Persuasion – Page 6 – Behavioural Design

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)

There’s at least one benefit of having a common name

Published February 23, 2016 by Anand Damani

Everyone I know who is told that his/her name is common gets peeved, including myself. But hey we found one huge benefit of having a common name.

In a study by researcher Randy Garner surveys were sent by mail to complete strangers. Accompanying the survey was a request to complete and return it to the person whose name was either similar or dissimilar to the name of the survey recipient. So a person whose name was Robert Greer got the survey from Bob Gregar or a woman named Cynthia Johnston got the survey from Cindy Johanson, in the similar name group. The dissimilar name group of course got surveys from dissimilar-sounding names. Those who received the survey from someone with a similar-sounding name were twice as likely to fill out the surveys than names that were dissimilar (56% compared to 30%).

Findings such as this one show the power and subtlety of similarity as a cue that people use to decide whom to help. That’s why pointing out similarities in any domain, including names, birth dates, religion, hometowns, schools, alma mater, etc. in discussions with any person before making your request or presentation could get you a favorable response.

Alternatively, if you’re designing a program/project/initiative/product for a particular client, you can harness the power of people’s natural tendency to be attracted to things that remind them of themselves in the name, title or label that you give it.

Source: Randy Garner – What’s in a Name? Persuasion Perhaps – Journal of Consumer Psychology (2005)

When should you admit that you are wrong?

Published February 15, 2016 by Anand Damani

Imagine you are the Marketing Director of one of the reputed airlines and your airline has frustrated hundreds of passengers due to lack of preparation and poor decision-making in the face of severe winter weather. All other airlines cancelled flights in anticipation of severe weather and returned to normal service within few days. In contrast the airline that you are the Marketing Director of, gave hope to passengers that the planes would fly – yet remained out of service for many days. In short your airline let customers down. Would you focus the blame on external weather conditions or on internal factors relevant to the company’s operation?

If you chose external weather conditions, you should leave your job and join an airline like Air India. You will probably find a lot of like-minded people there. Or may be the organization you work with is like Air India and would not support your decision. But if you chose to focus on internal factors relevant to the company’s operations, consider yourself a brave person, with a good sense of humility, to have admitted one’s mistake. Indeed a very rare thing amongst people and organizations. And if you would have chosen to acknowledge internal factors, not only would it benefit your organization, it would benefit your career too. Let me tell you why.

Says behavioural scientist Fiona Lee and her colleagues say that “Organizations that attribute failures to internal causes make it appear as having greater control over its own resources and future. The public might assume that the organization has a plan to modify the internal features of the organization that may have led to the problems in the first place.”

Lee and colleagues have tested this idea by conducting a study in which participants read one of the two annual reports of a fictitious company, both of which explained why the company performed poorly over the last year. For half of the participants, the annual report blamed internal (but potentially controllable) factors for the poor performance and for the other half, the annual report blamed external (and incontrollable) factors for the poor performance. Turned out that the first group viewed the company more positively on a number of different dimensions than did the second group.

Not just that, the researchers collected statements from actual annual reports of 14 companies over a 21-year period and discovered that companies that pointed to internal factors to explain failures had higher stock prices one year later than those that pointed to external factors.

Organizations that attribute failures to internal causes come out ahead not only in public perception, but also in terms of profit line. No reason to believe why it should not work for individuals. So next time you make a mistake, admit it and follow it up with an action plan demonstrating that you can take control of the situation and rectify it.

Source: Lee, F., & Peterson, C., & Tiedens, L. – Mea culpa: Predicting stock prices from organizational attributions – Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30(12): 1-14 (2004)

Mirroring others behaviour can get you likes

Published January 19, 2016 by Anand Damani

Often during a meeting or a negotiation we subconsciously mirror our colleagues’ or negotiators’ posture. The typical response is to change our posture, as if there were something wrong with being influenced by the other. However the following research suggests the exact opposite: Mirroring behaviour results in better outcomes for both.

Researcher William Maddux and colleagues conducted an experiment wherein MBA students were instructed to subtly mirror their partner during negotiation (e.g. lean back if the other person does) or not asked to mirror their partner. When one party was instructed to mirror the other, the two parties reached a deal 67% of the time. When they weren’t told to mirror the other, the parties reached a deal only 12.5% of the time.

Based on additional data from the research, they concluded that mirroring behaviour led to increased trust, and that increased trust typically led one negotiator to feel comfortable disclosing details that were ultimately necessary to break a stalemate and create a win-win situation for both parties.

Another research by Rick van Baaren and colleagues found that waiters at a restaurant increased their tip size by nearly 70% simply by matching their customers’ verbalizations, repeating back word for word the customer’s order, as opposed to saying “okay” or merely nodding.

Social psychologists Tanya Chartrand and John Barg say that matching behaviour of others creates feelings of liking and strengthens bonds between two people. It makes us say “yes” and do nice things for people we like.

At the same time, you don’t want your interaction to come across as mocking the other person. So the key is subtlety.

Sources: William Maddux, Elizabeth Mullen and Adam Galinsky – Chameleons bake bigger pies and take bigger pieces: Strategic behavioral mimicry facilitates negotiations outcomes – Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, no. 2: 461-68 (March 2008)

Rick van Baaren, Rob Holland, Brejge Steenart, Ad van Knippenberg – Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of Imitation – Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39, no. 4:393-98 (July 2003)

Tanya Chatrand and John Bargh – The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 6: 893-910 (June 1999)

Haath laga ke dekh (Try touching me)

Published March 29, 2016September 25, 2015 by Anand Damani

Hello from New York. We’re here to attend MakerCon and MakerFaire and meet interesting people like authors, professors, makers, inventors, innovators, chip designers, product designers, design thinkers and of course behavioural scientists. More on that later.

Continuing with the blogpost, translated in English ‘Haath laga ke dekh’ means ‘Try touching me’, used here in a challenging tone and manner. You’ll hear a lot of it at crowded places like railway stations, bus stops, inside trains and buses where people jostle for space and there’s an invariable brushing of elbows and shoulders. Leading to mock fights of the ‘Hungama’ Bollywood movie-type, where men challenge one another saying ‘Haath laga ke dekh’.

But in this post we’ll be focusing on the positive aspect of touching. How and why touching can sub-consciously lead to positive outcomes. By touching we mean, a gentle brief touch to the forearm, for example, not the touchy-feely kinds.

In the study ‘The Effect of Touch on Women’s Behaviour’ by N. Gueguen, French men randomly approached 240 young women by saying, “Hello. My name is Antoine. I just want to say that I think you’re really pretty – I need to go to work now – but if you’d give me your number – I’ll call you later – and we could have a drink together someplace.” If the women refused, they’d say, “Its not my day. Have a good evening.” If they got her number, they’d tell her it was just a study, and the women would laugh. With half the women, the young men added a light one-second touch to the woman’s forearm. The other half were not touched. I know what you are thinking – what would happen if it were India? But stay with me on this one. I’ll give you other examples to illustrate the point too.

Outcome: When the young men didn’t touch, their success rate was 10% and when they touched, it was 20%. Why did it happen? Women didn’t think like Antoine is such a good toucher. It happened because on a sub-conscious level, touch imparts a subliminal sense of caring and connection. Social neuroscientist pioneer Ralph Adolphs says that nerve fibers especially in the face and arm are directly connected to areas of the brain such as the insular cortex, which is associated with emotion.

Subtle touching, like briefly on the arm, has provided a positive outcome in many researches and experiments – from increasing tips for servers in restaurants and bars, to the servers suggestion to order a particular dish being accepted more often, to the increase in percentage of shoppers in a supermarket purchasing the food they sampled, to the proportion of shoppers in a mall willing to answer a survey, to a 2010 study of Basketball in Berkeley that found that the number of high fives, chest bumps, hugs, etc. correlated significantly with the degree of cooperation among teammates and wins.

Haath laga ke dekh. Try touching, this time used in a persuasive manner 🙂

Why focus groups cannot be relied upon

Published September 2, 2015 by Anand Damani

Marketers rely a lot on traditional research like focus groups to understand consumer’s motivations toward their brand, product and category. 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.

Imagine you’re coming back from a party that was at a lavish penthouse of an industrialist. You say you had a lovely time and I ask you what you liked about it. You say “the drinks”. But did your joy really come from talking to the attractive woman who wrote the latest fictional best seller? Or was it something you really relished like the food? Or was it something subtler, like the quality of the music? Or the scent of citrus that filled the house? Or was it the fact that you got to network with influential people?

Leonard Mlodinow, author of many books including ‘Subliminal’ says, when we come up with an explanation for our feelings and behaviour, our brain searches our mental database of cultural norms and picks something plausible. In the above case, your brain might have asked ‘Why do people enjoy parties?’ and chosen ‘the drinks’ as the most likely hypothesis, if ‘drinks’ happen to conform to a set of standard reasons, expectations, cultural and societal explanations for a given preference.

In a study mentioned in ‘Subliminal’, women were shown four pairs of silk stockings that were absolutely identical, except that each had a different and very faint scent applied to it. The women were asked to choose their favourite and they found no difficulty in telling why one pair was better than the other. They spoke of perceived differences in texture, weave, feel, sheen and weight. Everything but the scent. In reality, stockings with one particular scent were rated the highest, much more often than the others, but the women denied using scent as a criterion. In fact only 6 out of the 250 women even noticed that the stockings had been perfumed.

Truth is we most often don’t understand our own preferences. Despite that, we usually think that we do. And when asked to explain why we feel a certain way, most of us, after giving it some thought, have no trouble supplying many reasons that sound plausible.

It’s a market researchers nightmare – you can’t even trust people to know what they prefer, leave alone why. That’s why we rely on the knowledge of the human brain, human physiology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioural economics and proven experiments conducted by the best in the world to understand human behaviour and create Behavioural Design solutions.

Why 99% of Austrians donate their organs

Published August 11, 2015 by Anand Damani

Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein conducted an interesting online experiment in 2003, asking people whether they would be willing donors. Some people were told that the default was not to be an organ donor, and they were given the option of confirming or changing the default status. Others were told that the default was to be an organ donor, and again, they were given the option of confirming or changing the default status. When participants had to opt in to being an organ donor, only 42% did so. But when they had to opt out, 82% agreed to be donors.

To get a sense of the power of the default rule, consider the difference in organ donation rates between two similar European countries, Germany and Austria. In Germany, which uses an opt-in system, only 12% of citizens gave consent, whereas in Austria which uses an opt-out system, nearly everyone (99%) did.

Of course a successful organ donation program needs the infrastructure of the medical system in matching donors with recipients, transporting organs and performing successful transplants. But keeping everything constant, default option still plays a major role in increasing the donation rate.

In some countries like France, though the default rule is to be a donor, doctors still ask the family members for permission. Even then the default rule matters. As Childress and Liverman put it, “The next of kin can be approached quite differently when the decedent’s silence is presumed to indicate a decision to donate, rather than when it is presumed to indicate a decision not to donate.”

How many of you have changed the default settings of your mobiles? This power can be harnessed to change behaviour. Setting default options can have huge effects on the outcomes, from increasing organ donations to increasing personal savings to making better investments. Never under-estimate the power of inertia.

Sources: Eric J. Johnson & Daniel G. Goldstein – Do Defaults Save Lives? Science, Vol. 302, pp. 1338-1339 (2003)

Alberto Abadie & Sebastien Gay – The Impact of Presumed Consent Legislation on Cadaveric Organ Donation: A Cross Country Study – Journal of Health Economics 25, 599–620 (2006)

Small ideas make a big difference

Published May 5, 2015 by Anand Damani

There are lots of small everyday things that could benefit from being designed better. Things we take for granted in everyday life. But when designed well, things just work, leading to enhanced experience, satisfied customers, appropriate actionability, increased sales, etc. This post is about few of such small everyday ideas.

Like handles on doors. If there is a handle on the door, the tendency is to pull it. But almost all doors have a handle on the side it says push, too. If the door needs to be pushed, why have a handle? Simply keep it flat and we’ll push it.

When composing emails, wish there was a reminder to attach our files, when words like ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ were found in the composed email.

‘No Parking on Odd dates 1 3 5’ and ‘No Parking on Even dates 2 4 6’ tend to be so cumbersome. We need to first think about what date it is today, then figure that its ‘No Parking’ on that side, which means we can park on the opposite side. Instead what if we had ‘Parking on Odd dates only’ and ‘Parking on Even dates only’.

Because there are two traffic signals in view at all times, one after the zebra crossing and one much ahead on the other side of the junction, we Indians always push ahead wanting to be first (in whichever race that is) therefore not stopping at the zebra crossing and not allowing pedestrians to cross. So to get cars to stop at the zebra crossing, only one traffic signal needs to be there, placed just before the stripes begin.

Instead of having to choose from financial retirement plans with complicated numbers, what if we could choose, by looking at pictures of different homes (1, 2, 3, 4 BHK) that could be bought with different levels of retirement income.

I often get asked about what mega-pixel camera on the phone is good. Fact is that we don’t understand what mega-pixels mean. What will be useful to us is the information of what mega-pixel matched what size of print. But we know this one won’t happen, else phone and camera manufacturers won’t be able to convince us to mindlessly upgrade.

Remember using the plastic card key in your hotel room to start and switch off the power. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have one in our home, so that we could start/switch off the power with one stroke and do away with the nagging feeling of not having turned off the geyser or gas or some other appliance after leaving home?

The tendency is to think of these design ideas as small (insignificant) ideas, but they are the ones that make for the most awesome product, service experiences and of course get us to behave.

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.

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