Modern Wisdom - #626 - Richard Shotton - 8 Psychology Hacks Behind The World’s Biggest Businesses

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, Founder of Astroten and an author. Humans are predictably irrational. By studying these behaviours through clever techniques, advertisers and marketers have been able to boost sales and influence you in ways you might not realise or expect. So it's pretty important to discover how you're being manipulated. Expect to learn what are the most powerful words in persuasion, which human biases are over tested & overrated, how a small commitment can be the beginning of a huge commitment, which hacks make advertising campaigns stick in people’s minds, how to overcome the problem of analysis paralysis, how to change everything someone believes whilst changing nothing they experience and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get up to 55% discount on your Babbel subscription https://babbel.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) 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

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Richard Chotten, he's a behavioral scientist, founder of Astro10 and an author. Humans are predictably irrational, by studying these behaviors, advertisers and marketers have been able to boost sales and influence you in ways you might not realise or expect. So it's pretty important to discover just how you're being manipulated. Expect to learn what are the most powerful words in persuasion, which human biases are over-tested and overrated, how a small commitment can be the beginning of a huge commitment, which hacks make advertising campaigns stick in people's minds, how to overcome the problem of analysis paralysis, how to change everything someone believes while changing nothing

the experience, and much more. how to change everything someone believes while changing nothing, their experience. And much more. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Woop. The only fitness tracker that I have stuck with and by far my favourite, it tracks absolutely everything you do 24-7 by the most comfortable wearable that just sits on your wrist. It's your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, how much you're breathing, your stress throughout the day, every workout, every recovery run, the walks that you do from the car to the door. And this means that it gives you a very global overview, a very in-depth insight into what's going on inside of your body, how the changes that

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problems from your past or from right now, they even do couples counseling. If you and your partner want to do it, better help is the place to start. Head to betterhelp.com slash modern wisdom to get 10% off your first month and take a free quiz. They will explain how everything works and all of the different pathways that better help has available. That's betterhelp.com-modern wisdom for 10% off. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Richard Shotten. So the last episode that we did, we managed to get through eight out of 16 and a half psychological biases from your fantastic new book,

which is now out and people should go and buy right now. I like that as a bit of advice. Yes. The first new, this is half of an insight, base, value, neglect. What's that? half of an insight, base, value, neglect. What's that? So it's an idea here that people when they are weighing up numbers essentially responds to them naively. So if you show people a bowl of jelly beans, for example. And one of the 10 beans is a red bean.

And you tell people that they will get a cash award for picking a red bean. You give them the option of picking from either a 10 bean jar with one red or 100 bean jar with eight reds, you find that people will mistakenly want to pick from the larger number. So even though the absolute chance of winning drops, the fact that there are literally more beans perverts their decision making. So, so, people react to the number rather than what the number represents. I think that's where we're getting to with this idea. Ah, because eight sounds like more than one, but it's eight out of a hundred is supposed

to one out of ten. Exactly, exactly. So, if you're a marker, you can start to harness that idea to your benefit. So there's a lovely study from Gonzales, who's at a gay business school, and she came up with a study where she show some people a pack of balloons for 48 pesos. Some people see a 12-paysow discount, some see a 25% discount. And in that scenario, people prefer the 25% discount. Even though they are mathematically the same. Other set of people, she shows a jacket for 480 pesos. Some people see a 120-page discount, some people see a 25% discount.

Now the group that see the 120 peso discount rate it as a better deal than the group that saw the 25% discount. So once again, people are reacting to the size of the number rather than what that number represents. So Jonah Berger heard about this study and he has a wonderful pithy turd of phrase. He said that there is a rule of a hundred. If you're selling a product that costs more than a hundred pounds or a hundred dollars or a hundred euros, you should talk about your absolute discounts. If you're selling a product that costs less than a hundred, you should talk about the percentage discount.

Now that way you're always a product that costs less than a hundred, you should talk about the percentage discount. That way, you're always tapping into this insight. Didn't you find something to do with why bonuses are more effective than discounts as well? Yes, a really similar set of ideas here. So there is a lovely round study from 2012 where they sell hand lotion in a pharmacy for 16 weeks, sometimes they refer to it as a 35% discount, sometimes they refer to it as 50% more. And what they find is that on the weeks that they talk about it being 50% more, there are 81% more sales. Now even though these two things are mathematically the same, people cannot help to react to the scale of the number rather than what that number represents. So it's interesting there because most brands, most advertisers are fixated with talking about discounts.

What Rouse study suggests is you should contemplate, talk about value added bonus pack, you're getting more, because that will always be a larger, absolute number. Now it seems like it's how the discounts make people feel. It's like, what does this mean for me? Yeah, that's a really nice way of putting it. I think that's a better way of putting it in fact because what it gets to is a fundamental insight about how people make small commercial decisions that they don't weigh up these purchases in a fully considered way. They don't spend minutes upon minutes weighing up their shampoo purchase, working out whether this is an amazing deal.

Because frankly, if you spent that long on every purchase, you would grind to a whole in life. So instead, what people do is they make faster snap decisions. Now, some people call those emotional decisions, but really they're just about speed, it's about an immediate response. And what people respond to is that number, rather than what they should mathematically do, which is respond to what the number represents.

One of the pieces of advice that you have for YouTube thumbnail writing is to write at an eighth grade level and then make it more dumb than that, because as people are scrolling through YouTube every millisecond of attention that you can potentially get from somebody is very precious. And if you can convey what this particular video is about in a quicker, more easily understood way, then the next video you're going to improve your click-through rate. Oh, yeah, no, no, lovely point. I mean, I think one of the broad things we talked about last time was this idea that small

bits of friction have an outsized effect. It might feel like, oh, surely I've made such amazing videos, people are going to give me the benefit of doubt. They're going to work through some of these small barriers that I put in the way. But most studies suggest that is, is not the case. So if people want a practical tip, one of the things that I've discovered reasonably recently is there is a wonderful app called Hemingway. So it's completely free. You take your copy, you put it into the website of the app and it gives you a reading age immediately and you can sit there playing with your copy and it will tell you in real time as you make

those tweaks as you make those adjustments how you're dropping down the reading action. No way. Yeah, it's brilliant. It'll tell you, you know, you've got too many, used to the passive, you've got too many long sentences, too many complex sentences and it's lovely because it reacts in real time. So you can see your score improving. And I would say in terms of copyright and you're absolutely right, and the simplest things you can do is pitch

a much lower reading age than you expect. It will help. Extremeness aversion. Extremeness aversion. So, lovely set of studies from originally a psychological aim was to first key. So he was the research partner for years and years of Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2002.

Unfortunately, a diver that stage and you can't give a Nobel posthumously, so he probably would have won the Nobel if he lived long enough. But back in 1993, he runs a famous study, recruits a group of people and shows them two cameras. So you've got this basic and cheap camera let's say I can't remember what it was $139 and then a fancy expensive camera for say $200 and he asks people which would you pick which would you prefer and you get a rough 50-50 split. He then gets another group of people, shows them those same two cameras, but he also offers this new group a third camera for, say, $400 with loads of bells and whistles, loads of functionality. And what he finds is that only a small proportion of people, it's 21% of people, I think, pick that really high-end camera.

But what's of interest to us is the proportion of people in those original two cameras shifts dramatically. It's no longer one to one, it's now three to one in favor of the fancy camera. Now, he calls this finding, and it has been repeated with beer, popcorn, coffee, all sorts of different products. He calls this idea extremist aversion.

He says one of these quick rules of thumb that we use to decide how to behave is to pick the middle option. We fear that the cheapest option will be tacky and will look a bit mean. We fear that the most expensive option will be over engineered and will look like a show off. So the interesting thing here is you can shift people's willingness to pay by introducing a super expensive item that you never expect anyone to purchase.

So let's say you are selling a subscription to your gym program and you offer people where you can have a monthly price or you can sign up for annual. And let's say as a gym you are going to benefit by getting loads of people to sign up for your annual rather than your monthly offering. What most people would do is just think of, well, I'll reduce the annual price, I'll give people more benefits. But if you know about an extraneous version, what you would do is think, well,

let's offer a two year subscription, a three year subscription. You don't expect many people to sign up for that, but it's very presence makes the annual option look better in comparison, and it's that comparative bit that is so important in pricing. Are you familiar with Substack? Do you subscribe to any Substacks? I don't know. What Substack? It's a blog platform. It's kind of like what medium used to be.

It's very, very good. It's super, super popular at the moment and they are using extremist aversion. They're using the exact strategy that you're talking about. You can sign up monthly, you can sign up yearly, and then on almost every single person's or creator's profile, there is a founding member option, and the founding member option is usually the equivalent of maybe three or four or five years. So let's say it's $10 a month, it's $100 a year, or it's $500 for the founding member. The founding member gets, I don't know, a commemorative pin or something. It's basically pointless and a logo. But what you're actually doing here is anchoring people to think, well, that middle price is not so bad, I'll go for the $100 one. So anchoring has to be a key bias

that extremeness aversion is linked to. Absolutely. And there is a lovely lesser known study by Sutcle and Lichtenstein that suggests that the way that most brands use extremeness aversion could be improved on. So imagine, I'm sure it's probably the same as sub-stack, but most things Netflix spotify. You go go to their site and there's the basic

option, the mid option, the premium option left to right. The Suckley and Lichtenstein experiment says that is not the perfect approach. What you should do is show people the most expensive option first. So there are arguments and it's based on a lovely study, an fancy craft beer bar in America. Their argument is it's the first price that you see that is the most powerful anchor. So yes, you want an expensive thing to make everything else look better value, but it's the first thing that people see that sets that expectation. So if people read left or right, you should go high medium low, rather than what most brands do, which is low medium or high.

That's the same, I'm pretty sure I learned it from you on one of our last conversations. The same reason why restaurants should start their menu with some incredibly expensive platter, six person tasting menu, £250, which makes the overpriced focaccia bread at the first start of the Apparitifs. Exactly. You can just sweat when you see that $850 thing. You think, oh my God, I'm going to be bankrupt. So by the time you get to the 10 pound focaccia, you think, wow, few. Yeah, yeah, look at how brilliant value this for catcher is.

The same thing goes for wines as well, right? Like just pitch something nice and expensive at the top anchor everything down off that. Have you ever seen, is there such a thing as making that too big? Would it ever scare people away? Now that's a very good point. So I think you've got to the, the, the, the,

the nub of them out of there in the suddenly and lickedichtenstein experiment, it's, it's running a craft beer bar. So people come and sit down and they're given this menu of, I think, 13 beers. Either they see the cheapest beer, I think four dollars at the top, most expensive, ten dollars at the bottom, or they see the ten dollar beer at the top, cheapest at the bottom. And what's suddenly in Lichtenstein's find is there is a 4% increase in average spend when the most expensive beer is at the top. Now, that's brilliant if you run a bar or I think a restaurant because it suggests you should definitely be making sure the first thing people experience is expensive. But I think if someone has gone to a bar, they're not going to pick up a menu, see one item, drop the menu and walk out without lowering their eyes, you know, a millimeter. They're slightly committed. They've spent at least

five or ten minutes to get there. If you're on a website, you're probably not as committed. There's a greater risk of someone coming to the website, seeing a high price and bouncing. So if you run this test, you've got to monitor both average spend and conversion rate. So I think you're right that there is a danger that you take a finding in one setting, you use it elsewhere and you don't see the results you expect. So e-commerce and bars are different things. But what I think so valuable about this study is at least suggest a test.

You might never consider otherwise. And the brilliant thing with these tests is if they work, you run them forever, massive upside. They don't work, you run them for a week, turn them off, limited to downside. So absolutely agree, there are situations in which the experiment might not have the same result if you change the context. And then secondly, that's, yeah, there's a really interesting point about, could you push this too far? I know there was a Italian restaurant in Britain called Colupios and they pushed it to ridiculous extremes. They had a Vespa of a sale on the menu, so a £3,000 Vespa.

Now I think that's a brilliant way of using a radical, inexpensive anchor because you see that and you're not going to suddenly fear that you're going to end up with a really, really expensive meal. You're not going to feel like these people are exploiting you, but you've put out this massive number and you make comparatively everything else look a bit cheaper. So I think in that circumstance, the way that Carl Upt shows did it, you can have a really extreme number and not transgress fairness norms. However, I know there is an argument from negotiators that if you try this on a one-to-one basis, Chris Voss talks about this, more from experience, I think the next experiment, but he says, if you go into negotiation and pay review and you say,

what are million pounds? Well, it's such a ridiculous number that you are seen as acting bad faith and therefore you discredit yourself. So I kind of think that I've always got that Chris Voss voice in the back of my head when you're thinking about these anchors. So yeah, don't probably push it too far. I wonder whether there is something going on here to do with the categories of the products and which ones are particularly susceptible to what we're talking about. I get the sense that it would be more effective when you are looking at a menu or a list of items that are very easily comparable. But if Barker and Stonehouse were to put an incredibly expensive lamp up top, I wonder how much that cross is over when you're in there to

shop for a sofa or for a rug or for something else. The same thing goes, I find it very difficult to gauge the quality of the price of supplement brands, for instance, because you go in and you go, well, they've got this really expensive protein, but I'm not here for protein. I'm here to buy a new gym bag or I'm here to get whatever. So I wonder whether the breadth of the product range allows that anchor to almost decay in some way? Yeah, I mean, that's, I think that's a really interesting hypothesis. I think you're right

in that people are probably, you know, there are so many numbers around us. People are going to create their own mental comparison set. So ideally, you want to be setting a high ankle within that mental comparison. I think that makes, yeah, that, that, that seems fair enough. I think there you're probably getting to the, to agree of complexity where it gets the stage of the experiments that exist, take you so far. And then each individual brand probably needs to be thinking, well how can I rerun these studies in my particular store to see what works best for me. Denominating neglect. Denominating neglect. Now I think I'm sorry in my, in my idiocy at the beginning, I think I've blended together base rate neglect, which was the chow, hand lotion experiment, and I think I've blended together base rate neglect, which was the chow hand lotion

experiment. And I think I've raced straight into denominating the neglect. So when I was talking about jelly beans, I realized that halfway through I might have been mis-miss quotes. They are both very similar though. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they do. I think it's that underlying point of the naive reaction to numbers, which is key. So you want to think, how can I, and it's got to be honest, how can I honestly quote the largest possible discount? So you know, base rate neglect, you're talking about, maybe think about added bonus rather than discount,

to nominate and neglect, well that's when you move to areas like Gonzales and the rule of 100. You had this thing about stacking discounts in ascending order. If you go into, if anyone in the UK that's ever shopped in TK Max, I don't know if they have TK Max's over here in America,

but that's the sort of store where you would see 40% off plus 10% off plus an extra 5% off. Yeah, I don't have the computing power to be able to work out what the price of this item is. Well, what people do is they say, okay, 40, 10, 5, that's 55% off, but it's not actually, because if you take off 40, your tennis then off a smaller number, and then your five is offered an even smaller number still. So, I'd have to go back and do the maths and I'd probably have to set 70 to 10, but you end up with actually like a 51% discount. So again, it's stacking discounts is a way of making people, as you said, emotionally

respond and feel like they're getting a better offering than that they perhaps are. You said as well about adjusting the font size to get people to focus on either the sale price or on the original price and you can sort of adjust how much waiting people have there. Yeah, this isn't interesting. I think that this one from the Colter Brothers, what they show is they recruit a group of people and Half the people say see a original price of 100 pounds in small font and then new price 60 pounds in big font

other people see Original price at 100 pounds in big font New price 60 pounds in small font and what they show is the second group, the people who see the end discounted price in the smaller font, they think there's been a larger reduction in price. So they argue that people can flate physical size of the number with what it represents. So here, you want to be a bit careful because it is a one-off study. So has it got the same probability of working for your brand as something like scarcity or social proof or fairness, where there have been meta-analyses and hundreds of studies

in these areas, probably not. But it's another example of a potential experiment that you can apply to your pricing and no cost to yourself and intentionally increase your margins. So I think that is a really interesting one as a an areas test that if you hadn't heard of their study, you might never ever think of experimenting on it. The need to experiment. Ah, well, that runs over brilliantly. So what we've been discussing so far is sometimes the results you will get from a study will vary by context. And sometimes you will find a study that sounds interesting, but it's only ever been one run, one run once.

Now in those scenarios, so if you're either applying a study in a different place or there's not a huge body of evidence for it, you can't be certain it will work. So you need to set up your own experiments as a brand, as a business to rerun the study, but in your category, your specific brand, your specific circumstances. Now if you're going to do that, you've firstly got a great opportunity because all these studies are mentioning are in the the public domain so you can rerun the methodology quite easily just with those few tweaks that we talked about and if you do them though what you've got to be really careful of is how you test these ideas so you don't want to be directly asking consumers what motivates them. If you say to your consumers, okay, well, I'm thinking about, say, extremist version, I'm

thinking about not just offering you basic and premium, I'm now going to offer you basic premium, super premium. Would that change how you behaved? Your customer will probably laugh at you, swear at you. They'll say, well, I'm not a bloody idiot, of course, that wouldn't affect me. I will weigh up the amount you're charging versus the benefits you give me. So if you're interested in experimenting, you cannot ask people directly. What you have to do is this simple approach of what we call a monadic test. Half the audience has seen one of the offerings. So that's basic versus premium, half of the audience has seen basic, premium, super

premium. And if you split things out in that way, if you get a representative sample, you give them, randomize them into one of these two groups, you keep everything in the two settings the same apart from one variable any difference in performance any difference in people's reaction to those offerings you could attribute back to that single change variable so Yes, you need to experiment but make sure the way that you experiment is Sophisticated enough in that you don't take people's claims at face value enough in that you don't take people's claims at face value. Okay, so don't rely on stated preferences, wait for the revealed ones, and monadic is that just change one variable, don't fuck about with anything else? Yeah, it's a slightly pompous way that I think that's the danger of academics, that's the

danger of psychologists, they take a basic principle, they give it a fancy name, and they confuse the hell out of people. So all monadic means, I think Monad is kind of grateful one or something. People are not comparing side by side, you're randomizing people into groups. And then you as with the birds eye view, you the experimenter give both those groups the reasonably same offering, but you change one variable between the two groups. And yeah, absolutely. Any difference in performance you attribute to that, that single change variable.

I really enjoyed the story that you told you. You had seven biases that Ogle be tested. I think it was maybe for charity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Also, that's, yeah, the lovely example. So, what Ogle be changed to or Og will be concerned, I think they're called now, is they create an annual report. And one of the wonderful things they do

is they include things that didn't work as well as things that did. And they ran a test for Christian aid, I think it was in 2018. So 1.2 million envelopes go out for Christian aid and they put a little envelope through your door which basically asks you to donate money into it. You put money into the envelope and then they'll come around, say a few days later and collect it. They tested seven different messages. So some of those envelopes that went through people's door might have said, no, please donate, the government will add on another donation on top, gift aid.

Some of the messages said, for example, you've only got one week to donate, they're trying to move people to action through, it's guessed exactly, exactly. And then another one, though, those seven, was using heavier, more expensive paper, you know, thicker paper stock for the envelope. Now, that thicker paper generated twice the level of donations. I think it was 39 pence on average per person versus 18 pence for the gift aid offering. I don't think many people would predict that. It might be easy to post-rationalise afterwards. You could say, okay, well, it's all about costly signalling, you subtly infer that people are a bit mean if they only give a pound, and it makes them want to stick a bit more money

into they don't feel guilty themselves. Very easy to post-rationalise it, but to say that was going to happen beforehand, I think is unlikely. So to me, it's a lovely example, firstly of a company admitting what worked, as well as what didn't, and then secondly, showing that, you know, it's often very hard, you know, people are complex, it's very hard to know what will work. So if you're in a complex situation, you should be running experiments to prove some of these ideas that I'm saying work in generality.

They really sort of spread the strategies there as well. One of them was there was a special stamp that looked like it had been hand stamped and this has been delivered and prepared by hand which was what's that labor illusion. There's some people got labor illusion illusion of effort. Yeah, I mean, that's often works very well. You know, coming if we talked about that last time, but there's a lovely study by Marales. I have things at the University of Southern California where she goes out and recruits people and gives them a list of say 10 houses that meets their requirement. Some people are told that the estate agent generated this list automatically with a computer in an hour.

Others are told this state agent took 9 hours and they created the list manually. When people rate the quality of this state agent afterwards, the group who hear the estate agent went to the X-refer, they rate the estate Asian their ability at 36% higher than the other group. Oh, we did, we did, we did talk about this, we talked about it in, the example was Skyscanner. And it was the loading bar of Skyscanner, which is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Technologically totally arbitrary and exclusively performative.

Yes, absolutely. We might have talked about DICE as well, they're my favorite example. They talk about the 5127 prototypes, they got went through to create the vacuumless bag. You could argue, well, doesn't bloody matter how many failures there were? What matters is how high quality the final product is. But what Meralez would say is that it's a matter if it should logically be ineffective. What behavioral science tests are interested in, what does have an impact? And people use efforts expended as an easy way

of making a decision about the quality of a product. Okay, so you would normally expect, yeah, that emphasis of hand delivered efforts going into collective money to have an impact. So the fact it doesn't, I think, is something that it's very good that this agency admits occurred. You don't want people just to talk about their successes. We can learn just as much from people's failures.

Well, looking at the changes in donation that those people had coming back, it was 50% of them were below the control. Or a good chunk of them were below the control. So there was some things, I think the scarcity, which most people that come from an internet marketing world, this is a one time offer, the countdown time it begins as you hit the page,

you have 45 minutes to claim this once in a lifetime deal. But when you said, Christian Aid needs all donations by the end of the week, what you actually saw was a decrease compared to the control. So, you know, and who would have guessed that, especially from a world that's bereft of? Absolutely. And if someone works in e-commerce, they're probably right to think that for their own brand. There's a lovely, huge comparative study run by Swarbrick Jones. I think they look at 2,600 e-commerce studies, a lot of them in travel, and there's 28

different levers that are used across these different campaigns, and they rank the various different biases or levers on their average sales effect. And of the 28 they look at, the most effective overall is volume scarcity. There aren't many of these hotel rooms left. Next is social proof. Lots of people have bought this type of hotel room. Third is why I would call time scarcity, what they call urgency.

You haven't got long to act. So you're absolutely right for e-commerce people. I think scarcity is probably one of the first biases, time or volume that you would think about testing for your product. But I guess going back to that point made earlier around context is important. What you probably starting to see here is, well, commercial and charity, what works the two, they're varied enough that maybe you can't translate some of the findings from commercial settings into charity and voice versa. I'm thinking about my booking.com experience, which I use pretty regularly.

And I'm thinking, ex many people have booked this room today, like, hurried, these rooms are going fast. There's only this many left that we've got in our allocation and all this stuff. So it's every single being, there's taken all of the boxes that you've spoken about there. So the next one, which I think is very important and it's important not only for marketing, but I think for personal life too, which is framing. Oh, yeah, very good one. So it's essentially the idea that the same fact can have a market leaflet of different effects dependent on the language that's used. different effects dependent on the language that is used. So the study that I discuss is a 1974 one from Loftus and Palmer at University of Washington. And they play a video and you

can get this, if you people Google, Loftus and Palmer Experimental Video Car Crash, you will see a 15 second video of two cars crashing into each other. So have a look at that. And then what the psychologists did was get a large group of people and they said to some people, how fast are those cars going when they smashed together? Other people, how fast were those cars going when they contacted? Other people, how fast were they going when they collided? So they used six or seven different words, and then they asked people to estimate the speed of the two cars in miles per hour. And when the group who heard the words smashed, when they estimate the speed, they think it's 40 miles point eight per hour,

the group that heard the verb contacted, they think it's 31.8 miles per hour. So even though everyone is seeing exactly the same footage, there is a variance of 27% in terms of their speed estimate. Now, the psychologists were interested in police witness statements how people could be influenced by a skilled interviewer and so they were kind of concerned with how a a dubious police person could manipulate findings but I think if you're remarking what you can take from this is the language that they use to sell your products can be varied to huge impact. So for example, one of my favorite studies that isn't very well known is one from a Texas or a University of Texas psychologist, Peter and he gets a large group of people,

shows them an e-commerce site and for every purchaser, one of the items they're trying to buy just isn't there. Now sometimes on the site, it's labeled as unavailable, some people see Out of Stock, other people see sold out. When he questions those groups as to how irritate they are with the website. He sees a swing of 15% with the people who see unavailable being the most irritated, people who see sold out, the least irritated. Now, everyone is essentially like they're often some Palmer study. They're experiencing the same thing on an objective level. It's just

the language that's used to describe that situation varies. And if the website emphasizes unavailable, they're emphasizing their logistical magnitude, if the website emphasizes sold out, they're emphasizing how popular this product is. They're harnessing social proof. So the argument here is people do not experience events, they experience the description of events. And if you change that description, you can radically change people's reaction to the same situation. One of my favorite examples of this was from Sam Harris and he says that everybody knows

what it's like to finish a workout. You are sweating and panting on the floor and you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and your heart and your heart rates through the roof. This is a situation which oddly, despite being kind of objectively uncomfortable at the time, is actually oddly enjoyable, exclusively because of the framing that you place around it.

Now, if you were to spontaneously feel that while you were sat in traffic on your way to work, you would ring the hospital. You would think there is something terrible with me. So our story of what we tell ourselves around an experience very much is the determinant of the experience as well. Like the story that we tell ourselves

largely influences what the experience feels like to us. Yeah, so that's a, I've not thought about it that way. That's a lovely example. I'm never really often don't think about these experiments in a person saying, I'm always thinking about them from a commercial setting. But I came back from a stank do once and the flight landed very badly.

And I'd always been not particularly keen on flying, but that freaked me out and I developed a fear of flying. So I'd have to fly for work, yet I spent the entire flight thinking what would it be like to fall for five minutes from this plane that's bound to explode in the air. Now I tried all sorts of things to distract myself, having a drink, getting into a book, doing a cross with whatever it was, all the all these different things to try and get over this. None of them worked. The thing that worked was listening to heavy metal rap music, anything that has a adrenaline-fuel reaction in normality.

So I'd listen to it as we were taking off. And I think it over time changed my response from thinking, this is a signal that my adrenaline is a signal, this is a very dangerous situation, we're going to die, to the adrenaline flooding my body. Well, that's just how I normally react to this particular song. Oh, wow. So you'd, I'd never put the two and two together, but I think you're absolutely right. That's an example of reframing exactly the same decision by putting a different lens on it. Yeah, you'd, you'd used, this isn't like a cue that people would play calm music in order to become. This is a cue from your body. I am full of adrenaline, so I will play music which is associated with adrenaline. That's funny. Yeah. So I always listen to exactly the same song. I'm not particularly into rap,

but I have a workout playlist. One of them is Kanye West school spirit. So it's a console now. Okay, well, I can't. I know you can still listen to him. You just can't take his views on the Jews too seriously. Well, yes, I was only his music. So you there was another thing to do with and everybody's aware of this When you buy mints or ground beef, as it's called, out here, do you wanna call it 75% lean or 25% fat framing? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that is a leaven study. I might get the name wrong,

but essentially it's describing the same situation. But if you say 75% lean, people will think they meet, will be tastier. they think it'll be less greasy. If you emphasize 25%, in fact, by drawing tech people's attention to that particular element, you get a very different, different reaction. So you also had to think about using the benefit of using nouns rather than verbs. Oh, yes. Oh yes, so there is the idea that if you remind people that they are a voter, they're more likely to follow through and vote on the actual election day, then if you say to them, will

you vote? Will you be a vote? They agree, yeah. Will you vote? So will you be a vote from the agreement? Yeah, will you vote from the agree? They are more likely to follow through if they have described themselves as a voter. Probably because the voter that now describes who we are, it's part of our identity nature.

If you're just referring to an action, that's something that's fleeting and not particularly hypocritical, not. I wonder how? So yeah, that's something that's fleeting and not particularly hypocritical, not. So yeah, that's the idea. So we've tried to do, we've tried to apply this commercially and haven't seen any results yet, but reminding people that they had been a subscriber to a magazine and therefore should renew rather than saying to people, you know, you want subscribed, you should run you.

So, I haven't got a data back on that, but that's, I think it's something that could probably be applied a bit more. That's really interesting. I wonder how you get somebody from not being a thing to being a thing. My point being that what we're talking about here is the noun allows somebody to have that identity become attached and what you're looking to do is for what the identity becomes attached to, to be the action that you want them to take. If you want people to vote, you tell them that they are a voter. But if there was a world in which it was really difficult to be a voter or the only people that voted were people that earned over $100,000, I wonder how you get someone to believe in the new noun identity if they don't. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, that's a very good point. I mean, the tactic, I think we might have talked about this last time, one tactic in this area is what's called the foot in the door technique, which is if you want people to adopt a new behaviour, try and make the first request ridiculously easy. So there's a 1966 study where sometimes the experiment is Friedman Fraser asks people to put a giant sign saying drive carefully in their front garden, no, barely anyone does it. Other times they do a two-step process where first of all they are supposed to put up a tiny little sticker saying drive carefully loads build do it the cycle just leave wait two weeks and then they come up with a giant sign and in that second scenario three or four times more people put up the big sign and more people put up the big sign. And their argument is, well, you make the first request really easy, so people feel like they have to do it because it would be a churlish not to, such an important thing

as road safety. Once they've put up that sign, you can then use that in the principle of consistency. Once they've put up the sign, you then go back with your genuine ask and people will remember their past behaviour. They'll want to be consistent with that past behaviour. They'll think to themselves, I've put up the sticker, I must be interested in road safety. To be consistent with that, I better put up the giant sign. So I wonder if that, if you want to kick start this identity, start small would be the big thing.

Definitely ironically, yeah. Fanos. Oh yes, this was one of the most interesting areas I think when I was researching the book. And it's the idea that people's reaction, even in commercial situations, is remarkably driven by fairness. We're not just interested in a good is remarkably driven by fairness. We're not just interested in a good deal and an absolute sense. We are interested in being treated fairly compared to others. So the study that caught my eye was I think it's a 1996, it's quite an

old study and it is with students. So take it with a picture of salt, but it's a blower and baseman study. And when people arrive for the first day at campus, they are asked whether they would help the psychologist the next day with an experiment. They can have to turn up at the psychologist's lab, do 40 minutes of math puzzles, and they will be paid $7. The people who were asked that, 72% of them agreed to take part. Next group of people, they are given the same basic request, come to our lab tomorrow, do 40 minutes of math puzzles,

but this group are told you will be paid $8. However, they then follow up with a little white lie, they are then told that other people earlier would pay $10, but unfortunately they've spent all their cash and they can only offer 8 now. Now in that scenario, there is a 25% drop in what people are prepared to accept. So you get 54% of people agreeing to take part. Now this is fascinating because what a classical economist would say is, well, it doesn't matter what other people have paid, all you should focus on is whether or not $8 is worth 40 minutes of your time. So

you should have this increase. But if you think about the principle of fairness, people are enraged by this idea that others have got a better deal. Now, that study I think is fascinating because you can apply this in big and small ways if you are a brand. You can apply it in a big strategic way and think, how do I reframe my competition as treating their customers unfairly? And if you can do that, you can tap into this pool of anger that will motivate people to want to switch, come to your brand. Or if we're getting super tactical, you could apply this on your e-commerce site. So think about what virtually every e-commerce site does. Now, you're shopping for a pair of trainers, you've picked these trainers, $100, you love them, they look amazing, you're completely happy, you put them in your basket,

you go to checkout and then above the checkout button, what is there normally? Normally there is a giant box, you know, throbbing giant white box that says, you know, add your discount code. Now for that transgress fairness norms, add your discount code. Now for that, transgress fairness norms. Essentially, what you've done there is told your customer, you told these people who are completely happy to hand over the money, that other people are getting a better deal. That will in rage and they will go off and look for discount code, most of them will probably, probably never come back. So So, fairness, I think, is an interesting area that too many brands ignore. Too many brands think that people are cold,

calculating machines, but actually an awful lot of behaviour is driven by. Now, not the absolute benefit of the offer, it's am I get relatively getting good deal compared to other people? Shopify, interestingly, if you're on mobile, it's not the same if you're on desktop, but I would guess that probably at least 50%, maybe 70% or more of shopping is done on Shopify and mobile. Yeah. Their discount field is hidden behind a drop-down toggle.

Yeah, great, yeah, yeah, that's a really really nice idea because I think what that's working on. I think we would do something similar with like a, you know, if you've got a promo code, it's a very recessive little link you can add. And I think they're working on the principle that people who have a code will be really looking for the way to put it. People who haven't won't. So that's one time default, why default, given the fact that probably fewer people will be shopping with a code than without a code, why defaults to make the code?

And this big advert that you're paying more than you probably should do, and more than other people potentially are. Yes. Yeah, I think absolutely. You could have a, you could only show the discount box to example for people you've driven there via affiliates. You could put up your prices by a percent and then populate the box with a 1% off code,

and then anyone else who has an actual code could override it. There's loads of different ways. Did you see, talking about fairness, I think this has stopped over the last few years, but there was a period, especially when Black Friday first became big in the UK, where fast fashion companies and jewelry companies would slowly creep the price of their product up throughout October, into November, or they would just switch it over one week,

and then the discount, and people were using way back machine and internet archive and stuff to go back and look at what the old price of this product was, what they realised was that with the discount the price of the product was the same as it was when you could have purchased it at the start of October. Yes, so I mean, I think there is an opportunity there potentially for competitive brands to shine a light on that. I think there is also a self-interested doubt that you should have at the back of

your mind about some of these tactics, which is the difference in the short and the long term. In the short term, you will generate extra cash by some slightly nefarious tactics. The danger you have is if people ever feel they have been manipulated too far, then you get this retribution. So, you've always got a bit of a balance of how much you should push some of these pricing tactics. And there's a lovely idea from, I think it's an American philosophy called John Rawls, who talks about the, I think it's an American philosophy called John Rawls, who talks about the,

I think it was the publicity principle. And he basically talks about morality as, if someone you, you were applying this tactic, would they be angry with you? And if they are, then it should set off some alarm bells. At least you should consider whether it's worth doing. You know, it's a debate, I think, that Richard Deiler goes back and forth

on the beginning of his book, Nudge. Are you familiar with Good Heart's Law? Yes. Isn't it something along the lines of, once a metric has used as a target, that metric loses all validity. Correct. Yes.

You know that. Let's say that your outcome that you wanted to get that the metric that you were optimizing for was email subscribers So you said I want as many email subscribers as possible So that's a target what you're actually looking for the outcome that you're looking for is something more like I want lots of people that care about what I say to be interested and Receiving my emails in a warm and welcoming way on a weekly basis. That's what you're actually optimizing for, but the measure that you're using as the outcome proxy is email subscribers. But if you start to optimize exclusively for that,

what you could see is a world in which you said, sign up to my mailing list and every person that does will be given a million pounds will have free parachutes. And when people sign up to my mailing list and every person that does will be given a million pounds will, a free pair of shoes. And when people sign up and they find out that that isn't the promise that they're going to get, on the other side of that, you go, well, look, I achieved the target, which was get lots of email subscribers, but it wasn't the actual outcome that I was looking for, the measure ceases to be a good target.

Yes, if there was a sliver of difference between what you're incentivizing and what you actually want, you generate some pretty dangerous repercussions. I think you had an apology, is it Ganesi? I don't know how to pronounce it. It's very easy, yeah. Nese, sorry. Wonderful book, Mixingles and He Talks.

There's a chapter through the middle. And it's a wonderful coverage of some responses to ill-set incentives. So one of them he talks about, I think it might have been British archaeologists in China where they, this is not kind of 19th century, they reward peasants there for bringing them pieces of fossil and they get a set amount of cash per piece. So what happens is those people are very interested in maximizing their income. So rather than bringing a complete fossil bone, they find those fossil bones, They smash them into 20 pieces And they take each piece

One at a time to the the archaeologist to maximize their income. So yeah, you've got to be very careful about What incentive you set? Talking about fairness COVID toilet roll prices in the UK. Oh Yes, so Gosh, that was a study I ran back in the midst of COVID when people were hoarding toilet roll. And what I asked was, I said people a little thought experiment, I said imagine you, a local supermarket was charging a pound for toilet roll, they've put up the price to say two pounds, I can't remember what it was during the shortage, do you think this is fair?

And it was a phenomenal proportion of people who said it was very unfair or unfair, saying of the order of like 90%. Most economists would say this is just a reaction of supply and demand, but people don't treat prices in that manner, they feel that the exploitation of a surge in demand with excess pricing is unfair and there's a danger that they will punish that supply. You also spoke about how you could use righteous indignation to compel people to do stuff? Yes, I kind of think this is something that isn't really used enough. I'm interested in fairness because we've talked about the Blouten Basement study. People would rather have a smaller fee that everyone's getting than a large fee, but which is less than others. Now, you also see that in animals.

There is an amazing video online that I was strongly recommend people Google afterwards. If you put in friends the wall, capture monkeys, fairness video, what you'll see is a pair of monkeys happily performing all sorts of tasks for a slice of cucumber. But if one of those monkeys is paid in grapes,

which they rate as a better treat, and one is paid in cucumber, the monkey that is now being paid in cucumber will lose their rag. They will not perform for this payment. So again, it's a bias that you can see in humans and something we shared a common ancestor with three million years ago. When you see these drives of behavior, straddling the species, you'll know you're on some powerful. So if I was a brand, I would look at ways of reframing my competition as behaving unfairly. So if I was launching a

competitive taxi brand to Uber, surge pricing I think is their Achilles Seal. Most banks, if I was trying to compete with them if I was a new FinTech startup, I'd be talking about or reaching people when they have just been hit by a fine. They've got you know, two pounds over their overdraft limit, they've just been hit by a fine. They've got, you know, two pounds over their overdraft limit. They've just been hit with the 20 pound fine. That's a rare moment when people are so enraged, they're probably open to switching. So how do you reframe what your competition are doing

as a fairness transgression? Very nice. Freedom of choice. Mm. So this is an interesting area. And my pronunciation is never very good. I was always horrendous at languages at school. So it is a French psychologist, I think, called the game.

And he came up with an idea called the But You Are Free Principle. So one of many bizarre psychology experiments where it involves the psychologist dressing up as a beggar. There's another one by a guy called Santos called the Peac effect, all around how surprising requests generate more donations. But on this one, again, goes up to people at a or near a bus stop and he says, can you give me some coins so I can get a bus and I think it's 10% of people give him some coins. Next group of people we goes up exactly the

same request to begin with but then at the end he says but you are free to accept or refuse and the proportion of people who give him money jumps to I think 48%. That's a huge swing in behaviour. So interesting is of course everyone in both of those settings always had the ability to say no. All that's changed is the requester has drawn attention to the other person's ability to say no. So the argument here is one of the things that we love is to retain a sense of agency, a sense of control in the situation. So if you are trying to persuade someone to take out our subscription, to give you a rise, what you should be doing is drawing their attention to the fact they can say no. What again study suggests

is that will increase the probability slightly paradoxically of them agreeing to your demands. So you want to involve people in the decision process in a way? Yes, but I think remind them of their right to say no. So it's not just involving them. I think it's, give, remind them their sense of control. It is the key thing. And of course, you know, situations with beggars are a little bit bizarre. That five-fold increase is a very, very large one. So it's not just that situation where this,

but you are free, Prince Paul, works. I think it was Carpenter who ran a meta analysis free principal works. I think it was carpenter who ran a meta analysis about 15 studies I think where he looked at lots of different people at run experiments where they had emphasized the other person's freedom to refuse and there is a consistent increase in compliance. Now it might not be as high as again study but it's a consistent consistency. Wow that's a very reliable. So something else that seems to make sense here is if you are overly assertive when communicating with customers, and there was a place in Austin, a recovery center that had some

internal strife, and it was going to change, and all of the management was going to drop. And we also decided to, along with that. So there was sort of a, how would you say, a foundation, a baseline of ambient sort of discontent because there was some social murmurings in gossip about what was going on behind the scenes. And then one Saturday morning, every single member of this recovery place got an email that said prices are going up and it was going up by maybe two X or two and a half X and

You will be built and the new prices kick in in 48 hours reply if you want to if you if you want to Something like that and the number of people that I know who were really really sort of upset put off by that and One of the main things that happened there was it was the kind of language that was used. It was basically like price is going up, like it'll lump it, if you reply, if you want to cancel, type thing. And that over the legislative language,

I think didn't do them very many things. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they've got a kind of perfect storm of problems there. I think the one thing, or the couple of other things they did, they said that the price rise was going to be immediate. There's a lovely set of studies by people like Liam Delaney at the university of Sturley into what's called the present preference bias. So I think in one of his studies says to people, do you want to pay me £13 now or £16 in a month's time? And the order of 60% of people would rather pay

the larger amount in a month's time. Now, if you turn that into a monthly interest rate, I think it's 23%, if you turn it into an annualized interest rate, it's over 1,000% a year. It's a phenomenal interest rate, but people would prefer to pay it than give over the money in that instant. So what he argues is what he calls present preference bias.

We overweight, pleasure in the pain in the now, and we discount pleasure in pain in the future far, far too much. So if I was gonna push that price rise through, I would give people loads of notice and tell them it's happening in two or three months' time. Because spending an extra 10 pounds a month in that distant time period

won't affect me knowing I've got a hand over £10 tomorrow. That's... So give me the justification for charming versus cajoling an audience member. It seems like charm is always going to work. Yeah, there were always with all these, there are a few nuances. One of the interesting ones is The original kind of experiment so far earlier than again was a guy called Bram I think was Jack Bram and he came up with an idea called reactants so It's the argument if you feel your freedom is being curtailed you can often push out against this. And one of the early studies was by a guy called Pennybacker at the University of Texas. And so he puts up signs in a men's washroom that

either says, please don't graffiti or do not graffiti exclamation mark, exclamation mark. And he sees, I think, of the order of twice the amount of graffiti on the authoritarian sign. But what's interesting, so that's the same basic finding as you'll discuss in, we've got with again that if you're overly authoritarian it can backfire. But one of the interesting nuances is the extent of that backfire affects, depended on the authority level of the communicator. So if the sign was positioned as coming from the head of security, it really aggravated people. If the sign came from the groundsment, it didn't have much of a negative reaction in the authoritarian manner. So the point being

here is, reactants is far more likely to occur if the message comes from someone in a position of power. if the message comes from someone in a position of power. So if you are doing peer-to-peer communications of equal people, it might not be too much of an issue. If it is a letter coming from the tax office and they are behaving authoritarianly, it's much more likely to create this negative reaction. So think about who the message comes from. It is an important one.

I'm trying to work out why this effect would exist. Fairness makes a lot of sense. It's reciprocal altruism. It's not being taken for a ride. We could see how that would be adaptive. Having, I don't know, this pushback against a tyrannical leader almost, even if the tyrannical leader happens to be a badly-worded poster or a poor email. Forty-eight hours don't use a better price rise. I find it fascinating that it seems like embedded in our psychology is a way that we react to the local ecology in terms of how tyrannical it is, how authoritarian it is, it's mediated by the person that is giving that request in a way, which also suggests that we have some kind

of softness bias toward people that are lower down the totem pole. I think the implications of this are really interesting. Yeah, if it's an interesting question about why it happens, and I wonder if, you often look to some of these biases, is could there be an evolutionary explanation? And maybe it's a sense of, well, if we fear that we are losing control, that reduces our life chances, potentially, if someone else is in charge,

they're probably gonna look after themselves rather than us, maybe. Maybe we are queued up to respond in that way, but that's slightly speculative. There is some good evidence that talks about two different types of leaders that would have happened to answer. So one that rises due to prestige and another that rises due to dominance. The one that rises due to dominance is preferred during times of warfare, times of strife, chaos, because you need the strong, no nonsense. We are going to go and do this. We charge forward. You don't listen to anybody else like let's just get this done. Those leaders don't perform anywhere near as well during times of peace.

In fact, they're often killed. Homicide was one of the most common forms of death from within the tribe, not from outside of the tribe. It was within homicide. And yeah, I wonder whether there's... I don't know, would we have been at war or at peace most of the time, and cesterly perhaps we would have been in times of peace, which means that we have almost this kind of authoritarian radar or like a tyrannist radar that means oh, if the way that I feel at the moment is, if I'm in a bathroom and I'm just trying to take a piss in peace, this isn't the environment in which I will respond particularly well to someone that is using dominance

to try and get me to do something. That's interesting. So the next one, which I learned from Rory Suddle and the first time actually was the Red Sneakers effect. Oh, yes, yeah, but so a lovely set of studies from Francesca Gino at the Harvard Business School. And the basic idea is if we see people breaking conventions, we assume they are higher status. My favourite part of her study is a pilot study she did.

When she's testing out the basic idea, she goes out to academic conferences. This is early 2000s and the norm of behavior at these conferences, the convention is you should dress smartly. So if you're a bloke, you'd be expected to wear shirt jacket. So as people are arriving at the conference, she monitors their smartness dress and she notes it down. She then goes and finds those people and says the how many publications you got how many Citations you got so citation is

One review of your one mention of your work the academic work in a peer review paper so more citations The more success you know crude metric, but you're pretty accurate When she crosses the two bits of data she sees a very clear Inverse correlation so the super successful But when she crosses the two bits of data, she sees a very clear, inverse correlation. So the super successful academics, the people who go and talk shows, you know, write newspaper columns, they're the ones who are most likely to be breaking the convention and dressing really scruffily. Whereas if you go down to the other end, the people with barely any citations, the people

who have barely published anything, people who haven't got tenure, people who are just starting out in the career, they are much, much more likely to abide by their conventions. Now, Gino's argument is that you need status to break a convention. So imagine a situation in which you're at work. A CEO turns up wearing Bermuda shorts. Well, in that scenario, no one is going to send that person home. No one's going to criticize them. But if the intern does it, they get sent home, they get pinnared. So what Geno argues is you need a degree of social capital to afford or to be able to break the invention, you can ignore some of the punishments. And what, or they won't be applied to you.

And what she says is that people, and this is what I later study to show, is people are remarkably well achieved this. So we see people breaking inventions, we assume they must be higher status. So I love this because many advertisers have heard the argument that if you behave distinctively you're more like to be noticed what Gino ads is another layer

which is if you behave distinctively if you break convention you're more likely to be seen as higher status too. So it's a bit more could have new news to most brands, to most businesses, to most communicators. How would you apply this? So I think for most brands, there are an awful lot of conventions in their category. If you think about how watch ads behave, how perf you matter, how car as behave, most of them are byed by the same conventions. Think about a press ad for a car. Nine times out of 10, it shows a beautiful mountainous scene, bendy road, and then there's the car and a profile shot. What Gino would say is if you, unthinkingly, just repeat this convention in your advertising,

I'm thinking, Lee, just repeat this convention in your advertising. You'll be seen as low status. What you should do is think of your category, think of all the different conventions, split those conventions into two groups, some of which are there for a very good reason, leave those well alone. Others are just there for tradition sake. If you break those conventions, firstly, the one rest of the effects as you'll be noticed, but also the red sneakers effect says you're likely to be believed to be high status and mind more.

And this is mediated at least a little bit by the existing awareness, the positioning of the brand. If Kia decides to break convention, it's different to if Audi decides to break convention. Yeah, absolutely. With all these studies, there are nuances, and Gino looks a few. I think one of them is you need to be, or the audience needs to know you're breaking this on purpose. If they think you're breaking a convention through ignorance, it can backfire. And then secondly, yes, if someone is already perceived to be high status and they break a convention, there are awards are much, much greater. If you get down to someone who is perceived already to be low status and they break a convention, it can again backfire.

So yeah, there is a variance on those two criteria. The halo effect. Ah, the halo effect. So this is an interesting one. It's essentially the idea that people do not evaluate each element of another person discreetly. If they feel that someone is superior in one respect, it ripples out to all their other attributes. So the classic study, well, there are classics that are going back to the 1920s, but the one I really liked, the 1977 study by Nisbit, recruits, 118 people, and they all see a video of a Belgian academic giving a lecture. Now half the people see a video, same content,

but the academics a little rude and it comes across a bit cold. The other half of people see the academic being more friendly and warm. Now as you'd expect when the two groups rate the likeability of the academic, the group who see the warm-friendly academic rate the most 70% more likely. So you just as you expect you behave in a nice way you're more likeable. What's interesting though is Nisbit also asks about loads of other attributes of the the lecturer. Now what's their appearance like? How he retains their accent. And he finds that when the lecturer is behaving that friendly manner, people are twice as likely to enjoy the accent, think that he's good looking as in the other scenarios behaving like a big idiot. So the argument is here, if you have one dominant, positive or negative characteristic,

that will affect how your other unrelated characteristics are interpreted. So what's interesting here is if you are a business and you're trying to communicate how amazing you are, how trustworthy you want to be, how high quality you are, you don't have to just communicate those things. You could pick another area, which is easier to impress people on,

and then the expectation would all of your attributes and your metrics would improve. So it's almost a different way of thinking about what you should communicate. Don't necessarily communicate what matters, communicate what is easy to impress people on. And I think one area here for brands is think about well coming across as witty and charming. You can actually do that and have it. You can actually be funny. How you convince them when you are trustworthy or high quality, well that's a nebulous thing that it's harder to do in an advert. So work with the limitations of the kind of communication medium and try and emphasize

the metric that you can move, not necessarily the metric that you think matters. That's very interesting. I like the fact that with the halo effect, which in pop psychology is traditionally to do with pretty privilege, basically, that you have good-looking people and everybody presuring everything that they do. It's better. What you're saying here is that there are

a number of different vectors upon which you could win. If you were charming, if you were funny, if you were polite, if you were good-looking, if you were tall, if you were reputable, if you were whatever, whatever, like educated, well-informed, so on and so forth. You can use whichever of these you can win at to trickle down and try and cascade all the rest of them.

And I would imagine as well that there are some that are longer leave as the others. I would imagine wit, humor, personality, sort of charm, politeness, pleasantness, generally from an interpersonal perspective are going to be things that will trickle downstream more effectively because they're much more universal. Yeah, from a communications perspective, I think, and this is where I'm going to move into

speculative territory, so it would be just in challenges on this one. But I wonder if something like behaving witterly, you can do that in an advert. You can make a joke. You don't just have to claim that you're funny. The problem with when it comes to attributes like a trustworthyness or premiumness, it's very hard to absolutely demonstrate. You have to make a claim. And the problem with claims is why would anyone believe them? Because if you are low quality or high quality, you're both going to say you're amazing quality. A claim is completely empty, much more powerful to focus on things that can be demonstrated

rather than claimed. And I wonder if that's why you'll write on areas like wit. It's something you can demonstrate rather than just state. What about being too clever? There must be such a thing as that. Oh, that's interesting. So I mean, the closest study I've seen there is the the Prattful effect, the original 1966 study by Elliot Aronson. So he recruits a colleague of his taking part in a quiz and the guy is given secretly the questions and the answers by Aronson. So does amazingly well, I think gets 90 or 92% of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles. Now, when people are played a recording of that amazing quiz performance,

he, and they're asked how much they like the conquest contestant, the listeners give a so-so rating. Next, group of people, they're played the same recording of the amazing quiz performance, but there is an additional 30 seconds. And in the final moment to the quiz the contestant makes a cock up he spills a cup of coffee down himself. In that scenario the listeners who get that recording rate the contestant has 40 or 45% more appealing. So I think you're right there it can be this thing of perfection can be irritating. If someone comes across as this amazing genius,

well, our reaction is maybe to hate them somewhat because we feel worse in comparison. If they spill a cup of coffee themselves, they're no longer seen as maybe quite so much of a threat and therefore they can come across as a bit more appealing. So I think there is there might be, yeah, I think there is something in what you say. In the world of online content creation, there's a number of people who are really struggling at the moment because they never show vulnerability. People know that they've got vulnerability, people know

that they, their self-righteousness or the fact that they are unperturbed by whatever criticisms come from the internet and a lot of these people are quite worthy of criticism. But that has galvanized huge Reddit threads. There's hundreds of thousands of people in certain sub corners of the internet that basically are trying to find the vector on which they can finally get this person to show that something is actually bothering them. And I think that it's almost that sort of too perfect concern that we've got here. Yeah. If someone never shows any weakness, vulnerability, we become skeptical of that because we see it for ourselves. First off, we're skeptical because we think everybody has this.

Secondly, we are untrusting of them because we presume that they must be hiding what it is that they've got behind it. Thirdly, we would say, well, I'm going to continue to poke and poke and poke because this is a fun game to see how much this person can take before they do end up breaking. It kind of creates a perfect storm to galvanize people to try and take someone down. I've seen this multiple times and it's basically the same formula. Yeah, I think there's a, I think you're absolutely right there is a, there's a lovely study by Northwestern University where they look at likelihood to purchase products after reading a product review. So it's all

numeric product reviews, zero to five, five been perfect, zero been crap. And what they show is, as the review gets better, people become more like to purchase. They look at 100,000 different offerings, that's a huge sample. But what they find for every of the 2025 categories that they look at, for every one of those categories, the highest rate of purchases is not a five out of five reviews. It's somewhere between I think 4.2 and 4.5. Now that's where purchasing peaks, if the reviews get any better, purchase rates decline.

Their argument is exactly as you say, which is that perfection is too good to be true. If you find a kind of a random supplement brand, that you've never heard of and it gets 10,000 or 5 star reviews. What's more likely that it's actually perfect or something's being manipulated? People, if they see 4.7 or 4.8, therefore they're more likely to believe these are honest and give it the credence it deserves. So I think you're right, there are some studies commercially that show perfection can be can be off put. Peak and rule, which a lot of people listening will be familiar with

the original study that was done with endoscopies, colonoscopies. I think it was colonoscopies. Yeah, not a fun procedure. Not a fun thing, not something that normally gets experienced upon. Yeah, there's a lovely, kind of an array of my study. There recruit a group of people, and these are genuine patients going if you're going to ask me is, every patient is given a handheld device that buzzes every minute,

and when it buzzes, the patients have to turn a dial to say how much pain they're in. Zero none at all, 10 excruciating. So average time must be last 15 minutes, so they get 15 ratings from what they'd call the experiencing self, these are in-moment ratings. Next they get a rating from the patient as they leave in the hospital and then two months after the

operation and that is another rating reflected on how paying for overall the operation was. The expectation before the study was that the average ratings from the remembering self, those reflective ratings, should be roughly the same as the average rating from the experiencing self. But that is not what happens. The average amount of pain people experienced is only a poor guide to what people remember. What's a much better guide are two moments in particular. The peak moment, the single worst moment of that operation is disproportionally important and the final moment. So you could, for example, have a low level of pain for 13 minutes and then a medium level of pain for two minutes and that person would remember the experience worse than someone who had a medium level of pain for 13 minutes and a low level of pain for two minutes at

the end. It's the final moments that are disproportionately important. It's the single worst moments, disproportionately important in shaping memory. Now that's fascinating because that can be applied by brands. You might think Konoff is far too different a world, but that idea that some moments matter more than others can be applied to any brand experience. So, a couple of examples, I love a restaurant in London called Flatiron, steak restaurant, reasonably priced, like man, they're 15 pounds for a state $20, you have your steak,

well after they've given you the bill, they give you this tiny little pair of miniature steak knives, and they say, I'll just hand these in as you leave it. You hand them into the person at the cloakroom, buy the door, and in return they give you a salted caramel ice cream. Most restaurants end on the worst moment. They end on the bill, the pain, the faffing around, the splitting, the cash, all that kind of stuff. What Flatline do so cleverly is they create a high for that final moment as you leave. I bet you most people who remember, who most people who visit a flat and I remember that single instance.

Is there something to do with the effort of it not just being everybody on the way out gets a salted caramel ice cream? It's that you have to take the thing, get the thing, give it in. Oh, that's interesting. So I was thinking, I wonder if some of the appeal is, it's unexpected, it's surprising. It's also done after the bill. It doesn't feel like it's some kind of commercial transaction. Well, if you come into my restaurant, I'll give you an ice cream for free. That's just a negotiation. This seemingly is done out of the largest, you know, the, you know, the, the, it's done out of the kind of beauty of their soul as it were or whatever. They don't seem to have an obvious financial benefit. I wonder if that makes it so positive.

Have I told you about the thing we did with lollipops at nightclubs? Oh, I don't think so. Go on. Okay, so I learned about the peak and rule six or seven years ago. And we were encountering a number of challenges. One of them being that a lot of nightclubs are in high built-up city center neighborhoods places. Noise abatement orders come not only from the sound of the speakers, but also from the sound of egress when people leave. And if you dump a thousand 18 year olds on the street at three in the morning, they start chanting things, they run around in scream and laugh and fight and kick each other. So we needed to come up with a solution and I tried my best to come up with a Pete End

rule that did both of the things that we needed. So what we did was as people were leaving, we had two good-looking girls stood with buckets of lollipops, like just little sweet lollies, giving them a lolly, meant that they had something in their mouth, which meant they were much less likely to start chanting and singing. The sugar high seemed to have a reduction in the number of people that hung around afterward,

because it gave them enough of a little bit of energy to get them into a taxi in home. It meant that they didn't hang around the takeaways and do that stuff for quite so long, and hopefully it gave them a, oh, that was, wasn't that nice. Do you remember that lollipop that we gave or whatever? Sometimes we give people pound coins that had stickers on and the sticker was a flyer for our club night. And if they came back with just the one pound coin, they could get in for a pound with that one pound coin, but they had to hold onto it. That was something else else we tried doing. But yeah, that lollipop thing,

that was pure peak and... That's a lovely idea. Do you know what I mean? Who should talk to? There is an amazing guy called Stephen Colgan. I might have got that pronunciation slightly wrong again. And he was the the met I think for 20 years and he was became fascinated with behavioral science and he used all sorts of behavioral science tactics to reduce crime. And yeah, so the Lollipop idea reminds me of saying that he wants, talks about this whole idea, if you give someone a Lollipop coming out of a nightclub, you know, also makes them feel a bit like childish and obviously they're less like to punch someone else in the face, so hopefully.

Did that no one's ever had a fight whilst they've got a lollipop? Yeah, it's not that chanking has a, yeah. What about someone that's doing something that's less experiential than a flat iron or a club night in terms of peak andrall? I mean, the other one that I've seen apply it and it's not all about kind of sweet I feel like we've come to ice creams, lollies and haribo. Wiggle so there

are a cycle brand in the UK. One of the things they do you've ordered your fancy helmet and lycra they'll put into the order without telling you you have five pent bag of haribo. Now, it's an unexpected delightful thing at the end of the journey. Now, what I think's interesting about this is, most brands think about how do we make a brilliant first impression? What wiggle, what your nightclub example,

flowering, what they're doing, you're saying, well, yeah, maybe first impression is important, but actually, if we want people to come back to our restaurant on nightclub in a few months time, if we end on a high, they're much more likely to remember it. So I think it reorders people's prioritization of where they put their efforts. And the second thing it does is in some organizations, and this is the peak part, what they do is they think we've got these hundred different areas of our experience, our hotel or our restaurant. Let's try and make them all a little bit better. What the peak end rule would suggest is while you're fritter away your budget and it won't

have much impact, what you should do instead is think about, well, let's put all our budget for our creative budget into the, our lollies at the end, all our budget rather slightly better uniforms for the people that fly on and slightly fancy cutlery, let's put it into the Salted Calum Menel idea. You know, you pick one moment of excellence rather than trying to do everything a little bit better. Very interesting.

I think there are some broad implications. I imagine that both the peak and the end could be the same thing as well. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you ideally could argue well that if you're going to create a peak moment, best it's at the final. Because you get to you two multipliers on that.

Yeah, there's a restaurant called Tiki Tatsuya out here in Austin and it's a sort of Tiki Hawaiian themed thing. And every, I think it's every hour, every 30 minutes, all of the lights shut off, and this huge show occurs where light projection runs across the ceiling, and this Tiki head bursts into flames and all sorts of stuff happens. And it's actually quite intrusive, if you're in the middle of an interesting, but it's done in a really charming way, and it's kind of fun. And I want to say it's maybe every half-nourished, 45 minutes.

So it maybe happens twice during a typical meal. And Frankenstein's in Edinburgh, which is on, I want to say it's just at the top next to the vodka revolution. They have every hour or every 90 minutes. Automatic Frankenstein gets lowered from the ceiling and electric lightning sounds come and then he sits up and oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, all that shit happens. And it's kind of cheesy and kind of a bit shit. But at the same time you go, that was nice. I remember it. You know what I mean? I've remembered both of those things to you. If you told me when I went to Dean's Italian, what the peak part of it was, it's like, oh, well, the mashed potato was pretty nice, I guess,

or whatever. There's nothing there. Yes, you can argue whether or not you want the main memory to be the Frankenstein, I can't come down from the ceiling, but what you've certainly showed is, that that is something that is at least memorable. So the P Ken rule, I think, suggests the tactic of doing one thing accidentally rather not to things go well and made an ideally putting that at the final part of your experience, how you then create that kind of highlight moment. Well, that then I think is a little bit of subjectivity. Beautiful. Richard Chotten, again, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you're doing at the moment?

Well, I've just released the book, so a book called The Illusion of Choice, so get that in Amazon or any of the big retailers, have a look there. And then on Twitter at our shop, when ever I see an interesting article or experiment about psychology or behavioral science and how it can be applied in marketing or advertising. I'll post it up there. So either of those places are good. You have one of the coveted 99 follower spots on my Instagram rich and very well. Very well deserved. I really appreciate you. I love the stuff that you do. I can't wait to see what you do next and when it is ready, you will be coming back on and we will talk about it again. Fantastic.

Thank you very much Chris, much appreciate. Thank you very much for tuning in. I always enjoy having Richard on the show. I think that's the fourth time that he's come on now. Always great to learn about human nature and why we are the way we are. I'm going to leave you with a quote from Morgan Haussel here that says, the best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want. By this measure, some billionaires are broke.

I'll see you next time.