Behavioural Science Insights

Experiential bonuses

Think back to when you last rewarded an employee. It probably was with a raise or bonus. Did you know this is not the best way to boos motivation. Monetary gives a short surge in motivation, but is doesn’t last long. Ofcourse, baseline rewards are good because your employees deserve to be compensated for their hard work. But for motivation there is a better way to achieve this.

You should start focussing on experiential bonuses: free lunches, gifts, dinners with their partner, a trip to Disney with their family. These can be standard gifts at Christmas or unexpected gifts tailored to their situation (but not money).

It will boost pride, loyalty and work satisfaction over a longer period of time. Just so you know, if you ask them what they would rather have (money or a gift) they will choose the money. But know that the satisfaction with the cash will run out soon. Gifts will build good will. Next time you have to gift, think beyond the money. It boost appreciation.

Tip: Humans love appreciation not bonusus. Appreciation boosts the social relationship between employer and employee which last longer and has a far greater positive effect.

Using public praise

Did you know that an effective tool to make other people succeed in their tasks is public praise. Humans have the desire to seek pride for what they do and avoid shame as a result of their actions. Getting public praise helps to achieve this.

Public praise keeps up the social image and helps us signal our identity and norms to others. During social interactions we want to be seen in a specific way to fit in with the crowd. We want to seem hardworking, effective or maybe funny. When other people praise us for certain behaviour it will establish our image towards others. It will help us fulfill the need for recognition an beloning.

There are different ways you can praise someone. You might have a employee of the month in companies. Non-profit organizations may use a wristband or button to make it explicitly visible to others that this person donated. Research showed that in primary schools public praise can also boost performance. Children who received congratulation cards after finishing a school taks showed a 12% increase in performance.

Here is our tip: by giving people public praise you can boost motivation an performance. So, don’t be afraid to give someone some praise for what they are doing!

Meaningful numbers

Do you find it difficult to understand big numbers? You are not the only one. This is because processing numbers requires too much thinking. But sometimes, it is important that you do understand what the numbers are trying to tell you. For example, if it is about statistics about your health or welfare.

One important sector that uses a lot of numbers is the media and the news. Headlines guide your opinions and decisions. But we find it difficult to understand them sometimes. If a headline is talking about ‘33.000 gallons of drinking water’, do you know how much that is?

In an experiment, they tried adding anchors to numbers: adding a perspective that helps people interpret information much better. For example, 33.000 gallons of drinking water is about 2 average swimming pools.

What can you learn from this experiment? If you have to communicate a number, you should put it into perspective by finding an anchor. By using an anchor, you can make information much more meaningful for someone as it puts meaning to a value or statistic.

Make the desirable behaviour easy

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

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

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

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

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

Improving fundraising 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show the impact of actions.

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

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

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

Loss aversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplicity is key

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

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

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

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

Comparison isn’t the thief of joy

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

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

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

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

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