design thinking with behavioural science, you will get design thinking on steroids or Behavioural Design Thinking. Because a better understanding of human psychology you will get:

1) Better insights into why people do what they do;
2) Better ideas on where to look for solutions;
3) Better prototypes, because you will have a much sharper understanding of what specific behavioural outcome you’re designing for.

At SUE the essence of what we do is to train the Behavioural Design Method© at our Behavioural Design Academy and at in-company training and we run the Behavioural Design Method© in Behavioural Design Sprints together with our clients.

More about Behavioural Design as method:

Would you like to power up your team or project with behavioural intelligence?

Feel free to contact us. We are happy to tell you more about our consultancy or academy. Helping you innovate, transform or grow levering insights from behavioural science in practice.

Contact us

No worries, no strings attached!

3. The ethics of Behavioural Design

Behavioural Design is dark wisdom. The difference between positive influence and manipulation is a very fragile line. In the end, we have to be aware that Behavioural Design is about using deliberate action and techniques to influence the behaviour of the other in the direction you want.

The problem is that those who want to design for good quite often feel bad about using dark forces. Whereas those who use this dark wisdom to manipulate and mislead are usually much more motivated, advanced, and have fewer scruples about its application. Think about how extreme-right populists exploit fear and uncertainty, or think about how technology companies use our vanities and our desire for social recognition and belonging to the extent that it leads to (social media) addiction.

The world of interaction design is full of “dark patterns“, which are manipulative ways to present choices to us in such a way that they manipulate us into making a specific decision, whether we want it or not.

At SUE, we are very sensitive to this ethical component. We even encoded it in our mission. The SUE mission is “to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life and play”. Our point of departure for designing interventions for behavioural change always starts with the question, “How might we help people to make better choices? Moreover, how could we create products, services, and experiences to contribute to helping people achieve their goals or dreams? Our commitment to this mission is sacred, even to the point that we refuse to accept work that doesn’t match this mission. You can find more about this way of thinking below at “5. Outside-in Thinking“.

More on the ethical side of Behavioural Design:

4. Behavioural Design is about designing choices

Multiple levels of influence
In a certain sense, the term ‘Behavioural Design’ is a little bit misleading. Behavioural change is the outcome we aim for when we design an intervention. When we want to achieve this outcome, we need to create interventions on multiple levels at the same time:

Design attention: How do you make sure something catches people’s attention?
Trigger curiosity: How do you get people to invest time and mental energy to learn more about what you want from them?
Change the perception: how do you get something to stand out as the attractive option between other choices? How do you design the desired perception?
Design the experience: How do you get someone to have a positive feeling? How can you reduce stress or uncertainty?
Trigger the behaviour: How do you trigger the desired behaviour? How can you increase the chance of success that people act upon your trigger?
Change habits: How can you get people to sustain the behaviour? Most behaviours require much more than a one-time action. Think about saving, living healthy, exercising, recycling, collaborating, etc.

Thinking fast and slow

This simple list of influence levels teaches us that:

Behavioural Design is all about how we design choices and how we present those choices.

Behavioural Design has everything to do with human decision-making and how the brain works. The cornerstone of human decision-making is the masterpiece “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Kahneman and Tversky. This book – awarded with the Noble Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 – is the fascinating journey of the collaboration between two Israeli psychologists and their discoveries of how the mind works. This book is the ultimate work on thinking about thinking.

Kahneman and Tversky discovered that about 96% of our thinking is automatic and unconscious. Our brain is making most of the decisions for us by taking shortcuts – which they call heuristics -, with the goal of not having to invoke the 4% bandwidth of our slow, rational brain. In a way:

Influencing behaviour comes down to helping people to decide without having to think. Because the more we need to think about something, the more stress we get, the less we end up making choices.

Since 2018, we now have a second psychologist in the ranks of noble prize winners. Richard Thaler built upon the work of Kahneman and Tversky and zoomed in on how to make use of System 1-System2 thinking to nudge people into better decision-making in wealth, health, and happiness.

Our hard-wired tendency to persuade

When it comes to our attempts to influence minds and shape behaviours, our biggest fallacy is that we always tend to persuade the other with rational arguments. The problem with persuasion is two-fold:

Persuasion evokes system 2-thinking, and we don’t like that. When you try to persuade someone, you want them to think about your argument. Thinking complicates things.
System 2 is the little slave of system 1: we only accept rational arguments or facts when they align with how we already think about matters. You can only persuade someone who’s already convinced.

The real challenge is to make a decision making extremely easy. More about designing choices:

Want to learn how to design behaviour?

Join our two-day Fundamentals Course and master a hands-on method to use behavioural science to develop ideas that change minds and shape behaviour.

Check out the course

Join the 1.500 forward-thinking professionals who already graduated!

5. Behavioural Designers think ‘outside-in’

When we try to influence minds and shape behaviour, the most common mistake we make is to think inside-out. We take the benefits of our product or service as our point of departure, and we try to figure out how we could pitch those benefits so that people would realize the value of what we have to offer. Behavioural Designers work the other way around.

We take the human behind the customer as our focal point, and we try to figure out what this human needs to be successful.

Which anxieties, doubts, prejudices or bad habits he holds stand in the way of embracing the desired behaviour or which pains or frustrations we could solve for him.

The SUE | Influence Framework©

We developed the SUE | Influence Framework© as a tool to do outside-in thinking systematically,. This model brings all the forces to the surface that influence the behaviour of the people for whom we need to design interventions. The Influence Framework© consists of five questions we need to answer to understand why people do what they do and how to get them to act:

Job-To-Be-Done: What is the underlying goal for which people would have to embrace the new behaviour? How might we align the desired behaviour with goals that matter to them?
Pains: What are possible frustrations and pains in their current behaviour, for which we need to come up with a solution?
Gains: What are the benefits we have, compared with their current solutions?
Anxieties: What are anxieties, doubts, prejudices or other barriers that prevent someone from embracing the new behaviour?
Habits: Which habits keep them locked in their current behaviour?

Finding the answers to these questions will provide you with a blueprint of where to spot opportunities for behavioural change. In this video, you can find a brief explainer of the SUE | Influence Framework©.

More about outside-in thinking:

Three Cardinal Sins against Customer-Centricity in Finance
Clayton Christensen explaining Job-to-be-done Thinking (the famous Milkshake example)

6. Behavioural Designers work with principles from the science of influence

The next step in the Behavioural Design Method© is about turning a deep understanding of the forces that explain people’s behaviours, into ideas for behavioural change. These are two different games. Whereas the SUE | Influence Framework© uncovers the unconsciousness of people, is this part about applying principles from the science of influence to come up with solutions on how to change behaviour. We have developed a helpful tool for this: the SUE | SWAC Tool©:

It is foremost a very easy-to-use tool. It explains which four pieces of the puzzle you need to solve to create a context that will persuade someone into doing something and to have them keep doing it. What makes the tool so easy to use in practice, is that anytime you want to design for behavioural change, all you have to do is ask yourself four simple questions:

How can we make sure someone WANTS to perform the new behaviour?
How can we make sure someone CAN perform the new behaviour?
How can we SPARK new behaviour at the moments that matter?
How can we activate this new behaviour AGAIN and again?

When the new behaviour does not happen, at least one of those four elements is missing. The most important implication of this is that by using the SUE | SWAC Tool^© as a guide you can quickly identify what stops people from performing the behaviours that you seek.

If a sufficient degree of capability (CAN) to perform a behaviour is matched with the willingness (WANT) to engage in that behaviour, all that is then needed for the behaviour to occur is to set someone into action (SPARK) at the Moments that Matter.

Maybe you notice that in the tool it says moments that matter. Not one moment, but moments. As we learned, behavioural change doesn’t happen overnight. Most of the times someone needs to be reminded of the desired behaviour more than once for it to happen in the first place. Furthermore, behaviour becomes easier when repeated. Therefore, we have to make sure we SPARK someone AGAIN and again to activate the desired behaviour. So, you need to design several interventions at multiple moments that matter. In practice your intervention strategy will look something like this:

The objective of most intervention strategies is to not only to change behaviour, but to change this new behaviour into a routine behaviour (a habit), so the new behaviour will stick.

Often your desired behaviour is new behaviour for people and that’s why it is important to spark behaviour AGAIN and again. Only then the behaviour will take place, as illustrated above as the BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE THRESHOLD. When your objective is to design repeat behaviour, it almost goes without saying that you have to make sure the desired behaviour is performed repeatedly. If you can make someone perform new behaviour over and over AGAIN, it can become automatic.

7. Behavioural Designers research, prototype, test

The more familiar you get with how the brain works and how influence works, the more you become aware that human behaviour obeys a different kind of logic than formal logic. Rory Sutherland calls this “psycho-logic” in his brilliant book Alchemy.

The way people make decisions is highly context-sensitive. These decisions are full of stories they tell themselves and full of irrational beliefs they hold. Furthermore, even the slightest difference in how something is framed can dramatically affect how people perceive the meaning. When an English native speaker says they think something is “interesting”, it usually means precisely the opposite. Whereas a non-native Dutch audience would think “interesting” means what they think it means.

The importance of doing the research yourself

That’s why research and prototyping are so important. Before you come up with an idea for behavioural change, you first need to fall in love with the problem. You observe or interview humans and try to put yourself in their shoes. You’ll be surprised about how many thoughts and beliefs you hold are projections of your limited worldview onto the world of the target audience you want to influence.

Prototyping and testing are all about finding out which variation of your intervention has the highest potential to design perception, attention, curiosity, experience, behaviour or habit. Even with the clearest of insights, you can still develop an intervention that ultimately misses its desired effect. What you thought your intervention was supposed to trigger sometimes triggers the exact opposite.

More about prototyping and testing:

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

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!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

8. Domains of Behavioural Design

The number of applications for Behavioural Design is endless. Because in the end, most of the things we do as humans aim at influencing the behaviour of others. You can apply it from managing teams to the design of products. Or from getting people to buy products to changing the way they perceive a service or experience. And from the creation of financial habits, personal habits and healthy habits till the raising of children. At SUE, we’re particularly fascinated by six specific domains for behavioural change:

customer behaviour (product, marketing, sales)
citizen behaviour (government/society)
financial behaviour (financial independence)
voter behaviour (politics and government)
self-improvement (personal development)
team-behaviour (organisational design)

Most of our blogs and our weekly newsletter “Behavioural Design Digest” is about one of these topics.

9. Start to learn more about Behavioural Design

Now you have a deeper understanding about what Behavioural Design and how you can apply the Behavioural Design Method to influence minds and shape behaviour, there’s a couple of next steps you can take to learn more about the method:

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter Behavioural Design Digest, in which we take a closer look at how influence works in daily life.
Subscribe to one of the upcoming editions of our Behavioural Design Academy courses and master the SUE | Behavioural Design Method© to create next-generation, people-centred products, services, campaigns or policies.
Book in-company training for your team and learn the method while applying it to a critical business challenge for your organisation.
Hire SUE to run a Behavioural Design Sprint to fast-track your innovation, transformation or growth by leveraging behavioural science to develop people-centred products, services, campaign or policies with an evidence-based approach.
Book SUE for a keynote or workshop (contact us).
Check or frequently asked questions and discover answers to questions you didn’t even know you had.

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.

31/07/2021

How to manage a company is a Behavioural Design challenge

By Tom de BruyneAll, Employee behaviour

I have been a full-time entrepreneur for ten years. I can’t say it was my destiny to become one. I somewhat stumbled into it. My dad was a truck driver, and my mom is – to this date – the longest selling Tupperware saleswoman in Europe. And my academic career – A Master in Clinical Psychology – didn’t point in the entrepreneurial direction either. It was a moment of hybris that pulled the trigger for us. One day, about ten years ago, Astrid and I concluded an argument with our former employer in a bar with the words: “…In that case, we’ll quit”. ; The terrifying impact of that impulsive decision only daunted us on the way back home. We had no idea on how to run a company.

Why we sucked at it

In those ten years, we had to learn how to build and manage a company. And for quite some time, we sucked at it—big time. We were geeks and strategic planners. We figured out how to sell projects and get the work done with a growing staff, but we had no clue what we needed to build a healthy company and high-performance team culture. We were both exhausting our staff and ourselves. We made all the classic startup failures of working too much inside the company instead of working on the company’s growth. We would win a big project, work day and night to finish it, only to realise that we didn’t spend time on marketing or sales in the meantime. Nearly every entrepreneur has probably gone through this manic-depressive cycle between euphoria and despair.

The Behavioural Design Challenge

It was only gradually and with much great coaching that we realised that we needed to approach the company as behavioural designers: We needed to figure out which desired behaviours lead to our desired outcomes. We needed to figure out the deeper needs – or Jobs-to-be-Done – of our staff and clients. We had to remove obstacles that prevent the desired behaviours from happening. And we needed to trigger successful behaviours, turn them into habits and hope that these habits would compound.

Let me share some of the behavioural insights that helped us transform SUE from a startup to a healthy scaleup. (read further below the banner)

Want to find out how behavioural science can amplify your impact?

Please contact us for a 'Sixty with SUE': an hour of non-binding advice in which we can see how we can use Behavioural Design to tackle your project challenge or strategic problem.

Book a 'Sixty'

Go ahead, it is free and there are no strings attached!

1. Understanding our client’s Job-to-be-Done

Our clients don’t want behavioural design; they want a successful outcome. They hope for evidence that their new product or service will work. They want a breakthrough in understanding how to connect with their customers. They want a validated strategy to shape the behaviour of their target audience. They are looking for ways to persuade their stakeholders with insights into how real customers reacted to their offering. Some clients want their whole team to use the behavioural design framework as a shared language for understanding their customers. Understanding the jobs they have in their company for hiring us was the key to designing our offering.

2. Understanding our Staff’s Job-to-be-Done

The people who work for SUE dedicate their talent, time, energy, and creativity to our company. They work incredibly hard to create wow experiences for our clients. In the meantime, they have to deal with creative uncertainty, manage group dynamics, and design and test interventions. That’s quite demanding. For that, they expect something in return from us: respect, belonging, recognition, adventure, protection, growth, excitement, purpose. Only when we do a decent job fulfilling these needs can they feel free, confident, and inspired to do great work. The moments we have everything exactly right are scarce, but we work hard to fulfil these basic needs. Without their talent, energy and dedication, there would be no SUE.

3. Make desired behaviour easy

Two of the best decisions we ever made were to standardise our process and transform our know-how into a method. We have three training formats and three sprint formats. That’s it. These interventions make it far easier to train our staff; it allows us to scale up when needed, contributing to higher quality output. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, the only thing we need to focus on is the creative output. The rest is taken care of by the Behavioural Design Sprint process. Contrary to what most people think, a well-designed process is a rocket engine for creativity.

4. Design a growth habit

The final behavioural design intervention is the design of a growth habit. A growth habit is a disciplined, rhythmic way of working on the four pillars of a healthy organisation: 1) satisfied customers, 2) healthy business metrics, 3) Motivated staff, and 4) future proof roadmap. We now use these four pillars as the basic structure for our weekly Management Team meeting. We assess where we should improve and set up actions to move the needle in the right direction.

To commit to a growth habit is something we’ve been struggling with for too long. In the early startup phase, it’s hard to be disciplined when you’re playing ten different roles. But gradually, we learned that – just like with getting in shape – building a disciplined growth habit is the key to running a great company.

Would you like to power up your team with Behavioural Intelligence?

If your team misses Behavioural Design skills, be sure to check out our in-company training. Bringing your talent up-to-speed with the latest in behavioural science and teaching them hands-on methods and tools to apply this in practice right away. Tailormade to your organisation.

Check out in-company training

PS. We've trained many teams already! From leadership to project teams.

The difference between economics and behavioural economics

Okay, I admit this sounds vague without any background. Basically, it comes down to a difference in paradigm on decision-making between economists and psychologists that gave birth to a beautiful cross-over between the two: behavioural economics (also known as behavioural psychology). What is it all about?

Let’s start with a problem we have probably all faced. Many new products, ventures, policies or innovations of any kind fail because they don’t take a deep understanding of human decision-making into account. They are inside-out, not inside-in driven. Therefore, innovations are often technological high-end, make things more cost-effective or offer different unique selling points, but they don’t start at the end. How do people choose for your offering? What psychological effects does pricing have? What’s, is the impact of social influence? Does the way we display products or frame policies affect decision-making? Which unconscious psychological forces influence our decision-making? Do those forces make objective sense?

According to an economist, the answer is:

Decision-making is rational.
People make a cost-benefit analysis.
The utility is a critical driver of any choice we make.

However, if you have ever had any regret after purchase or not making a purchase, you know that economist rule out one crucial factor: emotion. Emotions from within and emotions attached to what we think others think or expect from us. We are not 100% rational (or econs); we are filled with emotions and sometimes make decisions that are a far cry from most optimal for ourselves or our future.

Behavioural economics put emotions into the economic equation.

Bounded rationality: critical concept of behavioural economics

Furthermore, economists propose people always have all information at hand to make informed decisions. But is that true? First of all, we are bombarded with information all day long via multiple channels and media. No sane person can process all this rationally. Secondly, do we truly have all information to make informed decisions, for example, about our future? This is where we really have to make crucial decisions, after all. Buying an ice cream is not so hard but deciding upon your mortgage or pension plan is a whole different ballgame. Do you have all the information at hand to make a 100% rational decision here?

For example, do you know exactly your income level in 5, 10 or 15 years? Do you know what the inflation ratio will be in the same periods? Do you know what your health level will be like? Will you be able to work full-time, part-time or be out of work?

Rationality requires completeness of information, computational abilities, consistency in decision-making and cognitive skills (ability to think through a problem unemotionally). No human scores 100% on all these factors. So, what do we do when faced with a decision? We rely on short-cuts and social cues in our context and past experiences. We are only human, after all.

Taking the human, so-called bounded-rational part of us into the decision equation is what behavioural economics is all about.

Behavioural economists have researched and unlocked these human tendencies for years. Behavioural Designers take this behavioural science to design environments that help shape positive behaviours and choices of people. In fact, by using the exact science and combining it with design and creativity, we can create tangible products, services, policies, or organisations that help people make better decisions for their health, wealth and happiness.

Behavioral Design is applied behavioural economics.

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

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!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Behavioural economics: a game of choice architecture

One final note: How can we design environments that shape positive behaviours and better choices? Often, we think we need disclosure. Make sure you provide people with all the required information to help them make their informed decision. Unfortunately, that again is an econ approach to matters. Even if you help people with the information they need for a particular decision, we as humans often don’t use it. Most of the times, we know what is good for us but don’t act upon it.

For example, we all know exercising is good for us, and I guess we have all made a plan to do some form of exercise one day or the other, but most of us either started and stopped or are still procrastinating. This is known as the planning-action gap or intention-action gap. This is not new, of course, as we see in general three tools being applied to get humans into action:

Restrictions (you cannot buy alcohol under the age of 18)
Incentives (if your child attends school five days a week, you will get more child support)
Selling (convincing people by telling them about benefits or USPs)

Behavioural Designers use another tool: choice architecture. We take humans and a deep understanding of their decision-making processes as a starting point to design a context that triggers better choices and behaviours. We do it using our SUE | Behavioural Design Method^©, a highly structured, practical approach to turn human insights into strategies and ideas that influence better choices and shape positive behaviours. Basically, turning the breakthrough science of human behaviour into practical applications. What this results in, you can check out on our success stories page.

Summary: What’s behavioural economics all about

For now, I just want to wrap it up with the three things to remember when designing better choices and behaviours:

You are dealing with humans, not econs
Humans use cues in their context to make decisions
You need to be aware of the intention-action gap

Taking these three principles as starting point already jumpstarts you in thinking as a behavioural designer. And understanding what all the fuss about behavioural economics is about (and how important it is to get a grip on success).

Astrid Groenewegen

Cover visual by Red with the Red Hat on Unsplash.

BONUS: free ebook 'Behavioural Economics: the Basics'

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'Behavioural Economics: the basics'. 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.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

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.

15/05/2021

How to make better financial decisions: mental accounting

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Behavioural Science Insights

Did you know we treat money differently depending on where it comes from, where it is kept, or how we label it? In this blog post, I want to introduce you to the concept of mental accounting. A fascinating psychological phenomenon affecting many of our financial behaviours, such as the way we spent and save money or value things for which we’ve paid money. Understanding more about mental accounting could help us design better financial decisions and behaviours. And understand why some people seem to make financial decisions that don’t always seem to make sense or be in their best interest.

Mental accounting: How humans violate the economic theory

Why mental accounting is so fascinating is that it simply explains why 1 euro isn’t always 1 euro. From an economic theory perspective, this might sound foolish. The value of 1 euro and another euro on the same day is equal. We have a whole international money rate system in place that can tell you the exact worth of your euro at any precise point in time. In four digits. Also, economists believe that it shouldn’t matter if you have a 100-euro banknote or five 20-euro banknotes. It is the same amount of money, and you will spend it the same way; after all, they are exchangeable. However, psychological research has shown that humans often violate this rational approach to money.

This works may be easiest explained by an example described in the landmark paper of Richard Thaler (1), the author of the influential book ‘Nudge‘ and a Nobel prize laureate. Let’s say you have bought a ticket to a concert and it cost you 50 euros. You made your way to the concert venue, you have dressed up nicely, you have arranged a babysitter, and if you say so yourself: you look good. You are more than ready for the evening out that you have anticipated for weeks. You get to the entrance, reach into your pocket to find out that you have seemed to have lost your ticket. After going through all the stages of grief: denial, pain, anger, depression, acceptance, finally, hope kicks in as you see the ticket booth is still open. You quickly head over to the ticket booth to find out you don’t get your ticket reimbursed but have to pay another 50-euro for a new ticket, which is luckily still available.

Okay, same scenario, but just a bit different. You want to see that same concert, again you dress up nicely, sprayed on a bit of cologne because it is a special night out, after all, the same babysitter is there to attend to your kids, and you head over to the concert venue. When you go over to the ticket booth to buy yourself a ticket, you realise the 50-euro banknote you had put in your pocket to pay for the ticket fell out. After almost panicky going through all your pockets, reality sinks in. The 50 euros are gone. Luckily, the time tickets are still available; you have to get out another 50 euros to buy the ticket.

The interesting question is would you do so in both situations? From an economist perspective, the exact same situation: You have lost 50 euros, and you have to pay another 50 euros to attend the concert. So, there shouldn’t be a difference in the decision you make. However, Thaler’s research found that people in the first scenario are far more likely not to buy a second ticket, whereas people in the second scenario do.

If you lose cash, it turns out you’re willing to buy a ticket. If you lose a ticket, you do not want to buy a second ticket.

Would you like to know more?

We have created a brochure telling you all about the details of the Behavioural Design Sprint. Such as the set-up, the investment, the time commitment, and more. Please, feel free to contact us any time should you have any further questions. We are happy to help!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

Mental accounting: What is it, and how do people do it?

Mental accounting explains this story. What is mental accounting? It is the idea that people tend to label money. And the moment you label money differently, it gets spent differently.

People tend to label money. And the moment you label money differently, it gets spent differently.

So, how do people mentally account? Well, there are several different ways in which people put money into different psychological categories:

You could mentally account by purpose. You can allocate money to a specific product or service, or objective. This is what happened with the concert ticket. It was assigned to the concert, losing the ticket felt we had lost out on the concert in our mental account. You think you are already in the ‘red’. You are not going to make it worse by spending even more money on the same product. But allocating money to savings is another way to mentally account by purpose.
You could mentally account by time. You could say I will spend X amount per week or budget that many euros each month.
You could mentally account as a function of how you have earned money. If you have put in many hours of hard work to make your money, you will spend it differently if you have earned it by winning a lottery.

Mental accounting: The sunk cost effect

Let’s take a look at another way mental accounting influences our behaviour. Let’s get back to the concert. Let’s say you have the ticket, only this time there is a difference in how you acquired that ticket. In the first scenario, you have prepaid for it; in the second scenario, the ticket was a gift. Imagine this situation, on the evening of the concert, there is this raging blizzard storm, and the concert is a two-hour drive away from your home. Would you go to the concert in both scenarios? If you would rationally think about it, you wouldn’t go in both situations. It is much safer to snuggle up comfortably on your couch. However, most people who have prepaid the ticket will make an effort to drive a few hours through a blizzard storm to attend a concert that they (only) paid $20 for. This is caused by a phenomenon known as sunk cost fallacy.

If people have spent effort, time or money on something, they will commit to the behaviour related to it; otherwise, they feel they lose out.

The moment you spend money to consume something in the future, our sunk cost effect of mental accounting kicks in. The moment you prepay, you have a deficit in your account. If you cannot consume, then you have to close your account in red. It’s like making a loss. People don’t like making losses, so they rather get what they paid for than perhaps make a better decision not to consume something. For example, if people spent 60 euros on a four-course dinner, but they are already full at the third course, most of them will eat dessert anyway. I paid for it! It feels like a loss not to go or not finish all your plates.

Another example made famous by Richard Thaler is about a man who joined a tennis club and paid a $300 membership fee for the year. After just two weeks of playing, he develops a case of tennis elbow. Despite being in pain, the man continues to play, saying: ‘I don’t want to waste the $300.’ (2)

The sunk cost effect becomes a huge motivator of consumer behaviour.

However, the intensity of the sunk cost effect isn’t always the same; it depends on how closely the cost and benefit are connected. Let me give you an example of how this works. Let’s say you love skiing and you have booked yourself a trip to the French Alps. You got yourself a four-day ski pass giving you access to all the ski lifts for the four days at the costs of € 160. You enjoyed the first three days, and then all of a sudden, the weather conditions change dramatically: Big snows, fog, heavy winds. No skiing conditions that will bring joy. The same scenario, but now you have bought four separate tickets of € 40 with which you can hit the slopes for four days. In which situation would you go out skiing on the fourth day?

This was researched (3), and it showed that people who bought the one ticket would be more prone to stay in. However, the people who had four separate tickets were far more inclined to go out and ski anyway. They felt the €40 burn in their pocket (cost) and want to experience the benefit (skiing). The all-inclusive ticket is, in fact, a form of price bundling. This leads to a ‘decoupling’ of costs and benefits. The effect being it reduces someone’s attention to sunk costs and decreasing a consumer’s likelihood of consuming a paid-for service. In other words,

Price bundling affects the decision to consume.

Now, it becomes interesting how we can use these insights to design for better choice and positive behaviour.

BONUS: free ebook 'Mental Accounting: How Money Works in our Mind''

Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'Mental Accounting: How Money Works in our Mind'. 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.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

Mental accounting: Using it for better decision-making

Being aware of the human tendency to engage in mental accounting and being affected by the related sunk costs effect can help us develop behavioural interventions that can help people make better decisions. I want to end this blog post with an example of how this might work.

A lot of people find it challenging to spend less money than intended. You can make this easier for them by partitioning. How does it work? Let me illustrate this with a real-life example that took place in India. In India, there are quite some low-income households with very little spare cash. Salaries are often paid in cash, making it very easy for family providers to spend it, for instance, in the bar, after a hard days’ work. Still, people also needed money for the children’s upbringing, for example.

Those households typically earned 670 rupees per week (£6,60 or $11,20), and most families only managed to put aside 5 rupees per week (0,75%) (4). The intervention they did is divide the money into envelopes before handing it over to the beneficiary and partitioning it beforehand. It increased the savings rates to 4% (27 rupees per week)(5). What made it even more successful is putting a visual reminder on the envelopes. So, for example, a picture of their children on the envelope contained money for their upbringing.

You could also use this for yourself. We are also more reluctant to spend money we have already mentally allocated for savings. You can distribute very physically, like the envelopes, but think about labelled jars in which you divide your household money. Viviana Zelizer, a sociologist at Princeton, calls this ‘Tin Can Accounting’ (6). The more digitally savvy translation of this is the digital saving buckets many banks offer nowadays, in which you can allocate your savings to specific goals. It will be harder to withdraw money from an ‘ultimate wedding dress’ or ‘summer family holiday’ bucket than from a general savings account.

Summary

We, as humans, often make very emotional decisions when it comes to money. It largely depends on how we have earned, labelled or how our money is kept, how we will treat money and how we value what we bought with the money. This largely influences our behaviour. A euro isn’t always a euro, and a dollar not always a dollar. It may sound illogical, but it will make perfect sense once you understand the concepts of mental accounting and the sunk cost effect. We need to take these psychological phenomena into account if we want to help people make better decisions.

Astrid Groenewegen

Cover visual by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

References:

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.

(1) Thaler, R. H. (1999). Mental accounting matters. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12, 183-206.

(2) http://www.eief.it/butler/files/2009/11/thaler80.pdf

(3) Soman D, Gourville JT. Transaction Decoupling: How Price Bundling Affects the Decision to Consume. Journal of Marketing Research. 2001;38(1):30-44.

(4 & 5) Soman, D., & Cheema, A. (2011). Earmarking and Partitioning: Increasing Saving by Low-Income Households. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S14–S22.

(6) Bandelj, Nina, Wherry, Frederik, Zelizer, Viviana (2017). Money talks, Explaining how money really works. Princeton University Press.

Photo by Fabian Blank

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.

15/05/2021

Behavioural Design Week: Matt Wallaert

By Astrid GroenewegenAll, Employee behaviour

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: Matt Wallaert

The first speaker on Behavioural Design Week was most certainly not the least. If you are looking for an hour filled with inspiration on applying behavioural science within your organisation, this is the keynote you don’t want to miss. In a wave of unstoppable energy, Matt shares the four steps needed for running a successful behavioural change project. He shares the don’t and don’ts combined with lots of humour—Matt shares how you can genuinely apply behavioural science. Learn from Matt’s experiences and get practical guidelines to get into the action yourself.

How to set-up a Behavioural Change Project
Behavioural Design Week 2021

Matt Wallaert: Our key take-aways

Matt explains there are four steps in a behavioural change project:

Behavioural strategy
What is the desired behaviour? What do you want people to do? Translate this into a Behavioural Statement with clear OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), so you can make people accountable; it is not one person’s task to run a successful behavioural change project. Everyone’s job is behaviour; everything can be linked to behaviour.

Behavioural Insight
Our job is to build a bridge between a world that is and a world that isn’t. We need to understand which bridge to build. Why is this a desirable outcome? Why don’t we already have this outcome (bottlenecks)? You need to look for emerging patterns and need cross-validation. I see this in qualitative research; do you also see this through your quantitative lens.

Behavioural Design
We start imagining interventions. All we do is changing the pressures or the environment and making behaviour easier or harder to do.

Behavioural Impact Evaluation
You need to measure the impact of your interventions. However, we are in applied behavioural science, not academic, behavioural science. You have to have some basic fluidity about the probability. In academia, p can be less than .5. This holds not true in business. If we can find a solution that can save some people’s lives, well, that’s a win. Maybe not scientifically significant, but essential.

Matt Wallaert: Quotes to remember

Science is a process, behaviour is an outcome.

Everyone’s job is behaviour, everything can be linked to behaviour.

Accountability allows for autonomy.

Our job is to build a a bridge between a world that is and a world that isn’t.

You need cross validation. Take a qualitative belief and validate it quantative.

We are not in academic behavioural science but in applied behavioural science.

Matt Wallaert: Further reading

If Matt’s talk inspired you, please make sure to pick up his book ‘Start at the End: How to build products that create change’. We finished reading it in one fellow swoop, and it has become one of our favourite readings.

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 Baptiste Tougeron on using behavioural science for more effective advertising.

Or, check out our upcoming edition of Behavioural Design Fest.

Also, you can find all the videos of the keynotes of Behavioural Design Fest 2018 and Behavioural Design Fest 2019; watch and re-watch here to upgrade your Behavioural Design know-how and boost your inspiration.

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

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!

Download the brochure

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

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.

23/07/2021

Fundamentals Course

Advanced Course

In-company training

Courses calendar

All

<img decoding="async" class=" wp-image-47820 aligncenter" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SUE-Illustration_Plant_Coral-ver.svg" alt="" width="239" height="239" /> Flip those tiles

Solve it efficiently while you can

<img decoding="async" class=" wp-image-8676 aligncenter" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Poedel-koraal-300x253.webp" alt="The" width="298" height="251" /> New Formats

Getting it done

Get more detailed information.

Little time, big yield

In conclusion

Do you want to learn more?

<img decoding="async" class=" wp-image-48754 aligncenter" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SUE-Emojis-Illustrations-Modified-61.svg" alt="" width="295" height="295" />The rules are back

Saying isn’t doing

They just don’t

The challenge

Download the SUE hand washing guide

Behavioural interventions

Astoundingly effective

Get more detailed information.

In conclusion

Do you want to learn more?

Misinformation or conspiracy?

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-49519 aligncenter" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ijsje.svg" alt="" width="252" height="252" />

Evolution made us skeptical

BONUS: free ebook 'Confirmation Bias: how to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Three forces that drive conspiracy theories

1. Cognitive bias

2. Group psychology

3. The need to belong

How to debunk conspiracies?

Want to learn how to apply behavioural science in practice?

In conclusion

Do you want to learn more?

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

Summary

BONUS: free ebook 'How to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Do you want to learn more?

<img decoding="async" class=" wp-image-48841 aligncenter" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/SUE-Extra-Variation-Head-Illustrations-Dart-Coral.svg" alt="" width="275" height="275" />

Persuading someone is not rational

BONUS: free ebook 'How to convince someone who believes the opposite'

Context can justify decision making

Do you want to learn more?

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-47810 size-medium aligncenter" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SUE-Emojis-_-Illustrations-Modified-11.svg" alt="" width="300" height="300" />

1. Behavioural Design is about influence

2. Behavioural Design is a method

Would you like to power up your team or project with behavioural intelligence?

3. The ethics of Behavioural Design

4. Behavioural Design is about designing choices

Want to learn how to design behaviour?

5. Behavioural Designers think ‘outside-in’

The SUE | Influence Framework©

6. Behavioural Designers work with principles from the science of influence

7. Behavioural Designers research, prototype, test

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

8. Domains of Behavioural Design

9. Start to learn more about Behavioural Design

Do you want to learn more?

Why we sucked at it

The Behavioural Design Challenge

Want to find out how behavioural science can amplify your impact?

1. Understanding our client’s Job-to-be-Done

2. Understanding our Staff’s Job-to-be-Done

3. Make desired behaviour easy

4. Design a growth habit

Would you like to power up your team with Behavioural Intelligence?

More blogs on the link between behavioural design and entrepreneurship:

Do you want to learn more?

<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-20991 size-full" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Gezichtjes_jakuzi-e1575627349659.jpg" alt="behavioural Design" width="425" height="352" />

The difference between economics and behavioural economics

<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-47978 size-thumbnail" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SUE-New-Icons-Human-with-brain.svg" alt="" width="150" height="150" />Bounded rationality: critical concept of behavioural economics

Want to shape behaviour and decisions?

<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-47280 size-thumbnail" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SUE-Coral-Icons-start.svg" alt="" width="150" height="150" />Behavioural economics: a game of choice architecture

<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-46011 size-thumbnail" src="https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SUE-New-Icons-25-Idea.svg" alt="" width="150" height="150" />Summary: What’s behavioural economics all about

BONUS: free ebook 'Behavioural Economics: the Basics'

Do you want to learn more?

Would you like to know more?

BONUS: free ebook 'Mental Accounting: How Money Works in our Mind''

Summary

Flip those tiles

New Formats

The rules are back

Bounded rationality: critical concept of behavioural economics

Behavioural economics: a game of choice architecture

Summary: What’s behavioural economics all about