#324 Using Behavioral Science to Hack Your Customers Minds with Richard Shotton, Founder at Astroten

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You cannot picture a megabyte. You can't imagine 56. So people understood the message but they couldn't remember it. Whereas Apple when they wanted to convey that exact same benefit of memory or storage. They use this brilliant phrase, a thousand songs in your pocket. And you can pitch a pocket and imagine a song. So because it's visualizable it taps into the principle of concreteness. When you are trying to influence other people, when you're trying to persuade and to change their behaviour. If you know about the bias you work with human nature, if you don't know about the bias you're trying to overturn human nature. And it is always more effective to work with human nature rather than against it. Behavioral science is basically just the study of what are those biases and how do you practically use them. Welcome to DataFrame. This is Richie. The recurring theme on DataFrame is using data science for marketing. The goal is to understand your customers better so you can provide them with more value or sell them more products and services. Data alone will only help you so much. You'll see better results by combining data with psychology. That is in order to go deep into your customers minds, you need to use behavioural science. I want to know about the benefits of behavioural science, what data practitioners need to know about it and how you use it responsibly. Our guest is one of the leading thinkers in behavioural science. Richie Chotten is the founder of Consultancy Astro10 where he helps companies apply behavioural science to marketing. He's also the author of the best selling, the choice factory and hacking the human mind. Let's learn how to hack our customers minds. Hi Richie, welcome to the show. Oh thank you very much for having me. I'm looking forward to this. I guess to begin with I want to know what's the most impressive example you've seen of a company hacking their customers minds. Lots and lots of companies use behavioural science once really brilliantly, but I think for someone that uses behavioural science again and again and again, I'll turn towards Apple. There is a principal known as Concreteness. The original studies were done back in the 1970s by Ian Berg at University of Western Ontario and he did a super simple study. He reads out this list of 22 word phrases and half of the phrases are what he calls abstract phrases. So it's things like basic truth or subtle mistake and half of the phrases are what he calls concrete phrases. So it's things like square door or flaming forest. So a concrete phrase is something you can visualize and abstract phrase is an idea or concept you can't visualize. And what Berg found is when he later on asked people how much they could remember. People remember on average 9% of the abstractions, but 36% of the concrete words. So you get this massive, massive fourfold difference between the memorability of a concrete phrase and an abstract phrase. And Berg's explanation is super simple. He just says visions the most powerful are senses. So if you use language, people can visualize. It's very sticky. If you use language, they can't visualize. It's completely forgettable. Now you take that principal and then you look at how Apple advertised and you see them using it again and again. So people understood the message, but they couldn't remember it. Whereas Apple, when they wanted to convey that exact same benefit of memory or storage, they use this brilliant phrase, a thousand songs in your pocket. And you can picture a pocket. You can imagine a song. So because it's visualized ball, it taps into the principle of concrete us. And that phrase about the iPod was much, much more memorable than anything Philips was so used. So I love Apple because you see them, not just that principle, there are others as well. But you you see them using these ideas again and again, it's that consistency, the differentiates Apple from other people. That's what I'm guessing. The Apple got amazing marketing campaigns are very memorable. And I do like that idea. I mean, I mean, I can remember you said flaming forest. I can't remember any of the abstract phrases you used at all. So already that's working. Absolutely. And it's interesting, you know, once we are aware of these ideas, they're not complex. Once you know visualizable language is powerful, that's quite an easy thing to repeat. But if you just knew a thousand songs in your pocket is a great strapline, how the hell do you as a communicator learn from that? But if you know it's the visualization part that's important, then it's very, very easy to mimic. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of lessons there for like just if the data scientists of data analysts, when you're trying to communicate the results of your analysis, often it can get very abstract, very technical and just having something visual there in when you come to reporting. So that's probably going to help help it have an impact. Well, absolutely. So if people are thinking about applying this to data analysis, I think there's a few things you could take from that Apple example. Firstly, use visualizable words. But the second one is keep it simple. And that's actually harder than it sounds because if you are an expert in an area and you're presenting to lay people, what simple is much simpler than you think it is. And I think sometimes experts in their area don't want to think they're dumbing things down. They think, well, if I explain something very simply, it reflects poorly on me as a communicator. But the evidence is the opposite. There's an amazing study. It's the best ever academic paper title. It's Daniel Oppenheimer. I think it's 2010, maybe 2009. He's at Princeton. And he does this paper. He says it's the name is a consequence is a very right vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity. Colon, there's problems with using long words needlessly. And what he does in this study, he gets abstract from academic papers. So these are the short praises at the beginning of the journal article that described what's going to come ahead. And he takes some of these abstracts that have lots of unnecessary jargon. He gives them to readers and then he says to read how intelligent you think the author is. He gets that data. He then gets another group, completely fresh group of people, shows them basically the same abstract, but he replaces the complex words with simple alternatives. And when that group rate intelligence, the author, they come back with scores that are 13% higher. Oppenheimer's argument is most of us are laboring under this misassumption that if we talk in a complex way, the audience will admire us and think we're wise and intelligent. But actually, if you confuse your audience, that irritation they feel, they're not going to blame themselves. They'll blame you. So yes, learn from Apple and its use of visualizable language moves from the concrete world, the abstract world to the concrete world. But also the simplicity, a thousand songs in the pocket is so much more simple. The most technology describes itself. So simplicity, visualizability, I think those are both things that date rail is going to apply. Absolutely. Yeah. Certainly simplicity is a really important thing. I just sort of recently, I took all the the transcripts from this podcast from day to day. And through them into like a word analysis to see like how sort of complex the language was. I think not me and I speak it. I think it's like a 10 or 11 year old breeding age level or something and most of this. And then we're trying to work out when guests talk technically is a better for engagement or worse, no strong pattern, apparently our audience is very smart. They can understand all the guests. But yeah, it's interesting that there's simply you go in general. It works well. I think there's an element of accessibility, you know, awful lot of people. I haven't got great reading skills. That's one reason to speak simply. But even if you're talking to a PhD audience or you sending an email out with your findings, don't fool yourself into thinking that they have dedicated half an hour of thinking time for your proposal or your argument. They're probably other things going on, you know, perhaps going on at home, the phone's ringing. So they might have PhD level abilities, but they aren't stressed and time poor. And if you make something hard to understand, often people will not engage and leave it for another time. They'll never get around to doing it or they will get frustrated that you've had an extra complex task in the situation. So this is not just a tactic for dealing with people who haven't got great reading abilities. It's a tactic we should use with everyone. Nice. Okay. So I'd actually like to take a step back. Because I think behavioral science is quite new to a lot of our audience. So talk us through the basic like what does behavioral science involve? What are the goals? Yeah. So if people have never heard of behavioral science, it's nothing complicated. It's essentially the study of what actually influences people, rather than what people claim influences them. And crucially, those two things are very, very different. And if there's a broad thing, it's summed up very well by a Princeton psychologist called Susan Fisk. So she came up with this lovely phrase. She says when people are making decisions, one of the key factors is that they are cognitive moises. So she came up with this brilliant phrase of cognitive moises. But one of her colleagues put it a bit more whittily. So Daniel Kahneman said, think used to humans, swimmies to cats. You know, we can do it, but we prefer not to. Not either of these academics is trying to be rude about people. You know, both of them were at Princeton, both of them deal with very, very intelligent people. So they are completely aware that humans are capable of amazing flights of logic. You know, we can build iPhones, samples of the moon, build up electric car. But they're also aware that from an evolutionary perspective, energy is a very, very scarce resource and thinking is energy intensive and it's effortful. So what we have evolved to do as creatures is ration deep considered thought. And most of the time, in most situations, we don't respond to them in a fully considered way. We often make a snap into it to decisions. So we're faced with a situation, maybe we're faced with a proposal. We feel positively to it or cold towards it. You know, we feel positive or negative. Once we've had that initial reaction, then we use logic and rationality to justify to ourselves why we feel that way. But often it's that emotional, quick snap to decision that comes first. Now, the way that we make those snap decisions is to use what psychologist slightly purposely called heuristics, and what we would just call in layman's terms, rules of thumb. And everyone has hundreds of rules of thumb in their mind that allow them to come to these quick snap intuitive decisions. And what's interesting is that those rules of thumb are prone to biases. And essentially, the main argument is if you know what these biases are, when you are trying to influence other people, when you're trying to persuade and to change their behavior, if you know about the bias, you work with human nature, if you don't know about the bias, you're trying to overturn the human nature. Behavioral science is basically just the study of what are those biases? And how do you practically use them? That's fascinating. And certainly I work in education. So I'm really keen on the idea of people thinking. Also, there are definitely days where I don't really want to think. I also like not thinking. Yeah. And also it's that kind of order-effective. First of all, I have this emotional reaction or intuitive reaction to a situation. And then often the thinking kicks in. And that's why even the most intelligent of students are prone to these biases. The more intelligent they are, the more able they are to generate almost endless reasons about why their initial reaction is right. So intelligence is often an antidote to the biases. Okay. Can you tell me more about the biases? Then like what are the different biases you need to be aware of? So there are literally thousands of experiments. We're in the first study in kind of modern psychology. I have responses back in 1880. So you've got thousands of these studies. But there are some that occur more than others. There are some that are more powerful than others. So one of the lots of people might be familiar with that is a very influential bias. Would be something like social proof. So this is the argument that humans are a social animal. We're a herd species that if we believe a course of behavior is commonplace or popular, that behavior will become more appealing and people are more likely to adopt it. So often if you want to change terms of behavior, if you want to get them to adopt a proposal that you're putting in front of them, rather than just default to giving people a long list of rational reasons about why to obey, what you want to do is create the impression that lots of others have already adopted this behavior. Now interestingly, this is a study because it's such a well-known one. There are hundreds of experiments into it. And there are studies that show, yes, this affects people when they're buying cans of coke or bags of crisps in the supermarket. There are also studies that show professionals are deeply influenced at work by social proof. There's a study from 2018 by the the behavioural insights team and they work with the Australian government. And they wanted to get doctors to give out fewer antibiotics. So send out letters to doctors, over 6,000 letters of a nice big sample. And sometimes the letters try and just rationally explain to doctors, educate them about the downsides of over prescription. And when those letters go out, there is a 3.2% reduction prescription rate. So some reduction but pretty small. Other doctors get exactly the same letter, all the same reasons. But at the top of the letter, there is a social proof argument. Now the exact line would vary according to the situation of the doctor, their individual prescribing habits. But let's say it's a very over-bscribing doctor in Sydney. It might say something on the lines of you're giving out more antibiotics than 90% of other doctors in Sydney. And when that message went out, there was a 12.3% reduction in prescription rates. Now that's interesting because doctors, you know, they define themselves as being logical, rational, evidence-based thinkers. But even they, even this group, were very influenced by what they thought their peers were doing. So yeah, if you're at work and you've put an argument together about a particular approach, don't think that logic alone is going to be your most successful tactic. Yes, give people rational reasons to adopt your suggestion, but also try and create this impression that lots of others are behaving the way that you're suggesting. That's absolutely fascinating. We've had a few episodes on the show around doing transformation programs. So like trying to do data transformation, get more people using data and things like that. And one of the consistent pieces of advice is show off what your, like, create champion. So if someone does something cool, you make sure everyone else knows about it. And so you're getting that social proof. Yes. So if internal behavior changes are interesting people, I would say that one of the biggest mistakes I see again and again with internal change programs is emphasizing the scale of wrongdoing. So let's say, you know, take a mundane example, you want to get people to fill in their time sheets. What many companies do, and I remember this from experience is I used to work at an agency, a marketing agency, and every couple of months we would get emails saying, you know, none of you idiots are filling in your time sheets and it's causing all sorts of financial problems. That is completely misusing social proof. That argument of lots of people in misbehaving uses social proof in the wrong direction. You're emphasizing the scale of wrongdoing. That means you remove a sense of transgression and the message likely backfires because most people think themselves, well, everyone else isn't adopting this policy. They must have a good reason. And I'd be a bit of a mug to do it myself. So with internal behavior change, the first thing to do is think, how can I honestly emphasize the scale of positive behavior, the uptake of the behavior I want? That might be the absolute scale, or it could just be the fact that more and more people do it. Emersonize that, not the large volume of people who aren't paving the way that you want. I'm sure if you didn't know about that kind of that bias that I did, then it's a very easy to mistake to make. Like, you think, okay, if I shame people publicly, they'll stop doing that, but it doesn't work as a tactic. Yeah, you see it all the time. So Chille Dini has run some studies around stealing, which is actually if you put signs up telling people how regularly something's been stolen, it gets stolen more often. He said, this is the government's big mistake, because it feels such a logical thing to do. You know, he said too many government campaigns will go out and say, loads of you scary noise and loads of students turn up late. loads of people don't turn up the doctor appointment. Yeah, these are all very, very well-meaning messages. But the problem is they use social proof in the wrong direction. They emphasize the scale of the thing you don't want, not the scale of the thing you do want. Okay, so it seems like a very simple messaging switch can help there. Now, you mentioned before that there's kind of two sort of thinking. There's this quick, heuristic thinking, and there's the sort of deeper sort of more considered thinking. Are there any cases where you want people to use one or the other and how do you make them switch? So most decisions will be made in this kind of quick intuitive way. And my argument would be rather than thinking, how do humans tend to make decisions? How can we overturn that? I would say work with human nature. If you know about social proof, if you know that we copy others, use that to your advantage. Now, that doesn't have to mean lying. You know, there is an ethical use of this, but I used to work with the, um, the blood service, you know, they were trying to get people to donate blood. And they used to call out and say, only 4% of people donate blood. That is a misuse of social review. Make it feel like a weird, aberrant behavior and people think, well, if no one else is bothering, why should I? What you can completely honestly say is 2.5 million people give blood every year. Now, 4% and 2.5 million is the same number and a, you know, roughly mathematical, we perfect. But, you know, in a country like, uh, Brent, now if you say 2.5 million, you are emphasizing lots of people are doing this behavior. If you emphasize 4%, you're saying lots of people aren't doing the behavior. Both of them are true. There's no ethical head start for either of them, but using the one that works with, uh, human nature is the one that's going to be more effective. Okay. I love that. It's just, uh, same statistic presented in different ways. So, yeah, and the underlying argument is deal with the words it is, not the words you want it to mean. Maybe the world would be better if people were thought for logical, rational decision makers. But we don't work in that world. So, tailor your communications and your attempts to change behavior to reflect what actually influences people. Okay. Nice. And I think, uh, in, in sort of data AI world technology world, a lot of the, um, things you have to do are persuade people to adopt new ideas or adopt new technologies. Um, how do you go about, um, getting people to adopt new things? For example, there are, it's a tough task. So we are creatures of habit. And there's some really nice work that suggests that there are particular moments when people are more open to changing their behavior. So some of the work comes from Catherine Milkman at water. And she came up with this idea called the fresh not effect. So her argument is a big driver of behavior is the desire to be consistent with our past selves. So we look down on people who are inconsistent, you know, maybe in America, they might call them flip floppers and brick. We might call them hypocrites or enough, you know, authentic. So most of the time, people aren't considering alternative ways of behaving. They're just doing the same thing again and again and again. But behavioral scientists don't just list the problem of changing behavior and how hard it is. They also come up with some solutions. And Milkman's argument is when we enter new time periods, I'll link with our past self is weakened and we become more open to change. So she does some lovely data analysis. She looks at volumes of Google search terms over time for things like quit smoking, start dieting, stop drinking. She looks at gym registration and attendance data. She looks at visitors to a website called stick where people make public pledges to change their behavior. And for each of these data sets, she sees the same pattern. So there is this pronounced spike in openness to change as people enter new time periods. So that could be the year being the month off from birthday, after a public holiday, you know, any moment in which this is almost this kind of fracture in the kind of progression of time, people are more open to change. So if you want to get some to adopt a new behavior, if you send out your message at a random time, it's likely to fail. But if you let's say wait until the first week of September and loads will come back from the holidays, it's more like to work. If you wait till the first of January, it's more like to work. If you wait till after an office move, it's more like to work. If you put your efforts into people who have just changed jobs, it's more likely to work. Now, I know that sounds like such a tiny little change, which will loads of people are skeptical about the genuine influence, but has a brilliant campaign by the West Midlands police. So the behavioral insights team, which is the government's nudge unit, they work the Westmans police. I think it's 2017 might be 2018. They launched a new service, essentially, it's confidential hotline. They let known criminals know about hotline, and they offered them the choice. You know, either we're going to hunt you down. They probably weren't that hard, drastic about it. But I, you know, we know who you are or we will help you find a new job or help you move to a new area and start a life, a fresh. Now they sent out 2777 messages to the criminals and sometimes they just went out random moments, other times, they sent the message just after people's birthdays. And the people who received the message just after their birthday at a fresh start moment, I think it was there were 56% more likely to phone the hotline than those you just got at a random moment. So even a group, like hard and criminals, this is probably the most difficult audience to change their behavior, you can imagine, even they are affected by a tiny thing like the fresh start effect. So that might be one consideration I'd have about introducing new schemes. Don't just think about making the products appealing, think about the moment in which you launch it. That's really fascinating. I think I mean, at the moment, September, so we got a load of like back to school advertisements for everything in January, you always get like, okay, go to the gym, change your life. But I do like that idea of like, find if you know when your customers birthday is that's a, or your prospect's birthday is that's going to be a really good time to message them. Oh, absolutely. And if you've got a lot of data, then it opens up even bigger moments. So when I read about milkman study, I thought, okay, well, if a small thing like a new month. It opens up people to change what about more meaningful life changes and what I found was there was an even bigger effect with what I called life events. So if someone had moved house, if they got divorced, if they'd started a new job, all sorts of unrelated behaviors were much more likely to turn. So people got divorced, more of a trying new lag as people move house might try new TV programs, you know, it seems like so much of our habitual behavior is driven by the context. If you have one of these big changes, lots and lots of other seemingly unrelated behaviors in life become destabilized and you have this small window of opportunity to more effectively influence people. So yeah, if you've got that level of data, think about, can I identify people who've just moved jobs? Can I identify people who've just started university or just moved house? And then they are much, much more valuable. That's interesting. So it's like, maybe the thing that just popped into my mind there's like, there's a slightly sketchy way of doing that. Just you go around scraping social media, you just see what's going on with people live. There are more ethical ways of doing that. So who linked in, for example, would know whether someone has just changed jobs, mobile data providers can tell you if someone's moved house, because what they're in fur is, you know, let's say someone used to be in battle them between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. And now they're in furrow constantly. Well, they're just, they would assume that's moved house. So there's so many data providers out there that you can get this kind of information. Now, or if you, you know, if you're something like giant supermarkets and suddenly people were used to be shopping at the bazaar and super store and now they're at the Ipswich Superstore, well, again, you can infer that they have moved house. This is how your own data set could be quite useful as well. Okay. So to seem like all this information on people's life events, it is available to find if you want. Another thing that I think behavioral science ought to be useful for is getting people to attention. I mean, there's so much going on like so many different distractions. It can quite often be hard to just make sure people are aware of your products or services. What do you, what do you, what can behavioral science help us with here? So you're absolutely right. There is, well, it might be one of the oldest studies around really. There's a 1933 study from head Vigvon Resthof. There's brilliantly named German psychologist and she did a super simple study. It bastardized it slightly just to make it a bit clearer, but she gives people these list of information. And let's say it's got 10 items on a nine of them are all animals, cat, dog, weasel. But one of the items is a bit of furniture like a chair. She gives people lists of information. They might have a couple of minutes to look at the list, she then takes the list away and then she asks people what they can remember. And what she finds is you see a very clear pattern and we are hardwired to notice what's distinctive. If you give people long lists of animals with one or two bits of furniture in people remember the furniture. Or vice-first, if you give people long lists of furniture with one or two animals sprinkled in, then remember the animal. So that became known as the Von Resthof effect or the isolation effect. And it's essentially this idea that our attention is drawn to what's distinctive. So if you're thinking about getting some detention, what you want to think about is what are the norms of behavior in my category? Or what are the normal ways people will communicate who are surrounding my message? And then once you've you can think of that, it's worth putting those norms of behavior into a list and then being quite candid about categorising them. You know, some of those things you think you might believe are crucial, but others you might think are just there for traditions. Like if you break those more traditional areas, then you are onto something very powerful. You're tapping into one of the most well-proven and longest-standing principles of Von Resthof effect. So simple one to work for me on occasion is called a "Pratful Effect". And it's this idea that if you admit a flaw, you become more appealing. Now that is a brilliant way of applying the Von Resthof effect in marketing because virtually every advertiser, 99.9 cent of advertisers, will brag. So if you come out with an admission of a weakness in your product, then you are going to stand out and you will get noticed. And if you're noticed, you know, that is mind-tenth of the battle. The most information is completely ignored. And if people think this sounds like a completely ludicrous approach, or just think about some of the products in your home, think about Guinness. Good things come to those who wait. That is admitting the flaw of slowness. Maybe a bit older one, but stellar, reassuringly expensive. That's admitting the flaw of being expensive. Marmite, good, sorry. Love it or hate it. Meeting half the population hate your product. You know, there are all sorts of amazing campaigns that have applied that principle. And I think all of the success and all of the success is it breaks what people assume is the cardinal rule of advertising, which is to brag. Interesting. Do you like the idea of doing things that are a bit different to stand out and also admitting your flaws? I mean, is it a tricky thing to do? Because I guess it could backfire spectacularly if you do badly. Oh, so actually, this is not a suggestion you should just randomly admit problems. But we really need to do it. It's very honest to yourself. I think what is your core strength? And maybe you are a service provider and you are very, very high quality. Well, if you're high quality, you're probably going to be quite pricey. And often people will be a bit embarrassed about mentioning that they're more expensive than their competitors. But actually, you know, it's very hard to prove that your high quality. One of the best ways to do it is actually draw attention to your price. Now, if you admit that you're a bit more expensive than other people, generally people assume, well, if they're pricey, they're probably high quality. Generally, people believe in trade-offs in life. So it's about admitting the right flaw. What's your core strength and then think, is there a mirror weakness that if I admit it went for size my core strength? And that, I think, is something that if you, yeah, don't do it randomly, don't do it willingly, but it's something that can be very, very powerful. Absolutely. Yeah, certainly, it seems like if you do it right, then it can be an incredibly powerful thing. I guess we're new data frames slogan. Sometimes we're slightly intellectual. It seems that you mentioned the prepful effect is kind of like, it sounds like a comedy thing. I get, prepful comes from comedy, right? So can you use comedy in order to get people's attention in this way? No, it's a really interesting one. Often some of the best brands that use a prepful effect, it's quite self-deplicating it. It could often lead to abusing situations. So I think you're actually spot on with humor. It actually links back to your original question about noticeability. So there's a psychologist at University of Amsterdam called Fred Bronner. And he did this very simple study. It gets huge sample, 1,287 people, gets them to flick through a newspaper. And then he asks them what mood they're in, good or bad, happy or sad, relaxed or stressed. And once they've answered those questions, he then asks them to try and recall as many ads as they can. And what he finds is when he cuts the recall data by mood. People are much more likely, I think it's 51% more likely to remember the ads if they are in that positive mood, happy or relaxed versus unhappy or stressed. So there's this argument that if you either reach people in a good mood, maybe you reach them the weekend rather than when they're on a Monday morning, or you use humor to put them in a good mood, they're much more open to what you're saying. And then on top of that, work that I've done suggests not only a people more like to notice you're advertising if you're in a good mood, they're more like to believe what you say, and they're more likely to be open to spend it. They're less priceless when they're in a good mood. And none of this stuff is speculation. Now all these insights are based on really, really simple experiments. So for the price sensitivity point, all I did was with a couple of other people, Ben Davies and Ben Sachs and Chris Davis, I think it was the three of us that did this one. We've got 821 people. We showed them a series of promotional ads. So it might be a case of beer for a 20-quid or a, you know, a meal deal at a supermarket. We got people to say that there was a good deal or a bad deal on the five-point scale. And then we asked them about their mood. And what we found is that the proportion of people who thought the deals were good value, were 60% if people were in a bad mood. It went up to 76% if they're in a good mood. So exactly the same offer. People are 26% more likely. I think it's a great deal if they're in a positive mood. So there's lots of evidence of this. It's not speculation. And I think it's not just a quirk of a one-off study. I think there's a very sensible rationale behind it, which is, if you're in a bad mood, you are skeptical. You focused on the opportunity cost of spending money. If you're in a good mood, you focus on the upside. All the benefits you're going to get for the products and minimise slightly the cost yourself. So yeah, there is no stability, believability and even price sensitivity, relations to upside of putting people in a good mood. But yeah, I can certainly see how if you try and put your customers in a good mood before you ask them for money, that's going to work really well for sales teams in particular. You know, you have a conversation, get your customer happy. And then that's the point where you start talking about pricing. Yeah, and there's an overlap here. This firstly, the evidence about, if someone's in a good mood, they're more likely to be risk-taking to believe things, to spend money. But there is another part of this, which is, if you repeatedly put people in a good mood, they're going to like you. And there is an argument called the halo effect. So the halo effect is essentially the argument that when we evaluate a personal or a product, what we probably should do is web each of their characteristics individually. So I should make a decision about someone's good looks, completely independent from their intelligence. But that would be time-consuming. And we are machines that are designed to make quick, fast decisions. So what tends to happen is people latch on to one stand-out characteristic of our person. And then they use that as a guide to all the other characteristics. There's a, there's a, studies going back to the 1930s, but there's a lovely study from 1977 by, I think it was Timothy Wilson and Richard Nisbit. And they get a colleague of theirs at university, a Belgian colleague who's working in America to record a lecture. And this guy has quite a strong accent and he records a lecture about a particular topic. And he does it twice. First time he comes across as very friendly and warm, second time, a bit rude and cold. The academics take that video, they play one of the videos to people. And then they ask them to rate the academic. Now, just as you'd imagine, completely logically, the people that see the friendly lecturer, they rate him as warmer and more likeable than the people who see the cold and rude lecturer. The interesting bit though is, on completely unrelated metrics, you see the same impact. So when people rate how good looking the lecture is, his mannerisms, his accent, again it's that when he comes across as warm and likeable, all those factors are scored higher than when he came across as cold and miserable. So we often take one fact about a person and then overextend it across all their other attributes. So if as a salesperson, you come across as likeable, what will also happen is your intelligence will improve, your trustworthiness will improve, your looks will improve. Now you push up one of these metrics and others will follow towards agree. So I think there's a double benefit of putting purely good mood, which is on that one-to-one basis, is you're then going to benefit from this halo effect? That's fascinating because you wouldn't necessarily think that likableness and good looking as our intelligence ought to be related, but I guess people blur these things if they're like you. Well, well, absolutely. I mean, you are right. Logically, they are not related. Absolutely, they're not related. But there'd be a mantra supposed for behavioral sciences, which is, we're not interested in what people ought to do, we're interested in what they actually do, and we see these metrics kind of moving in in lockstep. I don't necessarily exaggerate. It's not like, you know, if your scene is very good looking, you'll be seen as very intelligent, but your intelligence will move up compared to someone who didn't have that very strong standout characteristic. Okay, fascinating. So I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier. So you were talking about how with the prepful effect, it's about being honest with your customers, but also at the start, you mentioned that Apple is like one of the kind of the masters of behavioral science, and they're a very secretive organisation. So I'm trying to work out, is it a good idea to be more transparent with your customers or more secretive? When is one or the other a good thing? I think one of the interesting is about human nature is that there is one answer. And imagine you and I were given a task and we have to cross a river, you know, human nature a bit like that. You could swim across the river, you could build a bridge, you could hire a ferry. You know, there are lots of ways to cross that river, and just because there is the existence of a ferry, it doesn't negate the fact that swimming will also get you across. So there's the same as the same with persuasion. There are lots of these different techniques, and it's about matching the right one to the right circumstances, but it probably sets behavioral science, you know, and the practical use of it as much I think as an art as a science. Okay, so choose the right tool for the right situation. Actually do you have any concrete examples of like one or the other? Yeah, so often you'll be wanting to think about where your strengths lie. So Dyson, you talk about transparency. I think Dyson are transparent in a very, very interesting way. So, you know, one of the truthful stories about Dyson is that it took the inventor James Dyson years and years to go from the initial idea of the banking vacuum to the final product. And that is something that Dyson emphasized all the time. Now you look at their advertising, their website, you listen to their PR. In fact, if you pick up James Dyson's autobiography, the very first sentence is I went through 5127 prototypes to get to the bagless. Thank you. Now that emphasis of being open and transparent about the efforts you've gone to, that is a phenomenal tactic because exactly the same product will be rated as higher quality and preferable if people can see the effort that's gone into it. So there's a famous study boy, Andrea Morales at the University of Southern California, maybe 2005-ish. And what she does is she goes out and recruits a group of people in the market for a house and every person is given 10 apartments that meet their requirements. So everyone gets the same list. But some people have told this stay agent took one hour to generate the list and they used a computer. That's the low effort group. Other people have told this stay agent took nine hours to generate the list and that list was made manually. Now when Morales asked people to score the estate agent, how good was their service from 0 to 100, she sees this clear pattern. Low effort group, they rate the estate agent at 50 out of 100, higher effort group rate their estate agent at 68 out of 100. Exactly the same service, but you get this 36% difference in ratings. Now Morales' argument is it is a complicated question to work out whether someone provided a good service. And when we face complex questions, we often substitute them for simpler questions that give us an almost as good answer. And the simple question here is how much effort do I think the estate agent went to? So her argument is you as a communicator or as a business, you can't assume people will know what efforts you've been to. You have to be much more transparent about them. Now that's not about a low ethics approach of inventing stories of hard work. Most businesses are already doing that. They just keep those stories themselves. The argument here, if you need to let people know about them. And if you do, exactly the same products will be rated higher. So sorry, that was a slightly long-winded way of saying why for Dyson is it useful to really double down on that story? Because if you go through their history, there is a truthful story of effort. And therefore, being transparent about it is both honest to who you are and working with this hard-wired bias. If you're a company that doesn't have that effort story, well, then you need to look at other biases to tap into. So I think you're right, it's often matching it to the genuine insights about the organisation. Okay, no, it's a really interesting story about Dyson, like more than 5,000 failures. I think that requires a ridiculous amount of persistence. I think a lot of people would have given up, but long before that. And crucially, he normally says virtually over all the time, he doesn't say more than 5,000. He wishes 5,127. And there are studies that suggest that precision has a benefit. Now if you say more than 5,000, it fails a bit ambiguous. Have they made it up? Is it plucked out of the air? 5,127. Giving in that precision tends to be seen as more accurate and more credible. Okay, interesting. Like 5,000 more than 27. Again, they're right. Actually, so he's all about demonstrating effort being a good thing for customers. So at the moment, there's a big push with making use of AI to automate things. And so this is like a big trend in, let's see how much we can automate and do less effort for the same task. So it feels like there's some big implications here. AI is a more recent technological invention. So there's not, there are hundreds of psychological studies into its impact, but there are some. There's a 2023 study from Covid-milit VR University in Amsterdam, I think. And he shows people products. So some people have shown this poster and it's a drawing of a skull and they're told that it was created by an AI robot. Others are shown the same poster, but they're told it was handraught. Milit then asks both groups to rate that poster on its creativity, its artistic merit, even on their purchase intent. And for everyone of the metrics, he sees, you know, start pattern. If people think it is AI generated, they will rate it lower than if they think it's handraught. I think with purchase intent, it is 61% swing. So it's not a small change. And Milit's argument for this goes back to the illusion effort. He says, look, most people's experience of chat GPT is you put in a prompt when it spits out a blog post or a detailed answer in a second. They think of it as being low effort. So if you emphasize that you've used AI, you're telling people that little effort's gone into it exactly the same product will be rated worse. So you have a bit of a dilemma here or we have a few different options to put it more positively. In my world of marketing, what you don't want to do is what coped it at Christmas and emphasized your ads being made by AI. Why would you tell people that you're just going to reduce the impact? So that's one option. Don't positively tell people necessarily. But the other area is if you have to tell people that something's AI generated, maybe your client's pushing you to introduce AI and speed up the service. What you've got to be aware of is that unless you introduce counterbalancing measures, they will rate that product as worse. So what you might want to start thinking about is, can we switch attention from speed of delivery to the length of time it took to set up the processes and get the programming right. And I think that's a subtle shift that you can do. Absolutely. Yeah, a lot of these things like, okay, yeah, you're automating stuff, but it's actually, it's a subtle art in getting all the promises and all the workflows right. So it is a bit of effort to get it set up in the first place. Yeah, and don't shy away from telling people that. Don't assume that they will know, make sure you're transparent about it. It wasn't to do with AI, but I think the implications are spot on for AI, but there's a really famous story about the design of a logo back in the 1990s, maybe early 2000s. So two big banks merged and they became Citibank, I think it was Travellers and Citigre, maybe. And they hired Paula Shere to design the logo. So she's well-famous designer top of her field in the briefing meeting. Literally, as she has been told what she needs to do, she is sketching out a logo. And you can see this online. She sketches out on a napkin. You can find the images of this online or a quick Google. And it is essentially, to all intense purposes, maybe 95% the same as the finished logo she delivers a few months later. And legend has it that Citibank are like, well, how can you in all good faith ask for 1.5 million dollars? That was the fee. 1.5 million dollars for something that took you 30 seconds. And her legendary answer was, well, it may have taken me 30 seconds, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in 30 seconds. And that's the same shift I'm talking about. 30 seconds is the speed of delivery. 34 years is the amount of effort it took to get into that position. And you could think about that as an analogy for setting up these AI systems now. Nice, that's a good comeback. And when someone's trying to cheat you out of your hook, 1.5 million dollars, you really do need a good comeback. All right, so suppose your bust is like, okay, I really believe in behavioral science. We're going to go all in on this. Like, how do you get started? I would pick something that has a, it is a costless intervention. Because one of the things I love about behavioral science is, these ideas don't necessarily need a million pound ad campaign to make them come to life. They can be tiny, tiny, tiny tweaks. So I would think about, what is it we can change? The won't cost us anything, but we'll have a nice positive effect. Start small and it's easier to, I think persuade people to adopt it. So one of the studies that I've come across quite recently that I love is by Peterson and get the University of Texas. And it's basically about social proof, but it's really clever application. He gets a large group of people to go through an e-commerce journey. And sometimes an item isn't there. And it's labelled as sold out. Other times, it's labelled as unavailable out of stock. After people have, you know, got done there, you know, purchasing a journey, all the other tasks is given them. He asked them how we rotate. Are they with a website? And he sees this really clear variation. If the unavailable product was labelled out of stock or unavailable, people are very irritated. If it's labelled sold out, they're only a little bit irritated. And he's argument is if you say it's out of stock or unavailable, you are drawing attention to your own as logistical ineptitude. But if you say something sold out, what you're subtly doing is he's using social proof. You're emphasising this is a super popular product. You know, it's high demand that has meant it's not there. And that minimises that irritation level. Now that is a lovely study to put into practice if you own a Necoma site because you have to label your products that aren't there in some respect. So why not label the way that has the biggest impact as the biggest positive impact. And that's what behavioural science will tell you. It's this giant repository, hundreds, 100, 100 hundreds of studies. And just take those simple studies and apply them to your to your challenges. That's amazing because it's such a simple change going from all the labels out of stock to it's sold out. And that's just going to improve customer satisfaction. I love that low effort big impact. So I guess if you want to do more of these things, you can have to run some experiments. What sort of experience might you want to run yourself? Okay, so the biggest advice there, the single biggest thing is do not ask people directly. You know, if you have found any of these studies we're talking about interesting, if you go and say to someone, would you be influenced if you knew lots of other people were behaving in a particular way? Do not expect them to answer. Honestly, they will say, no, no, no, I make my own decisions. I think everything through very clearly. And then I make a very considered decision. But a theme of behavioural science is what people say and what they do are completely different things. So there's a brilliant psychologist at the University of Virginia called Timothy Wilson. And he wrote this book which sums up his ideas called strangers to ourselves. And the whole book is a series of studies showing people do not have full introspective insight in throw motivations. So if you stop someone and say what would encourage you to exercise more or to buy this lager? They'll give you loads of reasons. But they will be a very small subset of the the genuine reasons. They will give you reasons that reflect well on themselves that make them look like sensible logical decision makers. They won't admit these tiny little tweaks have only effect on them at all. So the first thing to do is put far less emphasis on surveying people, getting focus groups with them and instead far more emphasis on real world life experiments. And the basis of virtually every psychological experiment is you shut up naturalistic as possible situation and you do it in two variants. Everything apart from one metric is kept the same between the two situations. And then any difference in responses you attribute to that single change variable. So you know with the Peterson study you get as there are a thousand people to go through Necom's journey. You make sure it's exactly the same, you know it's the same time for people, the same time of day, the same offers. The only thing that changes is the wording of the label. And then you can feel reasonably confident that it was that wording change that affected behavior. So avoid listening to what people tell you influences them, run simple testing control experiments. And then ideally don't take one experiment as gospel. It could be a statistical fluke. Really what you want to see is either other people have shown this inside in lots of different situations or you should be looking at repeating all the months. Okay, yeah. So that seems pretty good. Don't trust what people say. And I like it. That's the biggest one. Yeah. And it seems like these are basically these like AB tests that you typically want to run. Yeah, they're very, so if someone works in kind of digital marketing, that would be the language they would use. The only thing that I would say is slightly different is often AB tests are about certainly my word of marketing. They're around the very final bit of creative. So you may be changing a color or some images you use. What I would say is you take that same theory of research and same methodology. But do it a bit earlier in the process. What you really want to be doing is finding out which of the principles like social proof or the practical effect, which work for your brand and your context and your situation. Find out what biases are powerful. And once you know that, well, that will be useful forever. Whereas if you're only testing that final, the kind of aesthetics as it were in an in digital marketing situation, well, you think that that information is very valuable for for that campaign or a month or two. So apply what you do with final creative all the way back to understanding people's motivations. Okay, wonderful. Yeah. So start early rather than realizing that your entire marketing campaign is using the wrong language. Okay, so it seems like when you're trying to hack your customer's mind, does scope for some sort of ethical disasters here? Are there any things you should avoid doing any red flags to watch out for? No, that's a brilliant question because I think your amps see right on that. Behavioral science and knowing about these principles isn't a kind of moral gav jail free card. You know, it is just a tool. Behavioral science is a neutral tool. And unfortunately, you can use this to sell cigarettes or you can use it to get people to do immoral things. Or you could use it to get people to donate charity and to recycle more. Yeah, it's just a tool. I always think I'm a helpful analogy. It's something like rhetoric. You know, rhetoric might be the, you know, they're the skill of putting a persuasive speech together. Now, if we think about learning some of those rhetorical skills, we would recognize very, very quickly that those skills can be used by dictators to get neighbors to hate other neighbors, or it can be used by Martin Luther King figures to get people to love each other. It's the same skills often, but they're put to very different uses. So, I think what people need to think about is, is the intervention I'm doing in the long-term interests of my colleagues or customers? Or think about it as, there's this lovely idea that Thaler covers with Sunstein in his book Nunch. He talks about the American philosopher John Rawls. You have the, I think calls it the publicity principle. It's essentially, if people were to know what I was doing, would I be ashamed? Like, if my local newspaper were to blast on the front page, would I be embarrassed that my neighbour in the eye? And if you would be embarrassed, then that is a very good alarm bell. So, you've got to be careful about how you use these principles. They're just the principles of what effectively influences people. Obviously, influence can be used for good or bad. I do not know that idea, that if you're doing something and it's going to be blasted of a newspaper, of a social media, and you think that's a bad idea, then maybe don't do that thing. It's a nice simple, simple rule. Okay, wonderful. All right, so just to wrap up, for people who are interested in learning more about behavioral science, where should they start? Well, the great thing is, this is a very popular field now. Lots and lots of good books out there. Slightly biased. I have three. So I've written a new one with a friend and colleague called Michael Eriflicker. We've wrote a new one called Hack and Human Mind. I've also got some earlier books called The Choice Factor and the Illusion of Choice. So lots of material that people can find out more. How can the human mind conveniently on the wall behind you? Yes, yes. Just happen to be there. Yeah, thanks. Unfortunately, I've been waving my head in front of it. So, wonderful. And I always want people to follow on social media. Is there any research you've particularly interested in at the moment, like, who should I be looking out for? If you look at other people, I'm a big fan of Rawry Settle. So, it works in similar industry to me. It works in marketing advertising. And he wrote a brilliant book called Outcoming. And I think what he's so good at is he has this very fertile mind. And he takes a lot of the same experiments that other people might discuss. Put the lateral implications, you know, it completely left field. So maybe check out a couple of his TED Talks. If you like the style. And you know, that, that, you know, might divide people, but I think I think he's very, very funny, phenomenally insightful. If you like that style, strong recommendation, Gaze Book Outcoming. All right. Wonderful. Definitely worth looking out for. All right. Super. Thank you so much. You're down, Richard. Oh, thank you, Richard. You're really nice to chat. Thank you very much.