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Behavioural Science Insights

growth hacking

Growth Hacking vs. Behavioural Design

By Behavioural Science Insights, Customer Behaviour

We often get questions on the difference between Behavioural Design and Growth Hacking. The short answer is that Behavioural Design is a method to come up with insights and ideas, while Growth Hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across digital marketing channels. Whereas Growth Hacking can provide you with the tactics, Behavioural Design provides you with the ideas and strategies to make the tactics work. Let’s explore this core idea a bit deeper.

Behavioural design is about seduction and persuasion, while Growth Hacking is about conversion.

A couple of years ago, I attended a fascinating conference in Estonia called Digital Elite Camp. It was probably one of the most exciting conferences I have ever attended (ok maybe except for our Behavioural Design Fest). The conference brought together digital marketers from all over the world to get inspired by growth hacking. I loved every second of it. I immediately sensed that I was looking at the avant-garde in marketing.

Geeks were geeking out on landing page optimisation, e-mail performance, search ranking, conversion rate optimization, etc. Everyone was obsessed with A/B testing and with building, measuring and learning. You could sense the joy of the desire to overthrow old school thinking on marketing, advertising and sales. This was where the future was happening.

Except for one thing.

I still vividly remember the crappy landing page design, the triviality of the incremental changes and the cheapness of the sales triggers with which they experimented. I felt that, although it looks incredibly cool to figure out how to get a conversion funnel right, it was too much conversion tactics and too little understanding of persuasion and seduction. They got lost in tools and tactics, while they didn’t care too much for how the bits and bolt of how seduction work.

Imagine what would happen if you would hand over the problem of seducing a girl to a computer scientist. His approach would make a lot of sense from a logical point of view, but chances that you’ll end up with a smack in the face are pretty high.

Imagine what would happen if you would hand over the problem of seducing a girl to a computer scientist. His approach would make a lot of sense from a logical point of view, but chances that you’ll end up with a smack in the face are pretty high.

Behavioural Design is about understanding how to create magic with the Growth Hackers toolbox

What I love about growth hacking is that it brought a bit of creativity to digital marketing. The problem with digital marketing is that to do it properly, you need to get a lot of things right. It’s not enough to know how to find audiences if you don’t know how to attract them. It’s not enough to attract if you don’t know how to convert them into qualified leads. It’s not enough to have qualified leads if you don’t know how to nurture them into trying out your products and services. And it’s not enough to sell to a customer if you don’t know how to turn them into excited, happy regular users.

Growth hackers looks at all these requirements in a more holistic way and try to figure out how to connect them in such a way that the tactics that are deployed actually lead to business growth.

You Suck At Photoshop

But learning ‘growth hacking’ is a bit like learning Photoshop. I can teach you all the tools and techniques to start working with Photoshop, but if you have no clue on how composition, perspective and aesthetic works, you’ll use the tools to create shit.

With the right tools and tactics, you can optimize for a local, but not for a global maximum. And the missing clue in growth hacking is insight in the human psychology of decision making. If you don’t understand how people make decision and why they do things or don’t do things, your growth hacking tactics are not going to to trigger the customer or user behaviour needed for growth.

If you don’t understand how people make decisions and why they do things or don’t do things, your growth hacking tactics are not going to trigger the customer or user behaviour needed for growth.

The Behavioural Design Method helps you to find radical new ways to connect with a user motivation or goal. It helps you to understand which barriers you need to address, how to make the desired outcome easy, how to add some motivational boosters to the mix and how to communicate the right series of triggers at the right time and place.

Case: Convert people for a Debt Relief Programme

Let me give you an example. In a project we did for an NGO that helps people to get into a free Debt Relief Programme, we discovered that the only way to break through people’s resistance and to turn audiences into leads, was to connect with them in three steps:

  1. Establish trust by connecting with their pain and frustrations
  2. Reduce uncertainty by claiming that all counsellors have been in debt too and know how you feel
  3. Motivate action by making it OK to have a get-to-know each other conversation first to see if it could work

Every other way of pitching the service was doomed to fail because people didn’t want to be framed as people who need help. Imagine a growth hacker optimising both the website and the digital campaign, not knowing this crucial insight. He would optimize within the boundaries of a useless strategy.

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Short Summary: Behavioural Design versus Growth Hacking

  • What behavioural designers and growth hackers have in common is a methodology of creative experimentation to figure out what works and what doesn’t
  • Whereas Growth Hacking is about the tactics and the tools, Behavioural Design is about how to create meaning and magic with the tools
  • Behavioural Design is a method, and Growth Hacking is a process. It’s not because you have a process, that you know what you’re doing
  • Behavioural designers and growth hackers should have sex because they will make beautiful babies.

One more thing: Don’t call yourself a growth hacker (or a behavioural designer)

Growth hackers are first and foremost digital marketers. They use the creative method of growth hacking to come up with smarter ideas for digital marketing faster. A Growth Hacker without technical digital marketing skills is worthless. The same goes for Behavioural Design.

I’m not convinced we should call ourselves Behavioural Designers. We are product-, marketing-, sales- or UX-professionals who use the Behavioural Design Method to come up with better products, services, communication and policies. I think that’s a better way to put it. We have also created a post on the difference between Behavioural Design and Design Thinking.

BONUS: free cheat card Value Perception

This cheat card will show you how we (unconsiously) value objects and people. It is a helpful tool if you want to hack your growth and power it up with Behavioural Design. For you to download, and use right away—a little gift from us to you.

Download cheat card

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

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

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
23/06/2019

How to influence the perception of value?

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

In this blog post I want to explore the concept of value. I want to argue that Behavioural Design is as much about influencing how people perceive and experience things, as it is about changing actual behaviour. The design of psychological value is in my opinion a great concept to think about how to change perception and experience.

 

Value is a critical concept in economics. Peter Drucker famously said: “The purpose of a business to create a customer”. And the only way to create a customer, is to make him appreciate the value of what the company is offering for a reasonable price. But what is value really? And are we good at calculating the value or something?

We are price clueless

Well, it turns out we’re terrible at understanding value. In the book Priceless, William Poundstone explains the concept of “Price Cluelessness”. Because we have no idea of what something should cost, our System 1 – or automatic brain – is always relying on shortcuts to figure out the value of something. If we see a nice pair of sunglasses in a Chanel store, we expect them to cost € 200. But in an H&M store, these € 200 sunglasses would never sell. Even worse: people would be outraged. The context determines how to decode the value.

We even take price as a clue

Our incompetence for understanding value gets even worse: We tend to look for the price itself to find a clue whether something must be valuable. Something is priced high; therefore it must be excellent, otherwise, they would never price it this high. Also, when we really want the high-priced item, we tend to look for explanations, to trick ourselves into believing it’s actually a bargain. Stella Artois once campaigned around this idea. You could buy a coupon to pay even more for your Stella, thereby underscoring its brand promise “reassuringly expensive”. What most people in Britain don’t know is that in Belgium, Stella Artois’ home country, Stella is just an ordinary beer.

Popularity as a shortcut for value

The fact that something is popular is also a classic “System 1”-shortcut for determining the value of something: Many people want this item, therefore it must be good. Popularity helps you to decide without having to think about that decision. This is probably one of the most critical roles of branding: You know you can’t miss with buying a Jack Daniels, because you know everybody knows Jack Daniels.

Psychological value

The examples above are classic behavioural psychology tricks on how to influence the perception of value. But that’s the easy part. It gets much more interesting when you approach value from a human-centred point of view. Human-centred designers take irrational humans as their point of departure, for which they design answers and solutions. And when you depart from humans, you ask yourself questions like ‘How might we help people to…’:

  • Achieve their goals and realize their dreams?
  • Build positive long-term habits?
  • Resist their impulses and temptation?
  • Look at reality in new ways to trigger positive action?
  • Feel appreciated and respected?
  • Take away pain or frustration in their current experience?

Behavioural Design is fascinated with humans, their dreams, their fears, their bad habits, frustrations and their desire for happiness. And if we can understand them and design solutions form them, we will create psychological value.

Psychological Innovation

Once you start looking at reality through the lens of psychological value, you can see it everywhere:

  • Mom in Balance makes it much easier to stick to your workout habit because you meet up every time with the same group of mums like you.
  • The value of your restaurant experience goes through the roof if the chef decides to have a drink at your table
  • The € 10 you pay extra to sit in one of the front rows in an Easyjet-flight is the cheapest possible way to feel subjectively richer than the majority of people.
  • Airbnb is selling you the feeling that you are experiencing the city like someone who lives there. That’s priceless.
  • Uber makes a taxi experience 100x less frustrating because you know exactly when your car will show up, you know how much the ride will cost and you don’t need to have a transaction with the driver.
  • Would you prefer to work at the helpdesk or at the customer success team? Both jobs are exactly the same, but the second one feels so much better

Once you start thinking about creating psychological value for humans, you try to come up with ideas to help them to overcome stress, anxiety, insecurity, bad habits. Or to help them to achieve their goals, dreams and aspirations and to experience joy, fun and surprise. The number of things you can do to innovate are endless.

When it comes to innovation, we’re too often looking in the wrong direction. We think it’s about technology, but it’s really about creating psychological value.

—

PS: Our Behavioral Design Method is a method to spot opportunities for psychological value. It’s a fast-paced highly-structured process to turn hypothesis into ideas and to prototype and test what works and why it works. You can learn the method in our Behavioural Design Academy or apply the method to solve a business challenge in a Behavioural Design Sprint.

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

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

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
20/05/2019

How Behavioural Science and Data Science should collaborate

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

Last week I had the honour to speak and lead a data science hackathon at the I-com conference in Malaga. I have never been surrounded by so many brilliant people in my life. What fascinated me was how much behavioural designers and data-scientist have in common, and yet, how little both disciplines know about each other, or even collaborate with each other.

Why I fell in love with Data Science

What data-scientists do is they look at data sets, look for patterns in that data and use that understanding to build a model that could predict behaviour. Their models predict things like: “What products will new mums buy more or less?” or “when will you watch what kind of content on which device?”, or “in which region can you stop distributing product catalogues, without hurting sales?”. I saw teams in the 24-hours hackathon come up with mindblowing predictions. And I felt really stupid for not understanding a single bit of how they build their models. But the thing is: I don’t need to because the computer simply calculates the predictive power of the model, so there’s no cheating or bullshitting possible. Fascinating stuff.

The blind spot of Data Science

There is, however, a very big limitation to this approach. And that’s the fact that we’re dealing with humans. It’s not because I can predict to a certain extent your future behaviour, based on data-analysis, that I wouldn’t be able to influence you to make different choices. After all, our choices are heavily influenced by how choices are being presented to us.

I can make you reconsider the choice of buying a camera, by letting you choose between three, instead of two models. If I present you with three models, you are far more likely to chose the middle one. And you wouldn’t have chosen it if I only had shown you two. If I play loud music in a restaurant, you will buy more unhealthy food. If I would prime you with images of Italy, you will buy more Italian food. If I add urgency and scarcity to buy the last items of a sales promotion, you will probably choose differently. The means for screwing up the behaviour that is predicted by the model are endless.

Meaning versus Reach

The challenge with the classic behavioural design method of interviewing and observation is that it’s very rich on meaning but poor on reach. And data science has exactly the opposite problem: the insights are scalable, but they are not rich in meaning. The fact that new mums buy much more housecare products, but buy far less mouthcare products , doesn’t explain why they do that. If you can understand why people do the things they do, you can easily figure out new ways to optimize your marketing.

How to collaborate?

The answer is simple: Design a creative process that leverages the best of both worlds. I would always follow these steps:
Let the whole team do interviews to develop a deeper understanding of how the target audience thinks, feels and behaves. This helps them to overcome their own biases, assumptions and prejudices and helps them to build interesting hypotheses.

Analyse the data you have with the hypothesis you’ve just formed. Try to figure out which hypothesis actually predict behaviour. But also: dare to go back: if you find interesting other patterns (e.g. non-parents buy way more deodorants than new parents), try to see if this insight could help you to revise your deep understanding of the drivers of the behaviour of your audience

Once you’ve developed a predictive model, based on qualitative and qualitative results, use Behavioral Design principles to come up with ideas for improvements of the customer journey
The fun part: Prototype, test and measure. Design experiments, measure results, improve your overall plan. Aggressive experimentation is what sets apart the truly innovative companies from the laggards.

This is such an interesting time to really make a measurable impact. But everyone’s struggling with the HOW-question: how to turn a deeper understanding of behaviour into business value. The creative method is the answer.

#justsaying 🙂
Have a great day,
Tom

Want to learn more?

If you want to master the science of influence yourself, you could consider enrolling in our two-day course Behavioural Design at our SUE | Behavioural Design Academy. You can download the Academy brochure.

Or maybe you currently have a challenge in which you want to influence choice or change behaviour. Please, take a look at our Behavioural Design Sprint. It might be the answer you’re looking for.

Or could be you just would like to get to know us a little better. We happily introduce ourselves here.

19/05/2019
mental models

Mental models: How to design for intelligent decision making?

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

We want to talk about mental models. They are key for intelligent decisions making. We want to introduce you to one of our intellectual heroes. A man who turned 95 on January 1st of 2019. There’s a fair chance that you’ve never heard about him. But you definitely have heard about his 88 years old associate, Warren Buffett. The man we’re talking about is Charlie Munger.

 

Mental Models: meet Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger became a hero to many people who are interested in better decision-making with a famous lecture he gave in 1994 at USC business school. The talk was called “A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business”. You can’t find it on Youtube, but the transcript was published on the blog of startup Incubator Ycombinator and in the curious book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack, The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger“.

I want to urge you to read the transcript of the lecture. It’s one of the most exciting texts you will ever read. I re-read it at least three times per year. In this lecture on Worldly Wisdom, Charlie Munger argues that the reason why Munger and Buffett beat the market with their investments, for more than 60 years is that they have a different approach to decision making. Munger argues that if you want to make better decisions, you need to use more than one mental models to look a the problem. One of his famous quotes to make his point is the following:

To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

He argues that most people in business, everyday life and investing approach problems from a single mental model. If you work in branding, everything looks like a branding problem, if you work in business consulting, everything sounds like a transformation problem. If you are an economist, everything looks like a market-problem.

Mentals models: Worldly Wisdom

Munger and Buffett pride themselves with locking themselves up most of the day, reading books. What they are looking for is elementary worldly wisdom.They are obsessed with learning interesting “mental models”. Mental models are concepts from all kinds of sciences that offer elegant explanations to the world. To quote Munger:

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head”.

A list of mental models.

There’s a lot of renewed excitement for Munger’s idea of Mental Models. Shane Parish, host of the amazing podcast “The Knowledge Project” and author of Farnamstreet, the ultimate blog on better decision-making by learning from the smartest people in the world. Shane Parish is writing a book on the subject. He recently published a post called “Mental Models, the best way to make intelligent decisions (109 models explained)“. It’s a list of all the mental models that he is using in his daily life. A lot of these models are concepts from cognitive psychology and the science of influence.  BTW, Munger is also fascinated with how human decision-making works. If you understand how people think and why they do what they do, you can do a much better job at predicting and changing their behaviour.

Mentals models: learn more

  1. Here’s another great blogposts on Mental models (Thanks for sharing: Ed Borsboom)
  2. Start making a list of your favorite mental models in your todo-list. I use Evernote. I created a folder “Mental Models” and started the habit to post concepts I use a lot in my thinking. My most recent one is this: “You are the sum of the five people you hang around with”.
  3. Re-read your mental model list regularly. Once you use them to look at challenges or problems, they will always provide you with new ways of looking at the problem and its solutions.

Enjoy Munger while he’s still alive. 🙂

PS: We had Munger’s mental models in mind when we designed the program of our Behavioural Design Acacademy  Fundamentals Course. Our program is designed to teach you some very powerful and easy to remember mental models for finding human insights and for coming up with smart interventions for behavioural change. #funfact.

Master the number 1 mental model in Behavioural Design.

In our Fundamentals Course you will master the Behavioural Design Method©. A powerful mental model (and hands-on tool) to decode human decision-making and translate this into interventions that shape desired behaviours. Join over 2.000 forward-thinkers from over 45 countries who have already joined.

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

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

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
04/01/2019

What is design thinking?

By Behavioural Science Insights

In this blog post, we will explain what design thinking is all about. Originating from the innovation arena, it has gained popularity in other business domains. Driven by the success of design thinking of radically focusing on the needs of the user. The how and why behind design thinking is explained in this article.

 

Design Thinking explained

Everybody seems to be design thinking nowadays or has at least have heard of the term. But what is design thinking? Why has it gained so much popularity? Is it something that can help you and your business become more successful? In this article, we will give a short design thinking masterclass. So, you’ll know what everybody is talking about. And you can see for yourself if you want to start implementing design thinking in your own company. We’ll explain how and lead you to some of the best resources on the internet. To make your life a bit easier, we’ve divided the article into several subsections. Which you can jump to by clicking on the following links:

A new approach to innovation and problem solving
Design thinking implementing the process
The steps in the design thinking process
Design thinking tools and videos
Recap

Design thinking: a new approach to innovation and problem solving.

Design thinking comes from the field of innovation and is a new approach, or process if you like, to solve problems taking the user as a focus point. The method has been described as far back as 1969 by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. But it really made a lift when d.school of Stanford University came up with a five-step approach to design thinking. Which was given a boost by Tim Brown of IDEO, and explained in his bestselling book ‘Change by Design‘. In this article, we’ll describe their approach, as it is most commonly used nowadays, and very practical to implement yourself.

design thinking

Design thinking: It’s all about human understanding.

Design thinking revolves around a deep interest in developing a deep human understanding of the people for whom we’re designing products or services. It helps you question and enables you to resist to act upon (often wrong) assumptions. Design thinking is extremely useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or complex. By re-framing the question in human-centric ways. Design thinking is so successful because it focuses on the needs of the user. Understanding culture and context through observation and qualitative research (storytelling) diagnosing the right problem.

Okay, that sounds nice and all. But why do we need this? To put things short, we all think in patterns. We all have ways we are used to doing things. Our habits, what we get taught in school, by our parents, and in the business place. Which is fine, as it helps us deal with everyday situations. We can rely on these patterns of thinking.

Design thinking: Protecting you against automatic behaviour

We need this automatic behaviour to survive. If we had to make every decision consciously. Or had to think about every behaviour rationally. Or had to learn to do everything from scratch over and over again our brains would crash. As we explained in our article about system 1 and 2 thinking of Kahneman. In short, we rely on doing every day – private and business – processes for the most part unconsciously. For example, when we get up in the morning, eat, brush our teeth, and get dressed. We don’t think about it; we do it how we are used to doing it.

There’s one downside to this patterned thinking. It makes it very difficult for us humans to challenge our assumptions of everyday knowledge. Especially when you’re expected to be a paid expert, it can be tough to start questioning your own experience . Also known as the expert fallacy or false authority. So, when we run into a problem that we haven’t faced before. Or that requires a new innovative solution, we often get stuck or come up with old answers that aren’t always the best.

Patterned thinking vs. innovative thinking

Often this difference between repetitive patterned thinking and innovative thinking (also commonly referred to as ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking’) is illustrated by the truck example. Have you heard of it? If not, let us tell you this story.

Some years ago, an incident occurred where a truck driver made a wrong judgment call and tried to pass under a low bridge. That turned out to be too low for his truck. His truck got so firmly lodged under the bridge, that the driver couldn’t manoeuvre the truck through it anymore. But also couldn’t reverse his vehicle. Which not only caused a problem for the truck, but also for the traffic that got stuck behind him. The story goes that the fire department, other truck drivers, road help, and other experts came over to negotiate how to tackle this problem.

Everyone was debating whether to dismantle parts of the truck or break down parts of the bridge. Each spoke of a solution which fitted within his or her respective level of expertise. And this went on for some time.

The story goes, a boy walked by, took a look a the truck and then said, “Why not just let the air out of the tires?”. Which took all specialists and experts by surprise, who were debating for hours trying to solve the problem.

 

design thinking truck

When the solution was tested, the truck was able to drive through quickly. The story symbolises the struggles we face where frequently the most obvious answers are the ones hardest to come by. Because of the thinking patterns we all have within. And it summarised what design thinking helps you realise: design thinking helps you to change the way you tackle problems. It encourages you to explore new alternatives. Creating options that didn’t exist before.

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Design thinking implementing the process

In this next part, we want to give you a concise design thinking masterclass. It will explain the principles of user-centred design. The first advantage and characteristic of design thinking is that it encourages us to take an integrative approach to develop new strategies or ideas. Whereas in a lot of ideation processes the research department passes on insights to strategic planners. Who in their turn pass their insights on to the creatives. And then the ideas are handed over to production to be made. Design thinking sees insight, ideation, and implementation as three overlapping ‘cycles’. You will also come across to these spaces being called ‘understand’, ‘concept’ and ‘develop’.

 

Design thinkers don’t follow these three cycles in a strictly linear way. You could pass through every cycle more than once. Could be you have an idea, but after prototyping your idea with real users, you come to learn they don’t understand it. Or didn’t do what you hoped them to do. Then you have to adapt your ideas. So, you go back to the drawing board.

 

Design thinkers build, test, and learn

We always like to say that strategy is nothing more than a hypothesis that you test, build, and learn. We are firm believers the best strategy is developed through ideation and prototyping. Sometimes the feedback you get in prototyping gives you such an extra insight into the consumer decision-making process. That you have to make a perception switch and come to a new understanding that will reshape your strategy. We like to call this process of including and being open to human psychology the concept of strategy development. As opposed to the more inside-out concept of strategic planning.

The task of a design thinker is to bring all phases together as one harmonious solution. The cool thing – we think – is when you have the design thinkers mindset you break through silos. Whereas the researchers, the creatives, and the strategic thinkers often work in different departments. Now you get to go through all cycles yourself with a multidisciplinary team. Which not only makes your work more interesting but especially makes sure a lot of valuable insights aren’t lost in the process of handing things over to the next department. Design thinking is an integrative approach that adds value and fun. And which is a springboard for innovative, smart thinking that puts humans first.

 

The steps in design thinking

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the stages of the design thinking process. There are five steps in total:

Empathy
The first step of the design thinking process is called empathy. You try to understand human psychology and try to find out why people make decisions. The goal is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. You could do this in several ways. One of the most reliable methods is observation. Watching what people do. Why this is a proven method is because a lot of what people do is sub-conscious. If you’d ask them, they wouldn’t be able you to give you a (correct) answer. But you could also consult experts, extreme users, or do qualitative research to gain a deeper personal understanding of people’s emotions, needs, desires and fears. Empathy is crucial to a human-centred design process as it allows to set aside your assumptions about the world or your target group. It is all about understanding behavioural psychology and identifying behavioural patterns.

Define
In this stage, you put together the information you gathered during the empathy stage. This is where you will analyse your observations and refine and focus the problem you are trying to solve based on what you found while empathizing with your user. We often tend to define the problem inside-out. For example: “We need to gain 5% more market share in gym subscriptions by the end of next year”. But the whole point of design thinking is that you start thinking outside-in. So, your problem definition should also be human-centred. For example: “We need to help people to build the healthy habit of coming to the gym so fewer people will quit”.

Ideate
This is the stage where you try to come up with as many as possible solutions to your problem. Several techniques have proven to be very useful like ‘brainwriting‘ or the ‘crazy eight‘. It is essential to get as many ideas or problem solutions as possible at the beginning of the ideation phase. Behavioural research done to research the effectiveness of teams have shown that individuals are best at coming up with as many diverse ideas as possible, whereas a group is best at picking the most promising ideas. A technique used for this is called dotmocracy. If you’re interested in unlocking more creative power from a group, you could read our post ‘3 techniques that will supercharge your team’s creativity“.

Prototype
Prototyping is all about learning. Your job is now the make some inexpensive, scaled down versions of your idea that can be shared and tested with the actual users. There are several ways to prototype. You can write value propositions on a page; you can make a first landing page, you can create a storyboard or sketches. This is an experimental phase, so it’s not about making the perfect prototype. It’s about making a prototype that will help you gather valuable user feedback.

Test
We go about the testing phase by doing qualitative interviews with our end users or potential target group we are trying to influence. Very important to remember to tell and not sell. You’re not at the stage of convincing someone yet; you are here to learn where your product, service, idea, etc. needs improvement. Which parts are unclear? What turns out to be the killer feature? All the test insights will be used to do an ideation round again to optimise the idea based on real user feedback.

 

Design thinking on steriods: Behavioural Design Thinking

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

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

 

Would you like to apply Behavioural Design Thinking to a challenge?

Then a Behavioural Design Sprint might be perfect for you. We have created a brochure with all the details of the sprint. Please, feel free to contact us any time should you have any further questions. We are happy to help!

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Design thinking tools and videos

There are a lot of tools and techniques to use to make every step of the design thinking process worthwhile. The masters of design thinking are the people of IDEO, and they did us all a massive favour by developing a design thinking toolkit that they’ve put online for all of us to use. Google has also put a great designsprintkit online. Just take a look in there, and see which tools you like.

One of the founders of IDEO, David Kelley, has given an hour long interview explaining his view on design thinking. You can watch it here:

IDEO has also made a series of videos explaining the mindsets design thinkers should have.

1. Iterate, iterate, iterate featuring Gaby Brink (1.16 min.)

2. Empathy (1.26 min.)

3. Creative Confidence featuring David Kelley (11.47 min.)

4. Embrace ambiguity featuring Patrice Martin (1.19 min.)

5. Learn from failure featuring Tim Brown.

 

 

6. Optimism featuring John Bielenburg (1.18 min.)

 

 

 

Recap

Design thinking is a process to come up with truly innovative ideas that are radically human-centred. The five-step approach of empathy, define, ideate, prototype and test help you to find solutions to problems with an outside-in view. Tapping into the consciousness and sub-conscious of your potential users. And helping you to validate your ideas before the money runs out.

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 have a first taste of the power of behavioural science —it is a little gift from us to you.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

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

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
07/12/2018
mental models

Cialdini Influence in practice

By Behavioural Science Insights

In this blog post, we want to give some examples of how to use Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion in practice. Well, we won’t explain all the principles ourselves, but Cialdini will do so too. Some of the persuasion principles come with a video in which Dr. Cialdini explains the principle himself. If you want a more extensive explanation the work of Cialdini on the psychology of influence, please make sure to read this post that will give you a recap of his work as published in his bestselling book ‘Influence.’

 

6 Universal Principles of Persuasion

In his book, Robert Cialdini uncovered 6 Universal Principles of Persuasion. Shortcuts that our brain uses to make decisions, or in Cialdini’s words shortcuts that make people ‘say yes.’ What makes the work of Prof. Cialdini so interesting is that he shows influence at work. He translates scientific research in the area of behavioural design and human psychology into practical business applications. His widely acclaimed studies are highly instructive to those who want to be more influential.

The six universal principles of persuasion (POP), also called the principles of influence are:

  • Reciprocity
  • Scarcity
  • Authority
  • Consistency
  • Liking
  • Consensus or Social Proof

In this post, you’ll find a series of videos in which Robert Cialdini explains the persuasion principles himself on various business conferences. It’s, therefore, a showcase how broadly his thinking can be used in practice.

Persuasion Principle 1: Reciprocity

“People say yes to those who have given to them first.” In this short 3.16 minute video, Cialdini tells about the social norm that exists across cultures that explains why the reciprocity principle helps to influence people’s behaviour. Who would think that remembering someone’s birthday could be so important if you want people to remember yours? You’ll know after watching this video.

 

To summarize: give what you want to receive. If a colleague needs help, and you can ‘lend’ him one of your team members, you’ll get his help later.

 

Persuasion Principle 2: Scarcity

People want to have what is scarce. How can you use this in daily business? There have been several examples of the scarcity principle working simply by saying something will be limited. There’s been an example that when British Airways announced that they would no longer fly to London – New York twice a week with the Concorde as too little passengers were using the service, sales took off the next day. Nothing changed about the Concorde, it became scarce and therefore wanted.

You can also use the scarcity principle by using exclusive information to persuade. Influence and rivet key players’ attention by saying for example ‘just got this information today.’

 

Persuasion Principle 3: Authority

“People are very willing to follow the lead of an authority. Suppose you are that authority? The implication is that you need to your background, experience, and credentials in the minds of the people you want to influence before you begin the process of influence”. This is how Cialdini starts his explanation of the principle of persuasion called ‘authority’. To sum it up, the principle shows that if an expert says it, it must be true. You can watch the 3.20-minute video here:

 

Don’t assume your expertise is self-evident. Instead, establish your expertise before doing business with new team members or clients. In conversations before a meeting, describe how you solved a problem similar to the one on the agenda.

Persuasion Principle 4: Consistency

If you want to get the loyalty of people that don’t quite trust you yet, the best way is to make them commit to something. Use the foot in the door technique where a small request paves the way for compliance with larger subsequent requests. To fully use the long-lasting power of commitment and consistency:

  1. Make people commit to something small first, making it easier to follow-up with larger requests;
  2. Try to showcase their choices to the public, so that they’re now accountable to everyone else;
  3. Get them to put in as much effort as possible, so that they’ll perceive the results as more worthwhile.

Persuasion Principle 5: Liking

“The number one rule of sales is to get your customer to like you. That’s true, but I am going to give it the status of the number two rule of sales. Here’s the number one rule in my view. It is not to get your customer to like you; it’s come to like your customer”. This is how Cialdini starts his keynote speech on the Australasian Real Estate Conference. Watch this 4.46-minute video, and you’ll know exactly what Cialdini sees as the psychology of persuasion when talking about the persuasion principle ‘liking’ and how you can use it to boost sales.

How do you get to like your customer, client, patient or user? By using the same tools, you can use for them to like you. You try to discover similarities. If you find something about someone you truly admire, you are going to like that person more. It’s all about having empathy. The key skill every behavioural designer should have. But it has to be genuine. It has to be true. This is how you can make sure you’ll find a genuine reason to like your ‘public.’ Cialdini explains this in this 5.02-minute video.

In short: to influence people, win friends through similarity. Create any bonds with peers, bosses and direct reports by informally discovering interests. And praise: charm and disarm, make positive remarks about others.

 

Persuasion Principle 6: Consensus/Social Proof

People follow what those around them are doing. In this video, Cialdini explains the principle of social proof. He uses the case about reusing towels in hotels. What’s very interesting is that he makes a clear distinction between cooperation and social proof. Want to know why cooperation didn’t work, and social proof did? Watch this 6.01-minute video taken on a pharmaceutical conference in Las Vegas.

 

And to add on to this, a very short video (0.55 minutes) in which Cialdini explains the door hanger experiment, that showed how social proof could help people save energy.

How can you use social proof in another way? Use peer power. For example, ask an esteemed ‘old timer’ in your company to support your new initiative or plan.

BONUS: free cheat card 'Principles of Influence'

Especially for you we've created a free cheat card 'Principles of Influence'. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from this blog post whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

Download ebook

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

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

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
22/10/2018

Kahneman fast and slow thinking explained

By Behavioural Science Insights

Excerpt: this is a reference page. Here you can find the fundamentals of Kahneman’s breakthrough work on human decision making. Firstly, it will address his discovery of fast and slow thinking. Secondly, the importance of our unconscious mind in making decisions and influencing behaviour will be discussed.

1. Kahneman Fast and Slow Thinking

On this page, we want to give you a quick guide to Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking work about decision making. Maybe you’ve already heard of system 1 and system 2. Or you’ve heard Kahneman was the first psychologist to win the Nobel prize for economics in 2002. Could be you’ve heard about cognitive biases and heuristics. Enough to be intrigued. He is one of our heroes and the godfather of behavioural economics. We’ll give you the highlights of Kahneman’s thinking which he published in his best-selling book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’

Therefore, this isn’t so much an article as a reference page that you can consult whenever you want to know more. Or reread about Kahneman. To make your life a bit easier, we have created page sections so you can easily jump to the subject that is of particular interest to you. We also have included shortcuts links for this page as well as links to more detailed information if you want to dive a bit deeper. The page sections:

System 1 and 2
The power of your subconscious mind
Heuristic: definition and meaning
Cognitive bias

System 1 and system 2

Most importantly, the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman showed that our brain has two operating systems. Which he called system 1 and system 2. These are the differences between the two systems of our brain:

System 1

  • FAST
  • DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: unconscious, automatic, effortless
  • WITHOUT self-awareness or control “What you see is all there is.”
  • ROLE: Assesses the situation, delivers updates
  • Does 98% of all our thinking

System 2

  • SLOW
  • DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: deliberate and conscious, effortful, controlled mental process, rational thinking
  • WITH self-awareness or control, logical and skeptical
  • ROLE: seeks new/missing information, makes decisions
  • Does 2% of all our thinking
How do you influence minds and shape behaviours? How do you change other people’s, as well as your behaviours? How do you help people to make better decisions? Isn’t it strange that the majority of all of our behaviours and communication aims at influencing other people? Yet, at the same time, we have no clue about the principles and laws that govern influence?

System 2 is a slave to our system 1

To summarize, you could say that our system 2 is a slave to our system 1. Our system 1 sends suggestions to our system 2 which then turns them into beliefs. Do you want to know more about the differences between system 1 and 2? We’ve created a more elaborate overview of the main characteristics of system 1 and 2. Or maybe you’d like to hear Daniel Kahneman himself explain the concept of system 1 and 2? This is a good video to watch and is only 6.35 minutes long.

 

 

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The power of your subconscious mind

Kahneman’s additional discovery of the bandwidth of each system was what made this research so significant. It was a breakthrough into the lack of reasoning in human decision-making. He showed how the two thought systems arrive at different results, even though they are given the same inputs. Foremost, however, he revealed the power of the subconscious mind; where we all tend to think we’re rational human beings who think about our decisions and about the things we do. Kahneman demonstrated that we’re (almost) completely irrational. But that’s a good thing. It’s our survival mechanism.

35,000 decisions a day

On average we all have about 35,000 decisions to make each day. These differ in difficulty and importance. It could be taking a step to your left or right when talking. Or deciding to take the stairs or elevator. But they all hit you on a daily basis. If you had to consciously process all these decisions your brain would crash. Your automatic system’s primary task is to protect your system 2 in order to prevent cognitive overload.

There are a few ways our automatic system lightens the load on our deliberate system. First, it takes care of our more familiar tasks by turning them into autopilot routines, also known as habits. But what system 1 primarily does is rapidly sift through information and ideas without you even noticing it by prioritising whatever seems relevant and filtering out the rest by taking shortcuts. These shortcuts are also called heuristics. We’ll explain them in the next section.

We are all irrational human-beings

Above all, we all have to accept that we are irrational human beings almost all the time. Even if you think you’re not. Somehow we can accept our irrationality, or at least understand it when it’s explained to us, but we keep making the same mistake with others. When trying to influence someone, we tend to forget they are irrational too. We often try to convince somebody with rational arguments or facts. We love to tell someone about the benefits of our products or services or ideas.

Decisions are based on short-cuts

However, the decision of the person you’re trying to convince isn’t based on this rational information. It’s based on system 1 shortcuts. Kahneman’s work demonstrates that people struggle with statistics and cannot reason the probable outcomes of their decisions. A second very important insight from his work is that our decisions are driven by heuristics and biases. We’ll dive deeper into those in the next two sections.

Heuristic: definition and meaning

The shortcuts our system 1 makes are heuristics. The definition of a heuristic, as can be found on Wikipedia, is:

Any approach to problem-solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method, not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, logical, or rational. But instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical. Heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.

A heuristic is our automatic brain at work

If we bring it back to Kahneman’s thinking, a heuristic is simply a shortcut our automatic (system 1) brain makes to save the mental energy of our deliberate (system 2) brain. This is our survival mechanism at play. You’re probably already familiar with the experience of heuristics. We sometimes refer to them as a gut feeling, guestimate, common sense, or intuition. We use heuristics for problem-solving that isn’t a routine or habit. The way we ‘build’ heuristics is by reviewing the information at hand and connecting that information to our experience. Heuristics are strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems. The most common heuristic is trial and error, trying to solve a problem based on experience instead of theory.

The availability heuristic

Another example is the so-called availability heuristic. When making a decision, this heuristic provides us with a mental short-cut that relies on immediate cases that come to our mind. Or easier put: we value information that springs to mind quickly as being more significant. So, when we have to make a decision, we automatically think about related events or situations. As a result, we might judge those events as being more frequent or more probable than others. Therefore, we have a greater belief in this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the future.

Heuristics can be wrong: biased

The problem with heuristics is that sometimes they’re wrong. They are nothing more than mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. Therefore, heuristics affect our decision-making and, subsequently, our customer’s behaviour.

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Cognitive bias

With all this in mind, you could say that Kahneman discovered something very interesting about our cognitive abilities as human beings. To be clear about the meaning of cognition, let’s take a look at how the dictionary defines it.

“The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.”

What Kahneman discovered is truly paradigm shifting. It is breakthrough thinking that can even hurt egos. We are far less rational and far less correct in our thinking than we’d like to give ourselves credit for. The side-effect of heuristics is that we all suffer from cognitive bias. A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own ‘subjective social reality’ from their perception of the input.

List of cognitive biases

There are a lot of cognitive biases. You can take a look on Wikipedia, at their extensive list of cognitive biases or check out an overview we made of the most common ones. The most important thing to remember is that we all base our decisions on a heuristic, and we all are influenced by our cognitive biases. By being aware of the most common biases, you can anticipate them.

Cognitive bias in recruitment

To round things up, here is an example that ties up all the concepts of Kahneman discussed in this post. Think about recruitment. If you have to interview a person for a position for your team or organisation, the chance of this person is getting hired is proven to be established in the first 10 minutes. What happens? A person steps into the room and your system 1 makes a fast, mostly unconscious judgment based on heuristics. This leads to certain biases in your judgment. If the person is similar to you, your system 1 instantly likes him or her (liking bias). If the person wears glasses, your system 1 thinks he or she is smart (stereotyping bias). It all happens fast.

Lowering mental stress

In conclusion, your system 1 has sent these suggestions to your system 2 without you even noticing it. And your system 2 turns those into beliefs. The rest of the interview your system 2 looks for affirmation of the system 1 suggestions. To recap, our brain simply loves consistency. It lowers our mental stress or cognitive overload. And there you go. You base your final judgment on the two operating systems of your brain. Helped by heuristics and skewed by cognitive bias. We do this all day, in all kinds of situations.

BONUS: How to become a better recruiter by understanding your biases'

Especially for you we've created a free cheat card to make sure you avoid these biases in HR situations. For you to keep at hand, so you can start using the insights from Kahneman whenever you want—it is a little gift from us to you.

Download cheat card

Go ahead, it’s completely free of charge!

To sum it up

To sum it up, by understanding Kahneman you can understand human decision-making. Because if you understand human-decision making, you can understand human or customer behaviour. You can see how we are predictably irrational. Dan Ariely wrote a beautiful book with this title, which we highly recommend. However, we just have to accept our own irrationality and understand that if we want to convince someone or try to nudge them into a certain behaviour, they are just irrational too.

Would you like to know more?

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

Download the brochure

Go ahead, there are no strings attached!

How do you do. Our name is SUE.

Do you want to learn more?

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

You can also hire SUE to help you to bring an innovative perspective on your product, service, policy or marketing. In a Behavioural Design Sprint, we help you shape choice and desired behaviours using a mix of behavioural psychology and creativity.

You can download the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course brochure, contact us here or subscribe to our Behavioural Design Digest. This is our weekly newsletter in which we deconstruct how influence works in work, life and society.

Or maybe, you’re just curious about SUE | Behavioural Design. Here’s where you can read our backstory.

sue behavioural design
17/10/2018

Why Nir Eyal is a bit of a hypocrite

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

Nir Eyal – the author of the book Hooked – taught a whole generation of designers and developers how to make people addicted to technology, by using techniques from behavioural psychology. Eyal demonstrated in his book how to design habits – a newspeak word for addiction – through the principle of variable rewards. The more a product or service rewards you in unpredictable ways, the more we will get hooked. There’s nothing our brain finds more appealing than the joy of anticipation.

The principle of variable rewards

Gambling addicts know this all too well. Casino’s designed gambling machines in such a way that they reward the gambler once in a while. Just enough to keep the player in a psychological status of being “on the verge of an epic win.” The effect is that the player continues to play until he runs out of money.

Well designed games use the same mechanisms. Jane McGonigal included in her fantastic book “Reality is Broken” pictures of the facial expression of people who are on the verge of an epic win. It’s like they’re about to get an orgasm.

Face of a gamer who's on the verge of an epic dwin, illustrating the power of variable rewards.

Face of a gamer who’s on the verge of an epic dwin, illustrating the power of variable rewards.

The secret behind gambling addiction and game addiction is a carefully designed reward system. And by writing the book Hooked, Nir Eyal brought these dark principles to the world of technology to teach technology companies to get their users addicted to their products. And based on the time we spend on our devices, they paid great attention. We’re always alert for this one crucial e-mail, that one little instant message, or the Facebook notification that could make our day. Most of the time it’s nothing, but once in a while, it’s a bingo! That’s variable rewards.

Why Nir Eyal is a hypocrite for blaming the user

My problem with Nir Eyal is not his work. On the contrary. I think Hooked – and the principle of variable rewards – holds enormous opportunities to apply these design principles to design positive behaviours. Think about the worldwide wave of positive Karma that the Japanese soccer fans received for cleaning up the stadium after their national team got beaten in the second round of the World Cup last month.

Japanese fans cleaning up after their national team lost the 1/16 final of the World Cup against Belgium

Japanese fans cleaning up after their national team lost the 1/16 final of the World Cup against Belgium

What I do think is problematic, is that Nir Eyal refuses to be held accountable for the global wave of smartphone addiction. In a recent interview with Dutch newspaper NRC, he claims that we are entirely responsible for our addictive behaviours. We shouldn’t blame Facebook. It’s us who lack discipline. That’s utter bollocks of course. The simple truth is that we’re fighting an unfair battle. Our mental control can’t possibly win from the refined techniques that continuously attack, exploit and reward our unconscious desires. Technology Ethicist Tristan Harris calls “a race to the bottom of the brain stem.”

I think that we need to get in terms with the fact that the science of influence is out in the open. The clock can’t be turned back on this. Ever since the invention of fire, humanity both did terrific as well as horrifying things with their newly acquired superpowers. However, in the right hands, we can do amazing things with these superpowers, such as designing healthy habits or altruistic behaviours. But in the wrong, greedy hands, the knowledge can go evil. Think Facebook, think Trump. Think Brexit. It seems like Nir Eyal opened pandora’s box and can’t close it anymore. It would suit him if he stopped being a hypocrite about it.

Related blogs:

The Dark Wisdom: How Design Manipulates the Way we Think, Feel and Behave.

How to create Change by Design, a blog on how to apply Behavioural Design to solving wicked problems.

Get your ticket for Behavioural Design Fest, September 21st, Amsterdam

21/07/2018

Rediscovering the Unconscious

By All, Behavioural Science Insights

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

Read the whole article here

 

Cover image as published by Harvard Business Review.

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