physical environment nudge

New year resolutions, and why we always fail?

Posted on by Britt

For starters, I wish you all a happy 2015. 

By Bryant Arnold Published: 30-Dec-12 Courtesy from www.cartoonday.com

By Bryant Arnold. Published: 30-Dec-12. Courtesy from http://www.cartoonday.com

 

Although it is a mandatory thing to say, it always makes me doubt about my own intentions, a bit- First of all, how can I possibly hope to cover your entire next year with one saying? It is a bit over-ambitious, isn’t it? And still I wish all of you a happy entire 2015, sleeping nights and Monday mornings included. Could it be that I merely wish this because social convention dictates I do so? Perhaps I don’t even wish for it, I just repeat the words I learnt as a child. Kind of like American’s saying good-day to each other by saying ‘How are you doing?‘. They don’t expect any of their receivers to roll out an epistle about their current situation and constitution. They expect ‘fine/great, and you?‘. And so, when I wished you a happy 2015, your mind probably automatically thought ‘thank you, and the same to you too!‘ (unless you really hate me, but I hope you don’t).

 

Click-whirr

This is a click-whirr effect (an apt term coined by social psychology guru Robert Cialdini). Click-whirr is when a stimulus or ‘trigger’ from the outside world stimulates behaviour from ourselves. The “Happy 2015”-click activates the “you too” whirr. Other example: a baby smiling activates a smile on your own face (unless you are truly an abdominal evil character, but apart from psychopaths nearly everyone else does smile back when babies give us their brightest leers).

 

Click-whirr underlies many nudging things in life. In fact, it underlines so much behaviour that it is hardly possible to spend a day without it. In any case, such a day would be very tiring, as you would have to think about all the automatic behaviours you would normally perform. Instead of waiting for a red light and walking or driving at a green one, you’d have to take some time deliberating about the meaning of the colours, and the necessity for you to follow them. What are the consequences if you do, what if you do not? Upon entering the office, instead of taking your morning coffee, you have to deliberate about the health aspects, environmental aspects and possibly economical considerations of this. No click-whirr (green equals go, entering office means coffee machine visit) would make life very very difficult and cumbersome.

 

This reliance on it, however, also makes us particularly vulnerable when we want to change behaviour. Suppose you did indeed think long and hard, over Christmas break, about the detrimental effects of coffee (believe me, there are none!). As a new years resolution you decided to cut down on coffee (insanity, if you ask me, but I hear a lot of folk around me attempting it). Your first two days at home you do fine, but then you go back to work and as soon as you pass the machine, before you know it you’re tapping a cup of blissful black splendour called coffee. Dang! Pardon my French, but you just succumbed to the click-whirr effect of the situation. The environment has always nudged you, guided you, supported you, towards taking the cup, so much that the behavioural path of seeing the machine, and drinking a cup, is ingrained in your subconscious memory.

 

The good news, you cannot help yourself, and moreover, you are in good company, nearly no one can! The bad news: Click-whirr reactions are not only vital for our existence, by nature they are very hard to change or break. The only obvious way of breaking them is removing the click. If you are dead set on stopping your coffee consumption, consider giving up your job…

 

Ways out of this conundrum?

Well, there is always the changing of your own mind, as Ida beautifully described in the previous post. If our thoughts and behaviour are inconsistent (not compatible with one another), we either change our behaviour or our thoughts. Well, after having tapped your morning coffee, there is (hopefully) no way in hell you are going to throw it away. That leaves you with changing your minds. After all, one cup might not be too bad, right? Just ‘cutting back’ would be fine, perhaps as much as one less cup a day?

The effectiveness of such changing of your mind can be debated. Sometimes it might work, sometimes it might not. In the case of coffee, by all means, drink it by the barrels and forget all your resolutions at once. But if you want to be more physically active, stop smoking (or worse things) or pay more attention to your cats and dogs, then perhaps only changing your mind is not the way to go.

 

How then? 

As we cannot easily change the whirr, we must change the click. Short of throwing the coffee machine out (or pouring printing ink in the water reservoir) there are better ways of doing so. Each situation of course requires individual attention, but in essence it is the same thing: changing the click. And here lies the problem.

 

The problem and the solution

The problem with New Year Resolutions is that they are nearly always focused on the whirr. Logical, since the whirr is our own behaviour, and ought not our own behaviour be under our influence? Well… as said above, no, not really. What we must change instead, is the click. Take a different approach to your office room, that does not pass along the coffee machine. Sell the car. Throw away all your scigarettes ash trays, lighters and anything else that reminds you of smoking. Do not linger in smoke areas and avoid going to friends or occasions where others do and will offer. Change the environment, do not try to change your behaviour.

Instead of having the resolution: quit smoking, your resolution should be: get rid of all smoking reminders. Kill the click, and you kill the whirr.

 

Now, if you are a pleased reader after this, please honour me with your very own resolution(s) and how you can rephrase them. If only I knew a right click-word to whirr you all into giving responses. You’ll have to do with my sincere request instead, and a pretty smiley 🙂

 

 

Source: Cialdini, R. (1984). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, New York: Quill

 

Another blog post (unfortunately only in German) covering similar stuff can be found here

Looks don’t matter! The case of popcorn and more…

Posted on by Britt

Too much Popcorn?

 

To give a short answer to that question if looks matter:

YES THEY DO

If that does not satisfy you, read on, I will delve deeper into why appearance (looks) do matter. For the record, I am talking here about product ‘looks’ although much of what is said could also be applied to the way we ourselves and other people look. But no  need to cramp it all into one single post.

LOOKS NUDGE

And there is nothing we can do about it?

A bold statement but it is true. A few striking examples are:

  • We tend to eat more popcorn if we’re given a bigger amount of it. In fact, this is true regardless if the popcorn is nice or of bad quality. The thing is, we like to think that we only over-eat because we actually enjoy the things we eat, but in fact, we over-eat because we simply get more. Is it that simple? In a study by Wansink and Kim (2005) it was. They provided Philidelphian moviegoers with medium or large sized containers of free popcorn, half of them were stale, the other half was crispy fresh. The first finding was that people actually eat more popcorn if they get larger containers. This is already rather remarkable, why would we eat more simply because there is more? But it is in human nature to use the resources we have avilable, so OK. What is more remarkable, however, is that, regardless of taste, we eat more. Those with crispy popcorn ate 45 % more popcorn when given large containers, but those who ate stale popcorn also ate more popcorn (33 %) given large containers. The conclusion: we do not eat more because we like it, but because we have more of it available.

Sidenote: as Wansink and kim suggest, we can ‘use’ this trick as well to benefit society, simply by increasing the portion sizes of healthful food, like snack carrots.

  • On the same topic, Wansink (and Ittersum, 2013) did another study on plate sizes. They found that the size of plates is a visual ‘cue’ for us humans from which we conclude how much food we’re supposed to take. For instance, in a Chinese buffet restaurant, larger plates amounted to people serving themselves 52 % more food, eating 45 % more and wasting 135 % more food in total compared to using smaller plates. A similar study was done by Kallbekken & Saelen in hotel restaurants. They found a staggering drop of 20 % of food waste just by reducing plate size and the social cues accompanying the filling of plates (they basically encouraged people to take less in single goes, but come back more often, thus making the portions people take more suited for their eventual consumption).

Sidenote: these examples show excellently how nudges (like small changes in plate sizes) can benefit all actors in the game. People eat less, which is generally in their health benefit, restaurant owners have to spend less money on food that is simply being wasted anyway, and the environment benefits as well because less waste is in general a relief for all involved ecosystems (nowadays the global landscape).

  • A third striking example is that of detergents. Not so much detergents themselves, but their packaging, to be clear. The package matters in terms of quality of detergents. No matter what detergent is really in the package… People were given detergents in either all blue, all yellow, or blue & yellow packages and consequently asked about the quality of said detergents. Subjects were pretty much convinced that the blue & yellow packaged detergent was by far the best one (of course it wasn’t, it was exactly the same detergent as in the other packages). What’s more, people named all sorts of reasons for this detergent being better, anything but that they liked the package more. In fact, they liked it more because of the package, but no one really consciously knew this.

Sidenote: This study was done some while ago (Packard, 1957) but the importance of packaging and colours has been proven time and time again. In fact, I bet that subconsciously you are ‘aware’ that light products are very often packaged in light blue tints, and packaging often takes colour ‘inspiration’ from the product it contains. Butter packages are often golden, as the butter itself (or so an ideal butter would be). What does the package colour contribute to the product? Nothing! Yet it still makes us more prone to buy a golden package than a black one, when we are buying butter. When we’re buying Heinz tomato ketchup, we will look for red (unless we want the one with reduced calories!). This is not really a conscious effort, although it is not hidden either, once could possibly think about this if one wanted to. Hence, this ‘nudge’ of the physical environment does not force anyone to go for a certain gold-coloured package, it simply nudges us. It signals to us “this package contains an equally golden product”.

The point made with these illustrations (and many others not mentioned here) is that looks matter. Not only that, looks are always there, and so there really is not at all a ‘questionable debate’ about whether we should or shouldn’t nudge. Unless we plan to sell butter and detergents without package all together, that is, we will always need a package and so a ‘choice architecture’. The question remains only, ‘how’ should we use packaging. To the benefit of only the seller, or also to the benefit of the consumer and the environment?

 

 

Sources: 

“Bad Popcorn in Big Buckets: Portion Size Can Influence Intake as Much as Taste, “ Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 2005, 37:5 (Sept-Oct), 242-5, Brian Wansink and Junyong Kim.

“Portion Size Me: Downsizing Our Consumption Norms,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2007, 107:7 (July), 1103-1106, Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum.

“Nudging’ hotel guests to reduce food waste as a win-win environmental measure”. Economics Letters,2 2013, 119 (3): pp. 325-327.Kallbekken, Steffen and Håkon Sælen, 2013.

“The hidden persuaders”, Vance Packard, as read in “Subliminal” by  Leonard Mlodinow (p. 23) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012

What’s in a word?

Posted on by Britt

What is in a word, indeed. Obviously, there’s letters, but just as obviously so, that is not all there is to words. Wording and framing of messages has effect on outcomes, and that isn’t exactly a novel finding either. Obviously, the way you put things matters (“Get your ass off the chair and do some jogging” does sound a bit less pleasant than “hey, you could go jog a bit for a while, after reading this post”). But even deeper, the words themselves can matter.

 

Take a trash can that says ‘trash’. Well that is just wonderful. In case you were wondering what the can with bag in it was doing in the corner of the room, there you have it. Perhaps it is even sided by two other bins, But what if the trash bin instead said “landfill“. Now instead of thinking yourself a hero for tossing your stuff in the bin, rather than leaving them on the table, floor or cabinet, you are reminded of the detrimental effect your behaviour has on the environment. No one likes landfills (with an exception to raccoons, maybe). You might reconsider your ‘offence’ of throwing away trash in that bin, if it could actually be recycled as paper, glass or plastic.

Landfill site in Hong Kong. Source: http://www.hkcleanup.org/en/content/hong-kong%E2%80%99s-landfills

 

Now there is nothing in the word landfill that is preventing you from throwing the trash in the bin. Nor is it a lie, per se, because much of the stuff that is thrown in the regular bins will either get burnt or end up on a landfill. The mere word is just a small alteration in the decision-makers environment, and it can affect our behaviour without forcing us to. In other words, this would be considered a nudge (in the right direction).

 

Quite negative, though, to go around naming trash bins for landfills. What if you really do have trash and it does not fit in any other category but the ‘landfill-bin’? First of all, my compliments, because it most likely means you’ve already recycled all the rest. Secondly, there is also an alternative strategy. take the paper bin. What if it said ‘save the forest, recycle paper’, rather than ‘paper’? Here are some other great slogans to consider (from here): “Money grows on trees: Recycle paper” or “Reuse old news!” or “Why recycle glass? The answer is clear”. One mmarvellousthing I remember from my childhood in Holland, were the paper trash cans in an amusement park there. They said (in a slightly mmetallicsounding audio-recorded voice that is unnoticed by kids) “paper here” (it rhymes in Dutch, ‘papier hier’). What was great, however, was the immediate feedback you got when you tossed something in. It said ‘thank you!’. The result: kids started begging parents and others around them for trash, so they could toss it in. Of course I am deviating a bit from ‘words’ here, since this is more related to feedback but the point is, as always: small changes in the environment can mean the world!

 

The point of it all is that with wording (sometimes specific words, sometimes sentences) we can hope to change people’s behaviour without infringing on their own decision making power. This is in psychology also known as ‘framing’. Tversky & Kahneman’s famous framing effect is an example. See the choice they gave people in two different treatments:

Experiment set-up by Tversky & Kahneman (1981)

 

When framed positively, most participants chose for saving 200 people, rather than gambling. But when framed negatively, participants instead chose to gamble. Odd, isn’t it? the idea behind it, according to Tversky and Kahneman, is that people react differently to things in a loss frame or a gain frame. In a negative frame, people avoid risks, but look for them in positively framed situations. Note, though, how effectively all of the presented options are the same in expected outcomes.

 

Anyway, let’s not dive too deep into the seminal paper of Tversky and Kahneman (although I do recommend it, if you haven’t read it before). The point, once again, is that message wording and framing matters. Moreover, what matters is if we are looking at preventing or promoting behaviour. Say what? Preventing would be to ‘stop people from drinking’ and promoting would be to ‘stimulate people to bike to work more often’. Or promoting recycling versus preventing the tossing of waste in the standard bin. We learn from prior studies in health behaviour that gain frames work better with prevention behaviour, but seriously, there are so many contextual factors to consider that it is very difficult to say if this also goes for environmentally friendly (types of) behaviour. It is also likely to depend on the mindset of the individual, and so it all becomes a very unpredictable jumble of factors about which we really cannot say much other than it is worth more research, particularly the effects on specific pro-environmental acts in specific situations among a certain target group of people. We can say that, and that there is a chance framing may matter! Now isn’t that enough to consider trying it? For me as a scientist, it definitely is!

 

 

Source & Reading suggestion:

Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel (1981). “The Framing of decisions and the psychology of choice”. Science 211 (4481): 453–458. 

Rothman, A. J., Bartels, R. D., Wlaschin, J. and Salovey, P. (2006), The Strategic Use of Gain- and Loss-Framed Messages to Promote Healthy Behavior: How Theory Can Inform Practice. Journal of Communication, 56: S202–S220.

A physical environment change nudge: Uppsala Bottle Bins

Posted on by Britt

People in Sweden are quite responsible in general, with 93% of Swedish respondents in a Eurobarometer poll stating that recycling of waste is pivotal for the environment. Although convinced of this, only 69% of Swedes claim to regularly recycle their trash. Now this is a half-full/half-empty glass issue, and I am not saying that 69% is too little. In fact, I am proud of Swedes that they score so high in this. The European average is only 59%, and only a few countries top Sweden in recycling: Luxembourg (83%), France (82%), Belgium (78%), the UK (74%), Austria (71%) and Ireland (70%). But nevertheless, 69% means that at least 31% of us can do more! That is a happy message, if you ask me, there is room for improvement. All we really need to do, is improve!

Coming back to the topic of this post: Uppsala’s Bottle Bins. Uppsala saw a brilliant opportunity in adding some bottle-collecting cylinders to their normal trash bins; it provides poor people with an excellent way to collect waste and thus both earn money and help society keep clean at the same time. As you can see on the photo below, pedestrians can dispose their pant bottles (and pant is high in Sweden, about 1 kr per small container, or 10 Euro-cents). People who can use some extra money can simply take out the bottles if they see them in there, without the need to dig through a deep trash bin (and sometimes leaving a messy sight).

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/02/pocket-history-bottle-recycling/4831/

Source: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/02/pocket-history-bottle-recycling/4831/ Original caption: “Empty beverage container collector, Uppsala 2012 (Finn Arne Jørgensen)”

This is a nudge that changes something in the physical environment of the person who engages in behaviour. In fact, it does so on two occasions. Firstly it suggests people that it is better to drop their flasks and bottles in the recycle cilinder, rather than tossing them in the common trash bin. Secondly, it allows people who are looking for these bottles as a way of income to collect them without having to go head-first into dirty trash bins!

If you want to check out these bins, by the way, they are still around at the Uppsala train station. If you’re around, go ahead and donate a bottle or two.