the next four chapters we head to foreign climes. In South Africa, we hear about how drawing on insights from a wide range of people helped to create a nudge to sell more SIM cards. We also learn how to facilitate a workshop to devise a spectrum of applied behavioural science ideas. Then we move onto Paris, where we hear about how hard it is to nudge the French to drink even more sparkling water and how adapting your interventions on the fly can overcome hurdles such as these.
In Thailand, we learn about how behavioural science was used to devise an innovative product to change women’s ingrained hand washing habits. However, without the right ecosystem of capabilities to create this innovative product, it never became a reality. Learning from this, we discover how to ensure this doesn’t happen to you, by creating a network of people who can help you turn ideas into products.
We then head across the Atlantic to Mexico, whose population are in the midst of an obesity crisis. In order to nudge the nation to adopt healthier habits, and when tackling behaviour change at this scale, we learn the importance of layering small nudges with big and how to tie these elements together with a model or theory of behaviour.
Back on UK soil, we hear about how an organisation moved from one small behavioural science pilot to embedding it at scale and learn what steps to take to achieve this. We then hear how behavioural science was used when interacting with those in the criminal justice system to reduce reoffending and discover how anybody can be empowered to apply behavioural science through training. Afterwards we hear about the importance of timing when applying behavioural science in business and learn why it’s important to measure the right thing, rather than what’s easiest.
In Scotland, we hear about a time when it was important to create neutral choice architecture and how to check that your nudges are ethical. We then hear about how to galvanise multidisciplinary teams from across a vast organisation, such as a major nationwide retailer, to improve a proposition using behavioural science.
We conclude with two case studies which showcase the entire process from start to finish. In Chile, we hear about how nudges were used to increase hand hygiene in an abattoir. Finally, we come full circle by returning back to London, where we learn about decreasing unsafe behaviour on a construction site using pink walls.
How should you read this book?
First, we recommend reading this book cover to cover. Then, as you start to develop interventions of your own, use the book and its tips as prompts. The tips from each chapter are numbered from 1 to 39; you can follow them all sequentially or pick and choose as you go along. Throughout the book, we refer to resources which sit on an online hub, which will enrich your journey as you begin to apply behavioural science.
Visit the hub at: www.ripple-book.com
Chapter 1: Year of the Rabbit, London
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
