With this Behavioural Design Overview we want to help you to navigate through the Behavioural Design Blog. Our ambition with this blog is to explore how influence works by applying it to interesting real world problems. Most of these blogs appeared in Behavioural Design Digest, our weekly newsletter. You can subscribe to the Behavioural Design Digest here.
Whether you have clients or customers. Whether you want to attract more clients or want them to buy, click, recommend or return. Behavioural science can help you get the most out of a customer.
Organisations are collections of human behaviours. These blog posts and videos shed a light on how to leverage behavioural science to achieve operational excellence.
If you want the general public to adopt policies or design behaviours that will creat more welfare or better communities this is the section to keep your eye on.
If you understand key concepts of behavioural science it can help you make better decisions that will improve your life, your work, your happiness and habits. Stay tuned here for self-improvement insights.
Behavioural Design is applied behavioural science. It is active and results in tangible insights and interventions. This section will highlight the methodologic part of Behavioural Design.
The true value of Behavioural Design is that it is applied behavioural science. In this section you’ll find blog posts on how to unlock the power of behavioural science in practice.
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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.
This blog post is an extended introduction to Behavioural Design. You will get a clear idea about what it is, how you can use it in your professional and personal life to influence minds and shape behaviour, and what you could do to learn more about it. Moreover, this blog post is the perfect entry to most other blogposts we published on the SUE Behavioural Design website.
1. Behavioural Design is about influence
How do you influence minds and shape behaviours? How do you change other people’s, as well as your behaviours? How do you help people to make better decisions? Isn’t it strange that the majority of all of our behaviours and communication aims at influencing other people? Yet, at the same time, we have no clue about the principles and laws that govern influence?
Behavioural Design is a systematic understanding of how people think and how they make decisions. This understanding forms the basis of thinking about interventions that lead to behavioural change. Maybe you want to influence the behaviour of your partner or children. You might want to influence your colleagues or managers. Some people like to develop a healthy habit for themselves or want to live a more sustainable life. Maybe you want to influence customer behaviour or win elections. No matter what the subject is, you can all think of them as a behavioural design challenge.
So what is Behavioural Design? The most pragmatic definition of Behavioural Design we came up with so far is the following:
Behavioural Designers combine Psychology, Design, Technology, and Creative Methods to find out why people do the things they do and to figure out through experimentation how to activate them to change their behaviour.
2. Behavioural Design is a method
The best way to think about Behavioural Design is to think of it as the combination of Design Thinking with the Science of Influence. Design Thinking is the method through which designers solve problems. Designers start with empathy. Through interviews and observations, they try to “fall in love with the problem”: Why do people do what they do and where could we spot opportunities for improvement? This insight phase forms the groundwork for creativity. First, designers develop as many ideas as possible, and then they prototype the most promising ones. They take the prototypes back to the real world and test them with real people to learn and observe how the prototype influences the targeted behaviour. Design Consultancy Ideo, the godfathers of Design Thinking, explain the process like this:
When you combine the method of design thinking with behavioural science, you will get design thinking on steroids or Behavioural Design Thinking. Because a better understanding of human psychology you will get:
1) Better insights into why people do what they do;
2) Better ideas on where to look for solutions;
3) Better prototypes, because you will have a much sharper understanding of what specific behavioural outcome you’re designing for.
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Behavioural Design is dark wisdom. The difference between positive influence and manipulation is a very fragile line. In the end, we have to be aware that Behavioural Design is about using deliberate action and techniques to influence the behaviour of the other in the direction you want.
The problem is that those who want to design for good quite often feel bad about using dark forces. Whereas those who use this dark wisdom to manipulate and mislead are usually much more motivated, advanced, and have fewer scruples about its application. Think about how extreme-right populists exploit fear and uncertainty, or think about how technology companies use our vanities and our desire for social recognition and belonging to the extent that it leads to (social media) addiction.
The world of interaction design is full of “dark patterns“, which are manipulative ways to present choices to us in such a way that they manipulate us into making a specific decision, whether we want it or not.
At SUE, we are very sensitive to this ethical component. We even encoded it in our mission. The SUE mission is “to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to help people make better decisions in work, life and play”. Our point of departure for designing interventions for behavioural change always starts with the question, “How might we help people to make better choices? Moreover, how could we create products, services, and experiences to contribute to helping people achieve their goals or dreams? Our commitment to this mission is sacred, even to the point that we refuse to accept work that doesn’t match this mission. You can find more about this way of thinking below at “5. Outside-in Thinking“.
Multiple levels of influence
In a certain sense, the term ‘Behavioural Design’ is a little bit misleading. Behavioural change is the outcome we aim for when we design an intervention. When we want to achieve this outcome, we need to create interventions on multiple levels at the same time:
Design attention: How do you make sure something catches people’s attention?
Trigger curiosity: How do you get people to invest time and mental energy to learn more about what you want from them?
Change the perception: how do you get something to stand out as the attractive option between other choices? How do you design the desired perception?
Design the experience: How do you get someone to have a positive feeling? How can you reduce stress or uncertainty?
Trigger the behaviour: How do you trigger the desired behaviour? How can you increase the chance of success that people act upon your trigger?
Change habits: How can you get people to sustain the behaviour? Most behaviours require much more than a one-time action. Think about saving, living healthy, exercising, recycling, collaborating, etc.
Thinking fast and slow
This simple list of influence levels teaches us that:
Behavioural Design is all about how we design choices and how we present those choices.
Behavioural Design has everything to do with human decision-making and how the brain works. The cornerstone of human decision-making is the masterpiece “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Kahneman and Tversky. This book – awarded with the Noble Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 – is the fascinating journey of the collaboration between two Israeli psychologists and their discoveries of how the mind works. This book is the ultimate work on thinking about thinking.
Kahneman and Tversky discovered that about 96% of our thinking is automatic and unconscious. Our brain is making most of the decisions for us by taking shortcuts – which they call heuristics -, with the goal of not having to invoke the 4% bandwidth of our slow, rational brain. In a way:
Influencing behaviour comes down to helping people to decide without having to think. Because the more we need to think about something, the more stress we get, the less we end up making choices.
When it comes to our attempts to influence minds and shape behaviours, our biggest fallacy is that we always tend to persuade the other with rational arguments. The problem with persuasion is two-fold:
Persuasion evokes system 2-thinking, and we don’t like that. When you try to persuade someone, you want them to think about your argument. Thinking complicates things.
System 2 is the little slave of system 1: we only accept rational arguments or facts when they align with how we already think about matters. You can only persuade someone who’s already convinced.
The real challenge is to make a decision making extremely easy. More about designing choices:
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5. Behavioural Designers think ‘outside-in’
When we try to influence minds and shape behaviour, the most common mistake we make is to think inside-out. We take the benefits of our product or service as our point of departure, and we try to figure out how we could pitch those benefits so that people would realize the value of what we have to offer. Behavioural Designers work the other way around.
We take the human behind the customer as our focal point, and we try to figure out what this human needs to be successful.
Which anxieties, doubts, prejudices or bad habits he holds stand in the way of embracing the desired behaviour or which pains or frustrations we could solve for him.
Job-To-Be-Done: What is the underlying goal for which people would have to embrace the new behaviour? How might we align the desired behaviour with goals that matter to them?
Pains: What are possible frustrations and pains in their current behaviour, for which we need to come up with a solution?
Gains: What are the benefits we have, compared with their current solutions?
Anxieties: What are anxieties, doubts, prejudices or other barriers that prevent someone from embracing the new behaviour?
Habits: Which habits keep them locked in their current behaviour?
It is foremost a very easy-to-use tool. It explains which four pieces of the puzzle you need to solve to create a context that will persuade someone into doing something and to have them keep doing it. What makes the tool so easy to use in practice, is that anytime you want to design for behavioural change, all you have to do is ask yourself four simple questions:
How can we make sure someone WANTS to perform the new behaviour?
How can we make sure someone CAN perform the new behaviour?
How can we SPARK new behaviour at the moments that matter?
How can we activate this new behaviour AGAIN and again?
If a sufficient degree of capability (CAN) to perform a behaviour is matched with the willingness (WANT) to engage in that behaviour, all that is then needed for the behaviour to occur is to set someone into action (SPARK) at the Moments that Matter.
Maybe you notice that in the tool it says moments that matter. Not one moment, but moments. As we learned, behavioural change doesn’t happen overnight. Most of the times someone needs to be reminded of the desired behaviour more than once for it to happen in the first place. Furthermore, behaviour becomes easier when repeated. Therefore, we have to make sure we SPARK someone AGAIN and again to activate the desired behaviour. So, you need to design several interventions at multiple moments that matter. In practice your intervention strategy will look something like this:
The objective of most intervention strategies is to not only to change behaviour, but to change this new behaviour into a routine behaviour (a habit), so the new behaviour will stick.
Often your desired behaviour is new behaviour for people and that’s why it is important to spark behaviour AGAIN and again. Only then the behaviour will take place, as illustrated above as the BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE THRESHOLD. When your objective is to design repeat behaviour, it almost goes without saying that you have to make sure the desired behaviour is performed repeatedly. If you can make someone perform new behaviour over and over AGAIN, it can become automatic.
7. Behavioural Designers research, prototype, test
The more familiar you get with how the brain works and how influence works, the more you become aware that human behaviour obeys a different kind of logic than formal logic. Rory Sutherland calls this “psycho-logic” in his brilliant book Alchemy.
The way people make decisions is highly context-sensitive. These decisions are full of stories they tell themselves and full of irrational beliefs they hold. Furthermore, even the slightest difference in how something is framed can dramatically affect how people perceive the meaning. When an English native speaker says they think something is “interesting”, it usually means precisely the opposite. Whereas a non-native Dutch audience would think “interesting” means what they think it means.
The importance of doing the research yourself
That’s why research and prototyping are so important. Before you come up with an idea for behavioural change, you first need to fall in love with the problem. You observe or interview humans and try to put yourself in their shoes. You’ll be surprised about how many thoughts and beliefs you hold are projections of your limited worldview onto the world of the target audience you want to influence.
Prototyping and testing are all about finding out which variation of your intervention has the highest potential to design perception, attention, curiosity, experience, behaviour or habit. Even with the clearest of insights, you can still develop an intervention that ultimately misses its desired effect. What you thought your intervention was supposed to trigger sometimes triggers the exact opposite.
Then our two-day Fundamentals Course is the perfect training for you. You will learn the latest insights from behavioural science and get easy-to-use tools and templates to apply these in practice right away!
The number of applications for Behavioural Design is endless. Because in the end, most of the things we do as humans aim at influencing the behaviour of others. You can apply it from managing teams to the design of products. Or from getting people to buy products to changing the way they perceive a service or experience. And from the creation of financial habits, personal habits and healthy habits till the raising of children. At SUE, we’re particularly fascinated by six specific domains for behavioural change:
Now you have a deeper understanding about what Behavioural Design and how you can apply the Behavioural Design Method to influence minds and shape behaviour, there’s a couple of next steps you can take to learn more about the method:
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter Behavioural Design Digest, in which we take a closer look at how influence works in daily life.
Book in-company training for your team and learn the method while applying it to a critical business challenge for your organisation.
Hire SUE to run a Behavioural Design Sprint to fast-track your innovation, transformation or growth by leveraging behavioural science to develop people-centred products, services, campaign or policies with an evidence-based approach.
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.
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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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.
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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.
Last week, I was attending a keynote presentation by the CEO of one of the biggest Belgian banks. He was presenting the story of the digital transformation of his bank and he brought it as if it was a visionary story. And although the man certainly had excellent presentation skills, I somehow got annoyed with his storyline. Probably in the first place because it felt like 2007 was back with cliché-slides as “Shift Happens”, “The Consumer is in Control” and “Remember Altavista? Look at what Google Did!”. But the second reason for my annoyance had to do with something more profound. He was preaching the “customer-first”-mantra, while in reality, his story had absolutely nothing to do with customer-first. It was very obviously “Bank-First”, under the disguise of “we want to make it more simple for the customer to buy more stuff”.
In my view, his keynote sinned against three cardinal sins of customer-centric innovation. And I want to argue that you can find these three cardinal sins in every digital transformation pitch by gurus, consultants and managers. So what I want to do is to put the spotlight on each of these three sins and I want to use the next blog post to suggest how you can transform these cardinal sins into decisive action.
Cardinal Sin 1: The customer as consumer at the heart of the strategy
At the heart of all these digital transformation keynotes sits the demanding, narcissistic customer. This customer is said to be spoiled by the speed and simplicity of Google, the absurd logistics of Amazon and the mobile interface-perfection of Apple and Facebook. What follows is that all these corporations assume that it’s exactly this demanding and spoiled attitude what makes this customer so different from the good old days. The CEO shared an example in his keynote of how his bank redesigned a front-office and back-office process to allow a customer to open an account in a couple of minutes on his smartphone. The bank would reward this customer with € 5, allowing him to walk into a Starbucks and buy a coffee just minutes after opening his account.
The problem with this example is that the banker looks at his customer with a “consumer”-frame in his mind. But when you look at the customer as a moody, demanding, click-trigger happy cowboy, and you build your processes and services around this persona, you’re doomed to lose the battle. Because the real challenges where every digital transformation project should focus on, are the challenges and problems that the human behind the customer is facing. And those problems are on an entirely different level: An incapability to build wealth, or to become financially independent. 95% of the people are financially illiterate and could really use some help to construct financial buffers, make smarter investments, generate passive income, etc. Thát’s the real design-briefing for which financial institutions need to develop intelligent answers. A better interface just a simple hygiene-factor for which they do need to catch up. To design your entire digital infrastructure around a spoiled persona is, to put it mildly, incomplete. And to put it more bluntly: out of touch with the real world.
Cardinal Sin 2: Evil KPI’s
Every time you hear Mark Zuckerberg doing an interview, he keeps insisting that the interest of the Facebook-community is central to everything the company does. In a recent interview on Reid Hofmann’s Masters of Scale-podcast, he says: “Our mission at Facebook is to discover where our community wants us to go.” With this mission in mind, Facebook employees conduct hundreds of experiments each day. Mark Zuckerberg is convinced that the world will be a better place if Facebook discovers what people want.
The only problem with this mantra is that Facebook has become a public company in 2012. And once a company goes public, its primal reason for existence is to create shareholder value. And the number one metric to create shareholder value is “engagement”: when as many people as possible, return to Facebook as many times as possible to serve them as many ads as possible.
Facebook-scientists, Facebook-algorithms and the Facebook-AI work really hard to generate a maximum amount of “engagement”, which, frankly, is newspeak for addiction: 1) The company has perfected the way notifications trigger little dopamine-shots in the brain in order to get people to return to the platform over and over again. Nir Eyal describes this addictive design in the book Hooked. 2) The algorithms and the Facebook-AI also know that the best way to get people more engaged is by fueling outrage. Nothing fuels better engagement than extreme content. The reason why a relatively small Russian troll-farm could have such a significant impact on the US-elections is that they correctly understood that outrage is the fuel that drives the Facebook-algoritms.
The point I’m making is this: Although Facebook’s rhetoric may be full of storytelling on “connecting” and “creating a better, more open world”, it’s business metric drives the behaviour of the company in a different direction. To maximize “time-on-device” and “engagement” to generate as many opportunities as possible to serve ads to people, has, in reality, led Facebook, its employees, its algorithms and its Artificial Intelligence to steer on more evil KPI’s like Facebook-addiction, craving for constant social recognition and political polarization.
This brings me back to the banker. His “digital transformation with the customer at the center” eventually also steers on traditional banking-KPI’s of selling as many products and triggering as many transactions as possible. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this. The bank needs to make a living. However, if they would also steer on real customer-centric KPI’s, I guess they would be much more successful. If they were to focus on maximizing spending power, maximizing investment capacity or capacity to loan, maximizing interest,… they would easily be able to come up with tons of new services for which their customers would never want to switch to another bank again.
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Cardinal Sin 3: An inadequate understanding of the good life.
Behind all these digital transformation stories I never hear the philosophical question whether all these changes are actually meaningful. If the goal of all these digital transformation projects is to help a spoiled consumer to buy everything faster and more frictionless, then the vision they have on humanity is incredibly limited. You can read in it the fulfilment of the ultimate corporate wet dream of reducing every human to a consumer.
Today, this reductionist consumerist vision leads to two crises of epic proportion. Of course, there’s first and foremost the ecological crisis. The speed with which our consumption behaviour is exhausting the earth and its vital resources is not sustainable. Read Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” or watch her Ted-talk.
But next to this ecological crisis we are also in the middle of a more profound psychological crisis. The more gratification we can buy, the less we seem to enjoy. The more we pursue impulses and individual greed, the emptier our existence appears to become. This crisis of meaning could well become the biggest crisis of the 21st century. It is funny in that context to observe that all those “Silicon Valley”-bobos are utterly obsessed with Stoic philosophy. Because they no longer know how to enjoy, they go back to the answers formulated two millennia ago.
In his keynote, the banker does not say a word about how the derailed banking world wants to play a meaningful role again in the lives its customers. We know what happened in 2008 with the money people entrusted to the banks. That turned out to be nothing more than casino money for speculation to increase the profits of the banks and the bonuses of the bankers. The fantastic challenges for the banks are nevertheless obvious: Helping freelancers to make ends meet. Protecting the middle class from loss of wealth and poverty in their old age (which is something the Dutch Rabobank is actively working on for example). Investing in projects that promote public prosperity. Boosting general well-being. Helping people to make their capital work for them. Looking for new ways to let the abundance of capital in the market find their way to entrepreneurs. Managing an aging population. Speeding up urbanization. Financing sustainability,…
There are so many opportunities to use digital transformation to become truly indispensable in the economy. So many possibilities to become incredibly relevant, once you put the human behind the customer at the center of your digital transformation. Simply start with replacing this spoiled persona at the heart of your transformation story with the citizen who has more and more difficulties to live a carefree life in increasingly difficult times.
Tom De Bruyne
Co-Founder SUE Amsterdam and the Behavioural Design Academy.
Cover image by April under Creative Commons License.
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.
Nir Eyal – once said: “Never trust a behavioural designer who’s out of shape.” The reason is that being (or getting) in shape or losing weight is all about showing (or stopping) a particular behaviour. And the secret weapon to successfully losing some extra weight is applying some behavioural design principles on yourself. So, if you want to light up your life and shed some extra you, you simply need to unlock the power of behavioural psychology.
Did I say simply? Yes, I did! The uplifting news is: You can quickly learn how to lose weight by using some simple behavioural design tricks, which you can use to effectively influence your behaviour (and I’m going to share The Golden Tip with you in a moment). Doesn’t that lift some weight off your shoulders already? Or, your bum. Or your belly. Or your second chin. Wherever you’d like. I’m all for it.
The Golden Tip
Okay, I understand you are hungry for The Golden Tip now. I can appreciate this appetite for knowledge. I need to make one more pun about eating before I move on, or are am I overfeeding you with puns already? I get it, so here you go. The Golden Rule is:
Ability eats Motivation for Breakfast
Let me explain what this means and what kind of substantial impact it can have on you realizing your goal to shed some weight. According to BJ Fogg – a Stanford professor who has studied human behaviour for years – there are two dimensions of behaviour: Motivation and Ability. For years we all only used motivation in trying to nudge our behaviour. But, most of the times it is much more effective to work on the ability axis. In plain English, making the desired behaviour easier or the undesired behaviour harder to do.
Let me give you an example. You can be very motivated to lose some weight. Most of us truly do. But most of us also don’t. It often takes the perseverance of a top athlete to stay focused and determined on that goal. Now, I ain’t no Olympic qualifier just yet, and my guess is most of you aren’t either. So, my motivation often goes down the drain, and I often switch to unwanted behaviour, like eating that bag of crisps that happens to be lying there. Or, drink that one (okay four) glasses of wine if you’re with friends. Or heating up that microwave meal after working late. No judgment here, we’ve all been there.
You can’t help your motivation from dropping now and then. But if it happens, ability is your secret weapon to success.
The secret weapon to success
But the key to successfully sticking to your weight loss plan lies exactly here. You can’t help your motivation from dropping now and then. But if it happens, ability is your secret weapon to success. By making your unwanted behaviour hard to do or your wanted behaviour easier to do, you’ll succeed. That’s behavioural design.
It may seem like an open door now, but the best ability intervention is not buying the unhealthy stuff: Don’t have any (not any) in your house, so if your motivation breaks you simply can’t eat something bad for you (making the undesired behaviour harder). Another intervention: Do food prepping. Make a healthy snack staple that will last a week, let’s say a healthy banana cake. If you get the 4 o’clock craving, you have that banana cake ready (making the desired behaviour easier). Bye, bye crisps. Something else: Put a toothbrush and toothpaste on your desk. If you get a snack attack, brush your teeth. See if you like to destroy your sweet minty breezy breath with some sugar or fat now. You won’t (making the undesired behaviour less enjoying aka harder).
These are just some examples of behavioural design by making behaviour harder or examples of making it easier. But I hope you get my point. Motivation is excellent, but the number one secret weapon for losing weight is ability.
Maybe you can come up with some more smart ability ideas yourself. I’d honestly love to hear them. Please post them on our Facebook page so that everyone can take advantage of them. I’ll put a healthy banana cake recipe on there too. To get you started.
How you can start right away
To wrap it up, the things you could do right away:
– Remove all unhealthy food from your house
– Make that banana cake or have someone make it for you
– Get yourself a toothbrush and toothpaste to put on your desk
– Analyse your behaviour: When does your motivation crack and where. And try to come up with some ability interventions for those moments (and please share them with us, ’cause we’re fellow crackers, you’re not alone in this)
Good luck!
Astrid
PS If you know someone who’s struggling to lose some weight, please share this article with him or her.
Astrid is the founder of SUE Amsterdam and The Behavioural Design Academy. Our mission is to unlock the power of behavioural psychology to nudge people into making positive choices in work, life, and play.
In two days of high-end master classes, we train people in unlocking the powerful principles of behavioural psychology and teach them our Behavioural Design Method™ that translates this knowledge into actionable skills to influence personal behaviour or the behaviour of customers, employees, family members or the general public.
Cover photo by Steve Rotman under creative commons license.
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Step by step, behavioural economics, and psychological science have expanded their reach to become an established part of the business, policymaking, and regulation – for anyone seriously interested in both understanding and changing behaviour. And within marketing and market research, behavioural economics has become a required area of expertise and competency. We are now witnessing the next big step – the creation of the role of the Chief Behavioural Officer (CBO). This move will ensure that behavioural science has a voice at the highest level inside companies and institutions, a clear demonstration of the impact and value it is generating.
In this article, we look at how, within the last decade, this has become the new reality. We identify two main drivers and examine how behavioural science is increasingly being factored into everyday business, policy decisions, and common practice. First, though, we take a closer look at the trend of the CBO role and in-house behavioural insight teams.
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.
