The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics by Stephen Wendel

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics by Stephen Wendel Designers and managers hope their products become essential for users—integrated into their lives like Instagram, Lyft, and others have become. Such deep integration isn’t accidental: it’s a process of careful design and iterative learning, especially for technology companies. This guide shows you how to apply behavioral science—research that supports many products—to help your users achieve their goals using your product. In this updated edition, Stephen Wendel, head of behavioral science at Morningstar, takes you step-by-step through the process of incorporating behavioral science into product design and development. Product managers, UX and interaction designers, and data analysts will learn a simple and effective approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Learn the three main strategies to help people change behavior Identify behaviors your target audience seeks to change—and obstacles that stand in their way Develop effective designs that are enjoyable to use Measure your product’s impact and learn ways to improve it Combine behavioral science with data science to pinpoint problems and test potential solutions Dr. Wendel is the head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar, where his team develops and tests practical techniques to help people overcome common behavioral obstacles with their finances. Steve is the author of three books on applied behavioral science and founder of the non-profit Action Design Network, which educates the public about behavioral science and product design. He has two wonderful kids, who don’t care about behavioral science at all.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

I'm going to be setting it low this time. Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. I've been loving the wonderful people who have been going to the show and giving us five stars and putting great referrals on there. We certainly appreciate the people who review the show and tell us how much they love it. And when you do it, I actually decide to go out and make another show. But if you don't, then I go, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't make another show. So if you get a

chance, go to iTunes in the referral section. There's like a little place there. It's free, too. It doesn't charge you anything at all. And you can leave like a five-star review or a five-star review. Or even if you just want to do a five-star review, you can leave those on the Chris Voss show. Tell us how much you like the show. Or tell us, you know, maybe how we can make it better. But I think you'll love the new direction the show's going.

We're having a lot of great, brilliant authors that we've invited to the show we've opened up to a whole wide swath of publishers that are sending us the most brilliant minds in the universe and uh our lawyers say we can't say that because uh you know we don't know how full the universe is so it might be a bit of overstatement but we're going with it i it because who's going to sue us? Aliens? They're not coming here. Yeah, and they don't know law either. So anyway, guys, we have a most brilliant guest. This gentleman knows it all. He's going to shape and make your brain bigger to a point that you may need

a larger cranium. You can order those on Amazon, I think. His name is Steve Wendell, and he's a doctor as well. Dr. Wendell is the head of behavioral science at Morningstar, where his team develops and tests practical techniques to help people overcome behavioral obstacles with their finances. Maybe you can help me with my coffee. Steve is the author of three books on applied behavioral science

and founder of the nonprofit Action Design Network, which educates the public about behavioral science and founder of the non-profit Action Design Network, which educates the public about behavioral science product design. He has two wonderful kids who don't care about behavioral science, so there you go. Welcome to the show, Steve. How are you doing, buddy? Thanks for having me, Chris. Things are going great. How are you? I love that last part. I mean, are there any kids that care about behavioral science? It's only the truth. I mean, do you learn more from business in your care about behavioral science only the truth i mean do you

learn more from business in your study of behavioral science or do you learn it more from your kids and you know it's like can i can i keep their attention for 10 seconds or 15 if i'm at 15 i'm like yeah i found something that really works is that when you're holding the ipad you're about to give them or the phone is that yeah sadly i know? Yeah, sadly. Sadly, private or real. I know how that works. But, you know, honestly, I would have had kids if I had known that you could just hand them an iPad and say, call me in 18 years, which is what I would have done. I mean, way cheaper than military school.

So, anyway, let's talk about your book. You've got your book out, and let's give this book a plug. It's from O'Reilly and it is called Designing for Behavioral Change, Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics. And this is going to be really interesting. I know people might hear that and be like, wow, this might be too smart for me, but we're going to make you smarter from this. And you're going to see how it's going to apply in your business and everyday life. What are the plugs people can look you up on the interweb, Steve? Sure. So best place to go is, of course, Amazon, the book's available. But if you want more information, check out behavioraltechnology.co and there you will find

both a summary of the book, you'll find some of the key lessons, you also find a short and free guide that walks you through what all this stuff is about and how you do it. Now, you have three books total, correct? That's right. Yeah. Do you want to plug the other two books just for fun? Sure. I mean, this is the one that's of general interest. But the second book I did, it was called Improving Employee Benefits. It's particularly how you apply behavioral science in an HR and benefits context. And the third one is completely different. It's particularly how you apply behavioral science in an HR and benefits context.

And the third one is completely different. It is actually a very personal book about the application of behavioral science and spiritual practice, not telling people what they should believe, but rather if you wanted to meditate, how might you make the space for that? Oh, there you go. There you go. That's important, especially right now in our crazy times and some of the depressing things that are happening. Meditation is good. I'm probably going to meditate for the next year and not come out of it. That or I'm going to astral plane, one of the two.

Hand me a beer. Anyway, I'm just kidding. So let's talk about what this book is. Well, first let's get a lay of your life and what motivated you to get into this field and write these books. Yeah, sure. So I got into behavioral science because of abject failure. I was building product, as I guess most people do.

I was building product, in this case, a product that was telling people to save for the future, to prepare for retirement, etc. And we got a big fat no duh from our users. Yeah, of course you got to save for the future. I know that. People didn't actually do it. And so I had the joy of learning from some of the leading behavioral economists and behavioral scientists in the field. I said, all right, well, try this, try this. And over time, I built that into my PhD

and built that into my studies. So it came from trying a very traditional approach to building product and doing marketing and learning that there's a better way. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. And I've always been interested in the study of people's behavior and their choices and everything. I grew up in a cult and I've always been, you know, and escaped it. I've always been studying as to why people make the choices they do, why they make crazy belief systems, why they have, you know, scotomas or blind spots and why they behave the way they do. In fact, a lot of people sit around this podcast and go,

what is the behavioral science behind Chris Voss? Hopefully you'll enlighten us. Enlighten them and they can start going. So that's what's been going on this whole time. So when I think about it as people are strange, but there's structure to that strange. We can understand why people, okay, maybe not. You sound like girls they meet on Tinder.

I'm sorry. I had to get that joke in there. My apologies for interrupting you. My apologies. you sound like girls they meet on tinder i'm sorry i had to get that joke in there my apologies so um so we look at like why does you know i do a lot of finance why do people say they want to save and don't do it why do people say they want to exercise and don't do it why do they say hey i really love your product and they never hear from again sometimes it's because they're lying but often that's actually not the case, especially if you have a good product, a good service, a good thing. And so behavioral science studies why that happens, why there's a gap between what we say, what we sincerely want to do and what we actually do,

the gap between intention and action. And then most importantly, we study how to fix that. And it's really exciting stuff. That sounds like more the study of what happens on New Year's Eve when you make resolutions. It is part of it. But yeah, okay, I get it. So give us a rundown at some of the stuff that you talk about in the book. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, first and foremost, we talk about what's going on.

What's going on with human behavior, whether that is different areas of behavioral science, whether that is the users of your product, whether it is the customers or the potential customers and whether they engage with you. And there's another area specifically on HR, right, and employee behavior. And so the first part of the book is just here's what we understand. And that we understand that people are fundamentally limited. We're not all intelligent. We don't, you know, we all have limits of attention and we all have limits of memory, willpower, et cetera. And that means something, right?

That affects how your customers behave, et cetera. We all get guided by emotions, right? As we talk about that. Second, the book talks about, okay, so you want to help people overcome this, right? When they actually want to do something, what do you actually do? And so most of the book is a blueprint. It's not a funny stories about people. It is a practical guide to, you got a business, you've got a marketing campaign, you've got a HRr program how do you

actually help identify that behavior obstacle and fix it and then measure whether you've actually had an effect that's the bulk of the book all right and in the hr area does that is that help uh hr people understand and improve the quality and output of of people they're working for the organization well it's it's sometimes h, sometimes HR folks want their employees to do something they don't want to do. We're not helping there. Just to be clear, this is all about the gap between intention and action. So somebody who wants to pick up a new skill at work, and what happens? Somebody who wants to really focus and get into into this project but it doesn't happen that that

that's those types of applications not how do you make your folks uh stay at work for 23 hours a day i can't really help with that yeah i want to be the office space guy where i just go fishing all day or you know do something else like you know i don't want to do my tps reports um but no it's it's really interesting to me the behaviors that people want i love the science of this because normally the only science that i've ever studied uh for selling and marketing is like you know books on sales which doesn't give you the whole picture because it just mainly teaches you either how to manipulate or or sell someone without without really understanding too much their psyche. It just kind of teaches you how to run roughshod over it or use reverse

psychology. Awesome. So I think there are a lot of thoughtful salespeople who are effectively behavioral scientists, right? Yeah. Thinking like, how do you help close this gap?

How do you find a willing, the willing buyer? But yeah, there's, there's, there's some junk out there too. Yeah. I mean,

it's, it's, it's some junk out there too yeah i mean it's it's it's uh uh and i think most great salesmen i've ever known are kind of behavioral science it's always interesting the application of it i mean all my great salesmen than i ever had um were they were really skilled at behavioral science um and cocaine um but mostly, well, maybe just cocaine. But behavioral science was good because they understood. I mean, as soon as they got on the phone, they started figuring out the age of the person.

They just had a real good feel for personalities, and so they know how to adopt and adapt and stuff. So it's really interesting. So it's a blueprint for behavioral design, an overview about how to apply behavioral science and product development and communications and you mentioned you've helped a lot of startups with this sort of data and stuff yeah that's right so i've worked for example with um 1776 a group out of um dc uh with 500 startups with a variety of individual shops, et cetera. And almost all new products, almost all new business endeavors

are fundamentally about behavior change, right? Because if nothing else, you're saying, you're doing this thing already. I'd like you to do it with my product, right? Or I'd like you to do it with my service. And it should be for the benefit of the person, but that's not enough. A value proposition isn't enough. And so what I do is I walk folks through, both in the book and when I'm talking to them in person. So what else is there beyond the value proposition? How do you figure out what's going on? How do you look for the signs of that? And then what do you do as a

business, as a product team, et cetera, to adapt, to work with the realities of your users, of your customers' psychology and who they are? Interesting. I mean, it's got to be pretty in-depth because, I mean, there's so many different things that can happen, especially in today's technology. Like in my world, you know, most of my sales is brick and mortar. So it was face-to-face. You meet with people. And nowadays, you know, companies have much more challenge because they're, you know, using whatever sort of UI they have online. And hopefully that's converting. And then you've got your abandoned cart sales and all the different aspects of the flow through of a customer prospect, you know, becoming a customer and going through the whole thing.

Sometimes when they walk away, et cetera, et cetera. And so give us some other tips that are in your book there. Yeah, sure. So I think one of the key differences between like a traditional sales process and both designing a product and designing marketing is scale. What this allows you, you mentioned that, hey, it's a much different world, and you've got to deal with all the digital architecture and the digital path. But there's also a tremendous opportunity there, which is you can see across a million people, right, if you've got them, or whatever your base is, you can see what's going on, what's going wrong, and be able to fix it at scale.

And that's the real excitement. And so one of the things the book looks into is, okay, how do you combine data science? How do you combine the tagging and tracking of different users' behavior, right, and see where are people struggling? Where does it look like, hey, people are really interested in this but they're they're faltering here and this goes a step beyond just the normal page drop off you see okay well hmm is it an issue of a reminder is it just the fact that often products fail and efforts at changing behavior fail because of mere attention somebody can look you in the eye and say yeah i'm with you

i want to do this and then their kid comes in the eye and say, yeah, I'm with you. I want to do this. And then their kid comes in the room and they're distracted and they never come back and think about it. Right. Oh, by the way, I think a lot of bad kids distracting me. No, you, you, you look like maybe a report comes up or maybe the greatest of all evils to behavior change. They start watching netflix or tiktok like how do you compete with that yeah so many good efforts fail simply because of attention we focus on value proposition we focus on how good this is for people we should be focusing first on attention because if you can't cast you can't cross that threshold value proposition emotion uh urgency,

all those things just aren't relevant. And it's going to be quite challenging for people because, I mean, you can be focused on doing something, maybe buying something on a card or researching a product, and then, bing, you get something on your phone, and, you know, you're like, oh, I need to see what Twitter says now. And then, you know, it's gone. One of my biggest problems that I have is is i'll sign up for services for trial because i'll be okay i want to try that i kick a lot of tires on a lot of stuff

and and uh i'm kind of open-minded as well let's try it and see you know let's see because sometimes i try something i'm like hey this is magic bullet and so um i'm notorious and I think a lot of people are, for like signing up for trials, and then I'll get the confirmation email. And that actually ends up taking time out that puts me off a little bit, but I understand why it's important. So then I go, okay, wait for the confirmation email, and I go do something else. Then I come back, and I hit the confirmation email. And then I kind of start toying with the product a little bit. And I'm like, okay, well, all right, I got this part done. So I'm just going to hopefully leave this open or I'm going to come back to this.

And I'm going to kick the tires some more, right? And 99% of the time, I won't come back. And like one of the things I'm going to have a suggestion in my forthcoming book is that people that give trials like that, what they really should do is instead of just giving a seven day trial, well, you might be able to tell me if I'm wrong or right on this. My feeling is they should give me seven days, but like seven days of usage where I actually use the product because then I have an ability to get gamified and addicted. But maybe, well, I don't know, I'm saying it fails 99% of the time playing that game,

because I just don't follow through on it. And then, and then by the time I remember, inevitably, for some reason, my brain goes, hey, remember that thing you signed up for trial, you check that out. And then I log in, it's like, yeah, five minutes ago that just expired. When are you going to need a credit card? And you're like, well, I won't test that product and get hooked on it. But I don't know. Is it better to do one or the other? Or maybe it's better to hold a gun to people's head and be like,

you must try this in the next seven days or the hell with you. Well, I mean, I think that's a great question, right? Because, look, I get distracted. I forget everybody does. So I look at, okay, if it's seven days of use, well, how are you going to get people in the using it, try it out, whatever. I think that's, that's, that's an obstacle even before that. Um, Hey, you know, uh, even before you get to the time is, the time has expired because what we think is, Hey, somebody has thought about this enough to sign up for a trial, but we don't think is, and then right afterwards they've been distracted.

We should think is our products, our services, are competing with every single thing in a person's life. Every dang thing. And again, Netflix, the great evil. What do we do? So what most companies do is they just try to yell louder. They try to say, pay attention to my product, read my email. I get the emails that say, Hey, so the trailer,

I know like, did you forget your trial? Did you abandon your shopping cart? Like, okay. Everyone is doing that. Everyone is basically trying to raise the volume instead. When are things quiet and you can be heard? In other words, we call it the structure of one's time. When can we find times in our users

and our customers and our employees' lives when they have the bandwidth? When can we align with their lives rather than try to make them conform to our goals? I've run lots of randomized control trials right formal experiments over the years and one of the ones i really love is is on simple timing so you take the exact same communication same sender same message

same sort of client everything's in call to action and you just change when you do it hmm i can easily get a 75 to 200% swing just on the timing. Wow. Right. And these, and these are unreasonable times, right? I'm not comparing it to like midnight on Saturday.

You're not writing me at 2am waking me up. So I did this with, with one of the largest employers in the world, large minimum wage population. Right. And for them, a lot of these folks were working two jobs, yelling at them.

Heck, they're going from job to job, right? Instead, you had to find the one time that they had bandwidth, which in this case was Sunday evening. Huge response, right? During the week, nothing. Yeah. They're busy working, they come home, they want to go here, watch the tube, fight with the old lady, beat the kids. Yeah. Something sort of like that, but hopefully not all of it. Yeah. Don't beat the kids, people.

Yeah, maybe not that. Yeah. And I did another one. I did the same thing, just replicated it with a big manufacturing company. Completely different. For them, their lives, like how they worked, their schedules, was, you know, Tuesday morning. That's by far the best. We had something like, yeah,

like a 300% drop off if we tried the weekend for them because they just were not there. That was not their life. And so the big lesson is you got to know your people. You got to get out and say, not only do I, what do I want to accomplish, but what are the real behavioral obstacles in behavioral obstacles in the lives of my users? And it's not only trial and error is a real big thing. You know, trying stuff, monitoring what works, what doesn't work. You know, I built a giant LinkedIn group from zero to 135,000. And one of the things we used to do is we used to do a lot of marketing.

And it used to be they would let us blast out to everyone's email that was in the group, or at least that allowed it, which was most of the people. And we could get just a huge amount of hits and clicks and people that were engaged with the group back then. And we played, we used to play the experiment game with when was the best time to send that. And it was really interesting. The best time to send it was Pacific Time, 7 a.m. on LinkedIn to the groups. Pacific Time, 7 a.m. Yeah.

On Tuesdays. That's what I'm missing. Cool. On Tuesday. And if you send on Monday, that thing wouldn't get read. Send on Friday, that thing wouldn't get read at all. People at that point are just watching Netflix at work and

it's like on Monday they would do all their work and then on Tuesday they're like hey I want to screw around a little bit I need some distraction and Wednesday or Thursday like somehow after Tuesday like Wednesday or Thursday down into Friday, we just, like, you know, totally crescendo down into nothing.

And then, you know, Monday, no one would mess with it. You couldn't do Saturday or Sunday on LinkedIn because, like, people don't even check into that. Yeah, great example. That's when we'd see just the most explosion. Like if you went 15 minutes earlier, half an hour earlier, 15 minutes later, half an hour later, just would not pull the money like that 7 o'clock boom right on the dot. And so, yeah, I've seen a lot of this behavior. What about the ethics of – well before we get in ethics um so do you have i suppose gamification the study of gamification comes a lot into behavioral science right yeah there's a lot of crossover between our communities yeah and and and i've always been

enthralled by that because but part of the same way like when you when i go to a website the ui is really important to me It's got to be really intuitive. Intuitive is a big thing. And we review a lot of products here on the Chris Foss Show, and that's another thing I look for is intuitiveness, like how easy I can pick up a product, figure out how it works, and not have to read the manual because reading is hard, eh? But the sooner I can play with it and fall in love with it,

the, the sooner I can have fun with it, which doesn't happen with any furniture from Ikea. Um, and, um, so, so the gamification of stuff and the UI and, and the, and that pathway into gamification is always interesting to me cause i love video games and and so anytime i either have a new video game that i review or a video game that you know is coming out with an update it's always interesting to me as to how the new version of whatever gamification they're using and and how they're laying it out and the steps and and all that stuff um it's kind of funny now when i play video games i'm, I'm being gamified right now. I can feel the

manipulation. They just want me to jump through the soup, and I'm going to do it. Yeah, but if you have a good time, hey, that's alright. Yeah, and it's too bad people's websites and products can't, I don't know, be as fun as video games. Maybe when people are starting to sell me stuff on Amazon,

there needs to be a shooting gallery or something you shoot the book to buy it or something i don't know maybe i'm maybe i'm too far ahead or maybe i'm just smoking crack one of the two if i am on the best crack smoker there is so there's that that's an arty lane joke um so anyway let's talk about the ethics of behavioral science, the discussion of the ethical challenges that confront designers. Well, tell us what that is. Yeah, sure.

So behavioral science is confronting the same challenges that marketers, product makers, designers, et cetera, faced for a long time, which is are you helping people, right? Are you doing something that your users want, doing something that your customers want, et cetera, faced for a long time, which is, are you helping people, right? Are you doing something that your users want, doing something that your customers want, et cetera? And to me, that's just table stakes, right? First and foremost, if you're not providing value, if you're not actually doing something that benefits them and is something they want, you shouldn't be doing it. Whether it's behavioral science or whether it's some other toolkit,

doesn't matter, right? But I think what is, um, and thankfully there, there, uh, there's been some attention to that and, and in the behavioral community saying, look,

yeah, we face the same struggle. Everyone else does. Let's call out some of the mistakes and try to fix that. And there's, there's a great discussion in the field on how to, how to ensure that we're, that we're,

that we're being ethical and not trying to coerce people. Not trying to,erce people. Years ago when the advertising agencies, there was a time in the 70s when they were putting a lot of subliminal stuff into advertising and they finally had to come out and go, we've got to knock this off. This isn't cool and ethical.

I think some of it's still being done. Camel cigarettes and stuff. But what are some examples of unethical stuff that's being done if you you know camel cigarettes and stuff but um but what are some examples of unethical stuff that's being done in that yeah so some of the there there are exactly some high profile examples so uh uber for example their behavioral science team worked on yeah i know i i you know i don't want to surprise people too much with the example we're gonna be here for hours yeah i know we could be here for a while no let's give one example um and it's actually it's it's many of the um many of the gig economy platforms punish people for taking breaks right they build it into the platform where uh if you don't click accept you

get punished right and so what does that mean it means do you really want a driver who is making more money for uber but hasn't been able to take a bathroom break and is feeling real tired but still driving you right and so actually new york times came out with a story just talking about the digital manipulation of how it was structured to maximize profit right and companies need to make money yeah it's fun but if you're not starting with an understanding of your users, then you're not building a long-term relationship. There are other examples.

There's one from a company called ThredUp that used some social proof, which is Alexandria just bought this. This person is looking at this right now. She loves it. This was like a dress and a clothing site online. The only problem was it was complete crap oh wow there was nobody i just had a little algorithm that was making up those sites i've seen that and i'm wondering about that yeah there's a lot of people buying this trash yeah and again this this isn't this isn't something that's unique to behavioral science right but we um you'll see um in the design, there's a guy named Harry Brignol.

He has a site called Dark Patterns. Talks about the Roach Motel, the site that you get in and you just can't get out. Right? They hide it. Or like Amazon. Try to cancel your membership, your Prime membership to Amazon. It's like trying to cancel an old AOL membership. Yeah, I know.

You call them and you're like or suckering the technique of how to trick people to revealing their private information right yeah um a lot of that what's what's really cool about behavioral science is there's a literature about behavioral science of ethics how our environment how the design of a like a workplace affects whether you're ethical or not. And so we have some tools to help people just walk the walk. Yeah. I think I see a lot of it in, uh, I believe,

I think it's the match.com corporation. There's, there's some corporation that owns like all the dating apps. And Ashley Madison was one of the companies that got into, uh, yeah, you wouldn't know. Um,

uh, uh, Ashley Madison was one of the people years ago who got into trouble where they were either having AI fake profiles, feigning interest in you, or they actually had hired people. But I think they had fake profiles too. Like they had like user generated profiles. And I see a lot of that when I'm on between Tinder or Bumble. Like I see a lot of that in a Bumble, like I'll ignore Bumble for a while and then I'll get on and like, so he was like 20 chicks after me and they're like, and they don't show their faces and they're like, there's 20 chicks that are interested in you.

And you're like, I don't know about that. And they're like for 29, nine to five, you can see what's behind door number or whatever. And I've fallen for it a couple times. And they're not really interested in you. They maybe swipe right or something. But they're not like, hey, I really want to meet that dude. I mean, look at his face. Seriously.

But then it's kind of funny, after I stay on Bumble for a while, like the first couple days, it just humps my legs with notifications, and oh my gosh. And then if you use it, then it keeps humping your leg, but then if you fall off and quit using it, it stops bothering you as much. And then every now and then it'll feed you like, somebody's really interested in you, and they're still not really interested.

So I see the gaming that goes on with the whole thing. And after the Ashley Madison debacle with the fake profiles and the fake AI that was like feigning interest in people to keep them on the site, I imagine that would fall under the ethics issues. Yeah. I mean, I think just real simple, is this something you would want done to you? Is this something you'd want done to your family, right? Yeah.

Because there are so many cool things we can do to help our users, to help our customers. Why do we have to resort to trickery, right? Just spend a little bit more time. Learn about the amazing techniques. You mentioned gamification. Right. So I think of behavioral science as a superset of what's used in gamification. That's like five main techniques. Right. In the guide, in the book, I talk about 100. From social proof to peer comparisons, the loss aversion, just so many different things that you can do to help people overcome behavioral obstacles.

There's such wealth out there. Why should we try to coerce people? Yeah, it's an interesting game. I mean, marketing, you're persuading people, but then there has to be this ethical line of not overly manipulating or being deceptive, I suppose. Yeah, or you actually want to keep customers and you want them to

give you that five star, right? So give them what they're looking for. Find the people who really want it, for whom you can resonate with their lives, and behavioral science can help you do that. Most people just tune in the five stars for the car crash and the Chris Foster podcast,

but then they bring brilliant people like you on. And so this is interesting to me. Like I i said i've gotten into the gamification of things and why people do stuff i mean all my life just whether it's religion or politics or just behavioral and belief systems like why people believe you know at any time you know you meet somebody who believes in there's you know we're all blue martians run around or we're all lizard people or oh you know you know that yeah yeah well i mean it's you know it's between us martians right um but uh and everyone knows they're not blue they're green duh uh so anyway uh but it's always been interesting to me how people can believe something and they build this, this supportive belief system around it, that, that, that amplifies it and sustains it.

And it's just always been interesting to me how people do that. And then of course gamification where, where you see the manipulation, like now when I get notifications from dating apps, I'm just like, yeah, okay. So how are you screwing with me today? What's going on here? Yeah, buddy. And I think that's, maybe that okay, so how are you screwing with me today? What's going on here? What's going on, buddy? And I think maybe that's where it ends up bad is where we figure out, we break the fourth wall and we figure it out and we go, yeah, I think I see what's going on here.

Right. And so if you're authentic, if you're actually trying to help people overcome something, then you don't have that problem. We call that confirmation bias, right, where you start to build that problem now which the uh like the we call that confirmation bias right where you start to build that world view that supports it and it's actually really cool how the mind works effectively like somebody will say hey the green martians instead the blue when they're looking out across the world they're actually seeing much more evidence of green martians of social security about to fail

right of whatever it might be because it's their mind helping them pay attention or thinking it's helping them pay attention to this thing and so a lot of people have heard of confirmation bias what they probably haven't heard of is you can actually fix that you actually you you can't stop the the selective attention what you can do is explain the opposite which is so i mean i do a lot of finance right so people who are buying bitcoin you just say explain to me why someone is selling right now and what that does is it turns the confirmation bias around they're suddenly paying all the attention to why people are selling oh man maybe there's a problem there or how social security is actually okay or how the

Martians are green, right? So it's using that bias to your advantage. A years ago, I think it was Anthony Robbins or Lou Tice or somebody I listened to, they talked about how, you know, one of the things we do with confirmation bias is it helps balance on their brains and it gives us reassurance that our choices are right like for example if you go out and you buy like let's say a red subaru 2020 suit red subaru as soon as you start driving around your brain starts noticing all the red exactly subarus and it goes see you're smart because other smart people like you you know if you don't see any red subarus then you're like maybe i made a bad choice

exactly yeah it's your mind thinking that it's helping you and tell of course it's really screwing you up yeah and that's where the real balance lies is like is this is this good information is bad information you know and and if you become obsessive or manic where you take things to a whole new level, I mean, that's where you really see obsessive compulsive stuff get out of control because they take a crazy belief system, and then all of a sudden they're running into Pizzagate ready to shoot people up at a pizza parlor because they think Clinton's have got whatever in there. And I'm not being political. I'm just using the example of someone i know

taking some crazy story and turning anything or q anon is a good example as well yeah um like you just listen to some q anon stuff or some of the so even some of the stuff they've been talking about with uh covid and you're just like did you think that through before? Yeah, I know. I know. It's interesting. What's amazing is that on the political realm, like, okay, there isn't really hard to touch, but when it comes to like, when it comes to companies, we've now have this many ways all around the world. We now have a common approach on how to identify these problems and attack them. Right. So as part of right so as part of the as part of

the book we did a survey of um people applying behavioral science around the world we got about over 40 percent of all of the teams out there responded to this detailed survey it's just awesome really people were very generous with their time and what you find is that we're we've kind of coalesced right from walmart i talked to them for example right from their approach to um uh i didn't actually talk to netflix but i know they're folks ideas 42 um like the uk government new zealand government these tiny non-profits in south africa armenia's consulting shop like all around the world it's we now have, Armenia's consulting shop, like all around the world. It's, we now have a way to,

to identify that problem you're talking about and say, okay, what do we do about it and how do we test it? And that is what's really cool. So we moved from just, man, this people do crazy stuff like you were talking about too. Okay. We actually have a playbook here. We know what it is. It's not perfect, but we've got to fix this. Yeah. But we've got a playbook on what to do.

And that's pretty exciting. And that's just coalesced over the last few years. Have you ever studied or gotten into like AI and some of the different issues we're seeing rise of facial recognition technologies and stuff like that? Yeah. So I don't work in AI uh in ai uh i do i have done quite a lot of work in um in machine learning and what's now called data science right um and that's and that's because for behavioral science you often have to analyze detailed

information about anonymous but individual behavior it's kind of a stepping stone to uh to doing uh to changing behaviors understanding what the heck's going on first. Your data tells us who you are. Yeah, anonymous. We always do it anonymously. Yeah, that's always interesting to me. Is that where my stuff is going when it says, hey, do you mind if we send anonymous reports to the company?

Is that where that's going? We certainly do those. They go lots of places. But, yeah, we certainly do those too. You want to understand what problems people are facing. Note to self, start erasing browser history. Let's see. If you're thinking of it now, you are well.

I'm screwed. I'm screwed, yeah. Steve Jobs and his centipede got me a long time ago. Customer insights is behavioral changes. How market researchers and customer insight professionals can move from customer intent to a deeper understanding of unmet needs of the end user and how to meet them. I have a lot of unmet needs. One was my father didn't hug me enough as a child,

but I'm not sure anyone can help me with that. Maybe match.com can, I don't know. Yeah. Can't help you. Sorry. That's the whole reason I had you on, man.

No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Sorry. I can help pulling that one. But I mean, it sounds like there's a lot of different things that companies need to go into,

especially from a tech aspect or website build, UI build, gamification, and ways to keep customers happy, keep them engaged. You know, like I say, UI is really important to me. I'm not actually a fan. Maybe there are some people that are a fan of the little pop-ups that walk you through how to do a product. I'm a, I'm a pretty easy assimilator like, and so I don't, that actually irritates me when I see that,

but I, I see the form and function of why it's important. And sometimes I skip over that and then regret it later. Cause I'm like, what did that other thing do? There was a box that said something cool and I can't find it. Yeah. And,

uh, I, it's a tough business. UI design and making it so customers can really stay engaged with the product, love it, and even understand to use it. Exactly.

Those walkthroughs are when your product is too complex for people to just figure it out, you need that. Let's devote some time on aligning with your users so they'll just figure it out. You need that. So let's devote some time on aligning with your users so they'll just figure it out instead rather than needing that walkthrough. Yeah.

And then price points too. I mean, I got into one company recently where they said, you know, you have to pay if you want this feature. And they had a tier process. And I was like, okay, well, I'll pay for that, and they didn't really specify, they just said you have to upgrade, they didn't specify which upgrade to get that feature, and so I ended up buying, you know, the cheapest tier, so I'm like,

well, you know, they said upgrade, that looks like, you know, I kind of looked down the list of things, I'm like, yeah, it must give me a thing, you know, they didn't specify what it was, I'll just do the cheap tier, you know, the the cheap tier and then turns out that didn't work for me uh they're like yeah you got to buy the other tier all the way up i was pissed i was like really pissed because i was like you guys did not explain in your systems and i went back and and went to the stuff and i'm like it doesn, it just is like a general upgrade. It doesn't say you need to upgrade to XYZ package or several of XYZ packages if you want that.

And that's how you lose customers. Like I was so pissed. I was so pissed from the experience. I told them to blow it out and I don't want to hear from them again. And it was a pain in the butt to get my money back. And they just ruined what I thought would be a great experience and all because they don't have that proper walkthrough of,

uh, of the UI and stuff. Exactly. Right. And it's just, it's not a good experience for folks. Instead, if you spend a little time,

right. Identify the obstacle. Is it one of, you know, for, for people trying this feature, is it one of attention? As I mentioned before, is it one of, um, like people trying this feature is it one of attention as

i mentioned before is it one of um like do they have a strong emotional reaction or like it doesn't seem like it's for me or you know i don't know are they going to try and trick me like you were talking about before you start you start getting wise to why so the tricks people are doing is it is it actually the value proposition is it procrastination these are the types of things we look for and then hey if people might want that upgrade, they want that feature, and they're procrastinating, cool. We've got some techniques that'll, for those who are willing, it can help them cross that barrier, right? If it's a question of, like, this emotional reaction, we've got some techniques that can help with that, right? So let me give a practical example.

So this one's in an opt in opt out context. Of course, a lot of companies are facing now. So as Leon on my team. So we had a pretty standard opt in process where we said, hey, do you want to receive more information from our company? And I don't know about you but whenever i see that i say uh okay moving on right you just you don't even read the thing you don't even think about it you're like that's something i can safely ignore and just make sure they're not trying to trick me in the language into saying yes here right so but leon said look well we know that some people

actually want our information i know crazy some people actually want it information. I know, crazy. Some people actually want it. So how do we get from, that's what we call a system one response, right? This intuitive, emotional, and just quick get it done to something where people stop and think. And those who really want your information, right? Who actually want to talk to your potential prospects will engage with you. She said, make it look unfamiliar. Add friction. In other words, completely the opposite of what almost every marketing text tells you. Oh, wow.

Right? And so he said, look, because the core problem is one of a patterned emotional response, let's try and break out of that. So he made it intentionally look different. In this case, it was a drop-down, et cetera. I changed the language a bit. And it slowed people down enough that they could actually read and see what was available 500 increase wow any randomized control trials this isn't blown smoke this is a random

random assignment uh identical groups just huge huge effect because he understood what the underlying behavioral problem was and how to resolve it. And again, we've got a dozen techniques for every one of these different things. It's not about tricking people. It's about can you actually connect with folks and see what is it they care about. You know, I had that with our website, the Chris Foss Show. I have to recheck as to what we're doing there because we did some experimenting with a new program that does some of the notifications for new posts. It's that pop-up that everyone has nowadays where it goes, do you want to accept notifications from the browser? Right, right.

But I know that there used to be a time where I hated when I would go to a website, and as soon as you land, boom, you want more information. Do you want to sign up for our email? And you're like, man, I haven't even seen your website long enough to figure out if I want to hear from you people. And that used to be a big beef with me. I think we made her pop at one time at either 5 or 15 minutes. Somehow I was looking at the bounce rate, and I was tweaking it,

and I found that was a looking at the bounce rate and I was tweaking it. And I found that was a high contributor to bounce rate was that pop-up coming way too early before people could really get committed. You know, even being able to read a few things. One of the things that I really hate, I think there's a few European, I think New York Post does it and some other people uh in europe but they do a pop-up where if you're not a subscriber they make you do a survey so you can read the news yeah yeah like that just makes me go f you yeah i know and even then they got like some getaway thing that that like are you sure you want to go like Like, yeah. Like give me another pop-up.

Ask me if I'm even more sure. Cause I can't get more sure at this point, but, uh, yeah, it's interesting how these different things work and then how they can balance out. And somewhere in there, I found like the perfect time by experimentation. It was three to five minutes or something where people could, could look at the site. They could poke around a little bit. They could read, you know, whatever the article was a little bit and then they had the pop-up come. And so if you try to, you basically try to close too fast or you try and you try and close the deal too fast, then you're going to lose the, then you lose the thing.

Yeah. And so think of like you, you got that through trial and trial and error. Right. And from your own experience, the problem that, that many people face, right. Who haven't had the experience experience that you've had in field is there are an infinite number of things you could test,

right? What behavioral science does and what designing behavior change does is it gives you a theory. It gives you a framework to think about this stuff and pick from that infinite space. Say, okay, is it X? Is it Y? Is it Z? And then in terms of the insight side, right, that you mentioned before, in the end, it's about, are you actually connecting with that customer? Are you actually making a strategic move for your business? Are you adapting to the changing times of COVID, et cetera? It's not whether people say they are.

It's not whether you're getting a sense of, hey, might this work? What behavioral science says is not only that understanding of, okay, here's how the mind works and here's some tools, but it's a commitment to actually measuring in the field. And so that's how we can do insights work as experimentation. We want to know, does this actually work better for our users? Not just whether they say they are, because there's that same gap between intention and action and insights work all the time. So this is a route, as we talk about in a marketing insights context research context a route to get past the word and get to the deed there you go there you go behavioral science why why i think why people do you know someone can make a lot of money behavioral science is figuring out why husbands do things for their wives because that's that's

another thing but that's, I'm not going to go there. It's not in marketing and stuff, but not going to go there. That's a question I get a lot. Why the hell do you do that? I don't know. Um,

but that's probably more psychology than it is behavioral science. Maybe it is. There's a whole different realm of getting on the couch if you will. Um, so, uh, any last thoughts we need to uh know about your book how it works what it's about and all that good stuff to pick up a copy yeah i mean if i just if we think of kind of a business level what this stuff means we've talked a lot about the

practitioner right what it takes to do this like there is this blueprint that you can that you can make from a business perspective the kind of the quick summary is companies all around the world over just the last five years have started to pick, have started to do this and it is exploding. And there's a good reason for it because it helps make more effective and ethical marketing, right? Because it makes products that not only promise that value or could deliver that value, but actually do it. They can close that gap between which a product could do and what it actually does. They can help employees use all the benefits,

value what's in the same way, get that value proposition, make it real for their lives. And from Walmart to Weight Watchers to Netflix to Amazon to tiny little companies all around the world, this stuff is going crazy. And it is exciting and it's cool. And again, we've in many ways coalesced around a common approach of behavioral problem solving. So I mean, I think there's just tremendous opportunity here for companies, organizations, et cetera, that aren't currently involved to learn what's going on. And do a lot of the companies nowadays have behavioral design department? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So part of the survey, right, where we got almost half of the teams out there in the world talking about what they're doing is about a third of them are in consulting either external consulting right for clients or kind of an internal group that helps uh right uh the other ones are distributed across they're embedded within design as behavioral designers they're embedded within um the data science group or they're embedded within marketing sometimes kind of shared between those that's that's where we see the prime application hr is is less, but it's one that's growing as well. So you can find all of this both in the book and the behavioral team survey is the results of that

that I'm happy to share with folks. Interesting. Behavioraltechnology.com. So what's the best way to pick up the book? What's the best.coms to go to for you? Sure, yeah. So to reach out to me to learn more, behavioraltechnology.co. It's also just on Amazon, right?

It's Designing for Behavior Change. Just look for the second edition. The second edition just came out with O'Reilly, and it talks about the tremendous change in our field and the vast growth that has happened over the last six years. Awesome sauce. First one came out. So check it out, my audience.

You can get it. It's from O'Reilly Books, Designing for Behavior Change, over the last six years. Awesome sauce. First one came out. So check it out. My honest, you can get it. It's from Riley books, designing for behavior change, applying psychology and behavior economics. This is pretty awesome. Maybe you can read it to your kids or something, but they don't care. Yeah.

Right. Um, yeah, I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. I, isn't it its own form of behavioral economics,

you know, trying to argue with the kid over whether or not they want the box of cereal you know like i did with my mom like mom can we buy fruit loose and she's like no we don't have money and i'm like uh i don't know anyway uh i certainly appreciate there things things you can't it sounds like it's a fine line between behavior economics and applying psychology and behavior change. So definitely a reason to pick up the book or read it and understand your world better, especially if you're in the business of marketing or CEO or you're running an organization, et cetera, et cetera. Be sure, my audience, to go to thecbpn.com or for the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. This will be appearing on several different shows, book author podcasts, Chris Voss podcasts,

and probably Startup Unicorn podcasts, so you can see it there as well. And you can also go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, if you want to watch the video version of this discussion. You can check it out there as well. Thanks, my honest, for tuning in. Be sure to stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time.