Behavioural science myth busting

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“If you’re a planner and you don’t employ behavioural science in your day job, then you’re a bloody idiot. It would be like being a pilot and forgetting to use your eyes.”

So said Kevin Chesters, CSO Ogilvy & Mather. It is a bold statement, but behavioural science is more than relevant: it’s robust and has identified a breadth of biases. So whatever a client’s communication challenge, there’s a relevant bias that can help you solve it. 

There are three common objections to behavioural science:

Myth 1: It doesn’t work 

The main reason behavioural science is rejected is that people claim not to be influenced by small nudges. This can be seen in a follow-up to perhaps the most famous experiment in behavioural science. 

In the original test, Robert Cialdini investigated what messages would be most effective in persuading hotel guests to re-use their towels. His first message simply stated the environmental benefits, and persuaded 35% to re-use their towels. The second stated that most people re-used their towels, and this boosted uptake to 44%. This suggests people copy others – known as social proof.

In the follow-up test however, Cialdini asked people to predict how they would behave. Overwhelmingly, they claimed they’d be more influenced by the environmental message than the social-proof one – the opposite of what happened. It’s not that the participants were lying – more that they were unaware of their motivations. If we ask people directly, we receive plausible, but misleading answers.

Consider the approach Rebecca Strong and I took when quantifying the impact of labelling washing-machine tablets as ‘ecologically friendly’. We sent a group of consumers the same type of washing-machine tablet. Half the group was told they were testing a standard supermarket tablet, the other half a green variant. They washed a load of clothes and reported back on the tablet’s performance. On every monitored metric, consumers preferred the non-green tablet.

The experiment unearthed consumers’ genuine reservations and misconceptions about green goods. Compare this to direct questioning, when shoppers often claim a deep and positive interest in environmental goods.

Myth 2: It’s just ad tweaking

The second objection to behavioural science is that it might improve performance marginally, but too little to be worth all this fuss. A punchy criticism, but not true. The most successful ad campaign of all time has a behavioural bias at its heart. 

When De Beers began advertising widely in the 1930s, there was no heritage of buying diamond engagement rings: sapphires and rubies were just as popular. However, De Beers forged a link between a diamond’s durability and the enduring nature of true love, as captured by Frances Gerety’s strapline, ‘A diamond is forever’.

Once De Beers had persuaded romantics that a diamond was the ideal token of love, it still had to convince them to part with a small fortune. So it embedded the idea that nothing less than a month’s salary would do. It worked because of the psychological principle ‘anchoring’ – the idea that, if you communicate a number at the start of a process, it influences the listener.

Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, who discovered the bias, believed anchoring works because listeners inadvertently use any arbitrary number as a starting point for their deliberations – and, in situations of uncertainty, don’t adjust enough away from the anchor. So ring buyers recognised that a month’s salary was too much, but it served as a starting place and they didn’t adjust down enough. The results were staggering – De Beers’ US diamond sales rose from $23m in 1939 to $2.1bn in 1979, a 19-fold increase.

Myth 3: It’s little more than common sense

Consider the bias discovered in a 1966 experiment by Harvard University psychologist Elliot Aronson. He recorded an actor, armed with the right responses, answering 92% of the questions in a quiz correctly. Afterwards, the actor pretends to spill coffee over himself (a small blunder, or ‘pratfall’). The recording was played to students, half of whom saw the version with the coffee spill, and the other half who saw the one without. They were then all asked how likeable the contestant was. The students found the clumsy contestant more likeable.

Aronson called the preference for those who exhibit a flaw the ‘pratfall effect’. It’s hardly an obvious insight, but it has been profitably harnessed by brands as diverse as VW (‘Ugly is only skin deep’), Stella Artois (‘Reassuringly expensive’) and Avis (‘We try harder’). 

Richard Shotton is deputy head of evidence at Manning Gottlieb OMD and author of the book The Choice Factory, published by Harriman House.

This article was first published in Issue 21 of Impact.