identity – We derive part of our identity from the groups to which we belong. In order to increase our self-image, we look for ways to enhance the status of the groups to which we belong.
social norms – These are the unwritten rules of social behaviour.
social proof – We tend to adopt the behaviour of those around us, following the norms of the social group; see also conformity.
status quo bias – We prefer to go with the flow and stick with things as they are; see also default bias.
Theory of Interpersonal Behaviour (TIB) – Conceptualises behaviour as a function of intentions, habits, and facilitating conditions. One of the TIB’s strengths is its ability to explain complex behaviour as a result of social and environmental factors.
transtheoretical model – Also known as stages of change, this is a theory which describes the process of deliberate behaviour change, such as smoking cessation.
word superiority effect – When we’ve been shown words very briefly, we tend to find it easier to guess the whole word rather than individual letters.
Introduction
Seemingly small nudges can lead to sustained ripple effects on our world
We jump on a plane to fly halfway around the world and stay in a stranger’s house which we’ve booked on Airbnb. After successfully bidding for a set of Titleist irons on eBay, we happily send £699.99 to golfmad_90 in Anglesey. And we’re more than comfortable with climbing into the backseat of a random Toyota Prius, hailed using Uber.
If you’d recounted these counterintuitive decisions to someone a few decades ago, they’d have been aghast. Why on earth do we trust these people who we’ve never met, let alone heard of?
It’s all down to one simple mechanism: seller feedback.
How has this seemingly tiny nudge had such a seismic effect on the way we live our lives and the way businesses operate?
We are social creatures who rely on networks of trust to form communities. Once upon a time, you would have happily given a box of eggs to your neighbour safe in the knowledge that, when the time came, he would return the favour by giving you a bag of sugar.
In our current economy, it’s necessary to make transactions with people whose reputations are unknown. So how do we know who to trust?
To make these decisions, we’re forced to rely on a proxy of trust in the form of seller feedback. After taking an Uber trip, for example, you rate your driver and your driver rates you. These scores are combined to create one measure which others can rely on when making a decision about whether to trust you. If other people have given you positive feedback, then we take this as social proof that you are a trustworthy human being.
Small nudges with seismic ripple effects
Seller feedback, on the surface, looks pretty inconsequential – it’s a simple star rating. Far from it. This is an example of a small feature which has enabled organisations such as Uber, Amazon, eBay and Airbnb to scale into billion-dollar businesses. This small nudge, or ripple in the water, has had butterfly effects across our entire economy. It completely changed the rules by which our hotel, transportation and retail industries operate.
And just as this minor mechanism has had a seismic effect on our economy, so other small behaviour changes can have a monumental ripple effect on businesses.
Anybody can harness the power of behavioural science and apply small nudges in the real world to create long-lasting and positive ripples of change. This book will inspire you to do so and show you how. We want to empower you to lead this change by applying behavioural science in your working life.
Amazing discoveries are continuously being made in academia, and these have started to be applied in policy. What they haven’t yet been translated into, however, are widespread applications in business. For example, how can behavioural science help the conversations you have on the phone, the letters you write and the webpages you design? To see how far the field has come, and where Ripple fits in, we’ll first take a look at the evolution of behavioural science to date.
The evolution of behavioural science
As behavioural science has slowly seeped into our collective consciousness, there have been three major stepping stones. The first, an epic stride, was the acknowledgement from academics that humans, contrary to the long-held assumption of economists, do not always behave rationally. Work from the godfathers of behavioural science during the 1970s to the 2000s – Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely and Robert Cialdini – revealed hundreds of our brains’ systematic biases and decision-making shortcuts.
The second stepping stone was the concept of applying behavioural science in the real world, which was popularised by Thaler and Sunstein in their 2008 book, Nudge. This inspired politicians from both the US and the UK to probe whether these decision-making shortcuts and biases could be used to help the general public make better decisions for themselves. We all want to save money in our pensions, for example, but we would rather have the instant gratification of a higher pay check than the delayed benefit of a comfortable retirement. Politicians realised that they could take advantage of the fact that our brains prefer to go with the flow of the default option and so implemented automatic enrolment into workplace pensions. Not only does this help citizens to reach their savings goals, but it also helps governments, whose weighty burden of catering for an ageing population is lessened.
These were the first two great leaps in the evolution of behavioural science. But we’ve barely made it across to the third stepping stone – the widespread application of the wonderful and varied learnings from behavioural science to the real world. Up until now, we’ve uncovered plenty of problems and potential behavioural solutions, but with no roadmap for actually bringing these solutions to life. We’ve lacked a practical toolkit for the messy process of applying behavioural science in the real world; particularly in the world of business. In short, we wrote Ripple to answer those who are thinking “What next after Nudge?” and for those who were wondering “How on earth do I start to apply behavioural science in the private sector?”
That’s what Ripple does. It gives you case studies to illustrate the many opportunities and pitfalls of applied behavioural science, and it gives you the practical toolkit to actually get behavioural science projects off the ground. You will learn how to apply and embed behavioural science in your business, and you will be inspired to make the world around you work better for human brains.
From pink walls to pig abattoirs: what you will learn
We’ll travel around the world as we look at this series of case studies where behavioural science has been applied in business. At the end of each chapter, we present three practical steps which you can take to start applying behavioural science in the real world.
We begin in London when Jez founded his first behavioural science practice. He conducted a series of experiments themed around rabbits to bring behavioural science out of the lab and into the real world. We learn the importance of running small experiments to bring behavioural science to life, before travelling a few short miles to the London Borough of Greenwich to hear about how baby faces painted onto shop shutters reduced antisocial crime. Innovative applications of behavioural science such as this come from serendipitous collisions, so we learn how to build a team which facilitates these. We then hear about how behavioural science was used to combat pickpocketing and learn the practical steps to help bring ideas such as these to fruition.
