I’m a clinical psychologist by training. When I stumbled into the marketing profession about 20 years ago, ‘psychologist’ was something you better kept for yourself. Back then, I’d much better confessed at a party that I rented out some windows in the red light district than to admit I studied psychology. At that time, psychology was considered to be ‘the sinkhole of the university’. But things have changed…
Applied psychology: Things have changed
This perception profoundly changed in the last 10-15 years. The first trigger event was the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. This was the first time that the field of economics fully acknowledged the importance of psychology to understand better how humans make decisions in markets.
The second trigger event was the astronomical takeover of Silicon Valley of the world. Tech companies perfectly understood that psychology was the key to world domination. They figured out how to leverage psychology to get people hooked to their apps and services.
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In the slipstream of Kahneman and Tversky’s Prize and their best-seller “Thinking Fast and Slow“, behavioural psychology got reframed brilliantly into Behavioural Economics. A friend of mine, a professor at a Dutch Management School, told me that ever since he changed “psychology” into “behavioural economics” in his research grant proposals, he won every grant for which he applied.
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The insaturable appetite for psychology caused an explosion of books that promised to provide deep insight into turning deep human understanding into persuasive products and services.
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Tech companies perfectly understand that behavioural science is the ultimate competitive edge.
Applied psychology: critical sectors are not using it
And yet, on the other hand, it’s still shocking to observe how many critical domains of society still didn’t get the memo on how the brain works. If you think about it:
The housing market is a great example. Every time policymakers develop a strategy to stimulate the buying power of starters, the problem gets worse. You don’t need to be a nuclear physicist to understand why: The more bidding power you give in the hands of people, in a market of scarcity, the more people will raise their bid, and the faster prices will rise.
Another fascinating example is a particular Covid-policy here in the Netherlands. A weeks ago, the Dutch government did something brilliant. They launched the “Dansen met Janssen” campaign. The campaign proposed an offer young people couldn’t refuse: If they got vaccinated with the Janssen Vaccine – of which you only require one jab – they would be able to go out on the same day with a valid COVID-passport. Youngsters and Young adults took the bait in hordes. The only problem: within three days, we had a couple of ‘super spreading events’ due to young people spreading the virus at parties.
The fierce debate today is about whether this proofs that the policy was stupid and irresponsible. We would argue it’s not. People desperately wanted to go out, so many of them who were still a bit sceptic now found a very motivating reason to get a jab. Who cares that the vaccine wasn’t working properly yet – it takes about two weeks -, and that they still had a pretty good chance to catch the virus. However, the chances that they would up at Intensive Care are not that high. The policy did a beautiful job in motivating a high-risk group to get vaccinated. The problem is that this is a tough argument to sell to policymakers who think in terms of risks and simple cause and effect relationships. They figure that since the policy caused an outbreak, it must be a bad policy.
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Summary: Applied psychology
Behavioural Science still has got a long way to conquer the hearts and minds of policymakers, leaders and managers. But given the size and the (intended or unintended) impact of policies on human behaviour, it better start to find its way into the boardroom fast.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
We all have been situations in which we wanted a behavioural change. It could be you want your children to behave politely. It could be you wanted your client to approve a budget. It could be you want your manager to grant you extra time to work on a project. It could be you need community members to contribute to preventing littering actively. It could be you wanted employees to embrace organisational change. No matter what situation you were ever in, we have all experienced once or twice that getting someone to do things is hard. At least, the way we often approach it. There is a more effective approach to change. This is what this blog post is all about.
Behavioural change; from pushing to easing
Now, think back to a situation you had to influence someone. Tell me, was it easy to get people to change their behaviour in the direction you wanted them to move? Did they say ‘yes’ right away, or do you remember it took some persuasion? Maybe it was heavy lifting even? I remember I sometimes even used some force: ‘If you don’t eat dinner, you won’t get dessert.’ Or, for example, have you ever tried to convince a client by first giving them a stellar presentation and by following this up by emails or phone calls, making sure you gave them all reasons to make them realise your offer is one they can’t refuse?
It might have worked. But it takes quite some effort, right? It is hard work pushing someone into the direction you want them to move. Change is hard. We as humans can change, but we are pretty risk-averse and rather accept our suboptimal situation than moving in an unknown direction. In behavioural science, two potent forces that keep people in current behaviour are status quo bias and loss aversion. We are simply afraid of losing what we have right now and take our current state (status quo) as our baseline or reference point for future decisions. Any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss. Inertia being the result. So, no wonder it takes effort to change people.
What if I tell you there is a better way to generate change? That takes far less effort. That steps away from our natural inclination to push people into doing things but takes a different approach. Because that’s what we often do, we use some form of pushing to move people. We do follow-up calls; we give arguments, provide extra information, deliver facts and figures, show results, send reminders, etc. I call this pushing as it starts at ‘us’. We make the calls, write documents, round up reasons and then deliver them to the persons we want to convince or influence. I love this quote from Jonah Berger. He says:
‘The intuition [of pushing] comes from physics. Imagine there’s a chair in your office, and you want to move that chair. We often push it. Want it to get it to go in a particular direction? If we push in that direction, it goes. The chair moves across the floor just like we want. But when it comes to the social world, when it comes to applying this intuition to others, changing minds, action, and organisations, there’s an important difference. Because when we push people, they don’t just go along as the chair does. When we push people, they often push back‘.
Behavioural change; a matter of psychology, not physics
So, the message is clear:
When we have to convince people, it is not a matter of physics but psychology.
It helps you to fight your assumptions. We all assume we know our clients, employees, partners, citizens think or need, but we often don’t. It’s another bias we need to fight: The expert fallacy. As most of us are paid professionals, we are assumed to be experts in our job. It becomes false authority when it is assumed that the opinions of a recognised expert in one area should be taken to heart in another area. So, if you are an expert in human psychology, your appeal to authority to have an opinion on what moves people’s choices and behaviours is valid. When you are an expert in a different domain, you might be fooled by your own of someone’s else’s opinion.
How to avoid this fallacy is quite simple. It takes two things: unbounded curiosity and interviewing six people. By interviewing, I mean talking to six people and genuinely listening to them, observing them, stepping into their shoes and turning your empathy radar way up. With this, you’ll be making the shift from focusing on ‘us’ that makes us forget the person to concentrate on ‘them’ that helps us move away from persuading by pushing.
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Behavioural change: Willingness and capability
However, human insight is one thing; you need to translate it into tangible interventions. If you want to change behaviour, you have two strategies: You can make someone want to change (boosting their willingness to change), or make sure someone can change (improving their capability to change). You can imagine that willingness to change requires some form of cognitive action. It has to do with motivation. However, it can be pretty daunting to stay motivated to us humans to set our minds on doing things for a more extended period. When we find ourselves in uncertain situations and new things (thus also new behaviours) are uncertain. As we discussed earlier, we are often okay with the status quo, even if it is not optimal. We often overvalue what we have.
Maybe you have ever experienced such a motivation wave yourself. Let’s say you genuinely wanted to eat healthy all day. You did great at breakfast (smoothie), coped at lunch (homemade salad), pecked away at some almonds in between, but then it becomes four in the afternoon. You are tired, you worked hard, and someone puts a bag of potato chips at arm’s reach. You truly have to push yourself hard to persevere in your new, healthy behaviour. Often, we lose this internal battle. Even more so, we can come up with outstanding arguments why we are deserving of some potato chips (if you want to understand why our human brain works this magic read this blog on the work of Kahneman). To make the point, you might see already that if we don’t want to rely on pushing as an influence strategy, working on willingness may not be our best option. So, what is?
The key to behavioural change: Take away bottlenecks
If you want to change behaviour there is one place where you need to start and what you need to consider. To successfully change behaviour we need to:
Start with taking away behavioural bottlenecks, the barriers.
We can do this by coming up with capability interventions: Focusing on taking away friction and lowering hurdles and making the desired behaviour easier to perform. Or as Berger states in his book ‘The Catalyst – How to change anyone’s mind‘: ‘The easier it is to try something, the more people will use it, and the faster it catches on’. We can easily replace ‘try’ with ‘do’, as the same goes for behaviour. The easier is it to do something, the faster it will catch on. The secret ingredient to change behaviour therefore is:
Not pushing someone in desired behaviour but easing them into it.
The actual name of the game we are in is removing obstacles.
To do so, you need to understand which behavioural bottlenecks your target group is experiencing. It would be best if you shifted your focus from us to them. So, whenever you catch yourself giving more arguments, sending over more information, coming up with reasons to buy, stating facts or sending reminders, put yourself on hold. And remember, there is a different approach to change minds, behaviour, and action with a simple reminder: If it were easy, everyone would do it.
I bet you never thought of a quote that glorifies hardship and discipline to make perfect sense to help us human beings to accomplish more by, in fact, taking motivation out of the equation. Life can be immensely satisfying, don’t you think?
BONUS: free ebook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?'
Especially for you we've created a free eBook 'How to Convince Someone who Believes the Exact Opposite?' For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
The know-how of behavioural science can be a powerful tool to shape choices and behaviour. Therefore in Behavioural Design, thinking about ethics and acting upon them is not just relevant – it is indispensable. In this blog post, you can read all about our vision, mission and behaviours to safeguard ethics in our Behavioural Design. It comes with a Behavioural Design Toolkit. Everything, to make sure we (and others) leverage this incredible power of behavioural science to do good.
The ethics of Behavioural Design
This post is a long-read about a subject that is very close to our hearts: the ethics of Behavioural Design. It will shed a light unto how we incorporate ethics in our way of working. It will also provide you with practical tools to help you pinpoint the considerations you need to make to safeguard the ethics in Behavioural Design. It is our take on things. It isn’t perfect yet. It is ever-evolving work-in-progress, but it is a solid start. I would love for you to read the whole post, but you can also jumpstart to specific parts right way:
Manipulation or positive influence?
Behavioural Design ethics: The Organisation Level
Behavioural Design ethics: The Personal and Team Level
Behavioural Design ethics: The Project Level
How Behavioural Design ethics make both human and business sense
Manipulation or positive influence?
When engaging in Behavioural Design, there is one critical question to ask ourselves: Are we in the manipulation business or are we designing positive influence? It is vital to address the ethics of Behavioural Design. Know-how of behavioural science can be a potent tool to influence choices and shape decisions. It can be a very dark art. It can, for example, be (and is) used to get people hooked to phones or unhealthy foods, to manipulate voting behaviours or create division in society. It can be used to exploit peoples’ fears and anxieties.
However, it can also be applied to help people engage in healthier habits such as exercising or eating healthy food or to create a better world by for example helping people to recycle, to act against climate change or to help others in need. Therefore, behavioural science in itself isn’t dark art as such; it is what you do with it. It is all comes down to intention.
However, it can also be applied to help people engage in healthier habits such as exercising or eating healthy food or to create a better world by for example helping people to recycle, to act against climate change or to help people in need. Therefore, behavioural science in itself isn’t dark wisdom as such; it is what you do with it. It is all comes down to intention.
If your intention is not the progress or the improvement of the person(s) you are trying to influence, then you are manipulating. If your intention is to help people make better decisions that will improve their life, work or living environment, that’s positive influence.
At SUE | Behavioural Design, we are very much concerned about the ethics of applied behavioural science. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life and play. As we are in the business of designing interventions that will influence choice and shape behaviour, we need to have a clear vision of the ethics of Behavioural Design and code of conduct. As mentioned earlier, the know-how of how people make decisions and how behaviour is shaped can be very dark art. Unfortunately, the people who are now really using behavioural science at scale often don’t have good intentions. And that, to us, is manipulation. It is meant for personal advancement or meant to benefit a privileged few.
That’s why we at SUE are on a crusade to introduce more people to the know-how of behavioural science and provide them with the practical tools to use it in their daily lifes.
So, our company mission implies that we should walk the talk. We simply have to have a clear vision of the ethics of Behavioural Design and we have to abide by that vision in practice. Unfortunately, there isn’t already a commonly accepted code of conduct in the behavioural science field. However, there are some interesting resources out there of organisations and people who want to use this powerful know-how for good. In this article, we want to provide you with insights and tools that we use as our ethical compass. Which can be applied on three levels:
The Organisational level
The Personal and Team level
The Project level
We hope it will give you some practical guidelines on how to use Behavioural Design for positive influence. It isn’t perfect yet. We are prototyping and learning every day. It is constant work in progress that we will keep sharing with you. Our goal is to be very open and transparent about how we try to safeguard the ethics of Behavioural Design and how sometimes we struggle with it. We hope you in this for the sake of progress, improvement, better decision-making and positive behaviour, and you will embrace our tools and best practices. Let’s create a positive countermovement by together applying Behavioural Design for good. Counterbalancing and exposing those who use it with evil or selfish intentions.
Behavioural Design ethics: Organisation Level
Mission and company culture At an organisation level, it all starts with having an actionable mission that has progress in its DNA and is backed up by the willingness and capability within the organisation to act upon it. This requires a mandate from management but also a company culture that attracts talent and clients who fit and believe in this mission and that rejects those who don’t. It also requires a company culture that is open to discussions. Our mission is:
We live by our Behavioural Ethics Principles, which are:
Selection of clients and projects Next to the mission and principles, we also safeguard our Behavioural Design ethics by carefully selecting the projects we engage in and the people with whom we work. Both at SUE and our Academy, we aren’t one-size-fits-all. Even in the days when we still were a small-scale company with not much money in the bank, we decided always to put our mission first and be selective in who we work for and who can enrol in our training.
We will never work for or train people working in industries that harm people, animals, the planet or neglect social and equality rights (if you want to find out more check out our Terms & Conditions). We will not sell our souls to the devil, not for a million. Or more. However, sometimes the world isn’t as black and white, and we find ourselves in shades of grey. This sometimes results in difficult decisions. Decisions which we always genuinely try to make based on our moral compass, and which are still open to discussion for anyone within our company.
Ongoing discussions That being said: We do have ongoing conversations in our team about projects we work on. Not working for the fur, tobacco or weapon industry is an easy decision to make. But should you work for an alcoholic beer brand or only for their 0% beers? Or milk? Or the oil industry, if they want you to work on their transition to sustainable energy? There aren’t always clear-cut answers to this and they alway s lead to different points-of-view. This is one way we try to safeguard our ethics: by actively and purposefully keeping the ethical discussion alive in our team. This code of ethics you are reading right now and the tools that come with it help us define the boundaries. Sometimes boundaries change because we learn.
And there are, of course, always loopholes. We had someone who ‘slipped’ into our Academy by applying via a Gmail address and faking his employer details. And we failed to do a sufficient background check. He turned out to work for a cigarette brand. That was not one of our finest moments, and our background checks are far more thorough now – trust me. But we don’t have and will never have a complete sense of control over who reads our blogs, sees our Keynotes, uses our tools, watches our videos or will buy our books. We know this, and we are aware of it.
We as SUE want to give more tools to these masses to help them make better decisions. Will we also reach the 2% asshole population? Maybe. If you recognise yourself as being an asshole, go away now. Our services and tools aren’t meant for you. Black-out what we have written, burn our writings, shred our tools. We don’t care, whatever makes your black heart tick. But leave. Now.
So apart from the framework helping you to become radically human-centred and discovering the human behind your client, employee, citizen or whomever you are trying to influence, it also is a revelation as it shows that having a positive perspective on human nature is indeed not just touchy-feely but a a methodical process.
Design for large scale impact What is a work in progress to us, is making the shift from more individualistic (or small group) behavioural interventions to influencing collective behaviour.
To have a genuinely positive impact, you need to reach a certain point of adoption. Coming up with system interventions and creating network effects is a way we can design for good on a larger scale.
Do you want to learn how to design for better decisions and behaviours?
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When it comes down to you, you also have a significant role to play. I guess the most important thing is always to be honest with yourself and to have a learning mindset. What I mean by this is that you have to accept that sometimes you will engage in activities that may feel right at the moment, but you won’t be happy with afterwards. And sometimes it is the other way around. That’s okay. The most important thing is that you learn from your experiences. We are firm believers of habits, automatic behaviours, that will help you shape your choices and behaviour without it taking too much cognitive effort. To activate this ethical learning effect, we have installed the ethical retrospective habit.
The ethical retrospective habit Try to make it a routine, after every project, to ask yourself these five questions[2] (or do it as a team):
What happened during the project that triggered emotions within yourself?
How did I feel (positive or negative) and what were my reactions?
What insights or conclusions can I draw from the experience? What did I learn?
How can I (or we as a team) apply what I learned to improve the future experience?
What actions can I (or we as a team) take based on what I learned?
We often do project evaluations or retrospectives, but by adding these five questions, you also add an ethical assessment.
Learn what matters to you and how to express this If you want to do some more self-exploration, check out this download by Alistair Sommerville, called the Little Book of Me[3]. It helps you pinpoint your values and enables you to get the conversation going within your team. This is very important when it comes to ethics. You need to understand which effect you have on other people. You also need to learn how to express your opinions within a group.
Shared understanding, empathy and self-awareness are the driving forces of making an ethical culture come to life.
A useful tool is the so-called Johari Window. It is also explained in the mentioned booklet, and we also made a download to explain the Johari Window[4]. It gives insight into your blind spots, which facades you pull up and what is usually out in the open or unknown to both you and others. It can be a handy team exercise to create mutual understanding and also apply outside-in thinking in your team discussions. See if you find it a useful tool (or parts of it).
Behavioural Design ethics: The project level
What we are trying to do at the project level is to try to lower the risk of unintended consequences. We genuinely have good intentions, and we are stirred by our company mission to use Behavioural Design to improve human decision-making. But sometimes we don’t see the complete project picture at the start of a project. And we are all influenced by our biases and mental mistakes. So, we try to design behavioural interventions to solve these challenges. Although we know 100% perfection might be an illusion, you should always have the ambition to lead your projects as ethical as possible.
Behavioural Design Ethics Checklist & Cards At the project level, you can add three behavioural interventions to safeguard the ethic relevant to your project. First of all, we work with our Behavioural Design Ethics Checklist and Behavioural Design Ethics Cards[5]. These help us ask the right questions at the right moment in three project stages; the Project Intake, the Project Preparation and the Intervention Evaluation.
These questions help us become aware of ethical considerations we need to keep in mind both before we even start a project. But they also allow us to address (unintentional) side-effects of our behavioural interventions. Feel free to use these tools and adjust them to your mission statement. Just as long as your mission is to design for good, we are perfectly fine with that!
Cognitive Biases Checklist The second way we safeguard our behavioural design ethics is to be aware of our own cognitive biases. We all are a slave to our system one and make (unconscious) mental mistakes or judgements of error based on the short-cuts our brain makes. However, no-one can ever completely override his/her system one thinking and decision-making process. Kahneman once stated that people could improve their decision-making by forcing themselves to think more deeply. So, even your initial reactions will be modified[6].
We have created such a forcing function by making a short Cognitive Biases Checklist that we keep at hand during projects. It does help to force yourself to think more deeply about possible mental mistakes by literally reading the checklist with the most common cognitive biases. For example, before you start a meeting, do an interview or even as the first thing you do as the start of your workday.
It both helps us to address the cognitive biases we as project team are dealing with and the biases the people for whom we are designing a behavioural intervention might have (and we need to consider). By searching for biases (even as organisations or institutions), you can try to reduce the impact biases have on decisions. Kahneman calls this a process of self-critique or quality control over decisions, which is feasible within reason.
You don’t want too much of it, to avoid what Kahneman calls ‘paralysis by analysis’. But within reason, there is room to improve what you as a team do within a project by a form of quality control. To make your reading-the-checklist behaviour easier to perform, make sure you print the checklist and keep it at a spot where you can easily see it. Stick it on your wall or make a blow-up to hang up in your team meeting room. Just one remark: This is in no means a complete overview of cognitive biases, far from it. If you want to know more about cognitive biases, we warmly recommend reading this blogpost of Buster Benson. If you wish to find out more about system one and system two thinking or in other words how human-decision making works, please read this blog post, and you’re up-to-speed in no time.
Is it true: no lying, whitewashing or sugar-coating?
Is it achievable?
If not all of these questions can be answered with ‘yes’, it is time to abort the mission. The intervention leads you in the wrong direction. Back to the drawing table. As said, this is a quick check. For more thorough ethical considerations, we use our Behavioural Ethics Checklist & Cards.
Would you like to leverage behavioural science to crack your thorny strategic challenges?
You can do this in our fast-paced and evidence-based Behavioural Design Sprint. We have created a brochure telling you all about the details of this approach. Such as the added value, the deliverables, the set up, and more. Should you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help!
How behavioural design ethics make both human and business sense
Ethics in Behavioural Design is not just a relevant but indispensable topic to think about and act upon. Know-how of behavioural psychology can be a powerful tool to shape choices and behaviour. We have created this toolkit for Behavioural Design ethics to make sure we leverage this power to do good.
It is our attempt to create a ‘army’ of fellow crusaders that will turn the tables and use Behavioural Design for collective progress in the world.
I am deeply concerned about the way the world is taking a turn right now. The consumerism sparked by corporates. The lack of privacy. The extreme right-winged political wave all over the world. The ecological destruction (let’s not even call it climate change anymore, climate deniers please leave this website right now, you are not getting it). The lack of tolerance of people with a different race, colour, sexual preference or religion. The fearmongering. The lack of empathy and compassion for people even living close to us.
But there are answers to all these problems. The solutions can be found. I believe we need another system of thinking and decision-making that is more human-focused and less shareholder-focused. We need an innovative approach to solving problems that puts empathy and compassion first. We need more people, like you and me, to get the tools to be successful. Not just the people in power or the filthy rich.
I believe that Behavioural Design will give people the tools to gain more control over successful outcomes, which is vital to fight nationalism, fear and egocentrism. Give people back control, you give him back self-worth, and you give them back the power to provide for themselves and their families. I think this shift in focus can start a grass-roots movement that will move things forward from the bottom up. The more people learn how to be more effective in changing behaviour, the faster we can accelerate coming up with solutions that spark positive behaviours. Of people, of communities, of teams, of organisations and nations. Our underlying objective is:
More success for everyone.
By teaching people which forces drive behaviour. By giving them insight into how decision-making works. By showing how they can come up with products and services that people genuinely need and are willing to pay for over and over again. How they can help people make better, healthier, happier choices. How with the know-how of Behavioural Design, we can all gain more welfare: For ourselves, for the ones we love, for the planet, we live on.
This may sound too grand or too philanthropic for your taste, but don’t leave this website just yet. SUE hasn’t been founded for those who want to save the world as an out-set. We are here for those who want to learn how people can make better decisions daily. For those who want to get better at creating and selling better products, services, and experiences. Those can be profitable, don’t get me wrong. But they can start with a human (or should I say humane) frame in mind. You will know why and how people buy or buy in things. But you will also have insight into what products are unneeded or what will trigger undesirable behaviour.
You can have the power to combine profits with better choices.
In doing so, you will help your business grow; you can provide stable income or jobs, create better living environments, promote healthy living and will help economies prosper. And very significantly: Your satisfaction and pleasure of doing what you’re doing will grow. You will start to experience success on different levels.
I genuinely believe that all positive change starts with behaviour. And I also think change is not something we cannot control or cannot do ourselves. We can all take small steps, steps that in return, can be contagious because of their positive results. Steps that can spread like a friendly virus. You just need the right recipe. And the recipe is Behavioural Design. Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his brilliant book ‘Sapiens’[7] that:
‘Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries, we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture’.
So, let’s create a new culture. A human-centred culture. And let’s get some sense of community back again while at the same time you’re experiencing business and personal success. It can be done.
Our company’s mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life, and play.
So, our take on Behavioural Design Ethics is for those people who will use Behavioural Design for the sake of good. If your intentions are no good, go away now. We need people who are curious-minded and forward-thinking who want to solve wicked problems to embrace this knowledge. If you’re one of the right kind – and I bet you are – you’ll find you’ll not only use this front running know-how in your work, but you’ll experience you will also start applying it to yourself.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
I want to share a couple of thoughts and insights on how data produces Fata Morgana’s . I have become a bit obsessed lately with how easy it is to be fooled by data. In this blog want to argue that many researchers and data scientists fall for exactly the same mistakes as conspiracy theorists.
The psychology behind Conspiracy Theorists.
You probably heard of Qanon. It’s a conspiracy theory about liberals running secret Satan-worshipping, child molesting, blood-drinking networks. The Qanon theory spread like wildfire on the internet in the last couple of years. In a brilliant post on Medium a while ago, a game designer argued that the nature of Qanon is strikingly similar to a well designed Alternate Reality game.
Alternate reality games (ARG’s) are designed for you to look for cues to solve a puzzle. One of the problems that game designers often encounter is a phenomenon called “apophenia”. Apophenia is: The tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas). Better said:
Once you are searching for patterns, you will start finding them everywhere.
Your players might encounter some scraps of wood on the floor that accidentally form an arrow, and they will become convinced that this must be a clue and can’t be a coincidence.
The same mechanisms are at play in the alternate reality of conspiracy theorists. The thrill of being a Qanonist is that cues are everywhere. Once you are sucked into the community of like-minded truth seekers’, you will stumble upon cues that are so convincing that they must be true. The addictive part is the fact that your fellow conspiracists will challenge you to connect the dots for yourself. “Wake up! Open your Eyes!” Nobody tells you what to think or believe, but once you connect the dots, the truth will reveal itself. Cracking the puzzle is similar to the dopamine rush you get from solving a game puzzle.
Of course, the problem is: Once you start looking for patterns, you will always find some. You don’t believe in Illuminati? Well, what about all these pictures of Hollywood stars who use the Illuminati “one eye” symbol? Coincidence? I don’t think so?
Still not convinced that liberals run satanic networks? Well, why do all these Hollywood stars use the 666-symbol, the number of Satan? Once you start looking for it, it’s so damn obvious! How can we all have missed this? Of course, all of this is an illusion. An illusion fostered by wishful thinking, selective attention and the addictive thrill of finding patterns.
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Data Scientists are a bit like conspiracy theorists.
Today I read a piece in the Dutch newspaper NRC about recent research amongst Dutch voters. We’re having elections here within five weeks. The study delved deep into the wants and beliefs of the Dutch electorate. And lo and behold, it discovered some fascinating patterns: “About 30% of the population are culturally conservative but economically liberal”. Or “There’s still an untapped potential if far-right parties would embrace more leftwing policies” or “Although 70% are in favour of a big government and income redistribution, progressive parties are suffering from a steady decline. This loss can be attributed to the fact that only a minor group of those people (15%) favour progressive themes as abortion, euthanasia, multi-culturalism and European unification”.
The problem with all the above: Sounds reasonable, but it’s bullshit. Real people don’t change their voting behaviour based on these issues. They answer a different question in the voting booth: Which leader or team do I trust the most to fight for the things that threaten my way of living? To whom do I sympathize?
Under the article, NRC posted a series of short portraits of voters and their consideration. The first portrait was featuring an entrepreneur, aged 35. Every time he filled in a voting configurator online, the Dutch Liberals came out as the party that best matches his beliefs and values. Yet he categorically decided not to vote for the liberals because he chose to answer a more powerful different question: He feels it’s time for a system reboot. So he feels more sympathy for the challenger parties, some to the far left, some to the far right. He voted for the FvD (a far-right party), but only because he felt sympathy for one of the (ex) leaders’ fighting spirit, even though he despises their racist whistleblowing.
Why you should have a healthy distrust for data.
The problem with quantitative research is that numbers and graphs signal objectivity and power. If you make the case with solid data, you are more convincing. But the problem is that the patterns we find are often a mirage. A fata morgana that the dataset produced. In the case of Qanon, the fata morgana is produced by combining random pictures that suggest a secret code. In the research above, the fata morgana is created by asking for beliefs and values within the voter base of parties. But it only takes a simple look beyond to data to realize that parties’ rise and fall have everything to do with the rise and fall of their leaders.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
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Or ‘Using the power of repetition not just to build memory, but also trust.’
Behavioural science is fascinating. Understanding some of the fundamentals of human decision-making will give you far more control over successful outcomes of personal and professional goals than you might have ever expected. But how do you turn this science into practice? This is a blog series highlighting the best insights from behavioural science translated into how to make them work for you daily. Behavioural economics applied. To help you make better decisions that will help you improve your wellbeing, work and society.
Behavioural psychology: The power of mere exposure
Don’t you wish you could remember things better? Every interesting article you’ve ever read, everything you’ve learned in school, wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could recite them by heart? Well, you know what you have got to do then right? Eat, sleep, and repeat. That’s the traditional approach to recognising and remembering. And it does work— sort of. If you repeatedly see or read things, you tend to remember them. Or put differently, the number of times you are exposed to something helps something to be captured in the memory structures of our brain.
But the truth is our memories are not infallible. As Kahneman and Tversky have proven, our brain operates on two decision systems: system 1 and system 2. System 2 is a slave to our system 1, which is our automatic, unconscious operating system that uses cues and shortcuts (called heuristics) to form judgments and opinions. Judgments and opinions that our system 2 then turns into beliefs. As Kahneman puts it:
‘Very quickly, you form an impression, and then you spend most of your time confirming it instead of collecting evidence.’
People rewrite and reshape their memories, often to fit with their existing beliefs. I read this quote from Caroline Webb that summarises it perfectly: ‘The startling truth is that we don’t experience the world as it is; we’re always experiencing an edited, simplified version’. What has this got to do with your memory? We tend to see our memory as a recording device that captures facts, observations and information with accuracy. The truth is, our memory is highly subjective.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
That subjectivity of our brain also makes it very interesting though. As it brings one of my all-time favourite mental laws into play: The ‘Law of Unintended Consequences’ also known as second-order effects. Yes, you can use repetition or exposure to capture information, but this is only an immediate consequence of the action (repeat-remember). There is a subsequent effect of our repetition action as well. Behavioural science adds on a fascinating second-order effect on the concept of repetition that explains why using repetition can help you be more influential.
If you repeat something, it doesn’t only activate memory; it also triggers trust and liking.
So, if you repeat things, you become trust worthier, hence more influential. In behavioural science, this is called the mere exposure effect, also known as the familiarity principle. It describes a phenomenon that causes humans to rate or feel positively about things to which they are frequently and consistently exposed, including other people.
Just think about when you hear a new song on the radio. At first, you may not like it, but after hearing it a couple of times it starts growing on you, and you start loving it. As you grow more familiar with the tune and lyrics, you can even get quite fond of the song. It like the saying: ‘something grows on you’.
The first scientific study on the relationship between exposure and appreciation goes way back to 1960. Researchers first asked participants to rate several nonsense words on a good-bad scale. They were then notified that they were in an experiment measuring the effectiveness of repetition in learning to pronounce strange words correctly. Some of these words were shown once, others twice, five times, or ten times. Participants had to take a look at the words, and then pronounce them every time they were presented to them. Following this ‘training’, they had to rate the words again on the good-bad scale. A significant repetition (or exposure) effect was seen, with the words shown frequently increasing in positive evaluation.
Strangely, however, words which were seen only once in training were judged afterwards not quite as ‘good’ as before the start of the training. Thus, as a result of 2, 5, and 10 exposures words improved in meaning, and as a result of but one exposure, they worsened. The study revealed the same effect with Chinese characters that people didn’t understand.
So, even when you talk bullocks like Trump (sorry, I could not let that one pass), but repeat it enough people may trust you anyway. But let’s leave the roaring research sixties behind and let us see this principle a bit more in the light of the present.
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Using the mere exposure effect to create brand loyalty
I guess the most discussed application of the mere exposure effect can be found in marketing and communication. If you expose someone to a brand logo, slogan or communication vehicle often enough, it boosts recognition. People will even recognise brands with the brand name removed.
Familiar stimuli require less cognitive effort.
We don’t have to go to the trouble of reading brand names, but we recognise the colours, shape of the logo and font types that we were exposed to many times before. Just do a little test yourself. I guess you can tell me which soft drinks these are even if you aren’t fluent in Arabic:
Visual source: Google.
Studies have shown that recognition, whether correct or mistaken, enhances the likelihood of preference.
Therefore, mere repetition can boost brand liking and brand loyalty. I guess we have all been there. If you ask me why I buy a particular brand of toothpaste, I buy it because I am used to buying it. I couldn’t give you a clear-cut answer to the benefits of my toothpaste or on which features it outperforms other toothpaste brands. I just like it (or have grown to like it because of familiarity). It again all links back to the fact that:
Our brain is continually trying to lower our cognitive overload and repetition helps us make autopilot decisions.
There is all kind of tactics to use mere exposure in marketing and communication. Depicting familiar situations in your communication, presenting ads several times, developing a distinctive identity, playing by the sector rules (ever wondered why all hotel booking sites look the same? Now you know), and so on. To me, however, the far more impressive effect of mere exposure is the impact it can have on decision-making.
Using mere exposure to make better decisions
It is essential to realise that the mere exposure effect substantially impacts human decision-making. People apply for schools, pick restaurants, favour people of which they heard the names more often or which they saw more frequently. So, if you commute by train to work every day and you see the same person making the same journey day in day out, you start to trust this person. The same goes for colleagues: the ones you see or interact with more often you tend to like more.
Liking people is one thing, but what if this mere exposure favouring affects your decision-making? To give you an example. If people apply for secondary education, they may consider a school, after reading the school curriculum and the school brochure, to be the perfect match but still apply for a school with a lesser fit because they have heard of it more often. Have you ever wondered why that blend, uniform looking global hotel chains are still in business? It is again the mere exposure effect at work. People may spend hours browsing hotel booking sites, checking out pictures and reviews of luxurious or boutique hotels. But often they tend to book a hotel which they are familiar with. Hence, settling with they already know. This is also known as satisficing instead of maximising. Most of us are satisficers.
Well-known brands give people comfort, especially in uncertain situations such as travelling to new surroundings. It’s like seeing your national air carrier on an airport across the world. It feels a bit like home in a strange kind of way. It is one of the pillars of success for fast food chains such as McDonald’s. Because you are exposed to them everywhere, all across the world, McD becomes familiar to you, and it makes many people tend to feel more secure to eat there instead of at the food stalls on the streets of Bangkok, which is a major mistake! Nothing, nothing beats eating Thai street food. I almost can’t make a better case than this that mere exposure sometimes makes you make worse decisions.
This flaw in decision-making has to do with a cognitive bias: ambiguity or uncertainty aversion. This is the human tendency to favour the known over the unknown, including known risks over unknown risks. This is why stockbrokers tend to invest in domestic companies more often, even though international companies are showing better numbers. But it also prevents people like me and you to invest in stock markets because it has risks that we cannot conceive of understanding. Even more severe is the fact that people choose to withhold from medical treatments if the risks are unknown.
If you want to help people to make better decisions, you, therefore, need to be very aware of their anxieties.
You can also minimise risk perception by again using the mere exposure effect itself. We, as humans are social animals. We want to be liked, we want to be like others, and we want to belong to a group. This is an innate human desire: we all want to be part of something bigger and want to feel respected and accepted. This is the reason why people tend to favour but also trust people who are similar to them.
It will reduce someone’s uncertainty when you expose them to a similar other.
Preferably several times. Let me illustrate this with an example. We worked for an institution that provided a debt relief program for youngsters with serious debts. The program was free of charge, but the attendance rate was meagre. When we conducted Behavioural Research, we revealed that the youngsters had extreme anxiety. They didn’t feel the debt advisors were people like them. When we communicated and showed, truthfully, that the advisors were all people like them that used to have debts themselves, the willingness to attend the program skyrocketed. We merely exposed them (at several touchpoints) with similar and familiar others which reduced the uncertainty aversion and boosted the desired behaviour.
What do you think after reading this text? Do you think we have a problem or not? And do you believe it is a minor problem or one that could harm us? Unfortunately, this rhetoric works. But we can learn from it. Not only how we can influence someone (please don’t turn into a Trump) but also how we are influenced on a system 1 level by the mere exposure effect ourselves.
But there is another way to make this mere exposure work for you without you having to turn into a Dumb.
You can also try to be visible yourself around the people you want to influence. Be repetitive exposure in person.
In his book ‘How Brands Grow’. Byron Sharp delivers scientific evidence that brands grow not by positioning or differentiation, but by salience. He introduces the concept of ‘mental and physical availability’. The more people see a brand or the more it is evoked in people’s memory; the more people will trust and buy that brand. Again, it shows that:
Familiarity breeds liking.
I believe the same goes for you being influential, as the findings of Sharp make sense and connect with the mere exposure effect. So, know that you’re the brand called you. Make yourself familiar by merely being around and make it easy as possible for people to reach, see or talk to you. And use repetition in your communication.
Be careful not to overexpose.
Not in words, visibility or advertising. Overexposure maybe makes up for arty pictures, but it is an art that is only appreciated by a few. Just a small but essential side-note repeating is not the same as copying. To be perfectly clear. Some people kind of misunderstand what repetition is about and are more in the business of stealing. And not even as an artist I may add.
Visual source: CNBC
Using mere exposure to build better relationships
Now that you are familiar with the mere exposure effect, you can also use it to build better relationships with people. Familiarity is the foundation of every relationship. You share more with people you have seen more. Mere exposure builds interpersonal trust. So, whether you want to earn the trust of a friend or your partner’s friends, your family or your colleagues you need to show up more. Invite them over for drinks, talk to them more often, go to get-togethers or send them a message now and then. It’s how salespeople or the best account managers operate by nature. They remember birthdays, make house calls, and keep in touch regularly. In the end, the unconscious decision-making part of people’s brain will prefer who they are comfortable with.
Using mere exposure to help solve societal problems
I briefly touched upon the relationship between anxiety and mere exposure. However, anxiety doesn’t always have to be a bad thing; you can also use it to your advantage. The mere exposure effect can help people become more aware and more willing to take action for severe problems. Researchers exposed participants to images of environmental risks and directed their attention repeatedly to a subset of these risks. When the participants were asked about those risk they were exposed to more often, they indicated to judge these risks to be more severe, more frightening, higher priority and more distinctive than risks they were exposed to fewer times. The researchers, therefore, suggest that mere exposure can increase the perceived severity of environmental risks because it increases the fear and distinctiveness of those risks.
I wouldn’t promote fear-mongering by the way, but this research does show that you need to expose people more often to a message to have an effect on memory and action. As we are facing some serious international issues today, it could be beneficial to see if we can leverage the effect of mere exposure. Sometimes people need to be shaken up a bit to care; I don’t know what the right balance is of the amount of fear. Just like a photograph can turn out wrong because of overexposure, the same goes here. Given is, you shouldn’t overdo it.
Mere exposure: don’t overdo it
Not all exposure is good exposure. Too much exposure can lead to conflicting feelings. Whether it is a person you see too much, or a brand or a communication. It can cause indifference, or something called ‘audience fatigue’. People reach a saturation point. So, you have to find a balance in the number of exposures. But also, the quality of exposures matters. Take a look at this social thread on Tide adds that people seem to dislike much.
Visual source: Reddit
When following Byron Sharp’s thinking, you could argue that the quality doesn’t matter and at least Tide has built mental availability. There’s certainly truth in that. But the fact is, too much exposure can decrease liking. Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt discovered that:
People’s enjoyment rises when an idea, experience or product is new, but when it becomes overly familiar, the joy will drop.
Visual source: the Wundt Curve (see resources below)
The lesson we can learn from this is that yes, we want to build familiarity. But we can build sustainable relationships by changing a familiar product, service or even yourself just enough to make the experience new again. This is why making incremental changes can be a tactic to keep benefiting from the mere exposure effect. And by the way, Wundt also discovered this is the way arousal works. So, if you want your partner to keep longing for you need to get out that familiarity comfort zone. Time to dust of those worn-out habits and find some new excitement.
Using mere exposure to study and remember
Next to the fact that exposing people to something multiple times is what will activate the exposure effect, there is also the question of timing. When do you expose someone? I guess we have all grown up with the habit to repeat, repeat, repeat to learn new stuff, remember it and reproduce it in tests. What we did back then (and maybe still are doing now) is using repetition to help us remember. But what we were never taught is how to apply this mere exposure effect on ourselves to get a maximum result. And this all has to do with the timings of the exposure.
The best learning experience comes from so-called spaced repetition.
It is one of the most powerful techniques to help your brain recall information (also check out my post about chunking). It would be digging a hole here to dive into the Behavioural Design of learning right now, but to bring you up-to-speed quickly. The benefit of spaced repetition is based on the research of Ebbinghaus who has discovered the Forgetting Curve. This curve shows we forget things over time.
Visual source: Farnham Street blog
But we can change the curve by adding space between the repetition. Or as Ebbinghaus said himself:
With any considerable number of repetitions, a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.
Visual source: Farnham Street blog
I will dedicate a particular blog to the way you can boost your learning experience using spacing and achieve memory mastery by using repeated exposure. For now, this quote of John Medina, author of ‘Brain Rules’ wraps it up nicely:
How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information in specifically timed intervals provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain. …Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid, it can be. Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once.”
Conclusion: mere exposure is applied behavioural design
To conclude, mere exposure provides people with a shortcut that lowers their cognitive overload in deciding something is valuable or not. By repeatedly exposing someone to something or someone, you can build liking, trust and memory. And it can help people to make better decisions and to shape desired behaviours. How’s that for making behavioural economics work in practice? Not bad, not bad at all.
You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.
You can download the Academy brochure here, contact us here or subscribe to Behavioural Design Digest at the bottom of this page. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.
Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
Behavioural science is fascinating. Understanding some of the fundamentals of human decision-making will give you far more control over successful outcomes of personal and professional goals than you might have ever expected. But how do you turn this science into practice? This is a blog series highlighting the best insights from behavioural science translated into how to make them work for you daily. Behavioural science applied. To help you make better decisions that will help you improve your wellbeing, work and society. This is part 1 of this applied behavioural science series: the power of chunking. Or, How to improve your capability to remember and learn.
Behavioural science: The power of chunking
One thing we all want more of in life is simplicity. In fact, mostly, our brain loves simplicity. We all have a very ingenious decision-making system in between our ears that helps us make decisions with as little effort as possible. Even now, your brain is continuously working hard for you to do as little thinking as possible. Most of the choices we make are based on automatic shortcuts. To save brain bandwidth for the decisions, we do have to contemplate rationally.
This so-called two systems thinking, that was discovered by Kahneman and Tversky, is actually a lifesaver if you imagine an average person is making 35.000 choices a day. Varying from minor decisions, such as should I step to the right? To decisions that have a greater impact, such as should I hire this person? Making all these decisions consciously would go beyond our cognitive abilities, so we need our subconscious mind.
So, let’s get back to learning and remembering. How can we make it easier for you to learn and remember? If you take the way our brain operates as a starting point, we need to start at the notion that our brain loves simplicity. By chunking or grouping separate pieces of information into chunks, this is exactly what you will be doing. Let me give you an example. Read these three sentences once and then say them out loud by heart:
Remember far is to information easier
Pieces is divided into up it if
Our logical are head that patterns in
Quite hard, right? Now, try these three sentences:
Information is far easier to remember
If it is divided up into pieces
That are logical patterns in our head
I bet; this time it was no problem at all. Fact is, it was exactly the same information only represented in another way.
Our brain is a pattern-making machine, as soon as we can discover patterns it is much easier to make decisions or to remember things.
I read this very interesting book by David Epstein called Range. In one of the first chapters, he dives into what makes up for a savant. Those chess players or piano virtuosos that stun everyone from the age of 3 with their talent. You probably have heard of the 10.000-hour rule: you need to practice something for 10.000 hours to become really good at it. Only that way you can reach the savant or elite level.
Kahneman and Klein found this only holds true for domains that are characterized by predictable patterns and logic. Like playing golf, playing classical music or a game of chess: ‘There are rules, and boundaries and patterns repeat over and over, feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid’. Now, you probably don’t have the ambition or are a tat late age-wise, to become a savant, but still, something very interesting was discovered with savants that can be relevant to you and it has everything to do with chunking; The plot thickens George Villiers would say.
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Change in perception: you don’t need 10.000 hours.
It was often thought that next to the 10.000 hours of repetitive exercise, savants had another characteristic. Savants must have a photographic memory. A logical conclusion if you witness young children who play symphonies by heart or four-year-olds that beat chess players ten times their age with impressive high-pace gameplays. But the truth is, savants in the predictable domains are masters at chunking.
Several savants were put to the test by different researches. Epstein refers to an experiment National Geographic TV did with Susan Polgar, the world’s first female chess grandmaster; they printed a mid-game chess play with 28 pieces on the side of a truck. Susan glanced at the truck and then recreated the game flawlessly. When they printed a random play with fewer chess pieces on the truck, she could barely recreate the play. It lacked existing chess patterns.
Chess players don’t have photographic memories and remember every single chess piece; they chunk meaningful pieces together that form familiar patterns.
Chunking may seem like magic, but it comes from the patterns savants have locked into their memory in those 10.000-hour repetitive study. Interested to know more about how to optimise your learning experience? Here’swere you can read sone more on spaced repetition. A variety of chunking applied to learning.
Chunking is all about presenting information in a way that it is easier to process for people.
So, the good news is: you don’t need a photographic memory to remember things. Better news still, you don’t need to put in 10.000 hours to be a chunking master. The world we live in is often far less familiar and predictable than golf, chess or classical music. ‘Our rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate or both’. So, focusing for 10.000 hours on patterns in daily life is less relevant.
Chunking can help people make sense of the complex world they live in.
You can use chunking to help someone make sense of what you are offering them or what you want them to do. But chunking is more than just providing someone with a logical pattern. If you chunk information or to do’s or goals, you are breaking-up a larger whole. Chess players don’t remember a whole game strategy; they remember parts of the tactics. So, when looking at behaviour:
Chunking can work as a way to break-up a harder to perform behaviour into smaller, manageable steps.
How to change habits using chunking
Some practical examples that may help you boost your sales, change the attitude in consumer behaviour or effectively design a customer experience or user experience. Let me start by telling you how to change habits using chunking: If you want someone to quit smoking, a sticky habit, that CAN be very difficult to change.
You can make it simpler by breaking up the quit-smoking-behaviour behaviour into chunks. The NHS has introduced a perfect example of this thinking. They help people stop smoking by not by focussing on quitting smoking at once but by helping someone step-by-step. First, you can apply for a free ‘stop smoking kit’. It contains things like nicotine patches and a squeezy toy to give you something in hand to replace your cigarette. But they guide you towards the end-goal of quitting smoking easily. By for example, first sticking on the patches and sending you motivational emails.
Visual: NHS
If you break down a goal into smaller steps, people feel more confident that they can reach the end-goal.
Therefore, chunking is also very effective in helping someone reach their goals. But also consider using chunking if you are trying to achieve a goal. Don’t focus on running the marathon at once, but start at 1K, 5K, 10K. You will get there in the end (and if not, running is just not your thing which I can relate to completely but that’s a different story).
How to improve sales conversion using chunking
Let’s check out some more examples of companies who do a good job adding chunking to their offering and who combine this technique from behavioural economics in marketing or advertising. The first example is the blogging platform Ghost which shows that chunking may help you improve your sales conversion and get you more online sales. Maybe you have ever heard of the ‘aha moment’ describing that point that people start to get value from a product and keep on using it. Ghost introduced a simple five-step process to guide users to the essential steps to get value out of the platform. These steps are laid out for users, and they see a satisfying green check mark and a strikethrough for tasks they’ve completed.
The only challenge with having someone takes steps on your website is that they have to be online to see the site. This was solved by Ghost by sending users who had left the online set-up process conditional emails depending on where they left off in the process.
Visuals: ghost.com
These emails gave clear guidance on how to finish the step. Eventually, they were able to boost the efficiency of their conversion rates with 370%, only by chunking the behaviour into smaller steps and guiding people through them.
How to shape behaviour using chunking
Another company who helps people develop good financial behaviour by chunking tasks is HelloWallet. They do this via a weekly Sunday email that contains just one small manageable financial task for users to focus on – perhaps merely setting up a holiday savings fund, and no more. HelloWallet points out that it takes just three minutes to set up, and by dividing up savings behaviour into smaller weekly chunks, people begin to develop better financial habits and are more likely to meet their goals. HelloWallet’s research shows that success in these small tasks builds people’s confidence and make them feel more able to tackle their finances.
Visual: HelloWallet
How chunking helps us remember things top of mind
Another upside of chunking is that our capability to receive and retain information improves.
You probably have experienced it yourself: have you ever better remembered a phone number by chucking it? For instance, the SUE | Behavioural Design phone number is (+31)202234626. But I remember it by chunking it: 223 4626 (the country and area code are in my automatic brain already so I don’t have to chunk those). This is why our phone number is also displayed in chunks on our website: To make it easier for visitors to remember it.
Why chunking works psychologically is that the chunks are seen as one ‘unit’ of information.
So, instead of remembering all separate digits, I just have to remember four chunks. Making the cognitive steps smaller. There now maybe is a question that comes to your mind. Is there anything known about the optimal number of chunks? Well, this has been researched. Early behavioural research revealed that humans best recall seven pieces of information plus or minus two. However, more recent studies show that chunking is most effective when four to six chunks (or steps) are created.
Conclusion: chunking is applied behavioural design
To conclude, chunking is a practical user-centred design approach that helps people to make hard behaviour easier to do.
By limiting steps or units of information, someone has to do or remember you help them lower their cognitive needs. At the same time, you boost their confidence, memory and capability to perform the desired behaviour. How’s that for making behavioural economics work in practice? Not bad, not bad at all.
www.mixergy.com, Andrew Warner “Interview: HelloWallet: 0 to 300,000 Paid Subscribers In 5 Months – with Matt Fellowes”, 29th November 2011; http://hrpost.hellowallet.com/engagement/webinar-recording-tips-for-effective-employee-emails/
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Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.
The Covid-19 crisis requires behavioural change
at an unprecedented scale
Abandoned Zeedijk street in Amsterdam during the COVID-19 outbreak.
A tiny creature with massive powers
One tiny microscopic creature did something to humanity what no other animal was capable of doing:
It stopped us.
Everything we thought about the present and the future has been shattered to pieces in just a matter of three weeks.
The future turns out not to be as positive as we anticipated.
The present turned out much more fragile than we assumed.
It took a tiny little virus to evaporate the profits of the last ten years in a matter of days. It squeezed out a sizable chunk of your pension. It might kill your job, and it might turn the debts you took in optimistic times, into serious liabilities.
The Covid-19 crisis requires behavioural change at an unprecedented scale. In this blog we explore the wicked design challenges for behavioural change.
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This virus has thrown us abruptly into a forced behavioural change experiment, and we are struggling to adapt:
We need to figure out how to stay in quarantaine without making each other’s life miserable.
We have to find a way to be productive and creative while isolated from our teams.
We need to stay in mental and physical shape.
We’ll have to use our mental strength to avoid anxiety and depression and to be grateful for what we have.
And we’re going to get back in financial shape after this crisis. Surviving this one will provide us with valuable lessons for the future.
A Classic Wicked Behavioural Design Problem
If this is not a wicked Behavioural Design problem, then what is?
(Ok except for the climate crisis, which, by the way, is getting temporary relief from our ferocious efforts to finance our progress by pumping the CO2-byproduct of that progress into the atmosphere and the oceans, whereby we turn it into a problem the future generation will need to fix).
This forced social distancing experiment challenges us to change our beliefs and attitudes, change our behaviours and build new habits.
This crisis has all the characteristics of the ultimate behavioural design challenge:
It involves new behaviour.
We will need to break existing habits,
The behaviour we want to design will probably pay off in the far future,
While at the same time, we need to to be disciplined in the present.
In other words: although most people will want behavioural change, their habits, their context and their relative inability to resist instant gratification, will make it extremely difficult to succeed.
Behavioural Designers always design interventions with these barriers for change in mind. We believe that behavioural change can only be achieved if we start with irrational humans. We’ll need to take into account the forces that prevent them from changing their behaviour. We need to find Jobs-to-be-Done that matter to them, and we need to try to make a connection with those jobs. We’ll need to discover the hot trigger moments, where motivation and ability are high and use those moments to let them commit to something small.
We then need to find ways to keep them engaged and to help them to build and sustain new habits.
We’ll need to leverage our psychological understanding of behaviour to help people to build the habits that:
keep them in a positive flow
get them to experience deep work
harvest the creative, social and intellectual capital of their team
be creative and productive
get them to experience gratitude, joy and wellbeing
contribute positively to the life of others
get them to learn new skills
trigger a curious and optimistic mindset
get them to grow as a person
get them to try new ideas and embrace uncertainty
Change behaviour and the rest will follow
This crisis forces us to practice virtue in the face of gigantic obstacles.
It provides us with a unique opportunity to practice calm, to inspire others with optimism and re-program our brain away from anxiety into fascination and desire for action.
All these positive outcomes can only follow from changing our behaviour first. We firmly believe that we will find calm, experience joy, get creative and feel the power of great collaboration, only if we act first. Our emotions and experience follow from our behaviour. Only if we can get ourselves to commit to new habits; only if we can prime ourselves into thinking differently; only if we infatuate others with our energy and excitement, we will be able to come stronger out of this crisis.
It would be the worst Behavioural Design if we as SUE wouldn’t come up with interventions to help contain the Covid-19 outbreak. Starting with how we manage things at SUE for all our clients and participants. And not to mention for our team. At our offices we have already taken all the measures that are advised:
We wash our hands regularly
Most of us are working virtually right now
We have special hygiene soaps in the offices
We have stopped shaking and hugging (and we are big on hugs)
But we are taking things a step further.
Make Behavioural Design work for you
Join our virtual Behavioural Design Academy and see how you can effectively change behaviour and habits to cope with this crisis.
Behavioural Design might be needed more than ever right now. In these times of uncertainty, we believe our clients and participants need all the help they can get not to come to a standstill. How can you make sure your clients are still coming to you? How can you make sure you and your team can still be a high-performance team when forced to work virtually? How can you install team habits? How can you better understand the psychology from clients, citizens and employees so you can help them make better decisions? How can we design behaviour to help slow the spreading of the virus down?
You might have been forced to stop travelling, but that doesn’t mean you want progress to stop or even worse to come to a standstill.
More know-how on Behavioural Design can help prevent a standstill or even help you acquire know-how to outsmart the competition (and virus). That’s why we will continue sprinting and training. SUE is going virtual as long as the outbreak isn’t contained. And SUE will start making free content and training to help organisations and people to install the new behaviours needed in these times. Just keep an eye on our newsletter that you can join on our homepage and this blog.
The reason for going virtual
After reading up on trustworthy sources on the Covid-19 outbreak, one of the most important conclusions is that we can help slow-down and contain the outbreak if we make sure a little people as possible come into contact with each other. We found this interesting graph that shows it in one clear picture:
That’s why we have decided to go fully digital at SUE. We feel it is our responsibility to our clients, participants and employees to protect them as much as we possibly can. By not bringing them together in one room. We have set-up a virtual training and sprint room, and we have all technology in place to visually collaborate from a distance.
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Book a Behavioural Design sprint to prevent a standstill and have Behavioural Design help you turn this crisis into progress.
Maybe we can make the saying ‘never waste a good crisis’ true for every one of us. We will develop, prototype and improve new working habits.
Let’s turn this forced virtual working into a blessing. If we can make this work, we can also keep it up when this Corona crisis is over.
It could open possibilities for employees to have more flexibility as working from home reduces their travel time. It can open up new ways of wokring that helps parents spend more time with their kids. It can make teams surge as this time can help them experiment with high-performance team habits. It can maybe help this planet as breaking the habits to jump on planes, to commute to work by car or shop ’till we drop is replaced by more positive habits. It will be an interesting journey, and yes, we will experience setbacks. But this crisis will force us to learn super quickly to build better behaviours. Necessity is the mother of all progress. In the meantime,
We will take you along on our journey to help create better habits.
Both in staying on top of our game in work performance, but also in finding out how to make sure you still feel genuinely connected when not being in the same space. We will share this in our newsletter and on this blog. Interesting times and we hope you will join us on this ride. That is both necessary, but also extremely intriguing.
Our clients and participants
If you have booked a sprint with us, we will contact you personally to give you all instructions how to participate in the virtual sprint to help you come up with solutions to make Behavioural Design work for you. Do you want to book a new virtual sprint, as you also might feel Behavioural Design is the missing layer to dealing with this crisis? Please contact us; we can help you out with everything.
If you have enrolled in our Academy, we have sent you an email with the latest update on how you can access the virtual training will take place. Please also check your spam folder to find it. Do you want to join the Academy? Just enrol on the Academy page, and you’ll get all the information on how to join the virtual training room. The dates mentioned on the website are still the dates of the training.
In this talk, I wanted to make a case for a more pragmatic definition of innovation. In my view, innovation is nothing more or less than trying out new shit to generate growth. And when you approach the innovation challenge from this angle, it’s evident to me that we’re too obsessed with technology to look for new ideas. In my keynote, I argue that there’s massive untapped potential for “trying out new shit” when you look into psychology.
Here’s the video (30 minutes)
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The 2020-editions of the SUE | Behavioural Design Academy foundation course are now online
A couple of years ago, Robin Sloan launched “Fish, a tap essay“. The essay is a manifesto about the difference between liking something and loving something on the internet. The core idea of the piece is that reading or watching something twice is a radical act of love. There’s so much new content that tries to grab our attention, that we tend to forget that mastery and appreciation only start to emerge from second or third readings. This is a powerful idea that influenced me a lot.
Speaking of which, I honestly think that there hasn’t been a year gone by without me re-sharing the honey badger video through social media. In my opinion, it’s – hands down – the funniest thing ever on Youtube. A guy named Randall who does a hilarious voice-over of a documentary-fragment on the honey badger, the most fearless animal in the animal kingdom.
I find great pleasure in the surprising effect of mixing two completely different genres: When you put the gay hairdresser-chitchat style on top of the nature-documentary genre, the result is, well, this:
Book a 60-minutes with SUE
Do you consider hiring SUE to learn how we could help you to imrpove your product, service or marketing through behavioural psychology? Book 60-minutes with SUE. Get a Behavioural Design perspective on your challenge. Who knows where it could lead to…
I deleted Twitter from my phone today. It drove me nuts.
I noticed that every time I opened Twitter, the platform is working hard to get me in an angry indignation mode. Under the “recommended for you”-header, partisan political messages are being suggested to me all the time. Twitter doesn’t do this because it thinks I’m interested in this content, but because its algorithms have figured out that angry people spend more time on the platform. I decided this week that I don’t want to spend more time on a platform that is actively using behavioural design to appeal to my darkest fears and desires just for the sake of being able to serve me more ads.
Twitter used to be my brain-feed. It was a delight to tap into the thoughts and links of smart people. However, the behavioural design of the Twitter-platform is triggering the worst in people: It triggers slogan-like writing, it rewards controversy with more likes and shares, and it allows people to hide their identity and reputation behind their avatar. Its design triggers outrageous behaviour and its algorithms fuel this outrage further.
I decided to switch my craving for interestingness to platforms where:
The design of reputation is much better: People are much politer and wiser on Linkedin because their professional status is much more at stake
Algorithms can’t play me. There’s no way for an algorithm to manipulate me when I’m listening to my favourite podcasts (Freakonomics Radio, Making Sense, The Knowledge Project). I decide to subscribe, and then the author has to work hard to earn my time. If not, I unsubscribe.
Threes had to die for it: Books are still the number one source for interestingness. To take time to explore a subject through the writing of a skilled author is the greatest joy.
If you can read Dutch, this is a screenshot of my Twitter notifications. Twitter suggests under the “recommended for you”-headings three Tweets to fuel my anger: An “I love Trump tweet”, a “leftist elite gone mad tweet” and “Immigrant crimes are being tabooed (by the leftwing conspiracy of course)”.
Learn the Behavioural Design Method
The 2020-editions of the SUE | Behavioural Design Academy foundation course are now online
Simple. A study of over 94,000 cafeteria meal choices has found that doubling the vegetarian options—from one in four to two in four—reduced the proportion of meat-rich purchases by between 40-80% without affecting overall food sales. (Thanks André Gubbels for the tip)
#Choice_Architecture #nudging
Smart Vegan framing
Our daughter loves chicken filet. We discovered this vegan option this week in the supermarket. I think it’s brilliant framing. By calling it “Chicken free slices”, you can’t help but thinking about the fact that it’s meant to be a chicken replacement. This is a beautiful illustration of “don’t think of an elephant”. This brand did a brilliant job in making you think of vegan chicken filet by calling it “chicken free”
#Framing
Book a 60-minutes with SUE
Do you consider hiring SUE to learn how we could help you to imrpove your product, service or marketing through behavioural psychology? Book 60-minutes with SUE. Get a Behavioural Design perspective on your challenge. Who knows where it could lead to…
Suppose you want to learn more about how influence works. In that case, you might want to consider joining our 
Behavioural psychology: The power of mere exposure
Behavioural science: The power of chunking
Visual: NHS
The only challenge with having someone takes steps on your website is that they have to be online to see the site. This was solved by Ghost by sending users who had left the online set-up process conditional emails depending on where they left off in the process.
Visuals: ghost.com
Visual: HelloWallet
Why chunking works psychologically is that the chunks are seen as one ‘unit’ of information.
