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Why being behaviour-smart trumps responding to demand
By me: Why being behaviour-smart trumps responding to demand. #design #localgov #innovation #behaviourchange
I’ve just come across a clear example of what I mean when I say that policy-makers and commissioners could be much wiser when it comes to using behavioural insights, and that being systematic about behaviour could lead to much better policy. In a comment…
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Behavioural insights, better metrics and @rorysutherland
New blog: Behavioural insights, better metrics and @rorysutherland
Now I’m been working with insights from behavioural sciences for a few years, I get asked to do talks to friendly audiences, which makes me think about what I’ve learned so far. Most of the points are about how people can best use the insights, but there…
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Using behavioural insights: commissioners need to get sharp
Using behavioural insights: commissioners need to get sharp #publicpolicy #behaviourchange
I spent an afternoon last week at Information Is In The Eye Of The Beholder, an event organised by the Design Councils’ Behavioural Design Lab. Maybe I’m lazy, but the main thing I took from it was a confirmation of something that has been becoming very…
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Will we do politics better if we understand behaviour?
How @David_Cameron’s #immigration speech seems to trigger #LossAversion:
If you’ve heard one of my talksrecently, on public services using insights from behavioural sciences, you might have heard me say that I reckon this perspective can make some policy decisions easier to understand than conventional narratives, and that…
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Interview with Warren Hatter on local government and low carbon policies
It’s not often I get asked to do an interview. So I was happy to oblige with some answers when asked recently. This is what I said about local government, carbon and climate (and a little on behavioural sciences), prompted by questions from Manchester…
shared via WordPress.com
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Audio: Can Public Policy Cope with Behavioural Sciences?
I recorded the talk I gave at the Political Innovation event at the end of September. But the sound quality isn’t great, so I didn’t do anything with it. Then, a couple of days ago, I listened to this newly-remastered recording of Joy Division playing ULU…
shared via WordPress.com
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BEHAVIOURAL INSIGHTS: CAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT USE RECIPROCATION TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES?
The With The Grain tool, which gives local authorities access to behavioural insights, draws on the (now quite extensive) literature on behavioural economics and psychology. One thing pretty much all practitioners agree on is the power of reciprocation.
Reciprocity is a very powerful urge. When someone has done something for you, you want to do something for them. When you consider how our species’s success has depended on our very social nature, it makes sense. And there’s plenty of evidence for this. In fact, there’s evidence cited by Cialdini as an extension of the behaviour change experiment that nearly everyone has heard of: the ‘getting hotel guests to reuse their towels by telling them most other people do’ story. You know the one.
It seems the most effective way of getting guests to reuse towels is to tell them that the hotel has made a donation to an environmental charity, and ask them to play their part by reusing their towels. Note the past tense: not ‘will make a donation for everyone who reuses’, but ‘has made a donation’. If it’s the other way round, it feels like a transaction and that it simply less motivating.
So, it seems that reciprocation is a much more powerful motivator of our behaviour (whether we are aware of this or not, and whether or not it’s rational) than incentives. You can see where this discussion is going, can’t you? In public services, we are used to thinking in terms of providing incentives to people to make smarter choices. For many, it’s pretty much a default setting when considering how to encourage behaviour change. We are not used to thinking in terms of reciprocation; and, what is more, there are real barriers to thinking in terms of, say, a local authority providing something in advance of the reciprocated action. It feels too risky to many; and we might worry about being criticised for being extravagant with public money.
And yet, and yet … there are examples of local authorities using the reciprocation effect. I’m thinking in particular of LB Sutton’s approach to gritting over the past couple of years. There are now 10,000 households who accept free grit from the Council. The expectation is that they’ll clear their – and their neighbours’ - pavements when there is snow. There is no obligation to do so, but sure enough they do it, which takes pressure off of local services. It’s interesting to contrast this with the (shall we say ‘mixed’) reactions to communities being asked to expected to staff libraries on a voluntary basis to replace an existing service.
Two points seem worth making. First, the Sutton grit example has legs: if we’re looking to encourage new behaviours, show that you trust people by fulfilling your end of the bargain first. In this way, what looks like a transaction, a ‘deal’ in a committee paper, might not even feel like one to residents. Second, more complex, is to consider how we might apply this principle more to relationships which are already transactional. Can we find ways of moving towards more reciprocal relationships, where the authority’s trust is rewarded by more independent behaviour and choices on the part of local communities, citizens and customers? I think this one has a long way to run.
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Can #advertising be ‘not evil’? #behaviourchange #neuroscience and cats with thumbs
I think the blog I’ve amplified below is significant because it’s from someone at a big agency and starts to respond to the “Think of me as Evil” report. I’ve posted my comments on the blog page (linked below and shown below. So I don’t need to add more comment here. Oh, and there’s a cute cat picture.
Amplify’d from wklondon.typepad.comneuroscience vs cats with thumbs
There seems to be a lot of talk in the trade press recently about ‘neuromarketing’. And there was an interesting piece ‘advertising is a poison’ in The Guardian last week. George Monbiot makes some good points in the article. At W+K we don’t tend to think of our work as a ‘battering ram’ of ‘pervasiveness and repetition’; the people behind the likes of Go Compare may well have a different point of view.
But is advertising the cause of a society that celebrates image, power and status, or is it a symptom of this society? People have aspired to these values since they were jealous of the neanderthal with a better cave. The societies where the state has tried to enforce the suppression of these aspirations - hello, Stalin’s Russia, North Korea - have in the main been pretty miserable places. It isn’t just advertising that makes humans want a bigger house and a new car.
Since the publication of Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, academics have been suggesting that advertising has the power to manipulate the subconscious. But it’s pretty rare that an agency team will have a conversation with clients about neurobiology, or how our message will be processed by the prefrontal cortex of our audience, or how we can conceal some sort of secret mind-control message in an ad. It’s just not that scientific or simple. We wouldn’t deny that advertising has the power to manipulate the unconscious mind. But pundits overestimate our ability to control or predict how we’re doing it.
Meanwhile, it’s ironic that Monbiot suggests advertising is to blame for low savings rates by UK families when at the bottom of the article there is an ad for… Barclays Investments.In Marketing magazine this week, Dr AK Pradeep ‘one of the world’s leading neuromarketing experts’ says, “One of my clients trying to sell milk experimented with various imagery - farms, grass, hay, barns farmers…The one that always wins out is cows. Somehow the source of a product is more evocative in the deep subconscious than anything else. This is something we’ve learned through neuromarketing.”
So, what about cats with thumbs, as featured in our highly successful campaign for Cravendale milk then?Our view: the difficulty with showing cows or talking about the other familiar benefits listed above by Dr Pradeep is that it gives the audience immediate permission to ignore you because they assume you’re telling them what they already know. But something dissonant and unexpected like a polydactyl cat slaps you across the face (not literally, we don’t yet have the technology to make that possible) and makes you pay attention in a way you wouldn’t have done otherwise for such a functional product. An 8% sales increase suggests that this approach has merits.
Of course, perhaps if we had done a campaign featuring cows with thumbs, we would have sold even more milk.
Read more at wklondon.typepad.comSee this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1iygi -
Irish President’s Inaugral speech: wisdom on prosperity, materialism and dignity we hope to hear one day from UK leaders
Nothing to add, save that it’d be good to hear this narrative from British leaders BEFORE a financial crash or similar.
Amplify’d from www.thejournal.ieIn full: the inaugural address of President Michael D Higgins
Read more at www.thejournal.ieHowever, in more recent years, we saw the rise of a different kind of individualism – closer to an egotism based on purely material considerations – that tended to value the worth of a person in terms of the accumulation of wealth rather then their fundamental dignity. That was our loss, the source in part, of our present difficulties. Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1hm02 -
New analysis suggests we’re cutting resource use but let’s not over-interpret #decoupling #degrowth
I’ve copied a few paras below, but you really should go to the Guardian website and read the whole article.
This is important because it allows us - very briefly, and possibly illusory - a glimpse of decoupling. Could it be that it is possible after all to reduce material throughput while economic activity increases?
Like I say, it’s just a glimpse. Even if Goodall’s tentative conclusions turn out to be true (and there are important caveats), the degree of decoupling would be nowhere near that required to reduce our resource use enough to sustain our civilisation in the long-term. But - hey - when you thought you’d never see even a glimpse, be pleased.
Two quick points:
One of several important caveats about the metrics is that the story on carbon looks different. ‘Offshoring’ our emissions to China not only gets them off our books; it also multiplies them massively, according to recent (not yet peer reviewed) data I’ve seen.
My main reflection on this article is that this is exactly the sort of discussion that needs to be at the heart of our political and policy debate. This is just the sort of finding that we look at the implications of if we are trying, as Tim Jackson has challenged us, to create the new macro-economics.
We can’t pretend that it is in the mainstream. Yet. But we need to use the influence we have to make it so.Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.ukWhy is our consumption falling?
From food to paper and water, Britain has gradually been guzzling less over the past decade. Why?
• Peak stuff: the dataWith so many significant events to look back on, one thing that few people will remember 2001 for is its entry in the UK’s Material Flow Accounts, a set of dry and largely ignored data published annually by the Office for National Statistics.
But, according to environment writer Chris Goodall, those stats tell an important story. “What the figures suggest,” Goodall says enthusiastically, “is that 2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.”
Goodall discovered the Material Flow Accounts while writing a research paper examining the UK’s consumption of resources. The pattern he stumbled upon caught him by surprise: time and time again, Brits seemed to be consuming fewer resources and producing less waste. What really surprised him was that consumption appears to have started dropping in the first years of the new millennium, when the economy was still rapidly growing.
Read more at www.guardian.co.ukIn 2001, Goodall says, the UK’s consumption of paper and cardboard finally started to decline. This was followed, in 2002, by a fall in our use of primary energy: the raw heat and power generated by all fossil fuels and other energy sources. The following year, 2003, saw the start of a decline in the amount of household waste (including recycling) generated by each person in the country – a downward trend that before long could also be observed in the commercial and construction waste sectors.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1g8pf
Yes, but … you don’t really think (do you?) that the fact that humans had differential status before advertising wipes clean the ad industry’s responsibility for encouraging the type of consumption that is trashing ecosystem services, increasing inequalities, reducing social cohesion, increasing mental illness, etc, etc. Hope not.
By the way, my understanding is that our ancestors out-socialed neanderthals, though I guess they may have been jealous of the blighters’ caves as well. Status envy probably dates to about 10,000 years ago with settled agriculture. Some people had bigger crops, and they didn’t share it all.
Maybe a cool question to ask yourself as an ad industry person, on the back of this debate is: given that we know how to use behavioural insights to drive behaviours, how can we use this to make people feel good about doing low-impact stuff? A future blog maybe?