Sub-conscious – Behavioural Design

Making decisions under stress

Published July 23, 2021July 23, 2021 by Anand Damani

This article of ours first appeared in The Hindu on 23rd July 2021.

The pandemic has made it more difficult for us to think rationally

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the biggest disruption to lives since the Partition in 1947 for those in India. It has caused dramatic shifts in our personal and work lives. It has, of course, caused illness and taken away many of our loved ones. It has caused many people to lose a substantial portion of their incomes. It has posed new behavioural challenges to governments and individuals. It has created great uncertainty. In short, the pandemic has put us all under immense stress. It has been so stressful that the one thing that every person on the planet wants right now is for the pandemic to end and for life to go back to pre-COVID-19 days.

Chronic anxiety

The stress caused by the pandemic has sustained over a long period of time and can be categorised as chronic stress. When we face stress, the body releases a hormone called cortisol. Prolonged exposure to cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, increases the risk of heart disease, sleep disruptions and mood disorders like anxiety and depression. Chronic stress has been found to kill brain cells and even reduce the size of the brain. Chronic stress has a shrinking effect on the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for memory and learning.

Studies in behavioural science show that we don’t tend make good decisions under stress. In fact, they have repeatedly shown that we often don’t make good decisions even in normal times. For example, we know exercising is good for our health but we don’t do it enough. We know overeating is bad for us but we still indulge in it often. We know binging on social media takes away time from doing what we are supposed to be doing but we can’t stop scrolling. This is some of our behaviour in normal times. Given that we are now facing chronic stress, our behaviour is becoming more irrational. For example, outdoors is generally a safer place to meet people than indoors because of a greater degree of ventilation. Yet, people feel safer indoors than outdoors. Indoors are generally safer than outdoors at protecting us, but not during the pandemic. People are more likely to wear masks outdoors, where it is actually safer, and remove their masks indoors, which at a time like this is risky behaviour.

After the first COVID-19 wave declined in India, people began travelling, holidaying, partying and attending weddings. There was no availability of vaccines then. When people had little protection against COVID-19, they behaved fearlessly. But now, even after partial or full vaccination, people seem more scared of contracting COVID-19 than they were after the first wave. Studies around the world are showing that most vaccines are demonstrating more than 90% protection against hospitalisation due to COVID-19. One would think that should make people less fearful, but that’s not the case.

Mindless investing

While most people are facing a drop in income, those with disposable incomes have begun investing their money on their own. Brokerage firms in India have reported the highest number of demat account openings in the past 15 years. Driven by the fear of missing out, a large number of newbie investors have begun following their herd by investing money in India’s stock markets and even in cryptocurrencies. But history shows that retail investors, especially the inexperienced newbies, are the last to enter bull runs, buying stocks and assets at high prices, because people in their social network are making money. People love making easy money. History shows that such irrational investing leads to bubbles that eventually burst leaving such investors with massive losses. People have begun buying and selling cryptocurrencies. These are not currencies but mere speculative instruments because they are neither backed by any underlying asset nor by the government. In fact, ‘crypto’ means hidden or secret. But history shows it’s no secret that such speculative manias are caused by our own irrational behaviour. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult for us to think rationally.

Co-WIN, casinos and luck

Published June 1, 2021June 1, 2021 by Anand Damani

This article of ours first appeared in The Hindu on 1st June 2021

The psychology behind trying our luck at booking a vaccine appointment is the same as in gambling.

The experience of booking an appointment to get vaccinated in India has been rewarding for some but frustrating for most. The procedure for a citizen to get vaccinated is to register on the Co-WIN website or Aarogya Setu app and schedule an appointment at a preferred centre. It sounds easy until you try it. Soon you realise that no matter how fast you click the confirm button, it’s not easy to get an appointment. That’s because vaccines are in short supply. And that is because the Government of India hasn’t placed enough orders.

People who have been trying to get an appointment find someone or the other in their social network who got lucky with an appointment. That motivates them to keep trying. The system of getting vaccine appointments has become gamified with vaccination centres releasing alerts of slot openings on social media. These alerts inform people about the openings of vaccination slots at any time of the day or night. They keep people hooked on to the game of ‘fastest finger first’ to book an appointment.

Vaccination and gambling

The psychology behind why random alerts and repeated log ins into the website to try one’s luck at booking an appointment works is the same as why people gamble money in casinos or buy lottery tickets. At a casino, people put money in the slot machine and press the button. People don’t know if they’ll win. They can’t predict it. But they believe that the odds of winning increase the more they play. So, they keep gambling. Of course, most people lose more than they win because the odds are always in favour of the casino, which makes most of the money. In the case of trying their luck at getting a vaccination appointment, people eagerly wait for alerts of slot openings, log in and press the confirm button. People don’t know if they’ll ‘win’ an appointment. They can’t predict it. But people believe that the odds of ‘winning’ an appointment increase the more they log in. So, people keep trying. Of course, most people don’t ‘win’ appointments because the odds are not in their favour. The only difference between gambling at casinos and booking vaccination appointments is that in gambling, the casino wins most of the time. But regarding vaccination, both the government and the people lose.

Active conditioning

In Ivan Pavlov’s experiment of classical conditioning, the dogs in the experiment would start drooling when they heard the sounds associated with food preparation. They would drool when the bell rang even though no food was present. After a while, the dogs would stop responding if no food appeared after the bell was rung. But psychologist B. F. Skinner found that rats and pigeons would continue doing the task much longer if they were rewarded occasionally rather than every time. Both are types of conditioning, but Skinner’s conditioning was active, whereas Pavlov’s was passive. The dog didn’t have to do anything conscious to get the reward, whereas the rat and pigeon had to undertake a task. Making the animal take an explicit action produced a stronger, longer lasting effect on behaviour.

Humans respond in similar ways as rats and pigeons when given an occasional reward for repetitive behaviour. Casinos give players the illusion of control by letting players place chips and play their cards. Giving them choices and making people take action makes them feel like they have some control, as opposed to giving purely luck-based unpredictable rewards. In case of vaccinations, the government is giving people the illusion of control by encouraging people to log in and try their luck at booking an appointment. Giving people the choice to take action towards booking an appointment makes people feel like they have some control, even though the odds are highly stacked against ‘winning’ an appointment. There is an element of surprise or uncertainty, so people are never sure when the appointment will come through. This is keeping people engaged. The question is, should the government be operating vaccinations like a casino?

Categorising activities in the context of the pandemic

Published September 1, 2020September 1, 2020 by Anand Damani

This article first appeared in the opinion section of The Hindu on 28th August 2020.

In the initial days of COVID-19, towards the end of March 2020, India went into a lockdown. The number of daily new cases at that time was 87. But the fear of contracting the virus was very high. Now after five months, the number of daily new cases has crossed 75,000, but the fear of contracting the virus has reduced. Why do people misunderstand risk?

One reason is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not novel anymore. But more importantly, behavioural science studies show that numbers don’t move people. When we read that three million people in India have contracted COVID-19, most people can’t make much sense of it. But when someone close to us in proximity or relationship contracts COVID-19 or succumbs to it, the fear becomes tangible. People suddenly feel vulnerable. Otherwise, people feel invincible, even though the risk of contracting COVID-19 actually keeps increasing with daily cases increasing.

Guided by emotions

Emotions cause us to misunderstand risk. For example, flying is something that many people get scared of even though flying has become an extremely safe mode of transport. Zero people died in a plane crash last year in India, while over 1,50,000 people died in road accidents. Yet, people feel scared of flying, not of driving on Indian roads.

Flying evokes a powerful emotional response. You are literally up in the air, in the hands of a machine and two pilots. If something happens up there, there is nothing you can do about it. This makes flying feel unsafe even though it is among the safest modes of transport.

Likewise, some people believe that they should not step out of their homes because going out means that they will catch COVID-19. In reality, going for a walk in an uncrowded area with a mask on is relatively safe. Some of the same people believe that staying at home is far safer than stepping out. So, they have started keeping their househelps at home. This is relatively risky, because distancing may not be possible within a typical home in urban India and droplets exhaled, sneezed or coughed out tend to stay in the air indoors for longer.

The risk of contracting COVID-19 in any given situation can be categorised as ‘very high’, ‘high’, ‘medium’, ‘low’ or ‘very low’. Visiting a gym generally would fall under ‘very high’ risk, while playing tennis would generally fall under ‘very low’ risk, even though both activities are related to fitness.

However, since each situation demands assessing the risk of contracting COVID-19, it complicates people’s decision-making.

Colour-coding different tasks

To simplify decisions, people rely on short-cuts. For example, if you stay at home, you are safe. If you believe in god, you are safe. If you are healthy, you are safe. If you have a particular deity at home, you are safe. Such simplifications, using which people assess the risk, make COVID-19 a dangerous pandemic.

To help people get a better understanding of risk, the government needs to devise a simple behavioural design. Just like a traffic signal communicates ‘stop’, ‘ready’ and ‘go’ with ‘red’, ‘orange’ and ‘green’ colours respectively, our daily activities need to be categorised as ‘red’, ‘orange’ and ‘green’.

Having outsiders visit your home would be ‘red’, visiting retail stores would be ‘orange’ and meeting a friend at an uncrowded park while keeping a safe distance and wearing a mask would be ‘green’.

If people can’t judge risks accurately, COVID-19 is likely to continue to spread like a raging fire in a forest.

Forced to adopt new habits

Published June 10, 2020June 10, 2020 by Anand Damani

This article first appeared in The Hindu on 14th May 2020.

Starting new habits is tough and requires overcoming inertia. Most of the time humans like maintaining the status quo. The majority of us don’t change the default settings when we buy a new mobile phone. Nor we do change the default settings of any new app we download. The tendency to stick with defaults happens across different aspects of our lives, from personal to social to office work. But this pandemic has jolted us out of our inertia.

We’re now doing new things that we haven’t done before. Those not used to cleaning their own dishes or homes are doing so now. Those not used to working from home are forced to do so now. Managers who wouldn’t allow their teammates to work from home have no choice but to ask them to work from home now. The pandemic has forced us to start new habits.

One habit that we Indians are not used to is maintaining sufficient physical distance from one another in public spaces. There are many reasons for this. Urban cities are densely packed with people. Houses in slums are cramped. Few roads have footpaths, forcing pedestrians to take up a portion of the road. Lanes are narrow; even main roads are narrow. Trains and buses are always packed. Queues are long. The population is overwhelming.

Environmental factors

Behavioural science studies are showing evidence that a large part of human behaviour is led by environmental factors. In normal times we don’t pay much attention to our environment because we don’t need to. If one has to take a crowded train to work because of lack of better choice, we get used to it because the goal is to get to office, in time. The environment becomes part of our sub-conscious. We navigate through life, lanes, stations, etc. without paying much attention to our surroundings. But the pandemic is now making us aware of our surroundings. Besides behaviours like hand washing, sanitising and wearing masks to prevent contracting COVID-19, the pandemic is driving another big behavioural change — keeping safe distance.

Merely informing people that they need to maintain at least six-feet distance from one another is not enough. People tend to forget about distancing while talking to one another. Maintaining distance is an alien concept for us.

That’s why we’re now seeing examples of behavioural design nudges in our environment that help us in maintaining distance in public spaces. Markings in the form of circles and squares are being painted outside grocery stores and pharmacies to help people maintain distance. People are now standing in these circles and squares while waiting in queues. I hope relevant authorities implement this rule, wherever crowds need to be managed.

Maintaining physical distancing

Around the world behavioural design nudges are being implemented to help people keep safe distance from one another. Restaurants in Hong Kong are putting tapes over alternate tables so that people do not occupy tables next to each other. A bus station in Thailand has put stickers on alternate seats so that people sit leaving one seat empty. Schoolchildren in Hangzhou, China are being made to wear caps with fan-like blades so that they cannot come close to other children. A police station in Thailand has placed transparent protective shields on desks creating a barrier between the police inspector and civilians.

We are likely to see many more examples of such behavioural design in the near future that help us keep safe distance, because the lockdown will eventually be lifted.

To see examples of Behavioural Design for keeping safe distance, click here – Instagram

Making doctors wash hands

Published April 28, 2020April 28, 2020 by Anand Damani

This article first appeared in The Hindu on 24th April, 2020

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian-born doctor came to Vienna in 1846 to work at the city’s General Hospital. Dr. Semmelweis noticed that women delivered by doctors had three times higher mortality rate than women delivered by midwives. He spotted a link between the lack of hygiene of the doctors and the mortality rate of the mothers. After he initiated a mandatory hand-washing policy, the mortality rate for women delivered by doctors fell from 18 percent to about 1 percent. Despite such a brilliant outcome, the idea of hand washing was rejected by the medical community. Doctors were offended by the suggestion that they could be causing infections. Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only two decades after his death, when Louis Pasteur, of pasteurization fame, raised awareness of pathogens.

From 1850s to 2020, hand washing has been advocated as a simple way of reducing the risk of infection. But even after 170 years, studies find that doctors still do not wash their hands often. A systematic review of studies on compliance with hand hygiene in hospitals, done by researchers Vicki Erasmus et al, found that only 32% of doctors and 48% of nurses wash their hands between seeing patients. Another study by researcher Didier Pittet, an infection control expert with the University of Geneva Hospitals, Switzerland found that compliance rates for hand washing amongst doctors and nurses was only 57 percent, and years of awareness programs urging doctors to wash up or use disinfectant gels have had little effect. A study of hand hygiene compliance amongst Indian doctors by researchers S. K. Ansari et al, found only 49% of doctors and 56% of nurses washed their hands with soap between patients.

If India needs to contain the spread of Covid-19, everybody ought to be washing our hands, especially doctors and nurses. But how can we change their hand washing behaviour?

The traditional approach of changing behaviour is to educate doctors and nurses on the importance of hand washing. It seems like the rational and logical thing to do, but even though doctors and nurses know that they should be washing their hands, they forget to do so. That’s why we need to apply behavioural design. Behavioural design is about creating subconscious nudges right at the moment where the desired action is to be performed, in our case where hand washing needs to happen.

Behavioural scientists piloted a low-cost experiment in rural schools in Bangladesh where behavioural design nudges were used to guide hand washing with soap after toilet use. Hand washing stations were built in visible and easy‐to‐reach locations, brightly colored paths were painted from toilets to the hand washing station, and footprints and handprints were painted on the path and at the hand washing station. Hand washing with soap after using the toilet went from 4% before these behavioural design nudges nudges were created, to 74% six weeks after they were introduced. No other hygiene education was communicated as part of the study.

Similarly, in hospitals where wash basins and hand sanitizers are placed, stickers of brightly colored footsteps should be placed so that doctors and nurses get attracted by them, which subconsciously directs them to the wash basin or the hand sanitizer. Such behavioural design nudges influence doctors and nurses to wash their hands with soap or sanitizer without making a conscious decision to do so. Hand washing is often done as a relatively subconscious habitual action, and can be easily triggered by contextual cues, so hand washing lends itself well to such behavioural design nudging. An experiment done at the Gentofte Hospital in Denmark has found that hand sanitizer usage increased from 3% to 67% when the hand sanitizer was placed in a prominent location with bright signage that caught people’s attention. Not bad for such a simple and low cost intervention.

The limitations of asking questions in research

Published February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Anand Damani

Researchers ask people for their opinion about their product, packaging or concepts to pick insights about their appeal, and get wonderful feedback that is sincere, detailed, and emphatic but has little relation to the truth.

We wrote about ‘Why focus groups cannot be relied’ earlier on the blog. Here’s another perspective – impression management. Impression management is one of a diverse array of forces that influence our truthfulness. Here’s a behavioural science study in which White college students were asked to state their level of agreement (ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) with the following two statements:

It is a bad idea for Blacks and Whites to marry each other.
Black people are generally not as smart as Whites.

Half the participants who were asked these questions received them the Black researchers and other half from White researchers. All participants were assured that the answers would be confidential.

When the questioner was Black, the participants’ responses were noticeably more Black-favorable than when the questioner was White. The impression management effect occurred without the subjects being aware that their answers had been influenced by the race of the questioner.

Impression management produces flawed, inaccurate responses to many questions, not just race related. That’s why we don’t ask people questions or conduct surveys or focus groups. We rely on the knowledge of the human brain, cognitive neuroscience, behavioural economics and thousands of proven experiments conducted by behavioural scientists on human behaviour, to create Behavioural Design solutions that make the impact.

Source: J.B McConahey, B.B. Hardee & V. Batts – Has racism declined in America? It depends on who is asking and what is asked – Journal of Conflict Resolution 25, 563-579. (1981)

How to get people to stop littering?

Published July 1, 2019July 1, 2019 by Anand Damani

Let’s explore few ways in which one could reduce littering:

1. You could fine people for littering.

2. You could place CCTVs in the area.

3. You could incentivize people for using garbage bins.

4. You could create a social stigma for people who litter.

5. You could make throwing stuff in bins fun.

6. You could use social proof to indicate that a high percentage of people use the bin.

But behavioural scientists did something better in the 2011 Copenhagen study that reduced littering by 46%.

They placed green footprints on the ground, pointing the way to the nearest garbage bin. Simple, low cost, effective Behavioural Design.

India, though is a different story. Usually there are no trash bins in public places, because the trash bins get stolen by people who sell it to make some money, even though they are fixed to the ground with screws. Everything in India has re-sale value.

So Briefcase has created a Behavioural Design solution in the form of non-stealable, waste-segregated, long-lasting, low cost, low maintenance, all weather, endorsable trash bins. But unfortunately, the local government authorities here in Mumbai – the officers from BMC, aren’t interested because of apathy. How can we change their behaviour? Can you help us?

Source: http://www.inudgeyou.com/green-nudge-nudging-litter-into-the-bin/

Do you spend enough time analyzing the problem?

Published June 19, 2019June 19, 2019 by Anand Damani

I used to hear the words ‘the client wants it yesterday’ a lot when I used to be in advertising. And for various reasons people in advertising succumbed to the pressure. This in turn led to clients crunching the timelines even shorter as years passed, while the ad industry diligently kept working harder at keeping deadlines, lowering the quality of strategic thinking, thereby positioning ad agencies as short-term ad campaign makers.

Though you may not be from the ad industry you may find yourself in a similar situation. Unfortunately, the temptation in such time-pressured situations is to use habitual responses to get started on the solution immediately. Since problem-construction feels like a waste of time, it’s the phase that gets sacrificed most often. In reality, it is the most important part of the creative process.

In the classic study on creative preparation conducted by behavioural scientists Jacob W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, they asked art students to create a still-life painting of an object, which was later evaluated professionally. The study found that students judged to have created the best work were those who spent the longest preparing – thinking about the object itself and how they were going to use it. When Mihaly returned to the same people 7 and 18 years later, he found that it was these measures of problem identification and construction that predicted the artists’ long-term success. Even 18 years later, artists who spent longer constructing the problem were more successful.

Says Jeremy Dean of www.psyblog.co.uk, “The choices made in the early stages have a massive impact later. That’s why spending longer thinking about the problem before you dive in is likely to lead to higher levels of creativity in the final product. Fools rush in where the more creative dare to tread.”

Needless to say, deadlines are part and parcel of constraints in any commercial work. Constraints bring out the best in us, but we need to give ourselves adequate time to analyze the problem well enough. That’s why before identifying the Behavioural Design principles to be applied to the challenge, we spend a substantial amount of time analyzing the product and customer data and map out the customer journey, whether the customer is a consumer, employee, investor or simply put, the user.

Source: Jacob W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – The creative vision: A longitudinal study of problem finding in art – Wiley New York 1976

S.M. Rostan – Problem finding, problem solving and cognitive controls: An empirical investigation of critically acclaimed productivity – Creative research journal 7, no. 2 (1994): 97-110

Behavioural Design for Urban Planning

Published June 7, 2019June 7, 2019 by Anand Damani

We were happy to be invited to speak at Milano Arch Week 2019 on applying Behavioural Design to urban planning or as they liked to refer to it ‘Urban Regeneration’. We are happy that architects are opening up to our practice of Behavioural Design to build cities that work for people living in it and to use architecture to modify public behaviour.

Our talk included Behavioural Design examples from my Instagram feed. Some of the examples we referred to were the Ballot Bin that gets cigarette smokers to stub their cigarette buds at the Ballot Bin because they are motivated to vote for their choice, whether the choice is about your favourite football player or some other topical question. We were asked about Bleep horn reduction system as a Behavioural Design nudge to reduce drivers’ honking. We spoke about how the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) in India has made it mandatory for appliances to come with star ratings and how it’s nudging people to choose higher star rated appliances so that people can save money and in doing so also consume lower power and contribute towards climate crisis in a positive manner. Some of the other examples we spoke about were Behavioural Design nudges to reduce overspeeding, getting people to – use trash bins in the outdoor, use sanitizers in hospitals, use stairs instead of escalators, and many more. If you’re curious to know more, click here.

Psychology and Physiology are deeply connected – Part III

Published January 14, 2019January 14, 2019 by Anand Damani

Continuing the series of ‘Psychology and Physiology are deeply connected’, this is the final one.

This experiment is popularly known amongst psychologists as ‘The Love Bridge’ study, named after the bridge in Capilano Canyon, Vancouver where the experiment took place. The suspension bridge spans 450 feet and hovers 230 feet above the ground, causing it to sway as the wind blows. There was another bridge in the area that was a small but sturdy wooden bridge bordered by guardrails, just ten feet off the ground.

At various times throughout the day, researchers Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron, had a young female assistant approach men between 18-35, as they stepped off the end of each bridge with a scripted story – that she was a psychology student conducting a study on the effects of exposure to scenic attractions on creative expression. The assistant would then ask each man to fill out a short survey. When done, she would offer to tell him about the study when she a little bit more time. Then she would write down her name and number and hand it over to the men. Most men happily accepted it and walked off.

As expected the female assistant started getting calls from the men. While only two of sixteen men who crossed the small sturdy wooden bridge called, half of the eighteen men who crossed the suspension bridge called. Why did she miraculously become more attractive to the men who crossed the suspension bridge than to the men who crossed the small sturdy wooden bridge?

Turns out that for the men who crossed the suspension bridge, anxiety and adrenaline translated into a heightened romantic interest in the assistant. Their physiological reactions affected their perceptions and behaviour.

But could the men who took the suspension bridge be more courageous and daring and therefore more likely to take a chance on calling the assistant?

To test the possibility, the researchers went back to Capilano to conduct a follow-up study. This time the female assistant was stationed only at the end of the suspension bridge. She approached some of the men right after they crossed and others, ten minutes after they had finished crossing.

More men who met the assistant just after they crossed called, than the ones who were approached ten minutes later. The latter’s anxiety had subsided and their adrenaline levels had gone down.

No wonder going for a roller-coaster ride on a date makes sense.

Source: Attraction under conditions of high anxiety – Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30 (1974): 510-17.