Anand Damani – Page 8 – Behavioural Design

Clocky & Tocky – Alarm clocks that literally get you off your bed

Published August 23, 2016 by Anand Damani

Have trouble waking up in the morning? Do you hit snooze on the alarm repeated like me, only to go back to bed and wake up later to realize that you are, as usual, late?

Here are two interesting products of Behavioural Design that could be of help. Clocky and Tocky are products created by Gauri Nanda, an MIT grad. Clocky is an alarm clock with wheels. When it’s time to wake up, these alarm clocks leap off your nightstand and run away beeping to ensure you’re awake. Tocky even lets you load your own wake up message or your favourite song.

See them in action by clicking here.

Does it really take 21 days to form habits?

Published June 28, 2016 by Anand Damani

In the preface to his 1960 book ‘Psycho-cybernetics’, Dr Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon turned psychologist wrote:

‘It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated the “phantom limb” persists for about 21 days. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to “seem like home”. These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.’

Self-help authors of 21 days to this, that and everything, may have reasoned that, if self-image takes 21 days to change, and self-image changes lead to changes in habits, then habit formation must take 21 days. Although ‘21 days’ may perhaps apply to adjustment to plastic surgery, it is unfounded as a basis for habit formation. Here’s the proof:

In an 84-day study by researchers at University College London, 96 participants were asked to choose an every day behavior that they wanted to turn into a habit. They all chose something they didn’t already do that could be repeated every day like eating a piece of fruit (behavior) with lunch (cue) or doing 50 sit-ups (behavior) after morning coffee (cue).

So how long did it take to form a habit? On average it took 66 days until a habit was formed. And contrary to what’s commonly believed, missing a day or two didn’t much affect habit formation.

But here is the relevant part. There was considerable variation in how long habits took to form depending on what people tried to do. People who resolved to drink a glass of water after breakfast were up to maximum automaticity after about 20 days, while those trying to eat a piece of fruit after lunch took at least twice as long to turn it into a habit. The exercise habit proves trickiest with 50 sit-ups after morning coffee, still not a habit after 84 days.

Interestingly, there were quite large differences between individuals in how quickly automaticity reached its peak, although everyone repeated their chosen behavior daily: for one person it took just 18 days, and another did not get there in the 84 days, but was forecast to do so after as long as 254 days!

So it’s unwise to attempt to assign a number to habit formation. The duration is likely to differ depending on who you are and what you are trying to do. As long as you continue doing your new healthy behavior consistently in a given situation, a habit will form. But you will probably have to persevere beyond January 21^stif you are attempting a New Year’s resolution.

Source: Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle – How habits are formed: modeling habit formation in the real world – European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998-1009.

If you want something to happen, write it down

Published June 22, 2016 by Anand Damani

Hopefully by now you are beginning to appreciate how a seemingly small design intervention can make a huge difference in behaviour change. Here’s one more story that illustrates this point.

British psychologistsPaschal Sheeran and Sheina Orbell conducted an experiment in two of Scotland’s busiest orthopaedic hospitals. The participants were elderly patients from low and middle class households, who had undergone hip or knee replacement surgeries.

Recovering from a hip or knee surgery is incredibly arduous. While recovering the smallest movements can be excruciating. But it is essential that patients begin exercising almost as soon as they wake from surgery, even before the muscles and skin have healed, or the tissues will clog the joint, destroying its flexibility. But exercising is so painful that many patients skip out on rehab sessions, especially the elderly ones.

So the patients were each given a booklet after their surgeries that detailed their rehab schedule, and in the back were thirteen additional pages – one for each week – with instructions: My goals for this week are _________________? Write down exactly what you are going to do. For example, if you are going to walk this week, write down where and when you are going to walk.

Three months passed. The patients who had written exact plans in their booklets had started walking twice as fast as the ones who had not, as well as, getting in and out of their chairs, putting on their shoes, doing laundry, all of it much faster, than the ones who had not written anything in the booklet. Why did that happen?

The psychologists examined the booklets of those who had filled it and found it filled with specific detailed plans about the most mundane aspects of recovery. Like one patient wrote that he would walk to the bus stop on a particular day to meet his wife coming back from work at 3:30pm and the time he would leave, the route he would walk, what he would wear and which pills he would take if the pain became too much. Someone else who would exercise each time she would go to the bathroom, wrote that she would automatically take the first step right away after standing up from the couch, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to sit down again.

All focused on how they would handle a specific moment of anticipated pain. They built plans around inflection points when they knew their pain – and their temptation to quit – would be strongest.

Patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with pain. They didn’t deliberately design their habits. So their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the first few steps.

So if you want something to happen, write all the steps down.

Source: Paschal Sheeran and Sheina Orbell – Implementation intentions and repeated behaviour: augmenting the predictive validity of the theory of planned behaviour – European Journal of Social Psychology Volume 29, Issue 2-3, pages 349–369, March – May 1999

We learn better from failure than success

Published May 31, 2016 by Anand Damani

I’m sure you’ve been through many training programs or ‘workshops’ as they are commonly called if you’ve been part of corporate culture, no matter which part of the world you are from. Besides these workshops being much-wanted breaks from regular work, we have doubts about how many translate to improving real productivity. Most of the training programs focus exclusively on the positive – on learning how to make good decisions via successful cases, but behavioural science shows that there is a better way of training.

Behavioural scientists Wendy Joung, Beryl Hesketh and Andrew Neal chose a group of firefighters as participants because their decisions carried important consequences. Training and development sessions were conducted amongst two groups of participants that included several case studies. One group learned from case studies that described real-life situations in which firefighters made poor decisions that led to negative consequences (error-based training). The other group learned from case studies in which firefighters avoided negative consequences through good decision-making (success-based training). Researchers found that firefighters who underwent error-based training showed improved judgment and were able to think more adaptively than those who underwent success-based training.

The reason for the efficacy of error-based training is that it increases attention of participants during training and makes the training a more memorable experience. The discussions after each case study in the error-based group were much more animated, with participants eager to find better ways to have resolved a problem and avoid mistakes, while the success-based groups were more subdued in their conversations and otherwise indicated that they were less engaged overall. Engaged trainees are going to learn more and retain more than their less-engaged colleagues.

So the next time you think of conducting a workshop you could benefit by having case studies, videos and anonymous testimonials of mistakes followed by a discussion of what actions would have been appropriate to take in those similar situations.

Source: Wendy Joung, B. Hesketh, A. Neal – Using war stories to train for adaptive performance: Is it better to learn from error or success? Applied Psychology: An International Review: 55, 282-302 (2006)

Numbers don’t move us, emotions do

Published May 25, 2016 by Anand Damani

Millions of Indians don’t have access to clean water, sanitation, electricity, education, healthcare, banking. The list can go on. The ones with access to all of it, including myself, are aware of the fact that millions go without it everyday. Yet it hardly moves us to do anything about it.

That’s the problem with statistics. It just doesn’t activate our emotions. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, has exposed this blind spot in our sympathetic brain. He asked people how much they were willing to donate to various charitable causes. Slovic found that when people were shown a picture of Rokia, a starving Malawian child, with emaciated body and haunting brown eyes, they donated generously to the Save the Children. However, when other people were provided with a list of statistics about starvation throughout Africa – more than 3 million children in Malawi are malnourished, more than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance, and so forth – the donation was 50% lower. At first glance it makes no sense right. When people are informed about the real scope of the problem, they should give more money, not less.

But what happens is that the depressing numbers leave us cold. Our minds can’t comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. That’s why we are riveted when a kid falls in a bore well but turn a blind eye to millions who die every year due to lack of clean drinking water. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Source: Paul Slovic – “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide – Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 79-95.

Why we hate losing more than we love gaining

Published May 16, 2016April 19, 2016 by Anand Damani

The tendency to be more sensitive to possible losses than to possible gains is one of the best-supported findings in behavioural science. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky were the first to test and document the notion of ‘loss aversion’ – the idea that we are more motivated to avoid losses than we are to acquire gains.

Loss aversion affects a lot of our decisions, in finance, negotiation, persuasion, etc. One consequence of loss aversion is that it makes inexperienced investors to prematurely sell stocks that have gained in value because they simply don’t want to lose what they’ve already gained. (We had also written about it in ‘Why we sell the wrong stocks’) Similarly, the desire to avoid any potential for a loss also makes investors to hold on to stocks that have lost value since the date of purchase. Because selling the stock would mean taking a loss on the investment, which most investors are reluctant to do, a decision that often precedes further stock price decline.

Another popular example of loss aversion is the debacle of New Coke. From 1981 to 1984, Coca-Cola company tested its new and old formulas in taste tests amongst two hundred thousand people across twenty-five cities. 55% of people preferred New Coke versus 45% who preferred the Old Coke. Though most of the tests were blind, in some of the tests people were told which was the New and Old Coke. Under those conditions, preference for New Coke increased by an additional 6%. Why did New Coke fail inspite of such extensive research?

Says Robert Cialdini, Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and advisor to Obama “During taste tests, it was New Coke that was unavailable to people for purchase, when they knew which sample was which. So they showed an especially strong preference for what they couldn’t purchase otherwise. People at the Coca-Cola company might have said, “Oh this means that when people know that they’re getting something new, their desire for it will shoot up.” But, in fact, what the 6% really meant was that when people know what it is they can’t buy, their desire for it will shoot up. Later when the company replaced Old Coke for New Coke, it was Old Coke that people couldn’t have, and it became the favorite.”

For people losing Old Coke was more valuable than gaining New Coke. What this means is that to make messages more persuasive they should be framed to avoid losses more than acquire gains. So a message like ‘Shop till you drop at 30% discount’ could be more persuasive if framed as, ‘Don’t miss the chance to shop at 30% discount’. The latter implies that the deal is scarce in some way (e.g. limited time) and that people could be losing the opportunity to get a good deal.

Sources: Daniel Kahneman and Nathan Novemsky – The Boundaries of Loss Aversion – Journal of Marketing Research 42:119-128 (2005)

Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely – Focusing on the Forgone: How value can appear so different to buyers and sellers – Journal of Consumer Research (2000)

G.R. Shell – Bargaining for advantage (1999)

Need a favor? Ask your opponent

Published April 12, 2016 by Anand Damani

Most of us feel shy asking for favors. And if it comes to asking for a favor from an opponent or someone who doesn’t view us in a particularly favorable light, we see it as totally objectionable, lest we get rejected or disliked. But behavioural science tells us that such hesitation is unwarranted.

In a study by behavioural researchers Jon Jecker and David Landy, participants won some money from the experimenter in a contest. Afterward, one group of participants was approached by the experimenter, who asked them if they’d be willing to give back the money because the experimenter was using his own money and had little left. Almost all agreed. The other group of participants was not approached with any request. All the participants were then anonymously surveyed about how much they liked the experimenter. Jecker and Landy found that those who were asked to do the favor rated the experimenter more favorably than did those who were not asked to give the money back.

Robert Cialdini, Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University says, “People are strongly motivated to change their attitudes in ways that are consistent with their behavior.”

The participants who returned the money back must have said to themselves, “Why did I go out of my way to help this experimenter I don’t even know that well? He seems like a good person”, when asked how much they liked the experimenter.

Often we are in need of some kind of help from a colleague or neighbor who for whatever reason doesn’t view us in particularly favorable light. We might hesitate to ask for the favor because we’re afraid of rejection or dislike. So we put off asking for a favor, whereas doing it would be a brave thing to do and more importantly, as the research indicates, is likely to work. Try it. You don’t have much to lose anyways. At most, the person won’t do you the favor. But if the person does it, he/she will counter-intuitively start liking you.

Source: Jon Jecker and David Landy – Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour – Human relations Volume 22, no. 4, pp 371-78

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)

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