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

[00:01:14] Richie Cotton: Welcome to Data Framed. This is Richie. The recurring theme on data framed 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.

[00:01:28] 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 customer's minds, you need to use behavioral science. I want to know about the benefits of behavioral science, what data practitioners need to know about it, and how you use it responsibly.

[00:01:46] Our guest is one of the leading thinkers in behavioral science. Richard Shotton is the founder of Consultancy Astroten, where he helps companies apply behavioral science to marketing. He's also the author of the Bestselling, the Choice Factory, and Hacking The Human Mind. Let's learn how to hack our customer's minds.

[00:02:06] Hi Richard. Welcome to the show. So I guess to begin with, I wanna know what's the most impressive example you've seen of a company hacking their customer's minds? 

[00:02:17] Richard Shotton: Oh, so lots and lots of companies use behavioral science once really brilliantly.

[00:02:22] But I think for someone that uses behavioral science again and again, I'll turn towards Apple. So there is a principle known as concreteness. So the original studies were done back in the 1970s by Ian Berg at the 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.

[00:02:49] So it's things like basic truth or subtle mistake. 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. An abstract phrase is an idea or a concept that you can't visualize. And what beg found is when he later on asked people how much they could remember, people remembered on average, 9%.

[00:03:14] Of the abstractions, but 36% of the concrete words. So you get this massive fourfold difference between the memorability of a concrete phrase and an abstract phrase. And begs explanation is super simple. He just says, vision's the most powerful of our senses. So if you use language, people can visualize, it's very sticky.

[00:03:32] If you use language that can't visualize, it's completely forgettable. Now you take that principle and then you look at how a apple advertise and you see them using it again and again. So the classic example would be iPod. Everyone else wanted to convey the benefit of storage for their MP three players.

[00:03:51] So they talked about a hundred gigabytes or 50 megabytes of memory. But the problem with that is it's completely abstract. You cannot picture a megabyte. You can't imagine 56. So people understood the message. They couldn't remember it. Whereas Apple, when they wanted to convey that exact same benefit of memory or storage, they used this brilliant phrase.

[00:04:13] A thousand songs in your pocket and you can picture a pocket, you can imagine a song. So because it's visualiz, it taps into the principle of concrete. And that phrase about the iPod was much, much more memorable than anything Philip or Sony used. So I love Apple because you see them not just that principle, there are others as well, but you see them using these ideas again and again.

[00:04:34] It's that consistency that differentiates Apple from other people. 

[00:04:36] Richie Cotton: That's when, yeah, certainly Apple's got amazing. Marketing campaigns are very memorable and I do like the idea. I'm already I can remember you said flaming forest. I can't remember any of the abstract phrases you used at all.

[00:04:46] So already that's working a Absolutely. And 

[00:04:48] Richard Shotton: it's interesting, once we are aware of these ideas, they're not complex. Once, visual 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 strap line, how the hell do you as a communicator learn from that?

[00:05:06] But if you know it's the vis visualization part that's important, then it's very easy to mimic. 

[00:05:12] Richie Cotton: I feel like there's a lot of lessons there for particularly for data scientists, 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 report things, that's probably gonna help help have an impact.

[00:05:26] Richard Shotton: 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 Visualiz 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's simple is much simpler than you think It's, and I think sometimes experts in their area.

[00:05:53] Don't want to think they're dumbing things down. They think if I explain something very simply, it reflects poorly on me as a communicator. But the evidence is the opposite. There's a, there's an amazing study. It's the best ever academic paper title. It's Daniel Oppenheimer I think it's 2010, maybe 2009.

[00:06:10] He's at Princeton and he does this paper and he says it's the name is consequences of er, right? Vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity. Colon, the problems with using long words needlessly. And what he does in this study is he gets abstracts from academic papers. So these are the short Es at the beginning of the journal article that describe what's gonna come ahead.

[00:06:34] And he takes some of these abstracts that have lots of unnecessary jargon. He gives them to readers, and then he says to the reader, how intelligent do 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.

[00:06:57] 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 mis assumption 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 gonna blame themselves.

[00:07:19] They'll blame you. So yes, learn from Apple and its use of visualiz. Language. It moves from the concrete world, the abstract world to the concrete world, but also the simplicity a thousand songs in your pocket. It's so much more simple than most technology describes itself, so simplicity and visualiz ability.

[00:07:37] I think those are both things that data analyst could apply. 

[00:07:40] Richie Cotton: Absolutely. Yeah, certainly simplicity is a really important thing actually. So recently I took all the transcripts from this podcast from Data Frame I, and threw them into a word analyzer to see like how complex a language was.

[00:07:51] Because I think normally at a speak, I think it was like a a 10 or 11-year-old breeding age level or something in most of this. And then we had, we're trying to work out when guests talk technically, is that better for engagement or worse? No strong pattern apparently are. Audience is very smart.

[00:08:05] They can understand all the guests. But yeah, it's interesting that the simpler you go in general, it, it works well. I think then there's an element of, 

[00:08:12] Richard Shotton: Accessibility. Yeah. An awful lot of people haven't got great reading skills. That's one reason to speak simply. But even if you are talking to a PhD audience or you're sending an email out with your findings.

[00:08:23] 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 got other things going on. Crap's going on at home, their phone's ringing, so they might have PhD level abilities, but they aren't stressed and time poor.

[00:08:40] And if you make something hard to understand. Often people will not engage and leave it for another time, then never get around to doing it, or they will get frustrated that you've added an extra complex task to the situation. This is not just a tactic for dealing with people who haven't got great reading, bill.

[00:08:59] It's a tactic we should use with everyone. 

[00:09:01] Richie Cotton: 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? 

[00:09:11] Richard Shotton: Yeah. So if people have never heard of be science, it's nothing complicated.

[00:09:15] It's essentially the study of what actually influences people rather than what people claim influences them. And crucially, those two things very different. And if there's a broad thing it summed up very well by a Princeton psychologist called Susan Fisk. So she came up with this lovely phrase.

[00:09:34] She says, when people are making decisions one of the key factors is that they are cognitive misers. So she came up with this brilliant phrase of cognitive minds, but one of her colleagues put it a bit more whitly. So Daniel Carvan said, think he is to humans. A swimming is to cats. We can do it, but we prefer not to.

[00:09:52] Neither of these academics is trying to be rude about people. Both of them were at Princeton. Both of them deal with very intelligent people. So they are completely aware that humans are capable of amazing flights of logic. We can build iPhones, send people to the moon, build a electric car, but they're also aware that from an evolutionary perspective, energy is a very scarce resource, and sinking is energy intensive and it's effortful.

[00:10:18] 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 snap intuitive decisions, so we're faced with a situation, maybe we're faced with a proposal, we feel positively to it, or.

[00:10:41] Cold towards it, 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 decision that comes first. Now, the way that we make those snap decisions is to use what psychologists slightly pompously istic, and what we would just call in layman's terms, rules of thumb.

[00:11:07] 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 are trying to persuade 'em to change their behavior.

[00:11:29] If you know about the bias, you work with human nature. If you don't know about the bias, you are trying to overturn human nature, and it's 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.

[00:11:49] Richie Cotton: That's fascinating. And certainly I'm, I work in education, so I'm really keen on the idea of people thinking, but also there are definitely days where, yeah I don't really wanna think. I also like not thinking. 

[00:11:58] Richard Shotton: Yeah. And also it's that kind of order effect of first of all. I have this emotional reaction or intuitive reaction to a situation.

[00:12:06] 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 isn't an antidote to 

[00:12:24] Richie Cotton: the biases.

[00:12:25] Interesting. Okay. Can you tell me more about the biases then? What are the different biases you need to be aware of? There are literally 

[00:12:31] Richard Shotton: thousands of e experiments. The first study in kind of modern psychology or behavioral sciences back in 1880. So you've got thousands of these studies, but there are some that occur more than others.

[00:12:40] There are some that are more powerful than others so one that lots of people might be familiar with, but 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.

[00:13:03] So often if you wanna change someone's behavior, if you wanna get them to adopt a proposal that you are putting in front of them, rather than just default to giving people a long list of rational reasons about why, to obey what you wanna do is create the impression that lots of others have already adopted this behavior.

[00:13:21] Now, interestingly, this is a study because it's such a well known one, there are hundreds of experiments into it. There are studies that show, yes, this affects people when they're buying cans of Coke or bags of crisp in the supermarket. There are also studies that show professionals are deeply influenced at work by social proof.

[00:13:40] Now, there's a study from 2018 by the Behavioral Insights Team, and they worked 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 'em about the downsides of over prescription.

[00:14:04] When those letters go out, there is a 3.2% reduction, prescription rates, 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.

[00:14:26] It's a very overprescribing doctor in Sydney. It might say something along the lines of, you are 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, they define themselves as being logical, rational, evidence-based thinkers.

[00:14:48] But even they, even this group, were very influenced by what they thought their peers were doing. Yeah. If you are at work and you've put a argument together about a particular approach, don't think that logic alone is gonna 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 are suggesting.

[00:15:14] Richie Cotton: That's absolutely fascinating because we've had a few episodes on the show around doing transformation programs like trying to, do data transformation, you get more people using data and things like that. And one of the consistent pieces of advice is show off what your create champion.

[00:15:26] 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 

[00:15:33] Richard Shotton: internal behavior changes of interest to 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.

[00:15:46] So let's say, take a mundane example. You wanna 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, none of you idiots are filling in your time sheets.

[00:16:03] And it's causing us all sorts of financial problems. That is completely misusing social proof. That argument of lots of people are misbehaving, uses social proof in the wrong direction. You are emphasizing the scale of wrongdoing. That means you remove a sense of transgression and the message likely backfires because most people will think to themselves everyone else isn't adopting this policy.

[00:16:23] 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 are doing it, emphasize that not.

[00:16:44] The large volume of people who aren't behaving the way that you want. 

[00:16:47] Richie Cotton: Wonderful. And I'm sure if you didn't know about that kind of that bias that I did then is a very easy to mistake to make. Like you, you think, okay, if I shame people publicly, they'll stop doing that, but it doesn't work as a tactic.

[00:16:58] Richard Shotton: Yeah. You see it all the time. So Cialdini has run some studies around stealing, which essentially, if. 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. He said Too many government campaigns will go out and say loads of youth, scary knives and loads of students turn up late.

[00:17:18] Loads of people don't turn up the doc's appointment. These are all 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 thing you do want. 

[00:17:30] Richie Cotton: Okay. So it seems like a very simple messaging switch can help there.

[00:17:33] Now you mentioned before that there's kind of two sorts of thinking. There's this quick heuristic thinking and there's this sort of deeper more considered thinking. Are there any cases where you want people to use one or the other, and how do you make them switch? 

[00:17:46] Richard Shotton: So most.

[00:17:48] 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.

[00:18:12] Lying. There, there is an ethical use of this, but I used to work with the the blood service. They were trying to get people to donate blood and they used to come out and say, only 4% of people donate blood. That is a misuse of social proof. You make it feel like a weird, aberrant behavior and people think if no one else is bothering wash I, what you can completely honestly say is two and a half million people give blood every year.

[00:18:36] Now 4% and two and a half million is the same number in a. Roughly math might not be perfect, but in a country like Britain, now if you say two and a half million, you are emphasizing how lots of people are doing this behavior. If you emphasize 4%, you're saying how lots of people aren't doing the behavior.

[00:18:52] Both of them are true. There's no ethical head start for either of them. But using the one that works with human nature is the one that's gonna be more effective. 

[00:19:02] Richie Cotton: Okay. I love that. It's just, same statistic prevented presented in different ways. Yeah and the underlying argument is 

[00:19:08] Richard Shotton: deal with the 

[00:19:09] Richie Cotton: world 

[00:19:09] Richard Shotton: as it is not the world as you want it to be.

[00:19:11] Maybe the world would be better if people were thoughtful, 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. 

[00:19:27] Richie Cotton: Okay, nice. And I was thinking in sort of data AI world, technology world, a lot of the things you have to do are persuade people to adopt new ideas or adopt new technologies.

[00:19:37] How do you go about getting people to adopt new things, for 

[00:19:40] Richard Shotton: 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 Waterton, and she came up with this idea called the Fresh Start effect.

[00:20:00] So her arguing is a big driver of behavior, is the desire to be consistent with ourselves. So we look down on people who are. Inconsistent. Maybe in American, they might call them flip floppers, and Britain might call 'em hypocrites or in inauthentic. So most of the time people aren't considering alternative ways of paving.

[00:20:19] They're just doing the same thing 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, our link with our past self is weakened and we become more open to change.

[00:20:37] 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 pledges to change their behavior.

[00:20:58] 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 beginning of the year, beginning of the month after a birthday after a public holiday. Any moment in which this is almost this kind of fracture in the kind of progression of time, people are more open to change.

[00:21:20] So if you want to get them 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 of people are coming back from the holidays, it's more likely to work. If you wait till the 1st of January, it's more likely to work.

[00:21:39] If you wait till after an office move, it's more likely to work. If you put your efforts into people who've 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 up. Skeptical about the genuine influence. But here's a brilliant campaign by the West Midlands Police.

[00:21:59] So the Behavioral insights team, which is the government's nudge unit, they work with the Westins Police. I think it's 2017, might be 2018. They launched a new service. It was essentially this confidential hotline. They let known criminals know about the hotline and they offered them the choice. Either we're gonna hunt you down.

[00:22:18] They probably weren't that like drastic about it. But either, we know who you are or we will help you find a new job, will help you move to a new area and start a life afresh. Now, they sent out 2077. 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, they were 56% more likely to phone the hotline from those who just got at a random moment.

[00:22:54] So even a group. Like hardened criminals. People, 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 art effect. So that might be one consideration I would have about introducing new schemes.

[00:23:11] Don't just think about making the product. Appealing. Think about the moment in which you launch it. 

[00:23:18] Richie Cotton: That's really fascinating. I think at the moment it's September, so we've got a load of like back to school advertisements for everything. In January. You always get okay, go to the gym, change your life.

[00:23:28] But I do like the idea of find, if you know when your customer's birthday is, that's or your prospect's birthdays, that's gonna be a really good time to, to message them. 

[00:23:36] Richard Shotton: Oh, absolutely. And if you've got a lot of data, then it opens up even bigger moments. So when I read about Milkman's study, I thought, okay, look, if a small thing, like a new month opens up people to change, what about more meaningful life changes?

[00:23:50] 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 churn. So people got divorced, wanted to try new lags, people move house, might try new TV programs.

[00:24:10] Now it, 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?

[00:24:32] Can I identify people who've just started university or just moved house and then. They are much, much more malleable. 

[00:24:39] Richie Cotton: That's interesting. And so it's maybe the thing that just popped into my mind there is there's a slightly sketchy way of doing that, of just you go around scraping social media to see what's going on with people lives and are there more ethical ways of doing that?

[00:24:50] Richard Shotton: Let's so who LinkedIn, for example, would know whether someone has just changed jobs? Mobile data providers can tell you if someone's. Moved house. Because what they'll infer is you, let's say someone used to be in Basildon between 6:00 PM and 8:00 AM and now they're in Thorac constantly. They've just, they would assume that's moved house.

[00:25:10] So there's so many data providers out there that you can get this kind of information, or if if you're someone like Giant Supermarket and. Suddenly people are used to be shopping at the Bason Superstore and now they're at the Ipswich Superstore. Again, you could infer that they have moved acid, so your own data set could be quite useful as well.

[00:25:29] Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah, just seem all this information on people's life events, it is available to find if you want to. Another thing I think behavioral science ought to be useful for is giving people's attention. 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.

[00:25:45] What are you, what are. Welcome. Can behavioral science help us with here? So you're absolutely right. 

[00:25:49] Richard Shotton: There is, wow. It might be one of the oldest studies around, really, there's a 1933 study from Hedvig von Rest that's brilliantly named German psychologist. And she did a super simple study. It bastardizes it slightly just to make it a bit clearer, but she gives people these list of information and let's say.

[00:26:11] It's got 10 items on, and 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.

[00:26:36] If you give people long lists of animals with one or two bits of furniture in, people remember the furniture, or vice versa, if you give you long lists of furniture with one or two animals sprinkled in, they'll remember the animals. So that became known as the Von Rest Store effect or the Isolation Effect.

[00:26:51] And it's essentially this idea that our attention is drawn to what's distinctive. So if you are thinking about getting some attention, what you wanna 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 categorizing them.

[00:27:17] Some of those things you think you might believe are crucial, but others you might think are just there for tradition sake. If you break those more traditional areas, then you are onto something very powerful. You're tap into one of the, most well proven and longest standing principles of Unres off effect.

[00:27:35] Simple one to work for me on occasion is something called the Pratfall Effect. And it's this idea that if you would admit a flaw. You become more appealing. Now, that is a brilliant way of applying the Von Rests, restore effects in marketing because virtually every advertiser, 99.9% of advertisers will brag.

[00:27:53] So if you come out with an admission of a weakness in your product, then you are gonna. Stand out and you will get noticed. And if you're noticed, that is nine tenths of the battle. 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.

[00:28:16] Good things come to those who weight that is admitting the flaw of slowness. Maybe a bit older one, but stellar, reassuringly expensive. That's admitting the flaw of being expensive. Mar Mike. Sorry. Love it. Or Haiti meeting half the population hate your product. And there, there are all sorts of amazing campaigns that have applied that principle.

[00:28:32] And I think not all of the success, but all of the success is it breaks what people assume is the cardinal rule of advertising, which is to brag. 

[00:28:41] Richie Cotton: Interesting. Yeah. I do like the idea of doing things to, that are a bit different, to stand out and also. Admitting your flaws. It is a tricky thing to do because I guess it could backfire spectacularly if you do it badly.

[00:28:52] Richard Shotton: Oh so actually this is not a, this is not a suggestion. You should just randomly admit problems. But what you really need to do is think you very honest yourself. I think what is your core strength? And maybe you are a service provider and you are very. High quality. If you're high quality, you're probably gonna be quite pricey.

[00:29:11] And often people will be a bit embarrassed about mentioning that they're more expensive than their competitors. But actually. It's very hard to prove that you are high quality. One of the best ways to do it is actually draw attention to your price. Now, if you admit that you are a bit more expensive than other people, generally people assume if they're pricey, they're probably high quality.

[00:29:29] Generally, people believe in tradeoffs 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'll emphasize my, my, my core strength. And that I think is something that if you, yeah, don't do it randomly. Don't do it willy nilly, but it's something that can be very powerful.

[00:29:50] Richie Cotton: Absolutely. Yeah. Certainly. It seems like if you do it right, then it can be incredibly powerful thing. I guess we are new data frame slogan. Sometimes we're slightly intellectual. It seems like you mentioned the prep fall effect is it sounds like a comedy thing. I get. Platform comes from comedy, right?

[00:30:05] So c and you use comedy in order to get people's attention in this way. Yeah. So that's a really interesting one. Often 

[00:30:10] Richard Shotton: some of the best brands that have used a PR for effect, it, it's quite self-deprecating and it could often lead to abusing situations. So I think you're absolutely spot on with humor.

[00:30:19] It actually links back to your original question about noticeability. So there's a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam called Fred Bronner. And he did this very simple study. He gets huge sample. 1020 287 people gets 'em to flick through a newspaper, and then he asked them what mood they're in.

[00:30:38] 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 50, 51% more likely to remember the ads if they are in that positive mood, happy or relaxed versus unhappy or stressed.

[00:31:04] So there's this argument that. If you either reach people in a good mood, maybe you reach 'em 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 are people more like to notice your advertising, if they're in a good mood, they're more like to believe what you say, and they're more likely to be open to spending, they're less price sensitive when they're in a good mood.

[00:31:33] And none of this stuff is. Speculation. Now, all these insights are based on 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 got 8 821 people.

[00:31:51] We showed them a series of promotional ads. So it might be a case of beer for a 20 quid or a, a meal deal at a supermarket. We've got people to. Say whether it 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 was 60%.

[00:32:16] 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 to 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 either, because I think there's a very sensible rationale behind it, which is.

[00:32:37] If you are in a bad mood, you are skeptical. You focused on the opportunity cost of spending money. If you are in a good mood, you focus on the upsides, all the benefits you're gonna get from the products and minimize slightly the cost to yourself. So yeah, there is noticeability, believability, and even price sensitivity relations to upside of putting people in a good mood.

[00:32:59] Richie Cotton: Okay. But yeah, I can certainly see how if you try and put your, customer's in a good mood before you ask them for money. That's gonna work really well for, I guess for sales teams in particular, you have a conversation, get your customer happy, and then that's the point where you start talking about pricing.

[00:33:12] Richard Shotton: Yeah. And there's, there isn't, there's an overlap here. There's 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 gonna, they're gonna like you and.

[00:33:29] There is an argument called the Halo effect. So the halo effect is essentially the argument that when we evaluate a person 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.

[00:33:54] And we are machines that are designed to make quick, fast snap decisions. So what tends to happen is people latch onto one standout characteristic about a person, and then they use that as a guide to all the other characteristics. 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 Nesbit.

[00:34:16] 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.

[00:34:37] 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, the. Lecturer, they rate him as warmer and more likable than the people who see the cold and rude lecturer.

[00:34:58] The interesting bit though, is on completely unrelated metrics, you see the same impact. So when people rate how good looking the lecturer is, his mannerisms, his accent, again, it's the, when he comes across as warmer, likable, all those factors are scored higher than when he came across as cold and miserable.

[00:35:18] 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 likable, what will also happen is. Your intelligence will improve your trustworthiness, improve your looks will improve. You push up one of these metrics and others will follow to a degree.

[00:35:39] So I think there's a double benefit of putting proficient a good mood, which is on that one-to-one basis is you are then gonna benefit from this halo effect. 

[00:35:46] Richie Cotton: That's fascinating. 'cause you wouldn't necessarily think that likable and. Good looking ness or intelligence ought to be related, but I guess people blur these things if they're like you.

[00:35:56] Absolutely. 

[00:35:56] Richard Shotton: You are right. Logically they are not related. Absolutely, they're not related. But there'll be a mantra, trust suppose in behavioral sciences, which is, look, we're not interested in what people ought to do. We're interested in what they actually do. We see these metrics moving in, in, in lockstep, and I certainly exaggerate.

[00:36:14] It's not if you're seen as very good looking, you'll be seen as very intelligent, but your intelligence will move up compared to someone who didn't have that, that very strong standout characteristic. 

[00:36:24] Richie Cotton: Okay. Fascinating. So I wanna go back to something you mentioned earlier. So you were talking about how with the pratfall effect, it's about being honest with your customers, but also at the start you mentioned that.

[00:36:34] Apple is like one of the, the masters of behavioral science and they're a very secretive organization. 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 

[00:36:49] Richard Shotton: interesting things about human nature is it isn't that there is one answer.

[00:36:55] Imagine, you and I were given a task and we have to cross a river, human nature, a bit like that. You could swim across the river, you could build a bridge, you could hire a ferry. There are lots of ways to cross that river, and just because there is the existence of ferry, it doesn't negate the fact that swimming will also get you across.

[00:37:14] That's the, I think that's the same with persuasion. There are lot of these different techniques and it's about matching the right one to the right circumstances, but it probably sets payroll, science, and the practical use of it as much, I think as an r as a science. 

[00:37:31] Richie Cotton: Okay. Choose the right tool for the right situation, actually.

[00:37:34] Do you have any concrete examples of one or the other? Yeah, 

[00:37:37] Richard Shotton: 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 interesting way. 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 bank's vacuum to the final product, and that is something that Dyson emphasized all the time.

[00:38:04] Now you look at their advertis. At 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 5,127 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.

[00:38:28] 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 by 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 market for a house, and every person is given 10 apartments that meet their requirements.

[00:38:51] So everyone gets the same list, but some people are told the estate agent took one hour to generate the list and they used a computer. That's the low effort group. Other people are told the estate 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?

[00:39:12] From zero to a hundred, she sees this clear pattern, low effort group. They rate the estate agent at 50 out of a hundred. High effort group rate the estate agent at 68 out of hundred, exactly the same service, but you get this 36% difference in ratings. Now, morale is, his argument is it is a complicated question.

[00:39:33] 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? Her argument is you as a communicator or as a business, you can't assume people will know what efforts you've been to.

[00:39:59] 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 is you need to let people know about them, and if you do exactly the same, products will be rated higher.

[00:40:18] 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. Is both honest to who you are and working with, this hardwired bias.

[00:40:44] If you are a company that doesn't have that effort story, then you need to look at other biases to tap into. So I think you're actually right. It's often matching it to the genuine insights about the organization. 

[00:40:55] Richie Cotton: Okay. No, it's a really interesting story about Dyson, like more than 5,000 failures.

[00:41:00] That requires a ridiculous amount of persistence. Like I think a lot of people would've given up long before that. 

[00:41:05] Richard Shotton: And crucially he normally says virtually ever all the time. He doesn't say more than 5,000. He always says 5,000 hundred 27. And there are studies that suggest that precision has a benefit.

[00:41:15] Now, if you say more than 5,000, it fails a bit. Ambiguous, have they made it up? Is it plucked out the air 5,127? Giving it that precision tends to be seen as more accurate and more, more credible. 

[00:41:26] Richie Cotton: Okay. Interesting. 5,000 1, 27. Get that right actually. You, you talk about demonstrating effort being a good thing for customers.

[00:41:34] 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. It feels like there's some big implications here. AI 

[00:41:47] Richard Shotton: is a more recent technological invention, so it's not like there are hundreds of psychological studies into its impact, but there are some there's a 2023 study from Kobe Mill VR University in Amsterdam, I think, and he shows people products some people are 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 hand drawn. Millet then asks both groups to rate that poster on its creativity, it's artistic merit, even on their purchase intent.

[00:42:22] And for every one of the metrics he sees, stark pattern, if people think it is AI generated, they will rate it lower than if they think it's hand-drawn. I think with Purchas intent, it is a 61% swing, so it's not a small change. And Millet's argue of this goes back to the illusion effort. He says, look, most people's experience with chat GPT is you put in a prompt and it spits out a blog post or a detailed answer in a second.

[00:42:51] They think of it as being low effort. So if you emphasize that you've used ai, you are telling people that little effort's gone into it exactly the same products will be rated worse. So you have a bit of a dilemma here, or you have a few different options. To put it more positively, in my world of marketing, what you don't wanna do is what Coke did at Christmas and emphasize your ads being made by ao.

[00:43:15] Why would you tell people that you're just gonna 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 gotta be aware of is that unless you introduce counterbalancing measures, they will rate that product.

[00:43:39] Worse. So what you might wanna 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. 

[00:43:56] Richie Cotton: Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of these things like okay, yeah, you're automating stuff, but it's actually.

[00:44:00] It's a subtle art in getting all the problems right. And all the workforce, so it is a bit of effort to get it set up in the first place. 

[00:44:07] Richard Shotton: Yeah. And don't shy away from telling people that, don't assume that they will know. Make sure you are transparent about it. It wasn't to do with ai, but I think the implications are spot on for ai, that there's a really famous story about the design of a logo back in the 1990s, maybe early two thousands.

[00:44:22] Two big banks merged and they became Citibank, I think it was Travelers and Citigroup maybe, and they hired Paula Cher to design the logo. So she's well famous designer, top of her field. In the briefing meeting, literally as she's being told what she needs to do, she's sketching out a logo, and you can see this online.

[00:44:42] She sketches out on a napkin. You can find the images of this online with quick Google, and it is essentially to all intents and purposes, and maybe 95% the same as the finished logo she delivers a few months later. A legend has it that city bank are like how could you in all good faith, ask for $1.5 million?

[00:44:59] That was the fee, $1.5 million for something that took you 30 seconds. And her legendary answer was 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.

[00:45:18] And you could think about that as an analogy for setting up these AI systems now. 

[00:45:23] Richie Cotton: Nice. That's a good comeback. And when someone's trying to cheat you after your $1.5 billion you need, you really do need a good comeback. Alright. So suppose your boss is okay, I really believe in behavioral science.

[00:45:33] We're gonna go all in on this. Like, how do you get started? 

[00:45:36] Richard Shotton: 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 tweaks.

[00:45:55] So I would think about what is it we can change that won't cost us anything but will have a nice positive effect start. Small. And it's easier to I think, persuade people to adopt it. So one, one of the studies that I come across quite recently that I love is by Peterson, I think at the University of Texas.

[00:46:13] And it's basically about social proof, but it's a 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 labeled as sold out. Other times it's labeled as unavailable or outta stock. After people have, got done their, purchasing journey, all the other tasks he's given them, he asks them how irritated are they with the website?

[00:46:36] And he sees this really clear variation. If the unavailable product was labeled out stock or unavailable. People are very irritated. If it's labeled sold out, they're only a little bit irritated and his argument is if you say it's out of stock or unavailable, you are drawing attention to your own as.

[00:46:56] Logistical ineptitude. But if you say something sold out, what you're subtly doing is using social proof. You are emphasizing this is a super popular product. It's high demand that has meant it's not there, and that minimizes that irritation level. Now that is a lovely study to put into practice if you own an e-commerce site, because you have to label your products that aren't there in some respect.

[00:47:21] So why not label 'em the way that. Has the biggest impact, has the biggest positive impact. And that's what behavioral science will tell you. It's this giant repository. Hundreds, one hundreds, one hundreds of studies. And just take those simple studies and apply them to your challenges. 

[00:47:36] Richie Cotton: That's amazing.

[00:47:36] 'cause it's such a simple change going from, oh, the label says out to stock, to it's sold out. And that's just gonna improve customer satisfaction. I love that. Low effort. Impact. Brilliant. So I guess if you wanna do more of these things you're gonna have to run some experiments. What sort of experiments might you want to run yourself?

[00:47:51] Okay so the biggest advice 

[00:47:53] Richard Shotton: there, the single biggest thing is do not ask people directly. If you have found any of these studies we're talking about, interesting. If you go and say to someone, look, would you be influenced if you knew lots of other people were behaving in a particular way? Do not expect them to answer honestly.

[00:48:07] They will say no. I make my own decisions. I think everything through very clearly, and then I make a very considered decision. But a theme of behavioral science is what people say and what they do are completely different things. So there's brilliant psychologists at the University of Virginia called Timothy Wilson, and he wrote this book, which sums up his ideas called Strangers to ourselves.

[00:48:28] And the whole book is a series of studies showing people do not have full introspective insight in their own motivations. So if you stop someone and say, what would encourage you to exercise more or to buy this lager? Now, they'll give you loads of reasons, but they will be a very small subset of the genuine reasons.

[00:48:47] 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 any effect 'em 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 live experiments.

[00:49:14] And that the basis of virtually every psychology experiment is you set 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.

[00:49:36] So you know, with the Peterson study you get. A thousand people to go through an e-commerce journey, you make sure it's exactly the same, 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.

[00:49:58] So avoid listening to what people tell you influences them. Run simple test and control experiments. And then ideally, don't. Take one experiment as gospel, it could be a statistical fluke. Really what you wanna see is either other people have shown this insight in lots of different situations, or you should be looking at repeating it more than once.

[00:50:22] Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah. That seems pretty good. Don't trust what people say. And I like that's the biggest one. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems these, basically these like AB tests then you typically want to run. 

[00:50:32] Richard Shotton: Yeah. They're very, so filming works in. Cut digital marketing, you know that, that would be the language they would use.

[00:50:37] The only thing that I would. Say 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 used. What I would say is take that same theory of research and same methodology, but do it a bit earlier in the process.

[00:50:58] What you really wanna 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 that will be useful forever. Whereas if you're only testing that final, the kind of aesthetics as it were in a in a digital marketing situation you know that information is brand valuable for that campaign or a month or two.

[00:51:21] So apply what you do with final. Creative all the way back to understanding people's motivations. 

[00:51:28] Richie Cotton: Okay, wonderful. Yeah. Start early rather than realizing that in the, yeah. Entire marketing campaign is using the wrong language. Okay. So it seems when you're trying to hack your customer's mind.

[00:51:39] Does scope for some sort of ethical disasters here. Are there any things you should avoid doing any red flags to watch out for? 

[00:51:46] Richard Shotton: That's a brilliant question because I think your s fee right on that behavioral science and knowing about these principles isn't a kind of moral g out of jail free card.

[00:51:57] 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 to charity and to recycle more. It's just a, it's just a tool. I always thinking a helpful analogy is something like rhetoric.

[00:52:19] Rhetoric might be the, the skill of putting a persuasive speech together. Now, if we think about learning some of those rhetorical skills, we would recognize 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.

[00:52:39] It's the same skills often, but they're put to very different uses. So I think what people need to think about 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 f covers with sunstone in, in his book Nudge. He talks about the American philosopher, John Rawles, who had the, I think it was the publicity principle.

[00:53:03] It's essentially, if people were to know what I was doing, would I be ashamed? If my local newspaper were to blast on the front page, would I be embarrassed to look my neighbor in the eye? Would be embarrassed Zen. That is a very good alarm bell. So you've got to be careful about how you use these principles.

[00:53:23] They're just the principles of what effectively influences people. Obviously influence can be used for good or bad. 

[00:53:28] Richie Cotton: I do like that idea that if you're doing something and it's gonna be blasted or newspaper or social media and you think that's a bad idea, then maybe don't do that thing. It's, 

[00:53:37] Richard Shotton: It's a nice simple rule.

[00:53:39] Richie Cotton: Okay. Wonderful. Alright just to wrap up for people who are interested in learning more about behavioral science, where should they start? The great thing is 

[00:53:46] Richard Shotton: 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 Aaron Flicker.

[00:53:55] We've wrote a new one called Hacking Human Mind, but I've also got some earlier books called The Choice Factor and the Illusion of Choice. So yeah, lots of material that people can find out more. 

[00:54:06] Richie Cotton: Having the human mind completely on the wall behind you. Yes. Yeah. Just happened to be there.

[00:54:10] Yeah. Nice. Unfortunately, I've been waving my head in front of it yeah. Wonderful. And I always want people to follow on social media. Is there anyone research you're particularly in interested at the moment? Who should I be looking out for? If you look for other people, I'm a big fan of Roy Suland.

[00:54:26] Richard Shotton: Works in similar industry to me, works in marketing advertising. And he wrote a brilliant book called Alchemy. 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, but the lateral implications, completely left field.

[00:54:46] So maybe check out a couple of his TED talks, if you like the style and that, might divide people, but I think he's very funny. Phenomenally insightful. If you like that style, strong recommendation. Get his book Alchemy. 

[00:54:59] Richie Cotton: Alright, wonderful. Definitely worth looking out forward.

[00:55:01] Alright, super. Thank you so much for your time, Richard. Oh, thank you Richie. Really nice to chat. Thank you very much.