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Bringing behavioural science out of the lab and into real life

Can you remember what first piqued your interest in nudging? For April, it was when a lecturer during a Psychology seminar asked the class to take out their matriculation cards and write down the last two digits of their student ID number.

“Now, I’d like you all to write down how much you’d be willing to pay for this lovely vintage,” the lecturer said, pointing to an image of a bottle of wine projected onto the whiteboard.

Amazingly, each class member’s bid for the bottle was affected by the student number they’d written down moments before. Despite being completely irrelevant to the value of the wine, this arbitrary number had served as an anchor for their subsequent judgements of value. The surprise at having the anchoring effect brought to life in this way was, frankly, unforgettable. Having fallen for this psychological bias moments before, it was impossible to deny the existence of the effect.

The start of anyone’s journey with behavioural science begins with a light-bulb moment, realising the counterintuitive and often humorous ways in which human behaviour is susceptible to nudging. It follows that if you want to get other people excited about applying behavioural science, you need to create these light-bulb moments. And to create that light-bulb moment you must move beyond the often dry academic case studies, to bring behavioural science to life in a way which feels relevant to people’s lives.

Imagine that you’re trying to explain the beauty of applied behavioural science to someone at a party. You want to capture their imagination by telling them the classic story of the fly in the urinal at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. You could try explaining it to your new friend as follows:

“To test a hypothesis that male attention could be directed into a particular domain by re-establishing a new environmental context, we did a randomised controlled trial with men in operational hygiene facilities. We found that the simple etching of an image on the urinal motivated them to hit the desired target, thus changing their behaviour and reducing urine spillage.”

Alternatively, you could add some colour to the story:

“From personal experience, most men I pass in the airport toilets tend to be incredibly bored, incredibly drunk, or often a combination of both. And that means that they pay little attention to weeing in the toilet, so often end up weeing on the floor. But, if you etch a fly onto the bowl of the urinal, men subconsciously aim for it, which reduces spillage by 80%.”

Which story would you rather hear? The second version is more likely to trigger the light-bulb moment, as your listener can relate to it more easily. Rather than blinding people with science, however impressive it is, get them excited by helping them to appreciate the applications of behavioural science in relation to their own lives, their roles at work, or their relationships.

Knowing that this was the case, this is exactly what Jez set out to do when launching a behavioural science practice within Ogilvy, the global advertising agency.

“Why should I care about behavioural science?”

The year was 2011 and Jez was an Integrated Strategy Director. Having worked closely with Rory Sutherland, who was Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, together they wanted to launch a team whose sole purpose was to apply behavioural science to advertising. They’d settled on the name Ogilvy Change and now needed to get their colleagues as excited about behavioural science as they were. In order to get the rest of the company to embrace behavioural science, they needed to capture their colleagues’ imaginations.

One option would have been to spend an hour lecturing about various heuristics and biases. They could have told them about how in America there is a wonderful ‘Save More Tomorrow’ programme developed by academics,1 which found that behavioural economics could be used to increase people’s savings from their salary from 3.5% to 13.6% over 40 months.

Alternatively, they could have talked about how The Economist had engineered its subscription choice architecture in order to generate more print and digital sales. Would-be subscribers had the option of a $59 digital subscription, a $125 print subscription, or a $125 print and digital subscription. Who would choose the print-only subscription, when for the same price you could get online access? Indeed, Dan Ariely found that with this decoy option, significantly more people chose the more expensive package.2 But without the print-only option, significantly more people chose the cheaper, digital-only option. Proof, right there, that our decisions are influenced by choice architecture and that behavioural science can have big impacts on business outcomes.

If they’d taken this route to convert colleagues into behavioural science enthusiasts, they might have got through to a couple of them at best. And this, in the early days of the field, is where it often fell down. Many of the learnings from behavioural science are theoretical and the challenge in a business context is bringing the application possibilities to life.

Similarly, it’s ironic that books such as the New York Times Best Seller Thinking, Fast and Slow,3 written by one of the forefathers of behavioural economics, was specifically written to appeal to an academic audience. The book was published with small, hard to read text, and very few pictures. Who knows how many more copies it may have sold had it also been published in a more populist format? Chunked into several books, with a bigger text size and plenty of pictures, this would have conveyed the virtues of behavioural science to a lay audience in a more engaging way.

The Year of the Rabbit

Instead of a lecture, Jez and Rory set out to conduct a series of playful studies in the agency to bring the applications of behavioural science to life. It was the Chinese Year of the Rabbit and so their experiments were all tied to this theme. Could they make people eat like rabbits, move like rabbits, bounce like rabbits and copulate like rabbits? Whilst these studies were inspired by findings from academic journals, their versions were far from being academically robust. But for their purpose this didn’t matter. The point was to bring the theories to life and to demonstrate the ways in which behavioural science could be used to nudge behaviour.

Eating like rabbits

Their first experiment was conducted in the agency canteen, where they set out to nudge their colleagues to eat more carrots. We are more likely to choose healthy foods if they are easy to reach, or first in line. For example, one study found that the location of desserts had a significant effect on whether customers in a hospital cafeteria chose the healthy or unhealthy options, with people more likely to choose the dessert that was easy to reach.4 In order to nudge their colleagues to eat more carrots, therefore, they moved the carrots earlier in the canteen line and doubled the quantity normally available. They also changed the description of the carrots to “Succulent Carrots”, knowing that sensory adjectives on restaurant menus increase both sales and satisfaction.5

The results? Before their intervention, there were always carrots left over at the end of lunchtime. As a result of their intervention, twice as many carrots were eaten, they went more quickly and they were all gone by the end of service.

Speedy like rabbits

When compared to tortoises, rabbits are fabled to move very quickly. How could they nudge people to walk faster than normal? A seminal, yet hard to replicate, study found that participants primed with elderly words left the room slower than a control group, aligned with the stereotype of elderly behaviour.6

To translate this into an advertising agency, they held two fictional briefings for airlines. In one of these briefings, they talked quickly and excitably about short-haul holidays to Magaluf or Tenerife. In the other, they talked slowly, this time about long-haul flights to visit grandparents in India. Crucially, they were interested in how quickly their unwitting colleagues returned to their desks after these fictional briefings. Whilst this experiment was crudely measured and would certainly not hold up in the hallowed halls of a university, they observed that their colleagues primed with the short, speedy and energetic trips moved back to their desks faster than those primed with slow, arduous and long-haul trips.

Bouncing like rabbits

How could they use behavioural science to get their colleagues jumping like rabbits? At the time Jez had small children and so had watched a song called ‘Wake Up Little Bunnies’ about 272 times from a TV show called Fun Song Factory. In this infamous lyrical hit, the narrator encourages us to “see the little bunnies sleeping,” whilst everyone sleeps. This is shortly followed by a rousing “Wake up, little bunnies!” upon which everyone jumps up and around like bunnies. Children, it seems, are very happy to shamelessly join in with this bunny jumping. But how could they get their adult colleagues to adopt this behaviour, in an office environment?

Being part of a social group involves following a set of unspoken behaviours. This is known as conformity and was famously demonstrated by Asch in 1956. Jez hypothesised that if enough people in a room bounced like bunnies, then the rest would follow suit. In addition, they recruited the CEO and Group Planning Director who, as figures of authority, their colleagues would be more willing to copy. They invited people from the company to take part in some workshop training, telling them that they’d be learning how to energise a room full of depleted workshop delegates. A control group were given a sheet of paper with instructions, which told them to press play on the bunny video before joining in by following the actions. Unsurprisingly, everybody stayed glued to their seats, muttering “There’s no chance we’re doing that.”

And what about in the other room? Jez was there to lead the session, with his two stooges in tow.

“So at this point,” he began, “we all need to lie on the floor and sleep like bunnies.”

Everyone obediently complied. There they were, all adults aged between 30 to 45, lying on the floor and sleeping like bunnies. The song played and as it said “Wake up!” they all woke up, assumed rabbit shapes and bounced around the room like bunnies. Having three people engaging in the behaviour was enough to encourage the rest to conform. It’s likely that the stooges’ seniority enhanced the others’ readiness to do so.

Copulating like rabbits

For their fourth and final in-house experiment, could they alter their colleagues’ answers to a survey about sex? One study found that sexual arousal had an impact on several areas of judgement and decision making,7 such as sexual preferences and willingness to practice unsafe sex. Whilst advertising agencies are renowned for being audacious, they couldn’t completely replicate this in their office.

A control group were surveyed in a cold room at 3pm, answering questions such as “How often do you want to make love?” and “How many partners have you had?” The other group completed the same survey at 6pm, in a warm room with beer and lads’ mags like Nuts and Zoo. Those in this room expressed higher sexual drives than those in the control and so, in a sense, they had been nudged to copulate like rabbits.

Bringing the experiments to life

The benefit of conducting these experiments within an advertising agency was having the capability to spin them into a compelling story. Everything was filmed and, armed with this footage, they asked the creative team to write a script for the film. In an inspired move, they positioned the film as a 1970s-era, BBC-style behavioural science programme. Rory, with his RP accent, was the perfect candidate to narrate the tongue-in-cheek script.

Once the Succulent Carrots had been eaten, magic pixie dust floated across the screen where they’d disappeared. CCTV footage of people walking back to their desks after the airline briefing was sped up for comic effect. Everyone bouncing like bunnies looked stupid enough without need for much further editing. And the anonymous takers of their sexual preferences survey were filmed in a prison-style line-up panning from left to right, only to reveal the identity of the shortest guy in the office.

They had conducted their studies, had a film to tell the story and were finally ready to tell the rest of the agency about their new behavioural planning practice. The company meeting was to be held at the Old Vic theatre, near London’s Southbank. After the usual updates on company performance, awards and promotions, they were allotted a segment to talk about the launch of the new practice. To bring it to life, Jez and Rachel Hatton, the Group Planning Director, donned long white lab coats to take to the stage and introduce the film.

The reaction? People were laughing, engaged and wanted to know more. The people in the film were also in the audience, so they couldn’t deny that their behaviour had been changed. This was quite a breakthrough which helped people to understand how they’d work with clients. After the meeting, people approached Jez asking to join the team and within a week they had their first brief.

Do it yourself: a toolkit for bringing behavioural science to life

In order to make behavioural science practical and relatable, it’s important to go beyond telling an anecdote. You want to demonstrate the results in a tangible way. Of course, it’s always interesting to hear about the results of experiments by behavioural researchers, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into clear recommendations in the business world.

That being said, rest assured that the task is made slightly easier by the fact that behavioural science is all about humans. Everybody can relate to it, once you’ve found a way to make it relevant for them.

#1 Get a local proof point

When you bring behavioural science to life for people in their line of work, they start to buy into it more. If you take a behavioural bias or heuristic and find a way to make it local to them, that’s when people start to understand the wide range of applications and merits. To do this, conduct a small experiment or case study within your organisation, in order to get a local proof point. Naturally, the type of proof point you need will depend on the nature of your business.

For example, you might run a small experiment to get more people recycling. You might take your two waste bins titled ‘Mixed Recycling’ and ‘General Waste’, and re-label them to ‘Mixed Recycling’ and ‘Landfill’. You might go one step further and make the landfill slot smaller, so that it’s difficult to put things in. You might conduct this experiment for two weeks and compare how many people recycled before and after your mini-intervention.

Alternatively, you might experiment with nudges in an email. There’s an upcoming event where attendance is voluntary, but you’d like to get more people to show up. Usually, you get a turnout of 60%, but you’d like to get it to 80%. You might begin by saying, “More and more of our employees are coming to these meetings and they’re giving stellar feedback.” You might say, “Eleanor, our Marketing Director, says she truly valued learning about new social media publishing tools at our last event.” You might sign off by telling your colleagues to avoid missing out, because there’s a great guest speaker lined up. You include an easy one-click calendar invite and sit back to count how many people show up to the meeting. You find that employee engagement rises by 25% as a result of that email, at no extra cost to you. You present the findings from your experiment back at the next company meeting, showing the two emails side by side.

#2 Bring your proof point to life

Operating within an agency like Ogilvy gave Jez a massive luxury: access to a world-class creative team with the ability and skill to transform crude behavioural experiments into a story, supported by visual effects, a script and a narrator. If you’re operating in a nascent start-up space, however, you’ve got to be a bit more resourceful. Yes, Jez had hidden cameras filming a boardroom of fully-grown adult jumping bunnies, but anybody with an iPhone can shoot some footage and cobble it together in iMovie. It might not look polished, but it will still bring to life the behavioural changes you’ve influenced. At the very least, it will capture people’s imagination more than documents of text.

#3 Minimise deception to avoid losing trust

An unexpected side effect of running these experiments was that Jez’s colleagues soon started to mistrust his intentions. These experiments were run a couple of months after he joined the company and often involved recruiting participants in an underhand way. For example, he’d sent out a company-wide email offering to upskill colleagues on workshop facilitation skills. After nudging them to jump around like bunnies, he’d later revealed the true purpose of the session. Before long, people grew wary of his motives, and he’d get people questioning whether legitimate and genuine requests were yet another underhand ruse. As such, be careful to limit your duplicity to times when it’s truly necessary.

So where’s the best place to start if you want to apply behavioural science in business? Try running some experiments to bring your ideas to life for your colleagues. Get some evidence to show that it works, bring it life with videos or pictures, but keep it playful. And if you use your colleagues as your experiment participants, then they’ll have some trouble denying that subtle nudges can have an unexpected impact on behaviour.

1 Thaler and Benartzi (2004).

2 TED (2008).

3 Kahneman (2011).

4 Meyers, Stunkard and Coll (1980).

5 Wansink, Painter and van Ittersum (2001).

6 Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996).

7 Ariely and Loewenstein (2006).