When you can’t stop seeing the thing you’ve just discovered

Back in 2019, I rewatched Home Alone for the first time in decades. I loved it. It's a brilliant movie. I think it's always interesting to rewatch films that you enjoyed as a child because you, well you notice things that you never noticed when you were a child. With Home Alone, I'd never realised just how great the theme tune was. It is fantastic. It's John Williams. At his best, it's Christmasy, it's memorable. I really loved it. But then, after this time watching Home Alone in 2019, something very strange happened. I started to hear this theme tune everywhere. I'd hear it playing in supermarkets. I'd hear it used in adverts for supermarkets. It felt like I was hearing the theme tune everywhere and I had no idea why. I'd seen Home Alone before. I'd heard the theme tune before. Yet I'd never noticed it. Now after rewatching it, I'm hearing this theme tune all the time, even in the strangest of places. A few weeks later, on a flight, I became convinced that the cabin chime was sampled straight from the start of the Home Alone theme song. Here is that cabin chime. And here's Home Alone. In my mind, these sounded the same. It's here, right? It's almost like the Home Alone theme tune was following me around haunting me. Except of course, it wasn't. Now you have probably experienced something like this. It might not be with songs like it was for me. It might be with products or celebrities, books, news stories. That niche thing that you have just learnt about suddenly appears everywhere. And it's not due to some supernatural reason. No, it is due to a cognitive bias that affects all of us. All of that coming up. Apparently, most businesses only use 20% of their data. That's like reading a book with 80% of the pages torn out. The point is, you will miss a lot. Unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights that are trapped in emails and call logs and transcripts, all that unstructured data can really make a difference to your business. Because when you know more, you grow more. You won't learn much reading 20% of a book. So why settle for just 20% of your company's data? Visit HubSpot.com today to learn more. Today on Nudge, I'm delighted to have Tom and Luan back on the show. Hello, I'm Tom Boudon Green. I'm a senior lecturer in marketing here at Bristol Business School. But I guess I'm here also because I'm now an author of a new book called Marketing Psychology, which I've written with Luan Wise. I'm Luan Wise. I'm a marketing consultant and trainer. And I've co-authored the Marketing and Psychology book with Tom Boudon Green too. Bridge that gap between academic theory and marketing practice. So working with Tom, we've explained over 400 different theories and bringing them to life, for example. And one of those theories explains what I started hearing the home alone theme tune everywhere. This is one of those theories that when you read it, you kind of nod and go, "Yeah, I've seen this. I've experienced this." It's called the frequency elution. My example on this is I was on a long journey quite recently and I spotted a new car model that I've never seen before. And then over the next few days and weeks, I'm seeing this model everywhere. I'm seeing it on other car journeys. I'm seeing it in car parks. I'm even seeing it on TV ad breaks as well. And that's why we call it a frequency elusion. It's almost, once something enters your awareness, it suddenly seems to appear far more often than it did before. The frequency elusion is when you notice something once and then start seeing it everywhere. You therefore might assume it is commonplace, even though it's not. You're just noticing it now, whereas you didn't before. I'm finding that particularly with Chinese brands, electric vehicles that are coming into the market, which I'm seeing time and time again. And I believe that I'm seeing them, or I think that I'm seeing them fairly regularly, but I'm sure that's because I'm not counting the number of Volkswagen's that I'm seeing. It's actually probably far more, but it's because I'm seeing that particular brand or brand, several of them that I'm focusing on those in particular. This bias is also known as the Badderminehoff phenomenon, not because Badderminehoff studied it, but because of a 1990s online discussion where someone mentioned that after the first hearing about Badderminehoff, a German left-wing terrorist organisation, they suddenly encountered that name again shortly afterwards. Other participants joined in with this discussion with similar experiences, and thus this phenomenon was first recognised. The original work in this area, it was actually from a blog at Stanford University blog written by Arnold Svicki. In the blog, which I've linked to in the show notes, it's a work he notes that once you notice a language feature, it suddenly feels like it's everywhere. You might hear someone saying literally used for emphasis. For example, I literally died laughing. Often folks who hear this for the first time, then hear it being used all the time, not because the usage of that word has increased, but because your selective attention makes you spot it more and confirmation bias makes you remember the uses and ignore the rest. Since then, it has been researched to show that the frequency illusion occurs. Martin Van Mjöle, published something in the journal called Languages a few years ago, 2020. What he did is look at a guide to Dutch literature, and he looked at several guides and looked at what the guide said were frequent occurrences in Dutch language. Then he went through a massive database of Dutch newspapers and magazines to look at, actually, is that true? Are there really as frequent occurrences of those features of Dutch language as the guides say there are? And of course, he found that there weren't. But we see those, or at least people in Netherlands, see these occurrences more often because they've been directed to see them by the guides that they're reading. In the 2022 study, the researcher gives an example of a Dutch literature guide from 1925. The author, Mortgat, wrote about two Dutch words for darkness. There is "doisternis", which means darkness or absences of light, and "doistering", a much more poetic word for darkness that might mean gloom in English. Now, back in 1925, the author who wrote this guide claimed that "doistering" was more commonly used. He writes a little bit of his far more often than the opposite word "doisternis". And yet that is entirely false. In texts from the 30 years before that claim, "doistering" only appeared eight times, whereas "doisternis" appeared nine hundred and nine times. Researcher Martin Van Mullen claims that the earlier 20th century author must have fallen for the frequency illusion. Mortgat learned about the less common phrase "doistering". He took notice of it when he would read it again, and that made it seem far more commonplace than it actually was. If we're guided to seek certain things, we're more likely to find them. So it could be brands that we see people wearing, it could be phrases that people use, it could be when going back to the whole "Stick 7" idea, it could be that we say something like "Oh, everyone is doing "Stick 7", but of course that's not really true, and actually everyone doesn't even know what "Stick 7" is. There are plenty of people that probably don't know if they're not in the right demographic, but we look for the occurrences once we've had that information cut to the front of our mind. It affects all of us. One study found that doctors who had seen more than one instance of a rare disease were far more likely to misdiagnose future patients with that disease, and as I've spoken about before in the show, another study found that hearing about multiple examples of a specific crime can convince viewers of a crime wave, even if there's no data to bag it up. This is the frequency illusion when we pay attention to a stimulus with far more likely to spot it in the future. It does not mean that that stimulus, the homolone theme tune in my case, is suddenly everywhere. It simply means that our brains are primed to pay attention to it. But the frequency illusion is just one of many cognitive biases that affect us all. Next up, I asked Tom about an equally important bias, the "Empathy gap". The empathy gap actually relates to the endowment effect, which I know you will have discussed in previous podcasts. The endowment effect is basically how we value products that we own more than we should. If you're selling a car for example, you probably set the price that you want to sell that car for, higher than the buyer actually intends to pay for it. The research, again, it's David Dunning involved in this, from the Dunning Crueger effect Cornell, but led by a leaf fan Boven, also with George Lowenstein, who is obviously very well known as Psychology. They actually undertook some research where they gave some students university branded mugs, and some students didn't get a university branded mug, but they were actually told that there would be an ability to sell between them. As you can imagine with the endowment effect, when the selling occurred, the price that was set by the sellers was higher than the price that the buyers were expecting. But what was actually more interesting about that experiment was they actually also asked each party the buyers and the sellers what they thought the others would pay or sell for, and they got those estimates wrong. So it wasn't just about the endowment effect, it was about understanding what the other person was likely to want to pay or want to sell for. They weren't able to see or empathise with the other person's point of view very well, so it's an empathy gap rather than just an endowment effect. Tom and the Wound write how people still frequently underestimate the emotions of others. They may see a person online emotionally affected by a specific situation. specific situation, perhaps even crying, and yet still lack empathy for that person. And if anyone's listening that's a long term user of LinkedIn, you might recall a CEO of a marketing agency who posted this really tearful selfie after he laid off some employees. And his intention was, we think, to show vulnerability, emotional leadership, but the reaction to it in the comments was very deeply divided. Some praise his openness, well, many criticized him for kind of making those layoffs about himself rather than those that were affected. So the response of those critics being so divided, I think that's a great example of the empathy gap. Others who weren't in that CEO's emotional state, hadn't been through that kind of tough decision, found it difficult to empathize and kind of judged his reaction through their own perspective. Say a colleague of yours issues you a deadline and then send you a blunt email to inform you. You probably assume that they're careless and rude, but you'll struggle to see that that person might be overloaded, stressed, or maybe dealing with something urgent or personal. That is because there is a gap between our emotional states, how we feel in the moment, and their emotional state, how they feel. We judge others as if they have the exact same emotional state that we have. If we're relaxed, we assume they should be relaxed as well. If we're stressed, we assume they should be stressed as well. And we misread their behavior when their emotional state doesn't match our own. It is why we'll often watch game show contestants on TV and think, gosh, that's really easy. I'd be so great if I was on that show. And yet when people actually do go on these shows, they often mention how it's much, much harder when they're actually up on stage being watched by millions compared to when they're answering the same questions on the couch. Now, let's move on to another bias that many of us fall for. It is the projection bias. Projection bias is the bias where people are assuming that their current feelings, their preferences, their beliefs, will stay the same in the future. And obviously that can happen over a long period of time. It's different to predict what we're going to be like in 20 years time. But it can also happen in a far shorter period of time as well. That interpersonal empathy gap can happen just within a week. So there's a paper by Daniel Reid and Barbara Van Luren, where they ask people to choose a snack to eat in a week's time either healthy or unhealthy. And they actually ask people at different times of the day as well. Either straight after lunch when they were feeling full or a bit later in the afternoon when they were feeling hungry. And the researchers actually returned the week later to provide that snack, but they pretended they'd forgotten what the people had originally ordered. And so they asked them again, what would you like at this particular point? And as you can probably predict what they found was that when it came to actually making a choice on the day, they chose less healthy options than they thought they had wanted when they made the prediction in advance. Even within a week people weren't able to predict how they might feel in the future. They were unable to understand their, how their hunger might affect them in that particular point. When we look ahead, we often mistake how future us will act. I experienced this yesterday. The day before yesterday, I landed back in the UK after a holiday in Thailand. Now while on the beach in Thailand, I told myself that I would definitely go for a run as soon as my plane lands. But when that day came around, I convinced myself that no way I can't go for a run I'm too jet lagged. I projected my relaxed holiday demeanor onto my future self, assuming that my motivation would stay the same. I asked Tom if there was a way to avoid this bias. One way of tackling that is to make a public statement. So pre-commitment, tell people you're going to make this decision and then you're more likely to stick to it if you had that sort of social connection with other people that you've made that commitment to. With that in mind, I'd like to tell everyone listening that I plan to go on a run tonight. All right, that is the projection bias. Let's now look at herd behaviour. How we tend to follow the actions of others. So a starting point is to think about herd behaviour and this is really about suppressing individual descent. If you think about the famous novel, Lord of the Flies written by William Golding, what happens at the end of that not to give the game away, but I'm sure most of your listeners will know the basics just a bit if they haven't read it is that the boys get led by the group decisions and they end up killing two children. Even though there are dissenting voices, they don't get heard because of the herd behaviour. In that situation, as well people tend to lose a sense of self, so we call this "individuation" so people get absorbed into the crowd behaviour and sometimes forget their own sense of identity. Both of those things really are linked to the "individuation" and herd behaviour. We follow the actions of others, each Christmas, millions of us tune into old Christmas movies like Home Alone, not necessarily because we absolutely adore these movies, but because we know that millions of people like us do the exact same behaviour. We follow the herd. This can happen on a grand scale, like I've mentioned, but it also occurs in much smaller groups and this is a bias known as social norms. We've also got social norms coming into play, so society is even small groups. Typically have specific behaviours that they might consider as normal. For example, in many countries, it's a social norm to stand in a line while waiting for a bus, even there's no formal rule requiring that. In marketing, even signaling the growth of a trend can make that trend appear to be a norm and I think there's a paper that refers to that by Castella from 2024. In the paper, Castella and his fellow authors explain how most people don't do the basic things that prevent diseases, like eating well or exercising. Now traditional health messages often rely on descriptive norms, like social proof, saying things like most people do "X", most people exercise or most people eat well. However, that often doesn't work when the behaviour isn't commonplace. Most people don't always exercise, for example. So Castella in the paper introduces the uptrend effect. Instead of saying that the behaviour is commonplace, messages that simply highlight that more people are doing it number four can work just as well. Across seven experiments, including real world field studies, they showed that declaring that a behaviour is growing makes people infer that it's becoming normal, which increases their own engagement. If you can't say most people in your area exercise, then say more people in your area are exercising today than they ever have before. A brand might highlight that thousands of people are using this new app or product so others are thinking, well, I should be doing this too. This is what everyone else is doing. They might not have considered it otherwise. Which reminds me to mention to you, that more listeners than ever before stay tuned to the whole episode of Nudge. They don't tune out during the ad break and they keep listening right to the very end. And I'd heavily advise you do that today because I have a special announcement to make at the end. All of that plus three more biases from Tom and Luan after this break. The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today after you finish listening to Nudge is the hustle daily show. It is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. The hustle daily show brings you a very healthy dose of a reverent offbeat and informative takes on business and tech news. If you'd like an interesting episode to get you hooked on this podcast, there's a recent episode called the AI app that makes your dream vacation a digital reality. If you want to listen to that, just go and search for the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome back you listening to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. We've heard how exposure to a stimuli can make that stimuli seem commonplace. That's the frequency illusion. We've learned how there's a gap between how we feel now and how we expect to feel in the future. That's the projection gap. And we've heard how we follow the actions of others, especially if we hear that more people than ever before are taking up that specific behavior. That's social norms and the up trend effect. Tom has an interesting follow up point on social norms. He says that simply using the word we when referring to customers can change how they act. And there is previous research. I think it was published in the journal and consumer research about the power of we and how using the word we when you're talking to a customer helps the customer feel closer to the brand. But then Ryan Cruz and colleagues follow this up with research published in the journal of interactive marketing, looking at not just the word we but this time the word you. So second person pronouns so just to make it really clear first person is I third person is he she day and in the middle is when you're talking directly to someone and use the word you and their hypothesis was that using the word you increase someone sense of involvement with that brand and involvement is a dimension of psychology which I think was first written about by Judith psychowski many years ago. Basically how sort of cognitively involved you are with what you're seeing and being fed and what they found was because the sense of involvement increases when you are addressed with the word you your brand attitude also increases to research a son he in a 2018 paper in marketing science. Found that using someone's name in an email subject line makes them 20% more likely to open email 31% more likely to become a sales lead and reduces unsubscriber rate by 17%. When you're placing an order at Starbucks and you know not only is we see this but there's academic research to support this as well that using someone's first name. It gives them a boost and quite simple one to implement the one is right about Starbucks there's one 2024 paper titled the Starbucks effect that proves this in the first of six studies in that paper 397 participants reviewed two real bakeries GGs and cases when at the bakeries half of the participants were given an order number. So they were told to wait for their order number to be called and then they would go and collect their baked goods, the other half were told to give their name and then wait for their name to be called similar to how it works in Starbucks today. Turns out the customer is a 37.5% more likely to recommend the bakery if they used their first name rather than an order number. I mean it's similar, I mean it's a very different theory completely but I was chatting to students here the day about the IKEA effect and how obviously that had a psychological benefit because you build the furniture yourself and you feel a greater sense of attachment and value to that furniture but also makes IKEA's job far easier in terms of shipping furniture around the world because it's in flat packs which is far easier to transport rather than you know a ready-made desk or a ready-made wardrobe which would obviously have lots of air inside it so you know I love those those ideas that could be taken to have practical benefit but also psychological appeal. Perhaps that is why so many people love Starbucks coffee. Anyway now to finish up Luan explained to me why after a hard day is work so many of us feel the urge to treat ourselves. For some that's a Starbucks caramel latte for others it's a cold beer but no matter what it is this urge to treat ourselves after some effortful undertaking has a name it is called the licensing effect. Yes so the licensing effect is a lovely one isn't it you know at the end of a busy day or a hard week you're going to allow yourself a treat maybe it's permission to enjoy a glass of wine or get a takeaway on a Friday night is that emotional boost for you. There's also a link between virtuous behaviour as well and indulgence. There's a paper by Azmakan and Ravi Dahl where they asked people to imagine themselves volunteering for three hours and there were two scenarios of volunteering and then they asked them to imagine they were going to a shopping centre obviously in America I think it was referred to as a mile but they were asked to either choose to buy whether they would buy a pair of designer jeans which is an indulgence or a vacuum cleaner which is obviously a more utilitarian product. They then repeated a similar experiment where they asked participants to imagine they've been given a $500 rebate in tax they were going to donate a hundred of that to charity and then would they rather buy one of two pairs of sunglasses one is more indulgent than the other and they then replicated it also with concert tickets too so it basically shows that if you ask customers to engage in virtuous behaviour they're then more likely to give themselves licence to then indulge afterwards. In Khan's study 108 students were split into two groups. The first group was the licence condition they had the virtuous first choice so these participants first chose a community service they would volunteer for either teaching children in the homeless centre or improving the environment they then made a choice about shopping. There was another group that was the control condition and these group of people didn't do any charity choice at the start they didn't have to choose a community service they went straight to the shopping task. In the shopping task participants in both groups were given $50 and had to choose between either designer jeans which is a hedonic purchase or a vacuum cleaner which is a utilitarian purchase. Those participants who had committed to volunteering first who had done the virtuous first choice the licensing first well they were a hundred and ten percent more likely than the other group to pick the designer jeans rather than the vacuum. Khan proved something that all of us know deep down if we've done something good or done something hard we feel we deserve a treat and perhaps you feel like you deserve a treat after listening to today's episode after all you've educated yourself about a number of different behavioural biases. Well I don't know if you'll consider this a treat but I do have a discount code for you. I'm delighted to reveal that I'll be speaking at the fantastic uplift live event in Birmingham on the 26th of March this year. Uplift live is hosted by my really good friend John Asperian and at the event he and his team focus on helping the attendees improve their LinkedIn presence. That's the specific goal of the event specifically give strategies to boost your audience numbers to connect with like-minded professionals and to get ahead with the latest LinkedIn insights but really there are insights there that all types of marketers can use to grow and I'll be there. I'll be presenting at the conference and I'll be talking about the exact strategy I used to grow this podcast. I'll explain the tactics I used to create the UK's number one marketing podcast detailing how you can use those tactics on LinkedIn and beyond to grow your brand. I have never spoken about this strategy before so I'm very excited to share it on stage it'll be the first time I've ever revealed it so if you are interested in listening to that and heading to that event search for the uplift conference or go to uplift-live.com or just click the link in the show notes which will take you there and here is the treat if you decide to buy a ticket you can use the coupon code Nudge at checkout and you'll get 50 pounds off the ticket price so use Nudge at checkout to get 50 pounds off. I'm really excited for this talk I'll be sharing insights that I've never covered before so if you're interested in attending click the link in the show notes. That is all we have time for today folks thank you so much for listening I had great fun putting this together mainly because I've been desperate to talk about my short stinted obsession with the home alone theme tune but also because I had such great fun chatting with Tom and Leighan if you want more from then I would highly recommend reading their book here is Tom explaining what makes their book so different from the typical marketing books you've read. The thing that perhaps makes it different to a pure psychology book is that we focused on this from a marketer's perspective so we've looked at things like a marketing funnel or a customer journey and tried to map out which theories might relate to that so when people are writing a strategy they can see which theories to draw on. It's a lovely book and a real treasure trove of behavioral science principles if you'd like to pick up a copy of the book then head to my link in the show notes. That is all for today folks once again if you do want to come along to uplift live and hear me speak about the strategies I used to grow this show just go to the show notes click on the link by a ticket and use the code nudge to get 50 pounds off I really hope to see many of you there next month. Alright cheers I've been your host Phil Agnew and I'll be back next week for another episode of Nudge. Bye bye