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Innovative applications of behavioural science come from serendipitous collisions

Have you ever thought about whether the requirement for scientific rigour might be holding behavioural science back? The field has progressed using the scientific method, whereby hypotheses are tested with rigorous experimentation and the results are interpreted with scepticism. In order to get published, academic research must follow the scientific method’s clear steps and withstand countless rounds of peer reviews. The problem with this process is that it limits creativity within the field.

Both Jez and April are scientists by training. Jez has a background in biology and chemistry, going on to study biochemistry at university, before later falling in love with behavioural science. April felt at home in the objective and unambiguous world of the sciences, studying the field of human behaviour at undergraduate and, later, postgraduate level. There is beauty, both agree, in numbers, data and statistics, but these serve no purpose when behavioural science starts and ends with science. After all, what’s the point of testing hypotheses with elegantly designed studies in a lab if the findings cannot be applied in the real world?

Therefore, we advocate a world where anybody can try their hand at applying behavioural science. By democratising behavioural insights, this will enable people from all fields, industries and walks of life to bring them out of the lab and into the real world.

Creativity thrives when worlds collide

Some amazing things happen when the world of behavioural science collides with others. It’s ironic that when people refer to nudge theory they often begin with the fly in the urinal, just as we did in the previous chapter. The cleaning department at Schiphol airport did not meticulously adhere to the scientific method and there was no scientific paper published with the results.

On the contrary, this example was borne of the collision of two worlds. The idea came from Jos van Bedaf, who managed the cleaners at Schiphol, and who in a previous life had spent time in the armed forces.8 Here he’d encountered urinals featuring targets and witnessed the positive influence for himself. Years later in his new role, in a completely new world, he found himself facing the age-old spillage problem. Joining the dots in his head, he suggested that they try a similar thing in the airport urinals. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Innovation may be borne of the collision of any two worlds, but something magical happens when behavioural science collides with the world of design. When Rory, who we met in chapter 1, became a pioneer for applying behavioural science in the world of advertising, he guided a collision of this creative space with the study of human behaviour. Advertising creatives wouldn’t dream of executing an idea without good design, whether that idea was behaviourally informed or not. As such, this collision with visual design brought behavioural science to life more than academics ever could.

Creativity thrives when isolated things come together and one of Ogilvy Change’s first landmark projects did just this. It was an innovative idea which coupled scientific insight with beautiful creative execution, at the nexus of behavioural science and design.

The London Riots and Babies of the Borough

It was the summer of 2011 and Jez was holidaying in Cyprus with his small children. He took a call from a friend in Manchester, who frantically asked him whether he was okay.

“What do you mean?” replied Jez, startled out of his holiday bubble of ignorance.

“Haven’t you seen what’s happening in London?” probed his friend.

After switching on the TV he was soon up to speed with the rioting that was happening back home. People were smashing the windows in their streets, and looting everything from cigarettes to alcohol, TVs to trainers. One of Jez’s friends was a bouncer and later told him that he’d slept in his car clutching an iron bar, in order to safeguard one of his most valuable assets. It was a strange time for human behaviour.

A behavioural explanation

Strange as it was, behavioural science can help to explain what was going on. It’s been established that assault rates increase as temperatures rise.9 Testosterone levels are higher in warmer than colder months10 and high testosterone levels are associated with aggression.11 What’s more, warmer weather means that people are more likely to congregate outside and longer daylight hours may offer more opportunities for crime. Once rioting has started, the broken windows theory posits that small signs of damage encourage further lawlessness,12 meaning that vandalism and looting escalate once they have started.

Shop shutters as canvases

Elsewhere in London, someone at Ogilvy had a seemingly unrelated idea. Tara Austin, a passionate and intelligent Planner with the tenacity to take an idea to the limit, wondered why it was that security shop shutters were not used as an advertising medium? They would be ideal, she thought to herself, as a means to advertise fast-moving consumer goods – exactly the type of products which these small shops are selling.

Fortuitously, Ogilvy Change’s very first intern, Dan Bennett, had been hired to divide his time between behavioural science and Ogilvy Labs, an innovation team. Dan was an enthusiastic, buoyant and exuberant addition to the team, who regularly found himself sitting in Tara’s department talking excitedly about behavioural science. By nature, people who work in creative communities tend to be curious and open to external influences, so Dan’s talk of behavioural science caught Tara’s imagination: rather than using shop shutters for commercial advertising, what if they could be used for social purpose?

A behavioural solution

Together, Tara and Dan thought about how scientific insight could be used for good. The cute features of babies, such as big eyes and round faces, have been found to stimulate a caring response in our brains.13 Of course, it makes sense that our evolutionary ancestors were motivated to take care of babies who, due to the long developmental periods necessitated by our exceptionally powerful brains, are unable to take care of themselves in infancy.

What if this caring response could be used to reduce antisocial behaviour? Rather than adding more police to the streets to reduce residual post-riot antisocial behaviour, why not try something counterintuitive? And so the idea for Babies of the Borough was conceived: spray paint babies’ faces onto shop shutters in an area affected by the 2011 London Riots, in an effort to reduce antisocial behaviour.

The idea was brought to life in the summer of 2012. The London Borough of Greenwich had been badly affected by the riots during the previous year. In particular, the Greens End shops in Woolwich had been badly damaged by looters. Greenwich Council, having been approached with the idea, were not interested in a collaboration. An alternative route was suggested by Nicole Yershon, who headed up Ogilvy Labs: why not approach the shopkeepers themselves? After knocking on shop doors up and down Greens End, they won backing from the shopkeepers. Besides being curious, the shopkeepers were excited to find out whether taking a punt on this idea could transform their community.

The canvases were ready, but what about the baby faces? In a moment of brilliance, Dan suggested recruiting local babies using Facebook. In general, proximal and specific social norms have a more powerful effect on influencing behaviour compared to vague or generic ones. The logic went, therefore, that murals of local babies’ faces might be a more powerful influence on behaviour than random babies.

Using these local babies’ faces as a guide, four street mural artists created spray paint portraits on the shop shutters of Greens End. The next morning, five baby faces had been created and the locals’ positive reactions were captured on tape. These reactions, coupled with an explanation of the project by Tara, were turned into a short film. This captured the imagination of the BBC, who interviewed Tara and Nicole shortly afterwards. The campaign started to get worldwide traction and was picked up in 12 countries across three continents.

A reduction in antisocial behaviour and crimes

Babies of the Borough was a creative exploration of how behavioural science could be innovatively used for social purpose and, as such, there was no experimental design. Despite the lack of hypotheses to test, it was still important to measure the impact. In addition to filming the locals’ reactions, the longitudinal impact on antisocial behaviour was tracked. One year after the campaign, antisocial behaviour had decreased by 24%, and declined further in the subsequent years. Five years after the campaign (2016), it was found that reported crimes in the area had reduced by 47.4% when compared with data from before the campaign (2011), with a 65.2% reduction in reported antisocial crimes specifically. Whilst it’s hard to isolate the effects of the babies on antisocial crime, the reduction for the local area (Greens End Road) was 23.7% greater than for the wider neighbourhood (Woolwich Riverside) over the same period, indicating that there was something unique to Greens End Road which reduced antisocial behaviour.

Fig. 2.1: Reduction of anti-social crimes across two sites

The Ogilvy team wanted to share their success with the rest of the world. As highlighted in the previous chapter, it was crucial to bring the story to life. Tasked with this was Emma de la Fosse, an Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, who built a strong narrative around the idea with an emotive film. On the basis of this, Babies of the Borough won a Gold Cannes Lion in 2013; a testament to its success.

Despite this recognition, the idea could have fallen flat if it weren’t for the drive and tenacity of a whole host of people. Tara joined the dots, conceived the idea and drove it forward. Jez sponsored the project from Ogilvy Change, lending credibility from a behavioural practice. Nicole backed the project with her budget and recruited street mural artists. Dan was responsible for planning and executing the project, and Emma crafted the story to be entered for awards. Along with countless others, this team had the combination of passion, energy and resilience to knock down the barriers which so often come between an idea and its realisation.

Now, Babies of the Borough is firmly established in the evolution of nudge theory. It is taught in behavioural science modules in universities, presented at talks as an exemplar of applied behavioural science and claimed by a multitude as their own idea. And it would not have happened if it weren’t for a collision of two worlds, two distinct ideas and many open minds.

Do it yourself: a toolkit for encouraging serendipitous collisions

In the first chapter, we considered how to spark a behaviour change revolution in an organisation and how to sell this to colleagues. In this chapter, we considered how you might best form a team to encourage creative ideas. What kind of people do you bring into the team to help your application of behavioural science to thrive? As shown by Babies of the Borough, it’s important to include people who are open to external influences, people with a diverse range of skills and perspectives, and those who are willing to take risks.

#4 Step out of the echo chamber

The best creative people have one thing in common: they’re receptive to external influences. Whilst they may not realise the value of these sources in the first instance, they file them away in their minds, only to uncover unexpected connections at a later date.

Standing in the way of this discovery process are newsfeed algorithms, which reign us into echo chambers where we are only exposed to ideas consistent with our own. To combat this, don’t rely solely on algorithm-based platforms for your inspiration; explore your many and varied interests. Actively seek out sources of stimulation beyond your existing circle and be receptive to external influences. Let your brain do the filtering and joining up, and unlikely collisions will generate extraordinary ideas. Bringing two divergent themes together in a new context might lead to an unexpected and joyous idea about how to apply behavioural science. It’s only by embracing the messiness of this approach that you trigger developmental shifts in a field like applied behavioural science.

#5 Collaborate with people who aren’t like you

Similarly, the collision of diverse skill sets can lead to serendipitous discoveries. Babies of the Borough might not have come to fruition if it weren’t for the combination of energy, resilience, passion, insight, research and artistry of those involved. Brilliant ideas never come from one single person and an idea is nothing without the ability to execute.

The successful application of behavioural science in business relies on generating a diverse range of ideas using people from different fields. Rather than cocooning yourself in an ivory tower digesting behavioural science journals, you need to venture out and take inspiration from people within your own business, or other businesses altogether, if you are to apply the insights from behavioural science in the real world.

As such, build and work in teams with diversified skills. Perhaps you might spend the majority of your time working in solely, say, the marketing team. Day in and day out, you spend time bouncing ideas off people with similar backgrounds, skills and talents. Contrast this with working in multi-disciplinary teams which, whilst more difficult, will inevitably lead to more innovative ideas. As true as this is for applying behavioural science in business, it also holds true for behavioural science research in academia.

#6 It’s risky, but try the crazy idea

It can be frustrating that when budgets are tight, the first thing a business cuts is their allocation for innovation. Taking this approach erodes value in the medium to long term, because sacrificing innovation hinders overall progression. If you aspire to make a successful change, you must allocate resources to trying new things.

It’s fair enough to keep 70% of your budget to do the safe stuff. And keep 20% to try out new approaches. But fight to keep the last 10% available for trying the risky yet innovative behavioural science idea. It might be high risk, but being the first to take an innovative approach gives you first-mover advantage, which can sometimes offer the greatest rewards.

What next for Babies of the Borough?

Credit to the team at Ogilvy, they’ve not rested on their laurels. The Power of Cute has been taken to other territories as street murals. Sam Tatam, a Partner at Ogilvy, is now leading the project to explore whether high-definition photographic images of babies’ faces will be even more powerful than the cruder articulations by street mural artists. Two such shutters are now up, but there are no results yet to illuminate whether the baby schema is more effective as a digital photograph or a caricatured artist’s rendition.

8 Evans-Pritchard (2013).

9 Bushman, Wang and Anderson (2005).

10 Demir, Uslu and Arslan (2016).

11 Dabbs, Hargrove and Heusel (1996).

12 Wilson and Kelling (1982).

13 Glocker et al. (2009).