Modern Wisdom - #592 - Richard Shotton - 8 Fascinating Psychological Biases

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, Founder of Astroten and an author. This might not be news to you, but the human brain isn't designed to be rational. There are cheat codes to get the brain to believe strange things, do strange things and change in ways you might not anticipate. Richard has one of the best insights into this world of mental models, psychology, consumer behaviour, principles for advertising and social change. Expect to learn the marketing secret about behaviour change that everyone forgets about, how to make habit formation absolutely seamless, why IKEA is so successful even though they don't make your furniture, a hack that any advertising campaign can use to make it stick in people's minds, how to fix the problem of choice paralysis and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 7 days free access and 25% discount from Blinkist at https://blinkist.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Illusion Of Choice - https://amzn.to/3XDakP7 Follow Richard on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rshotton  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Richard Shotten, he's a behavioral scientist, founder of Astro10 and an author. This might not be news to you, but the human brain isn't designed to be rational. There are cheat codes to get the brain to believe strange things, do strange things, and change in ways that you might not anticipate. Richard has one of the best insights into this world of mental models, psychology, consumer behavior, principles for advertising and social change.

Expect to learn the marketing secret about behavior change that everybody forgets about, how to make habit formation absolutely seamless, why IKEA is so successful even though they don't make your furniture, a hack that any advertising campaign can use to make it stick in people's minds, how to fix the problem of choice paralysis, and much more. The absolute OGs on Modern Wisdom will recognize Richard from, I think, in the hundreds, maybe episode, maybe 90-something, and then 150-something as well. So it's been a little while, but this guy is a complete beast. I absolutely adore his insights around human nature. He's just a wealth of interesting studies and stories. It's fascinating. You're just, you're going to absolutely love this episode. So sit back and enjoy. You're also now part of the OGs because in, you know, in two years' time, this

will be one of the OG episodes. So, you you know you're slowly becoming part of the that particular crew Anyway, I'll stop offling Richard. He's great. Enjoy this one But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Richard Chotten Someone who has had their head under a rock for a long time and hasn't been exposed for much behavioral science, maybe they're not an advertiser or a marketer, but they've probably got an interest in human nature. Why should anyone care about behavioral science, maybe they're not an advertiser or a marketer, but they've probably got an interest in human nature. Why should anyone care about behavioral science? Okay, good question.

So sometimes the terminology can be confusing. So if people haven't heard of behavioral science, it's essentially what we use to call social psychology. So it's the study of how people actually behave rather than how they claim to behave. And I would argue anyone who is an entrepreneur, anyone who works in marketing, anyone who is trying to influence other people should be interested in this topic. Because if you're any of those groups, you're in the business of behavior change. And all behavioral science is the study, came back 130 years of what makes for a effective behavior change.

So it's a super relevant topic. Above and beyond that, it is robust, which actually differentiates it from an awful lot of business theory. If you think about some very popular business theories, they're based on elegant arguments. And the problem with elegance is it's not often accurate. What's great about behavioral science is it's never based on elegant arguments. And the problem with elegance is it's not often accurate. What's great about behavioral science is it's never based on logical loan, it's always comes back to been proved by an experiment.

So we can give these findings genuine credibility. And then the final big strength, so we've got our relevance and our robustness, the final big strength of this topic is its range. So there are literally tens of thousands of studies. So whatever category you work in, whatever discipline you work in, there are so many Bavils aren't studies that pretty much will ever challenge you in front of you.

There's going to be an experiment out there that can help you solve that challenge. What would be an example of an elegant business theory which doesn't necessarily show up in practice? Well, I think one of the big theories that is prominent is this discussion of purpose being a successful way to drive business growth. Another one actually that got more in recently is every year the PR agency, Adelman, produce data on trust. And the story that they normally accompany this

date with is there has been a massive decline in trust. It's just not backed up by their own data. So it's quite commonplace that the headline findings that businesses and brands subscribe to are backed up by an analysis of the actual data. You use an example about why Marjorine isn't grey at the very start of the book. Why is that illustrative? So there's a lovely study, a really old study by psychological bluey Cheskin, where he was working with margarine manufacturers. So these manufacturers back in the 1940s, the Toronto win-over consumers stopped them buying butter, stopped buying margarine. And if he went out and directly questioned those shoppers,

they said, well, I don't buy margarine because it tastes bloody awful. I don't like the taste, that's why I don't buy it. But Cheskin was suspicious of this claims data. So he set up a really simple experiment. He got a speaker and he invited local people to come in and listen to the speaker and after they'd listened to the speaker there was a buffet ladle and part of that buffet was bread and a spread on it. And sometimes people thought they were eating bread and butter, sometimes they thought

they were eating bread and butter, sometimes they thought they were eating bread and margarine. Now in reality, Cheskin had switched things around. So he died the butter grave, so it looked like 1940s margarine, he died the margarine yellow, so it looked like 1940s butter. And when people ate margarine, masquerading as butter, they said, oh, it tastes beautiful, it's wonderful. When they ate butter masquerading as margarine masquerading as butter, they said, oh, it tastes beautiful, it's wonderful. When they ate butter masquerading as margarine, they said it tasted bloody awful. So what he showed by that was, it wasn't the taste that mad, it was the color.

You know, what we expect to experience is a massive guide to what we actually experience. And one of the things that sets those expectations is the color and the look of our food. So it's a really, really old study. But what's interesting about it is he recognized that a direct questioning of consumers is really problematic. What people tell us is often inaccurate in terms of their genuine motivation. So psychologists say people can fabulate, you know, often they try and tell the truth, but because they don't have full introspective insight into their own motivations, when they give answers in

focus groups or surveys. They're trying to be honest, but those ants tend to be misleading. So what psychologists do instead is set up these test and control situations and they observe how people behave. And that tends to generate more accurate ants. Stated and revealed preferences are just such an interesting divergence. It's something that I've been working on at the moment, looking at the mating market and some of the challenges that young people face. And when you look at mating preferences and you ask people, let's say that you would ask women, would you mind getting into a relationship of the man that was the same height as you? Would you mind getting into a relationship of the man that was the

same educational level as you? Would you mind being the breadwinner in a marriage? Most of the time women are okay with these things, but when you actually look at the revealed preferences of the kinds of guys that they end up going for, they tend to be a little taller, a little better educated, and a little more wealthy. And again, this isn't to say that women are being purposefully deceptive, nor your margarine hating, but are eating people from the 90s and 40s, it's simply a byproduct of the fact that we do not, no, there's a few things going on. It would be socially, when you're asking somebody a question,

there are certain sort of social mores and cues and concerns about what people are going to think and say about your response. I mean, the observer effect, I suppose, is going to be a big deal here. Yeah, I think you're actually right there. I think there are two factors going on. You're absolutely right. A bit more complicated than I was making out.

I think you've got a subset of answers where people self-edit. They think, well, what does society... What, how can I answer that makes me look like a upstanding, admirable person in society? But then there's this bigger problem, I think, of often people don't know their own motivations. So you put them on the spot, they give you loads of answers, but many of them are misleading.

They just post it on the nose at all. Yeah, there's a, what I don't know, if you read this wonderful book by Christian Rudder, called Data Clism. So he was the founder and chief technology officer of OKCupid. I think the subtyte of the book is saying like, how do you know what do people do when they think no one's looking?

And it's an analysis of all the data he has on dating, which show that what people actually do is wildly different than what they say doubly for both men and women. Yeah, I mean, Seth Stevens' Davidowitz has been on the show twice. Yeah, brilliant. Yeah, phenomenal. Did you see his most... Everybody lies.

Yeah, so everybody lies was the first one, and then his most recent book, which is about the biggest questions people ask, and I haven't stopped talking about it for ages and I can't believe that, I can't remember what it's called. Not everybody lies. Everybody lies was the one that discovered that Indian, the country of injury looks breast-porn, breastfeeding. Yeah.

The most recent one was using, don't trust your gut, thank God for that. Don't trust your gut is the new one. Dude, you'll fall in love with that book. It's phenomenal. But it's basically just the same thing. It's a data revealing what our genuine preferences are. Yes.

Got a particular subset of data. Because he's arguably, I think, is that in a focus group or survey situation, which most brands do, this is the vast majority of how brands and businesses find out about their customers, they just directly ask them. But he says the motivation is the customer in that scenario is to make themselves look good in front of the questioner. So the motivation is not to tell the truth. He compares that then with search on Google or Facebook or Pinterest where he says the motivations of the searcher, when you're typing things into a search box, are completely

alive and be telling the truth because if you don't put in what you genuinely want, you're going to get the wrong answer. So I think you're absolutely right. Prioritizing that data that people generate when they think others aren't watching. That's really powerful stuff. Okay, so you've got 16 and a half cognitive biases that form this most recent book of yours. The first one is habit formation. Why is that important? Yeah, so there's an awful lot of work by psychologists in to have it formation and it breaks down to two broad areas. So the broad argument is people have so many decisions to make every single day.

They don't have the time or the energy or the way with all to wipe those decisions in a fully considered manner. And therefore, what they do as a coping strategy is either rely on what psychologists call heuristics, pick the middle option, pick the most popular option, or they go even further, and they just repeat the same behaviors again and again. So if they find themselves in a similar situation, they repeat the same behaviour they did last time. They don't even weigh up alternative ways of behaving. So Susan Fisk describes this as people being cognitive moises. They have the capability to think deeply, but because thinking is effortful because it's

energy intensive, we ration that capability. Thousands of decisions to make every day, we can't use that capability on every one of them Daniel Kahneman puts it a little bit more amusingly he says thinking is to humans are swimming against the cats And we can do it but we'd rather not So an awful lot of our behavior Is habitual just this repeating the same behaviours again and again. That's a problem. If you as a business, or you as a person, want to get someone to do something differently,

because how do you get them to change their behaviour, if they're not even way out your merits compared to their existing form of behaviour? But the first thing that psychologists identify is that there are predictable moments when those habits are weakened. So Catherine Milkman, for example, talks about this idea called the fresh start effect. Her hypothesis is that one of the big drivers of human nature is a desire to be consistent. So many, many cultures have lots of negative language about people are inconsistent. So this desire for consistency gets us repeating behaviors. She then says, well, look, when we enter new time periods, our link with our past self is weakened and we are more open

And we are more open to change. So that's her hypothesis. But as I said earlier, the great thing about paper science is no one ever stops at that stage. They then look at various different datasets and observe datasets to try and test the idea. So she looks at gym registration data, gym attendance data, volumes of search terms around things like quitting smoking,

donating, and for all these data sets, once you plot them over time, she sees pronounced spikes at the start of new time periods beginning of the year, as we might expect, but also being of the month, being of the week, after it was birth phase, after public holidays, all these moments are typified by people being more open to change. So the first thing around habit formation is you've got to break an existing habit. What behavioral scientists do is identify when you should time your communications to maximize that, to get that business effect. So if you do an advertising campaign that plays off the back of New Year, New Year.

Yeah, that would be an example. Spotify is an example. So Spotify have discovered Weekly. They send you a new set of tracks, kind of a bit like things you listen to, but you've never actually listened to them. They've tried to launch that service two or three times, and it failed the first two times because they launched their first day, for about three days, then they launched it as Philwood Fridays. It was only when they launched it

as discover weekly on a Monday that they tapped into the fresh artifact. No way. Yeah, yeah. And they were, I think they worked with Richard Thaler either to post-rationalize it or as stimulus to test that idea. If you think that one's interesting, the best example I've seen of the fresh start effects is from the West Midlands. So the police launched a intervention with criminals which tried to encourage them to stop a life of crime, get back on the straight and narrow. So they're going to be helped with all sorts of support, get jobs, and break the kind of cycle. Half the people that they sent out this, they basically sent out a message saying,

we're on to you, ring this number, and we'll help you start a new life. Sometimes they just sent that out randomly. Sometimes they sent it straight after the criminals birthday. And they sort about, and we were double checking this, but I think there's other three or fourfold increase in response rates when the message went out just after the birthday. So this is a situation which you know, this is a very, very hard audience to change their behaviour. Even amongst hard and criminals, using this timing technique of the fresh

artefacts can boost effectiveness. That's spectacular. That is really, really cool. It's really cool. And it's something, she talks about this in her paper where she says, you know, often, look at institutions that have lasted a huge time. Many institutions have realized this. So she talks about the Catholic Church. It's not necessarily relying on an existing fresh start. They created their own moment when people kind of sloughed off their path self and thought of themselves in you and therefore weren't hampered by this

and bugbearer consistency. So she talks about the confessional. You go into that, you admit your sins, when you come out, you're a fresh person, therefore it's open to change, you don't feel like you're being inconsistent hypocritical. So you can both harness this bias by targeting particular moments, but you can also harness this bias by creating moments of rear-praise. What about uncertain rewards and loyalty schemes? OK, so if that's breaking a habit, you've then got all sorts of different studies into how do you recreate a new behavior. And one of the most interesting ones is the one you mentioned, which is around uncertain rewards. So the initial work for this goes all the way up to the 1930s and the archetypal

mad professor, a psychological, the B.F. Skinner. And what he does in his most famous bit of work is create these boxes. So he puts a rat into a box or a pigeon. And there's a little lever in the box. The animal doesn't know what a lever is. So first of all, it just ignores it. But sooner or later, it will bump into the lever. And then outcomes a sugar drop. So the rat will quickly learn

to pump away at the lever to be rewarded with these sugar drops, rats love a sugar drop. Skinner waits until the habit is embedded, to keep on pushing away this lever and being rewarded with one sugar drop. He then turns off the sugar supply and then monitors how long it takes for that habit to decay. And it's remarkably quick. Very quickly the rap comes ball to the lever. Then he creates another set of boxes and puts in a fresh group of rats. And the boxes are basically the same apart from one variation. Now, when the rats press the lever, rather than always getting a single drop, sometimes they get nothing,

sometimes they get one sugar drop, sometimes two, sometimes three. Average is out, one sugar drop per press, but there's this element of randomness, element of variability. When Skinner then turns off the sugar supply, while then the rat keeps on pumping on the wire

to leave for the ages, the habit is deeply embedded. What Skinner said is, if you want to create a habit far better to reward the behaviour that you want with an uncertain and variable reward rather than a fixed reward. Now later work by people like Shannon Fishback have shown that exactly the same thing happens with humans. We are more motivated by this variable reward than a fixed one. Now if you take this principle, you can then apply it to your loyalty schemes, which would essentially schemes to try and generate habitual behaviour of your behaviour by your shopper. What Skinner or Shem and Fishback would say is, most loyalty schemes at the moment make him steak. What most loyalty schemes do is say, you come to our coffee shop, you buy 10 coffees and we'll give you a free one.

That is a fix and certain reward. What they would say is you can make that scheme far more powerful without spending any more money by adding an element of variability. Don't give out a transactual relationship of 10 coffees, one free reward. Instead, give your staff the option to give out roughly 10% of coffees for free. So I might go in 20 times and not get one, you might get one every five times. Yeah, there's an element of uncertainty. You know, that would be applying Shen and Fishback stuff. Would that be the same as the McDonald's monopoly stickers?

Go on. So what do they do? There, that's the, um, so is the kind of fraction. Yeah, you on. So what do they do? Yeah, that's the态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态态 and then you can also combine these together in order to build up a monopoly board. Now, if you want to go down a real rabbit hole with this, once everyone's finished watching this episode, there is an amazing documentary on YouTube just by a small creator. If you search McDonald's Lottery scam, and what it talks about is when McDonald's first released the lottery, it went absolutely wild, and they were very concerned around.

They were dropping, I think it was a million dollars or maybe it was a lot of money. It was like at least hundreds of thousands of dollars that people could win with just one of these stickers. So they left one guy, one dude that used to be part of an advertising company in charge of this. So they gave him the job of security. This guy who's always made that winning. So he gets in with the mob. He starts, he becomes almost like a wannabe gangster because he's able to deploy all of these different and they've got a sophisticated system.

It's people that are unrelated, cashing them in in different states, using different names, using different IDs, blah, blah, blah. But then when you actually look at where all of the money ends up coming back to, it's within a three mile radius of his home postcode, or something like that. And it's just fascinating. This guy gets away with it for ages and ages and the way that he gets away with it is he has McDonald's on the hook. It might not be McDonald's. I think it's technically the company that did the competition on behalf of McDonald's because they weren't following elements of security correctly as well. So he ends up having something over them and then he gets caught and then, oh dude, it's a really, really great story. But very variable schedule reward. Same thing that's happening

with social media. You open your phone, you don't know how many notifications you're going to have. If you've got any DMs from someone that's cool or interesting or whatever, it's the exact thing that Instagram uses to do. I do exactly right about social media that if you went on to Twitter or Facebook and there was no knowledge of how your tweet had been received,

I think you would have faded, it would have disappeared by now. It's that excitement of not knowing whether you get 10 retreats or two or 50. It keeps people coming back again and again. So you can see, I think the absolute power there. You know, the other one on a much smaller scale and there were some unintended consequences of this. There was a lovely example from Sweden, I think of Stocko. They decided to introduce this lottery mechanic to their speed camera, or speed cameras.

You drove past, and if you were speeding, you got a fine, and your money went into a giant pop. If you drove past and you were under the speed limit, well, every, let's say, 10,000 cars, they took a photo of you, got your number plate, and then you were given a proportion of all the fines. And there's some lovely data about the average speed in that in those kind of streets, dropping quite significantly. Wow. So I think you're very effective. Very effective solution. Yes, yeah. There was, I mean, the only problem with that one. I think it proves the principle, but it also shows that introducing these ideas is very context dependent. What they hadn't factored

was, I think, that some people were trying to gain the system. So they found that some people just kept them driving around and around the block to go past the speed camera to hope they would win the lottery. So kind of worked. It's a nice, I a nice proof of content. That's fantastic. Okay, next one, make it easy. Make it easy. So, this is an interesting one. There is an argument for people like Daniel Kahneman. The people are... So, he says that people often have the wrong mental model about how to change behaviour. So in a recent interview, he was asked what's the single most important thing he'd learned from the hundreds of hundreds of experiments he'd run, and he said well that's simple, three words, make it easy. And he argues that the most effective way to change behaviour is to focus on making it easier

removing friction, whereas what most people try and do is increase motivation. Most will try and make the audience desire the behaviour that they want to encourage. Now, that's Kahneman's argument. Even though he's a Nobel laureate, nothing in behavioral science is taking some word alone. Everything has to be proofed, experimentally. And Bergen and Rogers run this wonderful experiment with the Department of Education America, trying to test the idea. So back in 2017, they launched this new service where parents can sign up and they will be texted information on how to encourage their children to work harder. They launched the service in one of three ways.

First way is the kind of what they call the standard way. People are texting information and they're told if you want to sign up for the service just click on this link. The link took from the form 30 seconds of effort to fill in. And in that scenario, 1% of people sign up. Next group of randomly selected people texted the same information about why the service is amazing, but this time they are told if you want to sign up, just text us back the word start. So they've removed about 30 seconds of effort, tiny, tiny bit of effort, and you get an eightfold increase

in sign up rates. Next and final scenario, another group of randomly select parents texted the same information about the wider services, amazing. But they are told you are enrolled if you don't want to be text back the word stop and you get 97% of people enrolled. So this removal of tiny bits of friction changes the enrollment rates in this program by 96 percentage points. So it backs up Kahneman's idea that small bits of friction can have a disproportionate effect.

But then comes the clever bit. The psychologists then go out and recruit 100-plus educational experts, teachers, head teachers, and municipal breakers. They tell those experts the setup of their three different scenarios, and they get the experts to try and predict what they think the sign-up rates will be in each scenario. Now those experts aren't stupid, they know that friction will put people off. They get the direction of change right, but they are wildly wrong in terms of the scale

of the impact. So, they think that about 35% of people sign up in the standard variant, 45 or so in the simplified 66, I think or so on the autumn, wrong. So they think there'll be a 21 percentage point change of behavior based on the removal of friction. Whereas in reality, it was a 96 percentage point change. So what they argue is that experts have the wrong model of human behavior, they underestimate the importance of friction, they overestimate the importance of motivation. And from that, they go and make the argument that this means that many businesses misallocate their resources. So too much time and effort goes into motivating an audience

to want the product, too little time and effort goes into making it as easy as possible to get the product. That's brilliant. I can also see from my history running nightclubs for a decade and a half that some of the things that we used to do felt a lot like pressing on the accelerator as opposed to removing the brake. We would be doing things that would entice people to come down as opposed to asking the question, why are people not attending? Like, why are people not attending? Is it that we need to make it easier for them to get from where they are to the nightclub? Do we need to put on party buses that can pick up 40 people at the time and give them

a schedule of when they just need to be outside of their house? Do we maybe need to just run that without even asking them if they need picking up? Maybe they just need to be collected. There's going to be a bus at 9, 10 and 11 from outside of the student union and it will deposit you here. You don't need to sign up in advance. It's just first come first serve and it'll always be there, something like that. We never ask those.

Yeah, to me that is a lovely example because I can imagine if you're working in the nightclub business and someone comes with an idea about bus schedules, you're like, oh my god, this guy should have been in the counter. Not sexy. If they come with an amazing, exciting, creative promotion, you're like, this is the person for me. What Khanam says, this is the person for me. What Connemys says, this is almost like the kind of a Cassandra curse.

It was actually the bustling tabling thing that would have been far more frantic. Should have been working for Transport of London. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn't there an equivalent that I read about a long time ago, it may have been from you to do with pension contributions when people got raises. Yes, so there is a lovely example.

So the behavioral insights team did the work in Britain, I think, 2013, 2012, and it's an amazing one. So up until then, this is a kind of a natural experiment. You had to do about five minutes of admin, so early 2010s, and then you would be enrolled in your company pension scheme. And when that was the case, about 61% of people in large companies were enrolled, the government then made a change, which is everyone has to be enrolled unless they sign a form saying they don't want to

be in it. So it takes about five minutes of work to get out of the pension scheme. Now suddenly within six months, enrollment rates in those companies has gone up to 83%. That's a 22%-percentage point change. Now remember the government is spending tens of billions pounds in tax incentives to get people into a pension. And what turns out to have the biggest effect is not those tens of billions, billions of pounds incentive. It is a tiny, tiny bit of admin. If you move it from having to opt in and spend time to get into the pension, to opting out, you have a phenomenal change of behaviour. So you're absolutely right. That would be a massive scale example

of how these little, little bits of friction have a much bigger and expected effect. I have no idea where I've pulled that study from, but I remember it being lurking in the back of my mind. There was also something else to do with increases in pension contribution. You try to suggest to workers, you should give more of your pension next year or something like that. And you got very low levels of enrollment. However, when people got a raise, you said we're going to give a higher percentage or of this raise, just a little bit less raise is going to come to you because a tiny bit more is going to go to the pension. It was this unseen as yet unactualized extra salary, portioned off a little bit more aggressively into pension and the uptake from that was way higher as well. Yeah, that's the

great. So that is a Richard Taylor and Shalom O. Binancey idea called Save More Tomorrow. And what they talk about is this idea called present preference bias or present bias or hyperbolic discount rate, which essentially means I've anyone values pleasure in the now, much more than pleasure in the future. So, and what's the same with pain? The point being if I lose, if I, if I'm told things that it cost me £5 now, it's painful.

If I'm told that, saying it's going to cost £5 in a month's time, it doesn't bother me. We act as if there is a very steep discount rate between now and the future. What Shloma Binatsian failure did was say, with these companies, why don't you set up a scheme? Where you're not essentially asking people to put my name to their pension now, you're saying, will you agree to put my name to a pension in a years' time or sign it or come out automatically in a years' time? And people think, well, I don't care what happens in a years' time, I mean, you know, that's so distant, it's attenuated, it doesn't viscally affect me. And that led to significant increases in pension contributions. So, yeah, there's this

whole host device, I think what you're getting to there is that there's so many of these biases. As long as you can match the right ones, the challenge you have, you've got these really effective evidence-based tools to use. Do you ever look at the other guys and girls that are in your industry, like the Thales and the Sutherlands and the Shotons of the World

and look at yourselves kind of like wizards because you pretty much are. Like what it is that you're able to do is akin to alchemy or wizardry. I know, well, we're all in some of that wonderful phrase in these book, it's called alchemy. So I think that this is something that is available to everyone. I mean, the great thing is you have But this is something that is available to everyone. I mean, the great thing is you have hundreds upon hundreds of psychologists, thousands upon thousands of psychologists working full-time, running studies that are then put into the public domain. So if you run a business, you know, and you haven't got a giant research department,

well, why not use the accumulated knowledge of all these psychologists? So I think you're right, there is some very powerful work that other people have been created. It is a crying shame not to harness these studies. Okay, make it difficult. So what I argue make it easy is if you want to change behaviour, first thing you should think about is removing friction. What are the blockage stopping people put more time and effort, think about those and getting rid of them? However, there are nuances to these studies and on some occasions you might want to add a tiny bit of friction in. So if you want to change some perception of the value of your products, if you want people think this is a premium worthwhile product, then there is an argument

for adding friction in. So the study that's relevant here is from Dan Ariali. So he comes up with an idea called the IK effect. And what he does, he and Michael Norton, they recruit a group of people and they show them a professionally made iKiabox. And then they ask those people, how much do you want to bid to take that box home with you? And from memory, and I'll be a little bit out of here, but let's say average bid is 40 cents. and I'll be a little bit out of here, but let's say average bid is 40 cents. Next group, same process, bring them into the lab, show them an IKEA box, but this time it's not assembled, it's just in pieces on the floor and the participants have to build it themselves. These people then spend a bit of time putting the box together and then

they are asked to put a bid in for how much they'll pay to take this box home. And you see a jump I think it's of your about 60 percent. I think we're ganked about 70 cents is the average bid. Now what Northern area you argue and they do this test in multiple different ways. They try essentially the same thing with origami birds, lots and lots of different experiments and poof at the same point. But what they argue is, the more effort someone goes to, the more they appreciate the products. So you have this slight tension. You want to change behaviour, remove friction. But if the problem you have as a business is people think your product is a bit crap, maybe the quality is the problem. Well there you might want to think about adding a small dash of friction.

So an example of this impractice, there is a lovely study which has real-world implications by Ryan Buehl, where he works with a travel comparison site and gets thousands of people to look at searching for holidays. And sometimes the results are served up immediately. Sometimes there is a very small delay. And whilst there's that delay for a few seconds, there's a little bar that goes round and round saying searching alitalia, searching bridge stairway, searching delt rail lines. Now, when the two groups are asked to report back on how comprehensive they think the results are,

the group that have the delay, that see the effort that's going on, they will rate that product as better. So you can take this study and slightly abstract settings that are really not enough done. You can then apply it to your web design or your restaurant layout. Let people see into the kitchens. They can see the work that's going on. You can take some of these ideas

and they can have a very practical seven implications for a brand. I use sky scanner a lot. Oh, yeah, yeah, they deploy exactly the same thing. We're searching our friends, we're searching our lingus, we're searching KLM, we're searching British airways. Are you telling me that that's all fucking performative? I'm saying that there is a, well, it'll be, if it's not, it's highly coincidental,

there is a study from about 10 years ago on travel comparison sites, which shows if you purposely slow down the site and you've got to make sure people, the effort they're going to is visible. Then that product, they've didled product. They've diddled me. They've bloody diddled me. So one of my old business partner for the nightclub stuff,

one of his house minutes is a quantitative analyst, freelancing, and he's been brought in by people like Lloyds to do all manner of complex analysis. That to them, apparently it's just total cutting edge stuff. Whereas to him, he can do it in his sleep. He's a smart guy. And he created a spreadsheet. He needed to create a spreadsheet

in order to be able to do this presentation for them. He's presenting this. Finally, the culmination of maybe six months of work by him as this consultant. And he created, he spent, he said, at least a full day learning how to artificially render loading bars in Excel. And he did it for exactly the same reason that he pressed a button and Excel just, it's numbers, right? It's not computing the world. It's not trying to calculate the trajectory of the sun. It's trying to work out how much

money is left in the bank account. And apparently it would just ping, it would do it instantly, but he artificially added in this computational effort with a loading bar, and he even managed, I think he managed to get it to get almost to the end, and then it would stop for about five seconds, as if it was really having to turn the cogs of the processing power within the computer, and then it would arrive. And, yeah, you can feel you're on the edge of your seat. You're waiting for the, compare them, do exactly the same thing. So you've got two tactics, I think, that you can apply here. You've got, make your customer go to a little bit of effort and you've got to be careful

to do it at the right time and not do it really nearly, focus few moments, but this is essentially like the wine cork. Someone has to spend physical effort getting into the bottle and make them feel like this is a high premium item. Getting your consumer to go to a bit of effort, boost quality exceptions, that's the idea effect. So getting your consumer to go to a bit of effort, boost quality exceptions, that's the idea of effects. And then I think you've got this other bit which is very related, which is if the consumer can see the efforts you've gone to, they appreciate it more. And sometimes that's kind of moving to this idea of the illusion of effort. Now my favorite example of that is probably Dyson.

So if you think about what is the repeated PR story of Dyson, it's the fact that he went through 5,187 prototypes before he got to his backless vacuum. Now if consumers were completely logical, rational decision makers, it wouldn't matter. That's not care if he's gone through one or a million prototypes. What should matter is the quality of the product itself. But what people like, even, Morales say, is that's how people should behave, but behavioral scientists are interested in how people actually behave.

And working out the quality of a product is a very time-consuming and difficult thing to do. Working out how much effort that product has been to, that is the much easier to take in. And what people often do is when they're faced with a complex difficult calculation, which gives them an ideal answer, is they almost without knowing it,

replace that calculation with a simpler and almost as accurate question. So people perhaps should be asking how high quality is this product? Because that's tricky, they end up saying how much effort do I think that brand has gone to? And they use that as a proxy for quality. So the argument to service providers like your friend or to brands is not to fictitiously invent efforts because most people go to them but it's to make sure your client or the consumer knows you've been to them be much much more transparent make sure

you you tell them I can't remember who it was that I was speaking to that used the example of bags of flour and pre-cooked breads in the windows of Italian restaurants. Oh, gone, yeah. Just that it is, you know, especially if it's artisanal flour that's been ecologically sourced

from the hills of the Himalayas, you think, oh my God, look, they've got the flour, the flour's out front. I mean, that's how, you know, why my God, look, they've got the flowers out front. I mean, that's how, you know, why would they put it in the fucking window? They don't even need it in the window. It needs to be in the kitchen, or it's of any use. But I wonder whether that's an obvious display

of care about this. I also, I'm kind of thinking about the more cottage industry, I'm kind of thinking about the more cottage industry, local, very middle upper class shop, everything served to you wrapped in brown paper and fucking twine. You know, it's got one of, every preserved jars got one of those criss-cross red and white lids on the top of it.

I just think that all of these are little signals of effort. Look at it, God, if they care this much about the twine that they've wrapped my ham shoulder in, then surely they've gone through the effort of this other stuff too. So there is a whole body of work, especially people working the kind of food and drink, there's a whole body of work around the idea that what we experience when we drink or eat something is partly what we expect to experience. So it's very, very important to set up positive expectations about a food or drink. That could be through price, it could be through the way that you serve the product, the

care and attention, the twine, it could be the description that you give, it could be the brand that it comes from. But you've got to set up those positive expectations. People do not objectively weigh up the chemical constituents who have food. They're eating with their mind. There's a lovely study by Stanford Psychologist called Babbership. And he serves people five different bottles of wine and each of those bottles of wine

has a prominent price label but the twist in the experiment is there are only four different liquids. One of the wines is repeated. So sometimes people are drinking wine thinking it costs five dollars a bottle. A couple of minutes later they have a little sample of a wine, it's exactly the same wine, but they think it's different and they think it costs $45 to bottle. When Shiv asks the participants to rate the scores of those wines, they rate the same wine that they're told is expensive, 70% higher. So people have a role of thumb in their head that if it's expensive, it must be high quality. And that becomes a self-fulfilling property. So yeah, those expectations are just

a nice to have. They're absolutely crucial for a brand. What was the book that came out about a year and a half ago or two years ago, two co-authors. Pop Neuro was the website that they used and they had, you live 100% seen it. I can't believe it. Maybe Matt was one of the author's names and the other guy was like subcognitive. But blind sight, Matt Joseph. Thank you. Thank you. God for that. I down on, yeah, yeah. So in a phenomenal work, really nice compliment to your, both of you. And in that, they did that example. They found a study where at Simeleo's had been given one glass of white and one glass of red wine. And they'd said, like, please give us the notes. And if you haven't

watched some, which is an amazing documentary on Netflix that goes through, if you want to become a top flight semelier, the standard of training that you have to go through is crushing. It is absolutely insane. You need to be able to detect from the smell and sip of a glass. What year it is, what vintage it is, not only what country it's from, particular region of which country, what time of year it was harvested, what amount of time it's been fermented for every, it's absolutely insane. Anyway, they give these semalliers one white one red. Please give us the notes that you think you have. Oh, it's got, you know, moccasins and links Africa

and whatever else it's fucking coming through. It's a favorite combo. And it turns out that the red wine is just a white wine with red food coloring in it. And they did another one where they had four different types of gourmet pate and one of them was actually dog food. Oh god. And no one could pick the dog food out, no one could, which is just insane. So I think the first thing to learn from this study is if you like buying expensive wine,

get your partner to buy two bowls, the normal stuff you buy and a bottle from Lidl and make sure you actually appreciate it in a blindess otherwise. Ah, yes, yes. Well, I mean, that would be a justification for just delabeling all of the wine that you have. And then maybe you could use variable choice rewards as well,

especially if you have a, well, I suppose that this is what's happening with wine boxes in a way. And all of these at home delivery selection things, because what you're doing is you're not quite sure what's going to arrive. You've created some constraints. I wanted to be sweet. I like red. I like chardonnay. I like a blah, blah, or you know, whether it's Gusto or any other kind of delivery service, butcher box, any kind of monthly prize giveaway. But you don't quite know what you're going to get. So there is an element of variable schedule reward and there is a uncertainty around. It pushes your preconceived ideas of your stated preferences and actually allows them to kind of clash up against something that you surprisingly might enjoy.

Yes, I think the whole Gusto food box model is fascinating and I think it's this wonderful balance of make it easy, make it hard. What they've done is recognise that people fall into a rut of just cooking the same thing again again because they don't have the mental energy to keep on thinking of new recipes. So they make it very, very easy to have that variety. But they also recognize that cooking from scratch is difficult. So they provide you with all the ingredients, again make it easy, but they don't push it to the logical conclusion. Well they don't send you is meals that you stick in the microwave because they know that if they did that, it wouldn't, even if

it tasted just as good, it wouldn't, even if the food tasted just good from an objective level, people wouldn't appreciate it much. Because you need that little bit of F to feel like a proper chef putting things together a bit. What was that thing where you added an egg? Betty Crocker. Thank you. This is one of our worries, right? The worry that...

Where is the story that inspired Dan Arielia, Michael Morton, to write the IKIP effect paper? I knew that. I knew that, Richard. They have it at the beginning of their paper and they say, look, is this an anecdote? This whole story of Betty Crocker didn't sell when it was just instant cake mix that you poured into a tub and whisked up with water. And then it only took off when they retrospectively added

an extra step of cracking an egg into it. They say, look, is this too good to be true? Is it just marketing myth? Why don't we go and test it in control circumstances? Amazing. All right, the generation effect. What's that? So the generation effect 1970s, I think, might be 1978, two Canadian psychologists, Graffins, Slamacher at the University of Toronto, recruit a group of people. They give them a long recruit a group of people, they give them a long list of words. The first half get, let's say catfish dog weasel elephant, they give this list of words, then they can read through it, it's taken away and they try and later on recall as much as they can. Next group of people get essentially the same list of words, but rather than it being

cat, it's C blank T, then it's D O blank, then it's, I'm not going to try and spell wheeze on it often, but it's just the, all the words with one or two, let's miss it. When that group try and recall the phrases a little bit later, they remember between 10 and 15 percent more. Now, the psychologist argument is that the second list of words is more memorable because people have to generate the answer themselves, hence the generation of it, and it's that act of creation that sticks the idea in people's minds. So there you have this fascinating tension again with advertising. You need to create an ad that is easy enough for people to understand.

They don't just walk and buy. But if you don't give any role for the consumer, then it's very forgettable. What you really want to get is this kind of, this balance of ease and difficulty again. So some people have applied that in a very pedestrian way. There was an ad for cancer research, I think where it said, the second biggest cause of cancer is OB, blank S, blank TY. That's the

generation effect. It's a very literal use of a well-known psychological experiment and it will have very positive results, it will stick in people's minds. But when it's done really well is where I think people apply these experiments with a bit of creative flair. So you go back to 1980s, 1990s, and you think about the classic economist ad. I never read the economist and at the bottom it said management trainee age 42. Now that I think is a lateral application of the generation effect. What David Abbott, the writer of the poster was doing there, was not directly stating, you are a failure if you don't really do the economist, he was setting up this interesting amusing, reasonably simple puzzle. The viewers had to solve, and by solving it, they're essentially generating the answer, and that makes it sticky, that makes it memorable.

So you've got this literal application by Cancer Research, you know, great ad, but where I think you get to the real brilliant ads is when people are doing it with this. They're harnessing the general insight of the study. They're not sticking to it completely literally. That's beautiful. Like that idea, the subtext of a 43-year-old management trainee, somebody that is floundering in their career, they should be further along than now, still, there's even, I don't read the economists, or I never read the economists, there's something kind of snooty and self-righteous about it as well? I already don't like this 43-year-old management trainee. It's just, it's gorgeous.

It's like a razor-sharp incision of a bunch of different memes. Well, that's not, I think, I think that idea of it being multiple things at once is brilliant. So you've got this generation effect of the audience coming up with the solution as it were. You've got this distinctiveness. Most brands never go out and say, do not buy me. So firstly, that grabs your attention. And then I think the third and final point is, and this might, I think we might have heard Rory Southern say this, is that often you can get across a slightly unflattering or not very nice message with a dash of humour. The underlying message in the economists is a little bit nasty. It's, you're a failure if you don't read our product, but they manage to say it with a bit of charm, which means that they can convey that slightly

me message without offending people. So yeah, I think there are lots of strands of that particular ad that make it so good. Can you ask questions to trigger the generation effect as well? Yes, there is a, I think it's aloo alia study, which shows if you pose a statement as a question, you tend to boost credibility and believability. However, I think the kind of slight complication was the success of that, depended on the prestige the brand was held in. So if the brand is admired, it works very well, if the brand is low state, it's unamired, it works quite badly. What's an example of that?

So I think the sentence he has kind of in his studies, something on the lines of, did you know, Avante Shoes can reduce osteoporosis, not quite right, other times, the other half of people in the study just saw a statement, Avante Shoes reduced osteoporosis, and he found if there had been preced proceeding positive information about Avante, big boost by using the question, if he had run some negative information about this fictitious corporation, the question often backfired. Oh, so it's mediated by how well the brands foresee. I mean, I think a lot of these questions as well. If you're going to use a very cool slightly effortful advert with some blank spaces in or someone's got to fill it in, that, for

instance, the economist advert works because the economist is an institution. It wouldn't work for edition one of the new businessmen monthly, perhaps. Yeah, or maybe it would work for both those brands, but it wouldn't work without David Abbott's copyright skills. You know, you can imagine someone trying to pose essentially the same point in a slightly pedestrian way, in it, flopping. Which to me is one thing it's worth stressing about behavioral science. I would always take the approach that these experiments and insights are just hypotheses about human nature. It's just half the task.

What a mark to an entrepreneur needs to do is then take the insight and then they need to apply a dash of creativity. So that sounds a little bit wooly. One of my favorite examples that I've come across, a few took from separate sources, a few separate sources recently, is around a creative use of social proof. So social proof is the argument that we are deeply influenced by the people. So if a brand looks like it's popular, it will become

more popular still. What most brands do to try and harness that idea is to say we're the million customers, nine out of 10 people will use our products. That's the kind of literal interpretation. What I'm saying is that's just the start. What you need to do is think about how can you can apply this idea a bit more creatively. How can you imply popularity without directly saying it? And my favorite example at the moment is Red Bull when they launched. You all like this, it was around nightclubs. Supposedly, when they launched, they go and find nightclubs, and then they crush up loads of empty Red Bull cans and stick them in the little bins around the nightclub.

So when people come out, they see these bins full with Red Bull and they assume that everyone else in there was massively energetic, so they had a couple of red balls. So it made it feel like it was a popular product amongst that group. That's applying social proof, I think, in a truly, truly creative way. One area that I would love one of the guys from behavioral science to get into would be optimizing YouTube thumbnails and titles. So this is the world that I live in, right? This is my currency for at least one part of the show. I need to get people to click on the video. CTR, click through rate, percentage, how many people get shown it versus how many people click on it, and watch time. So retention. Retention and watch time is down to the editing. It's down

to the first five to 15 seconds of the video. There's a number of things that go into that. But the way that not only your title, title length, are you posing a question? Are you using punctuation in an interesting way? Are you using the Zaganec effect to create open loops? How does this relate with the text that above it. That is, if there is not a behavioral science competent team applying these insights to optimize thumbnail and titling for larger YouTube creators to give those insights, there is a huge agency opportunity available there, because the Mr. Beasts of the world and the PewDiePie's of the world and the guys at the absolute absolute top, they will be doing this. I know that Mr. Beasts spends between ten and thirty thousand dollars on each thumbnail. He has hundreds and hundreds of thumbnail options for every different video.

And then when it comes to titling to heal of reverse engineered, I mean, I know for instance that the average number of characters in the top video of your suggested feed is going to be 44. So it's 44 characters long is the average number. The use of words that invoke a powerful or aggressive response, words like war, battle, shock. These are sort of things that cause people to click. But generally, I mean, this is both for brands and for creators, is an incredibly important thing to get right. Okay, I have this amazing piece of content.

I've worked incredibly hard on it for a long time, and I'm being defeated by CTR and watch time. It's like, I can't get people to time. It's like I can't get people to click on it and I can't get people to stay with it. This is one of the reasons why Fast and Furious 9, if you look at the pace of the cuts in F9, it is unbelievably quick. And if you think about the pace at which people swipe through TikTok, it's like swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. It's more than once a second. And that pace that you move at

is the pace that people are becoming used to. So Mr. Beast, his most recent video where he cured a thousand people's blindness by paying for their cataract surgery, that employed a new tempo of cuts within the edit. I'm not actually sure, I'm sure he'll speak about it at more length, but yeah, he tweeted about it a new tempo of cuts within the edit. I'm not actually sure, I'm sure he'll speak about it at more length, but he tweeted about it a couple of days ago.

So that, I mean, he's always using eyes to camera. He's focusing very heavily on blues. There's almost always a red somewhere in there. The use of arrows, especially red arrows is something that causes people to click. So the all manner of different bits and pieces going on here that will be grounded in stuff that probably already exists, but it's such a new format and given that YouTube is the number two search engine in the world after Google,

and it's so high volume. First off, selfishly, I don't want to have to try and reverse engineer this stuff myself, so someone should write a book on it, behavioral science for YouTubers, to try and reverse engineer this stuff myself. So someone should write a book on it, behavioral science for YouTubers. But also, there would be, it's just a fascinating new medium to deploy all of this through. Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating.

I think the, what the behavioral biases, essentially, I think stimulus to come up with ideas to solve some of those problems. So it's the ones that might be relevant. There's a lovely idea, one of the favourites, called the Illusion of Control, and it's by Ellen Langer, who was a Harvard psychologist back in the 70s. In 1975, she goes around an office block and she tries to sell people lottery tickets for $1.5 the people just have given the lottery ticket for $1 and they have given their numbers, there's no choice, half of them get to pick their numbers. She then waits a week and then just before the draw for the lottery she goes back

to the office and she tries to buy back those tickets. Now the first thing she finds is that everyone wants more than they paid. So there's an ID called the Endowment Effects once we own it we value it more. But that's not what she was studying. She wants to know the difference in valuation between the two groups. The first group who had no choice on average they want a $1.96 to sell their ticket back. But the group who got to pick their numbers, they want $8.67. So there is a full, full variation in the valuation of what is quite obviously a commodity. Langer's argument is one of the biggest drivers of our of our behavior is the desire for a sense of control for sense of agency. So even if you give

someone a completely meaning, meaning a meaning less or superfluous choice, it will make them value whatever they pick that much more. Now in my world of thinking about how you get people to buy things or change their behavior, you can take that principle and you can apply it to your promotions. So you could say, well, what most brands do is say, you buy this product and you get this reward. Well, Lange would say that's a mistake. You should give people an option of two things. So maybe it's a free pizza or a car wash.

Even if 100% of people pick the pizza, there is still a value in offering the car wash. It's very present, allows people to choose and because they have picked it, they value that, that pizza more. So I wonder with some of these attempts to engage, is giving the audience maybe some degree of choice. It doesn't have to be meaningful, it could be whether your background is blue or red or you're going to launch or choose there a Wednesday, the more you can get them to feel

like a sense of control, the more likely they will appreciate the product. The Keats Heuristic. Keats Heuristic. So, that is an idea that phrases that rhyme are more believable. So study done 1999, I think a follow up maybe 2000 by Matthew Maglund and I think an apologist and perhaps this wrong Jessica Choffekbash and what they did was give people lists of pseudo proverbs. So we would both get a list of proverbs and on your list you might see something like what might you get? I don't know if you drink it will help you think and I might get if you drink it will help you ponder. Now that isn't actually one of their examples,

that's pretty naff but that's the basically what they did. You know, it's exactly the same sentiment for the fake proverb, but one of us gets it in a rhyming form, one of us gets in a non rhyming form. And they give out loads of these different lists with lots of different variations. So essentially they can compare how believable the proverb is in rhymes, how believable is it

when it doesn't one? And they see a statistically significant increase in believability and belief in the accuracy of the proverb if someone got it in a rhyming variation. Now fascinatingly, going back to what we were talking about at the very beginning, if they say to people, look, you rated all these different proverbs, do you think you're influenced, do you think you picked the rhyming ones because they rhymed, do you think they said they were accurate? And I think it's one person in the entire study says, yeah, that might have influenced me. Everyone else is, oh no, no, definitely not.

But by her dispassionate, you know, A versus B test, she sees rhyme does have an effect. Now, I was interested in this for a couple of reasons. I firstly, I thought, well, that's really interesting, but advertisers don't just need to boost believability, also on a boost memorability. So we reran that study, and we gave people these long lists of fake proverbs, half of which Ryan Car half of which didn't.

We then invited them back in the evening. They looked in the morning, then came back in the evening. And we saw people about twice as likely to remember the rhyming phrases as the non-rhyming ones. It was about that order. Forget exactly the swim. But what's fascinating there is you've got this set of experiments which shows rhyming phrases are more believable and more memorable. Yet if you then go and

look at the regularity with which businesses use advertisers use rhyme, it has been in massive long term decline. It was a phenomenally common tactic 50 years ago. Pringles in the 80s, once your pop can't stop. Hague in the 1930s, don't be very ask for hate. Marzaday helps you work rest and play. Again and again, we see Ryan being used. But if you think of the last 10 or 15 years, it has almost disappeared. I did a study looking at ads over the years and it

drops to about 10%. So what's interesting here is you've got advertisers or at least the people creating the ads, ignoring a technique that is very effective. And then I think you have to ask, why is that the case? And my thought, often drawing here on Talib's work, is that if you pay an expert and you don't reward them directly, so the agency is not rewarded according to whether you sell a product or not, if they're just given a payment for their advice, what tends to happen is it leads to complexity. Because if you are a consultant or advisor, you know that if you give a very simple but effective advice, you'll get fine,

because it sounds obvious. So what ends up happening is you build an increasingly complex model to explain and make recommendations because it's that sense of sophistication that justifies your fee. So I'm fascinated here not just by the behavioral science showing the effect on the end consumer and fascinated by the fact and the system which means this tactic is very, very rarely used. The internal machinations of the advertising industry are pretty fascinating. Yeah, and you know that's there I'm interested in but the same would be true I think for any service industry. You know, if you are a consultant who sends a one-line email that saves your company,

hundreds of thousands of pounds, it will be very hard to justify a massive fee because it looks so simple and so easy and people will begrudge you. If you produce a hundred paid report and have loads of people running around creating that report, it's easier to charge a large amount. So there is a tension between what creates effective solutions and what is in the interest of the agency or consultant who is supplying those solutions. the agency or consultant who is supplying those solutions. Was it Oglevy that did the thing to reduce complaints of wait times at security at London Heathrow? No, so I don't think so.

I thought it was, I think I saw it first, when we were reporting it in the, it was in a Houston airport, I think. So I think it predates, I'm pretty sure it's kind of a story going around in America reported the New York Times a reasonably thick accurate the Houston Airport people were landing Minute walks a to the baggage carousel and then a a seven-minute wait and after a long flight They got annoyed quickly and they started to complain.

So what the airport did was try and reduce the weight, but found it wasn't really possible. So rather than keep on spending more and more money on a falls errand, instead of sending the passengers directly from passport control to the baggage carousel, they just sent them on a kind of six minute walk, zigzagging across the airport with this fence laid out so they couldn't go there directly. And so people by the time they got to the baggage carousel, there was only a minute wait

and complaints plummet. And the argument was we treat occupied weights very differently from unoccupied weights. So we're not bothered if we're walking, but if we're standing staring at a beige hair cell, then it's deeply, deeply frustrating. I think Rory missed in his transport for humans book as something that we could have done with regards to this, that I would like way more options on Google Maps from getting from point A to point B. For instance, I will opt to drive a route that puts me in less standstill traffic, but takes longer to get home if I'm going home at a time where there might be a little bit of other drivers on the road.

Because for me, it is existentially less painful to go a route that takes 10 minutes longer and maybe five miles further however one that I know I'll always continue to move along as opposed to being in standstill traffic even if it's both shorter and quicker. So I would like to opt for the route that has the highest average speed perhaps. Yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely so that I so I live in London so far less driving because it's just painful, but my view would be to get to another place in London, it's not just the time I'm interested in, I'm interested in the fewest possible changes, because if I have to walk to get on a bus, then change the tube, then change the line, then get on

a train, I can't sit and relax if it is a single train which takes longer and then there's a long walk and I've only got one change of mode, I would have massively prefer that. Absolutely right, there is a I think Raw is book with Pete Dyson, it's brilliant looking at some of these areas that all the systems that transport providers have created optimized to shortening time when there are many, many other factors that would make a journey more pleasant. Conqureteness. Oh, by and lovely by. So the study here comes from a Canadian psychologist called Ian Begg.

So back in 1972, he was working at the University of Western Ontario, recruits a group of students, 25 of them, and we'll come back to that. And he reads out a list of 22 word phrases. Now, the phrases are all jumbled up, but 50% of them are what he calls concrete phrases. So things like square door or white horse. The other 50% are what he calls abstract phrases. So things like subtle truth or basic fact. The students read through these lists of words and then the words are taken away and beg ask people to recall as much as they possibly can.

And his key finding is that the students remember 36% of the concrete words, 9% of the abstract words. So there's a massive fourfold change in memorability, huge change. Remember some of these studies we're talking about are reaching out 5 or 10% improvements. This is a massive 4-fold change. His explanation is, according to Begg, vision is the most powerful of our senses. So if you can picture a word, if I say a square door, a square door pops into your mind, almost unbidden, if you can picture it, it's sticky, it's memorable, but with an abstract phrase that you can't picture, it's very, very forgettable. So the tactic that communicators should use is think, well, work out what you want to convey to an audience, and it might be an abstract benefit,

but you have to translate that abstract benefit into very concrete visualizable language. So if that sounds a bit vague, best example that I know of is Apple iPods. Every other brand that they were competing with, all these MP3 players, they had the abstract benefit of memory that they wanted to convey. But the way they conveyed that was in abstract terminology. No, Philips and Samson would talk about 215 megabytes of memory. Completely abstract, completely forgetable. What Apple did was convey that same abstract benefit of memory, but using very concrete visualisable language.

A thousand songs in your pocket, can picture a pocket, that makes it sticky, that makes it memorable. So currently, businesses are communicating abstract objectives in abstract language, they need to change and translate those abstract language into something far, far more concrete. You need to get customers to be able to easily imagine using your product. Yes, absolutely. So you need to be able to get them to easily imagine your product, first of all, and imagine the benefits. Because people, you know, Samsung Pro or Philips were able to put a picture of the MP3 player, but people wouldn't remember the benefit of the 215 megabytes of memory. So Apple's genius was turning that benefit

into something that's visualizable. There are separate studies which are right, there's a guy called Ryan Elder who's come up with these ideas of perceptual fluency, where he argues, if you can get people to imagine using your product and it's a pleasurable, enjoyable product, they, the production's intent will increase. So he did this bizarre study where he shows people pictures of cake and the fork on a plate, so the cake's on a plate and the fork's either on the left or right and he asked people to say whether they would be interested in buying that cake, have delicious as it look. The twist in the experiment

is half the people see the fork and left half on the right, he then questions people to their handiness if that's a word, whether they left or right-handed. And what he finds is if the fork is in the place where you would normally leave it, so I'm a right-handed person, I'd normally roof the fork to the right, purchase intent goes up about 30% his argument, he's just removing a bit of friction, you make it easier to imagine eating it,

that gives you a chance to mental experience some of the benefits that entice as you in. Even that tiny, tiny bit of friction can change levels of of of designability. What about stories of the statistics? So the argument here is I think that the study was by Paul Slowvich at the University of Oregon. He came up with this idea called the identifiable Victim Effect, which is probably the only bias that is supported by both Stalin and Mother Teresa. In his study, it's a beautifully designed study. He recruits people under false pretenses. They think they're doing like, let's say

some maths puzzles. That's the psychological experiment. They finish the study and then he says, oh, before you go, read this from our sponsors, it's a message from Save the Children. And if you're interested, you can donate some of the fee, I'll give you five dollars, whatever it was, you can donate some of your fee to that charity. Half of the participants hear about malnutrition in Marley, 100,000 people affected, lots of statistics, the other half hear about the story of a single girl called Rockia. And what Sloughit shows is more people donate when they hear the single story, and they donate on average more money.

So his argument is it is hard to conceptualize or visualize as statistic. Now I can't picture a million people, I can't picture a hundred thousand people, so it leaves me cold. For that description of that single girl suffering, that is easily relatable, that is visualizable. So I think you know a lot of these biases you start to see interlinking. That one definitely comes up in podcasting as well. So when it comes to trying to convey any sort of story, I mean, you're phenomenal at this because every single concept, every single statistic that you try to put across comes with an analogy, it comes

with a story and it causes people to be invested. When I first started doing this show, you know, when you first came on four years ago, maybe even longer, five years ago now, I was adamant that what you wanted to try and achieve in a podcast was to ruthlessly index information and to kind of high pressure hose it into people's ears, which I didn't realize at the time, but basically makes you a slightly more conversational book summary service, which isn't what you're here for. What you're here to do is to get exactly what can't be conveyed within a book, what can't be conveyed within a summary, and that's a vibe. So I've taken

to referring to podcast as vibe architects, like you're just here for a vibe. So I've taken to referring to podcasters as vibe architects. Like you're just here for a vibe and Adam Masriani, who has a phenomenal sub-stack called Experimental History, which you would adore. He did a take-down of peer review recently. He decided to completely pirate a study that he'd done and just release it on the internet in a PDF bypassed all the journals, all the peer review and just said, look, you can have a look here as all of the data, you can reassess everything, just put it online, he's phenomenal.

And he wrote a post-alimenting why we forget all of the things that we learn. You know, you go through, I made an analogy about accounting, I did first your accounting when I did business at uni, and I can remember that one of the five principles of accounting is prudence. And I can't remember what it means. I don't understand what prudence means in an accounting context. The numbers are the numbers. I don't know what the other four are, but I just have this. And he was like, what you have is this word sort of floating

around in the back of your mind. But what I can remember, the vibe that I can remember is getting on the bus to uni, on the morning of the exam, and speaking to my housemate, who was less prepared than me, and I felt very under-prepared, the vibe that I remembered from that interaction and that exam overall was, wow, no matter how under-prepared you think you are, there is still way further to fall. And for the most part, you're going to be in the middle of the bell curve of whatever it is that you're doing. That's the vibe, that's the lesson that I took away from it. I can't remember anything. I did AS and A level business, then a three year business degree and one year musters still, don't remember the five principles of accounting, but I took that away. And for me, that's the same as stories.

You know, it's the reason that if you look at Morgan Howesles, the psychology of money. Water book. Yeah. Just outstanding. But he's talking about what is an unbelievably dry topic for quite a lot of, you know, there's only, I think, maybe 15 between 10 and 15 chapters or principles or whatever, maybe even be eight across the entire book. And it's a big book, ish. But it just falls by because you're learning about Warren Buffett when you grow up and you're

learning about, you know, all it is is just easy, easy, easy stories. So that to me, James Clears, atomic habits, very story heavy, David Goggins never finished and his first book can't hurt me, also incredibly heavy. It's one of the best sellers, I think it's the best selling self-published book of all time. Oh wow, yeah, it's terrifying. But well, from self-published David Goggins to the Iliad and Odyssey. There is an argument from a classist called Havelock, I might have mispronounced that, where he says, if you look at all these stories that were once, all stories that were passed down from Storyteller to Storyteller by Voice and Memory, you go through them and what you find is they are remarkably heavy

on concrete phrases. I think it's the wine red seed talks about in one of those books. They're very light on abstractions. And the argument Havlox makes is because abstractions are easy to forget. So when you tell me a story, I don't repeat it to my mate exactly the same. It's the concrete visualized by elements that stick.

So let's say you gave me a really abstract story and it goes through 10 people back to you by the time it comes back to you and more probably have been refined to much more concrete visualizable elements. That's awesome. Okay, precision. Precision. So this is a this is one I really like because the the book is 16 and a half behavioral biases that influence what you buy. And I kind of liked that title because it's an amazing Julian Bond book, the history of the world, 10 and a half chapters. So I kind of had that flow to go around in my head. And I came across a study by Schindler at Rutgers University. And in this study, he gives people mocked up ads for a deodorant.

Everything's the same about the ad in two different scenarios, apart from one fact. Half the people see the ad with the fact that it reduces perspiration by 50%. The other half of people get the same ad, but it says it reduces perspiration by either 47% or 53%. When Shindler questions all the people as to how accurate and believe all the claims are, the claim when it's a precise number is about people believe it's about 10% more likely to believe it than when it's around number. So people believe the 40% or the 47 claim they don't believe the fifty percent claim.

Now the argument goes that we quickly learn in our daily life that if someone says something in round vague terms they often don't know what they're talking about, whereas if they talk precisely it's from a position of knowledge. So from my perspective if you ask me how old my cousin was, I would say they're in their 30s. If you ask me how my brother was, I would say 51. If I know the facts, I'll give it to you exactly. If I'm sure I'll give it to you in vague round terms. So what Shinla then says is people use this as a cue to judge the credibility in that procedure claim. So if you want to publish an article, don't say 10 reasons, 10 ways to become a great pollcaster, it should be 11 and a half or 11.

It sounds like you've picked these because they're all exactly right, whereas if you say 10 reasons, it feels like you're just trying to fit the list. You can see this again, we were talking about James Dyson earlier. It wasn't 5,000 prototypes, he talks about. It's 5,187. The more precise you can be in your numbers, the more believable they tend to be. I had Edward Slingland on the show. He is an ancient Chinese philosophy expert, first trying not to try, which is about, whoo-way, the Chinese art of effortless action. And then he wrote a second book called Drunk, which is how we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way through civilization. And his argument is the beer before bread hypothesis that civilizations came together actually to drink because it was easier to do that. And one of the interesting justifications that he gives for why humans enjoy drinking

with each other and why it's been such an effective cultural technology is that it switches off the PFC. Switches off the prefrontal cortex. It means that lying is more difficult to do. And people who are under the influence of alcohol are more accurate at detecting lies than people who are sober. Is that true?

Wow. It's how I completely get you're going to reveal your secrets when you're drunk. But I never thought you improved that. Actually, that is, that's, I'd love to see that experiment. I'd love to be recruited for that experiment. Yes, you could have been, you could have been on both sides. Yeah.

But so what you have is a cultural technology, which is basically a truth detection enhancer and a lie telling reducer. So it's this very, very good, very optimal way to get people to bond. It was heavily used to bond together armed forces, for exactly the same reason. It's just, it generally, I was really interested with that. And I think that you're talking about the precision of what's going on here. That's kind of like a cultural technology where reducing the ability of somebody to lie. You know, if you do, if someone tries to pin you down, everyone's, you know, tried to ask a friend about how can you

couldn't make it to my birthday last week? Oh, it was, uh, and it's this real big, convoluted answer as opposed to, oh, I had a puncture or I had a this or I did that. It's, you know, there's always five intersecting reasons why answer as opposed to, oh, I had a puncture, or I had a this or a did of that. It's, you know, there's always five intersecting reasons why. And it's because they can't come up, but if you know, if they're not telling the truth, that is, as opposed to just being a thing. And I think that alcohol kind of is a technology that can do something similar.

Yeah, well, that is interesting because there's, I've kind of read this, there is an argument that why we said right at the beginning that people often don't know their own motivations. Now, you kind of think, well, surely there is an evolution advantage to knowing ourselves really well, but the argument is, if you believe you're telling the truth, if you are deceiving yourself, then however drunk you get, you're not going to reveal the wrong thing. The best way to deceive everybody else is to deceive yourself first. Yes. Yeah, you're on your own, you're on the hype, it's all your own rubbish.

So there are thoughts, I think that I think I've read this around hairs, like, in the rabbit type thing, when they are being chased by a predator, they zigzag around, but supposedly they don't know which way they're going to go next. Therefore, they don't have a tell that they're not going to be. So they're jukeying, they're jukeying a prey, they're giving the old San Francisco, whatever it's called shuffle But they yeah, so but it feels like very random, but they don't know where they're gonna left right so no way The hawk or whoever else is following it can't learn it's Of course, and it's also gonna give away no tells because if you don't know dude, that's such a that's an amazing story

Okay, so precision I'm kind of worrying though. Now. I'm saying it amazing story. Okay, so precision. I'm kind of wondering though, now I'm saying it, how the hell does anyone ever work that out? So I think this is one where we should probably go and they've said, that could be you, you kidnapped me and rabbits. Oh, and rabbits. Come back in four years time. Thank you. Look at my expert on hairs. Pricing. How's pricing related to precision? So there is some lovely work. Oh, and this, I unfortunately only found the follow-up after the book had been written. So, in the book, I think I talk about a University of Florida study by Janice Evsky and Euse, where they show, again, get a sample of people all shown the same items, block of cheese, TV, bicycle, some others. Some people are told the price around amount,

so the TV's $500, some are told a precise amount, $5.5. The psychologist then asked everyone, well, how good value do you think the car is? What do you think the real value of these items is? And what the cycle is fine is that when people give their answers, everyone comes back with a lower amount, so everyone realises brands bump up their price above what it's actually worth.

But what the cycle just argue is their price above what it's actually worth. But what the cycle just argue is, when people see a precise price, they jump down in their kind of mental calculations in much smaller increments. So they think, okay, well, it's not worth, whatever I said, $500, maybe it's worth $495. No, maybe it's $490.

Whereas if people, certainly if it was $500, if people see the round price, they 500, they think, oh, it's not worth 500, it's worth 480, 460. So people assume that precise prices are marked up more fairly than round ones. So if you as a brand or a business, a selling something at 100 or 1000 pounds, you're in this wonderful, you've got this wonderful opportunity of you can increase your price and you will increase the desirability and perceived value of that product. Now that study by those two psychologists is a slightly abstract study and you could think well it's not really a real world, it's the lab. But what Uber have done is released data recently on a

real world test where thousands upon thousands of potential customers were offered a surge price. And some people offered a 2x surge price, some people offered a 2.1x surge price. And what Uber found was people were more likely to accept the 2.1x price. So, what Yannishev's getting you have found in a lab study has been proven in far more robust and a much, much larger study by Uber. It's just this sense that if it's a round price, it's probably being pumped up, plucked out of the air. If it's precise, feel that some thoughts gone into it and people have only put it up to what's really, really necessary.

There has to be a relation here between reviews and statistics around product reviews and stuff as well. Potentially, I think what this would argue, yeah, if you better to say you've got 9,632 reviews rather than 10,000, that would be absolutely true. The most interesting study I've seen around reviews though is that a five out of five star review is potentially damaging. So it was a Northwestern University study, hundreds of thousands of products, 120,000 say products, they looked at the reviews across 28 categories and then they looked at the likelihood of people going to buy the product. And all the reviews were scored one to five. What they found was that as the review to those products got better, people

were more like to purchase just as you expect, but then at some stage and it did vary by category, I think it was between 4.2, 4.5, likely to purchase peaks and then if the reviews get any better for every category, you start to see this decline in likelihood of purchase. Their argument, as I call it this argument, was perfection is too good to be true. If you see a product, 50 reviews, all of them 5 star out of 5, what is more likely that this is a genuinely perfect product with no flaws at all and that everyone has all enjoyed it, or there's been some funny business going on and that veranda has been, you know, paying people to put positive reviews on, or editing out the negative ones.

So perfection can be alarming for people and they just, and therefore put them off from purchasing. Rulling this across again into my industry, there is now a five-star review on Spotify for every podcast and there's always been one on Apple Podcasts as well. And it's got a first decimal point. So pretty much every big show that's not currently in a cancellation crisis is going to be 4.7, 4.8, 4.9. Andrew Huberman, he might know I might not, he's an optimologist and neuroscientist from Stanford, is so, he's got one of the biggest podcasts in the

world, probably top 10 podcasts in the world, but he's so unobjectionable that he's got a five across the board on both Spotify and on Apple podcasts. So I actually wonder if I should message him and tell him that he needs to get some negative reviews. If he can just piss off a small cohort of people, he actually might end up with better conversions if he was more like a kid. Well, I mean, yes, I mean, the categories it was tested on were things like hair care and shampoo. So there's always an element of does this translate to the different world. But an element of does this translate to a different world. But the great thing here is behavioral science in these experiments set up a hypothesis to go out and test and at least consider that

you would never normally consider. I mean, who would ever think less than a five star reviewer is a problem. Most people think that's brilliant. It just gives you an angle. I think that your competitors who aren't using behavioral science wouldn't have thought of. And it's often those under exploited opportunities that can be very, very profitable. That's a really beautiful sentiment. And that's one of the things that I adore about learning this sort of stuff from yourself, from Rory, from everybody else that I hear. Okay, so Richard, I'm going to give you enough time to make it to the pub. The illusion of choice. Yeah. Where should people go if they want to pick that up? Oh, Amazon's probably the easiest place, but

pretty much any bookshop with an online facility will have it and hopefully quite a few real life stalls, but yeah, Amazon's an easy place to get it. And where else should people go if they want to follow the stuff that you do online? So I tweet from at our shop or if they're interested in applying this to their business, if you go to astrotenn.co.uk, that's where you've got my company website. We give like consultancy to people like Google and Mondelez and Sky. So yeah, that's the other area. Richard, I appreciate you and I'm very much looking forward to our next eight and a half biases that we still got

excellent. I like built up a thirst, so I'm looking forward to it as well. Beautiful, aren't we? Thank you. Thanks a lot, cheers. Offends, beacuse, beacuse, beacuse