8 Fascinating Psychological Biases - Richard Shotton

One of the big drivers of human nature is a desire to be consistent. She looked at gym registration data, gym attendance data, volumes of search terms around things like quitting smoking, dieting. For all these data sets, she sees pronounced spikes at the start of new time periods, beginning of the year, beginning of the month, beginning of the week, after people's birthdays, after public holidays. All these moments are typified by people being more open to change. So the first thing around habit formation is you've got to break an existing habit. What behavioral scientists do is identify when you should time your communications to maximize that.

Someone who has had their head under a rock for a long time and hasn't been exposed to much behavioral science, maybe they're not an advertiser or a marketer, but they've probably got an interest in human nature, why should anyone care about behavioral science?

Okay. Good, good question. So sometimes the terminology can be confusing. So if people haven't heard of behavioral science, it's essentially what we used to call social psychology. So it's the study of how people actually behave rather than how they claim to behave. And I would argue anyone who is an entrepreneur, anyone who works in marketing, anyone who is trying to influence other people should be interested in this topic, because, you know, if you're a ... any of those groups, you're in the business of behavior change. And all behavioral science is, is the study going back 130 years of what makes for effective behavior change. So it's a super relevant topic. Above and beyond that, it is robust, which actually differentiates it from an awful lot of business theory. If you think about some very popular business theories, they're based on elegant arguments, and the problem with elegance is it's not often accurate. What's great about behavioral science is it's n- never based on logic alone. It always comes back to being proved by an experiment so we can give these findings genuine, um, credibility. And then the final big strength, so we've got our relevance and our robustness, the final big strength of this topic is its range. So there are literally tens of thousands of studies. So whatever category you work in, whatever discipline you work in, there are so many behavioral science studies that pretty much whatever challenge you have in front of you, there's going to be an experiment out th- out there that can help you solve that challenge.

What would be an example of an elegant business theory which doesn't necessarily show up in practice?

Well, I think one of the big theories that, um, is prominent is this discussion of purpose being, uh, a successful way to drive business growth. Another one actually that got more interesting recently is every year the PR agency, Edelman, produce data on h- uh, trust. And the story that they normally accompany this data with is there has been a massive decline in trust. It's just not backed up by their own data, so it's- it's quite, um ... it's quite commonplace that the headline findings that businesses and brands subscribe to aren't backed up by, um, an analysis of the- the actual data.