Motivation – Page 4 – Behavioural Design

Does it really take 21 days to form habits?

Published June 28, 2016 by Anand Damani

In the preface to his 1960 book ‘Psycho-cybernetics’, Dr Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon turned psychologist wrote:

‘It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated the “phantom limb” persists for about 21 days. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to “seem like home”. These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.’

Self-help authors of 21 days to this, that and everything, may have reasoned that, if self-image takes 21 days to change, and self-image changes lead to changes in habits, then habit formation must take 21 days. Although ‘21 days’ may perhaps apply to adjustment to plastic surgery, it is unfounded as a basis for habit formation. Here’s the proof:

In an 84-day study by researchers at University College London, 96 participants were asked to choose an every day behavior that they wanted to turn into a habit. They all chose something they didn’t already do that could be repeated every day like eating a piece of fruit (behavior) with lunch (cue) or doing 50 sit-ups (behavior) after morning coffee (cue).

So how long did it take to form a habit? On average it took 66 days until a habit was formed. And contrary to what’s commonly believed, missing a day or two didn’t much affect habit formation.

But here is the relevant part. There was considerable variation in how long habits took to form depending on what people tried to do. People who resolved to drink a glass of water after breakfast were up to maximum automaticity after about 20 days, while those trying to eat a piece of fruit after lunch took at least twice as long to turn it into a habit. The exercise habit proves trickiest with 50 sit-ups after morning coffee, still not a habit after 84 days.

Interestingly, there were quite large differences between individuals in how quickly automaticity reached its peak, although everyone repeated their chosen behavior daily: for one person it took just 18 days, and another did not get there in the 84 days, but was forecast to do so after as long as 254 days!

So it’s unwise to attempt to assign a number to habit formation. The duration is likely to differ depending on who you are and what you are trying to do. As long as you continue doing your new healthy behavior consistently in a given situation, a habit will form. But you will probably have to persevere beyond January 21^stif you are attempting a New Year’s resolution.

Source: Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle – How habits are formed: modeling habit formation in the real world – European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998-1009.

If you want something to happen, write it down

Published June 22, 2016 by Anand Damani

Hopefully by now you are beginning to appreciate how a seemingly small design intervention can make a huge difference in behaviour change. Here’s one more story that illustrates this point.

British psychologistsPaschal Sheeran and Sheina Orbell conducted an experiment in two of Scotland’s busiest orthopaedic hospitals. The participants were elderly patients from low and middle class households, who had undergone hip or knee replacement surgeries.

Recovering from a hip or knee surgery is incredibly arduous. While recovering the smallest movements can be excruciating. But it is essential that patients begin exercising almost as soon as they wake from surgery, even before the muscles and skin have healed, or the tissues will clog the joint, destroying its flexibility. But exercising is so painful that many patients skip out on rehab sessions, especially the elderly ones.

So the patients were each given a booklet after their surgeries that detailed their rehab schedule, and in the back were thirteen additional pages – one for each week – with instructions: My goals for this week are _________________? Write down exactly what you are going to do. For example, if you are going to walk this week, write down where and when you are going to walk.

Three months passed. The patients who had written exact plans in their booklets had started walking twice as fast as the ones who had not, as well as, getting in and out of their chairs, putting on their shoes, doing laundry, all of it much faster, than the ones who had not written anything in the booklet. Why did that happen?

The psychologists examined the booklets of those who had filled it and found it filled with specific detailed plans about the most mundane aspects of recovery. Like one patient wrote that he would walk to the bus stop on a particular day to meet his wife coming back from work at 3:30pm and the time he would leave, the route he would walk, what he would wear and which pills he would take if the pain became too much. Someone else who would exercise each time she would go to the bathroom, wrote that she would automatically take the first step right away after standing up from the couch, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to sit down again.

All focused on how they would handle a specific moment of anticipated pain. They built plans around inflection points when they knew their pain – and their temptation to quit – would be strongest.

Patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with pain. They didn’t deliberately design their habits. So their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the first few steps.

So if you want something to happen, write all the steps down.

Source: Paschal Sheeran and Sheina Orbell – Implementation intentions and repeated behaviour: augmenting the predictive validity of the theory of planned behaviour – European Journal of Social Psychology Volume 29, Issue 2-3, pages 349–369, March – May 1999

All’s well that begins well

Published April 5, 2016 by Anand Damani

Any event that has a good ending is good even if some things went wrong along the way. That’s why ‘All’s well that ends well’. But ‘All’s well that begins well’ can be true too. Especially in the case of customer loyalty programs. Every retailer looks to increasing customer loyalty by offering incentive programs like frequent flyer programs or a club membership program. But amongst so many kind of programs which ones manage to perform better?

Behavioural researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze conducted a research to find out. They handed loyalty cards to 300 customers of a local car wash. Every time the car was washed the loyalty card was stamped. There were two types of cards: one required 8 stamps to receive a free car wash and the other required 10 stamps, but 2 stamps were already affixed to the loyalty card. So both cards required 8 washes to get the free car wash.

After several months of the researched program, the researchers found only 19% of customers in the 8-stamp group made enough visits to claim their free wash compared to 34% of the 10-stamp, All’s-well-that-begins-well group. The latter group also took less time to complete their 8^th wash, taking an average of 2.9 fewer days between car washes.

According to Nunes and Dreze, reframing the program as one that’s been started but not completed, rather than one that’s not yet begun, motivated people to complete it. Additional findings from research suggested that the closer people got to complete a goal, the more effort they exerted to achieve that goal. Data revealed that the amount of time between visits decreased by about half a day on average with every additional car wash that was purchased.

Now we know when to ask people for help on a project. One that’s already underway but incomplete, rather than one that has to start from scratch, is likely to be the project that gets help. So get started, help will be on its way.

Source: Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze: The endowed progress effort: How artificial advancement increases effort: Journal of consumer research 32: 504-12.

Post-it Notes can be really sticky

Published March 9, 2016 by Anand Damani

Behavioural scientist Randy Garner has done an intriguing piece of research that demonstrates the power of handwritten Post-it Notes.

He sent out surveys to people with a request to complete them. The survey was accompanied by either (a) a handwritten Post-it Note requesting completion of the survey, which was attached to a cover letter; (b) a similar handwritten message on the cover letter; or (c) the cover letter and survey alone. More than 75% of people who received the survey with a Post-it Note filled it out and returned it, compared to 48% of the second group and 36% of the third group.

Garner wondered whether it was due to the attention-grabbing neon colored sticky notes. So he sent out a new batch of surveys. A third of the surveys came with a Post-it Note with a handwritten request, a third came with a blank Post-it Note, and a third had no Post-it Note. The handwritten Post-it Note got a response rate of 69% compared to 49% for the blank Post-it Note and 34% for no Post-it Note.

Why did it happen? Although handwriting a Post-it Note is so simple and seemingly insignificant thing to do, people recognize the extra effort and personal touch and feel the need to reciprocate this personal touch by agreeing to the request.

Garner found that the handwritten Post-it Note did more than just persuade people to respond to the survey: those who received the survey with the handwritten Post-it Note returned it more promptly and gave more detailed answers to the questions. In fact the handwritten Post-it Notes that were more personal with initials and a ‘Thank you’ had response rates higher than the rest of the handwritten Post-it Notes.

Using Post-it Notes can not only earn a profit for 3M, but for you too.

Source: Randy Garner – Post-it Note Persuasion: A Sticky Influence – Journal of Consumer Psychology (2005)

Organizations have bad habits too (and they can be changed)

Published December 1, 2015 by Anand Damani

“Individuals have habits; groups have routines. Routines are the organizational analogue of habits”, wrote Geoffrey Hodgson, who spent a career examining organizational patterns. And as we know habits can be good or bad. Not just that, they can be dangerous, because while performing routines, employees yield decision-making to a process that occurs without actually thinking, automatically – habit.

Paul O’Neill who is known to have turned around the fortunes of a company called Alcoa – Aluminum Company of America understood this really well. Alcoa was going through troubled times when it hired Paul O’Neill as CEO. Investors, executives and workers were unhappy. Quality was suffering. And competitors were stealing customers and profits.

O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. These are keystone habits. The habits that matter the most. These are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

So O’Neill figured he needed a focus that everybody – unions and executives – could agree as being important, so that he could bring people together. He said, “So I thought everyone deserves to leave work as safely as they arrive, right? You shouldn’t be scared that feeding your family is going to kill you. That’s why I decided to focus on: changing everyone’s safety habits.” So he made SAFETY his top priority and set an audacious goal for a manufacturing company of that size: zero injuries.

The approach was brilliant because unions had been fighting for safety rules for years. And managers were happy since injuries meant low productivity and low morale. What most people didn’t realize was that O’Neill’s plan for getting zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history.

According to O’Neill’s safety plan, any time someone was injured, the unit president had to report it to him within 24 hours and present a plan for making sure the injury never happened again. The reward: people who got promoted, were those who embraced and cracked this system.

If unit presidents had to contact O’Neill within 24 hours with a plan, they needed to hear about the accident from their vice presidents as soon as it happened. So vice presidents had to be in constant communication with floor managers, who in turn needed to get workers to raise warnings as soon as they saw the problem. Meanwhile in those 24 hours everyone in the chain had to generate a list of suggestions for their immediate superior, so that there was an idea box full of possibilities for the unit president to choose from. This changed the company’s rigid hierarchy as communication had to make it easy for the lowliest worker to get an idea to the loftiest executive, as fast as possible.

As Alcoa’s safety patterns shifted, productivity skyrocketed, quality improved, costs came down and autonomy improved. If molten metal was injuring workers when it splashed, then the pouring system was redesigned, which led to fewer injuries. It also saved money because Alcoa lost less raw materials in spills. If a machine kept breaking down, it was replaced, which meant there was less risk of broken gear snagging an employees arm. It also meant higher quality products because, as Alcoa discovered, equipment malfunctions were a chief cause of subpar aluminum.

By the time O’Neill retired after 13 years, Alcoa’s annual income was five times larger than before he arrived. Its market capitalization had risen by $27 billion. Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world – the keystone habit that changed it all.

Source: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Smoking – the toughest habit can be broken

Published July 14, 2015July 14, 2015 by Anand Damani

We’re non-smokers, but we empathize with those who want to quit after years of smoking. It’s not easy. People try lots of things to quit smoking – nicotine patches, cold turkey, replacing the cigarette with something to keep them busy, avoiding the spots where smokers congregate, making new year resolutions, promising their kids/wives/girlfriends, what not. Few succeed, most fail.

We’ve chanced upon something that has proved to be more successful than any other way to quit smoking. CARES – Committed Action to Reduce and End Smoking – is a savings program offered by the Green Bank of Caraga in Mindanao, Philippines. Here’s how the savings program works. The smoker opens an account with a minimum balance of $1. For 6 months, the smoker deposits the amount of money he (includes ‘she’) would otherwise spend on cigarettes into the account. After 6 months, the client takes a urine test to confirm that he has not smoked. If he passes the test, he gets his money back. If he fails the test, the account is closed and the money is donated to charity.

Results of this program have been evaluated by MIT’s Poverty Action Lab and look better than other anti-smoking tactics. Opening an account makes those who want to quit 53% more likely to achieve their goal. In a study done by Xavier Gine, Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman, those who were offered CARES, including those who turned it down, were about 45% more likely to pass the nicotine test than the control group. Would smokers relapse once the 6 months were over and the pressure was off? After another six months of the 6-month program, researchers found that customers who took up CARES and even those who were offered but didn’t enroll, did markedly better than the control group.

If you wish to quit smoking in the same manner by depositing money with us, email us at anand@brief-case.co Seriously, no kidding. We’ll do a test after around 6 months. We can agree to donate to a charity you don’t like. So that adds to your motivation to quit. And, if you want to commit to any other self-improvement, we’re open provided it can be verified whether you have achieved it or not.

Source: Xavier Gine, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Zinman – Put your money where your butt is: A commitment contract for smoking cessation – American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2(4):1-26 (2010)

The way a restaurant bill gets split affects what’s ordered

Published March 31, 2015March 31, 2015 by Anand Damani

How do you split the bill while eating out at a restaurant with friends? Equally? Or depending on whose had what?

In Germany diners usually figure out the price of their individual bills and no one feels bothered. But in Israel or US or India for that matter, such behaviour may be considered rude. Irrespective, the interesting part is how splitting the bill affects ordering behaviour.

Behavioural economist Uri Gneezy and colleagues divided students who didn’t know each other, into 3 groups of diners, based on how they paid the bill. In the first group, six diners (three men and three women) paid individually. In the second, they split the bill evenly. In the third, the researchers paid for the whole meal.

Turns out, the way you split the bill affects what you order. Of course people ate the most when the researchers paid. But when it came to the equal bill-splitting group, people tended to order more expensive items, than they did when each person paid for his or her own meal. Because for every rupee/dollar they ordered, they had to pay only one-sixth of the cost. So why not order the most expensive dishes? It’s about the incentives, not about individual personalities.

Uri Gneezy, says, “This is an example of negative externality – someone else’s behaviour affects your well-being. Let’s say you are a non-smoker, and a smoker sitting next to you decides to light up. He enjoys his cigarette, but you are also ‘consuming’ his smoke. The guy smoking has bestowed a negative externality on you. The party consuming the goods is not paying all of its cost. In the bill-splitting situation, the person enjoying the large, expensive lunch is doing the same thing. People simply react to the incentives they are facing.”

Source: Uri Gneezy, Ernan Haruvy and Hadas Yafe – The inefficiency of splitting the bill – Economic Journal 114, no. 495: 265-280 (April 2004)

The smartest thing on the idiot box

Published January 19, 2015January 19, 2015 by Anand Damani

Behavioural Design is on National Geographic Channel.

Behavioural scientist Daniel Pink is doing a show called Crowd Control. Its a series of experiments that use behavioural science to solve public problems like how to get kids to not pee in the pool, how to get people to follow instructions in emergency flight landings, etc.

It’s on National Geographic Channel on Mon-Thur 10pm India time.

Because it’s a TV show, they’ve had to factor in the entertainment quotient. That’s why few of the solutions are not scalable. Nevertheless they make for some of the smartest ideas you’ll see on TV.

See the edited video clips of the experiments right now here.

Talk on Investor behaviour (Franklin Templeton)

Published November 8, 2017December 29, 2014 by Anand Damani

We spoke on Investor Behaviour at Franklin Templeton’s Independent Financial Advisor convention in Bali on 12th December.

Our presentation was about investor’s biases, heuristics and rules of thumbs. We also conducted a live auction that brought alive our irrational behaviour amongst the audience who participated in it.

The rest again is confidential material. But we will be posting many articles on behaviour – consumer, employee, shopper, investor, public that we promise.

Have an awesome year.

First ever TEDx – Q&A for VJTI

Published January 13, 2015September 22, 2014 by Anand Damani

We were invited for the first ever TEDx – Q&A session for VJTI engineering students and makers, on 17^th September 2014 at the VJTI campus (VJTI is one of the premier engineering institutes of India having received funding from The World Bank). A big thanks to TEDxGateway’s campus connect initiative. What an awesome time we had answering questions from curious minds at VJTI about Bleep, its future, human behaviour, behaviour change, Behavioural Design and the role of technology in Behavioural Design.

Students of VJTI were shown our TEDxGateway talk on Bleep and Behavioural Design immediately followed by a Q&A session that seemed like it would have lasted hours because the questions just wouldn’t stop from the enthusiastic crowd. But of course we had to have a maximum time limit of an hour. Here are highlights of the Q&A session.

Questions naturally began about Bleep and its future. We explained to students that Bleep being a product that solved a social issue and not an individual problem, is the responsibility of the Government of India. Which is why we aren’t selling Bleep to individual customers who we believe will hardly form any numbers. Plus Bleep won’t help car manufacturers sell more cars so they won’t install it voluntarily either. After some question and answers most seemed to accept our answer but some still seemed optimistic that Bleep could be sold to individuals. May be it was their optimism bias. May be one day we’ll be proved wrong.

Students asked whether Bleep could prove to be distracting and cause accidents in emergencies. We informed them that we had tested Bleep for over 3800 km and no accidents had occurred. We also told them that according to Jeff Muttart’s study (a traffic-accident reconstructionist) in emergencies people don’t use the horn and therefore Bleep will not go off and distract them further. Jeff Muttart has pored over hundreds of surveillance videos of real-life car crashes and near-crashes. His study shows that emergency horn use is not associated with decreased accident involvement. He found that drivers never steered and honked at the same time, and usually they didn’t honk at all. About half of emergency honks were meant to chastise and came only after the danger was over. The other half were just preludes to a crash. “It really didn’t serve any purpose at all. It was just, Hey, by the way, I’m going to hit you.”

(Muttart, J., “Factors that Influence Drivers’ Response Choice Decisions in Video Recorded Crashes,” SAE Technical Paper 2005-01-0426, 2005, doi:10.4271/2005-01-0426)

Someone asked “But what will happen to people’s honking behaviour once Bleep is removed from the car?” We told them that we haven’t done the post study, but we jokingly said, “First let Bleep come into our cars. Then we’ll see what happens if its not there anymore.”

The most interesting part of the session was the discussion about Behavioural Design and behaviour change. We sensed that the students found it to be a new, unique and intriguing concept. We spoke about irrational behaviour, difference in attitudes and behaviour, why we cannot solely rely on will power for behaviour change, why most educational campaigns don’t work, how we create false memories, why we use Behavioural Design and not work towards increasing people’s self-awareness and how collaboration between engineers and designers can design new products that facilitate behaviour change.

One of the curious students having read about People Power (click on the link to read about it) before attending the session, asked us to speak about the experiment. So we obliged and told them about how human behaviour is contagious. Like right there in the auditorium once the first student raised his hand to ask a question, seeing him one by one the others followed. Soon we were asked if we had solutions for littering, spitting, eve teasing, not talking on the mobile while driving and so on. May be one day we may.

Meanwhile we told them that we had a solution for another behaviour change. We spontaneously made an offer to VJTI students and makers that we’d be happy to hire a person who could help us create a product on a project that could potentially change an aspect of our behaviour. If you are an electronic engineer, maker and are interested to change human behaviour, email us with your work at anand@brief-case.co

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