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in november twenty eleven coca cola changed the color of the can they removed the distinctive red and to raise awareness for polar bear conservation they made the can white but this packaging change it didn't go down well coca cola is kidding its new white cans for the holidays the new design was supposed to raise money to help polar bears the drink inside wasn't changed at all but the new color of the can changed how consumers perceived the taste some even claim the new can change the taste of the coke side to some this seemed ridiculous just drink it the cheese so they're going back to the red cans next week but today on dutch we'll learn how sites smells and sound alter not only what we buy but how we taste perceive and remember all of that coming up cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow in nineteen twenty nine the german psychologist wolf gang ko devised a simple experiment on the island of ten he showed the spanish speaking population two abstract shapes one was a spiky jagged shape and the other was a smooth round shape although the names have altered over the years they've come to be known as the k and boob shapes these shapes are very well known they've even been featured on an episode of q now look at these two shapes they have names alright yep one now one well one is the key and the other is the boo tell me which is which wolfgang gang found that almost everybody matched the word uber with the rounded shape and k with the angular shape uber is on the right clearly uber is on the right would you agree with that without definitely k that's the spiky the spike moment and and what would you say johnny gosh i hate to think i would i would say they should go back to their diet sir in two thousand and one two neuroscientist updated this experiment testing it on speakers of many different languages and found that the finding holds no matter where you're from k sounds spiky and boob sounds rounded sounds shape our perception and charles spence the oxford university researcher and author of the book sense hacking used this finding to advise dairy milk he found that the words don't just see more angular around it he found that tastes can be altered too here he is sharing his work at the most recent conference that business is more angular and is key key instead and so he came out in twenty twelve suggesting but if you know about these aesthetic connections between the senses if you want to make your chocolate taste sweeter make it rounder but probably reduce some of the sugar as well okay same taste per but a little bit less unhealthy and the following year cadbury came out and indeed indeed do that they rounded off their chocolate bar to cut the weight by three point something grams but they didn't change the formula and what the response was of of of readers of the daily mail was a revolt saying what do you leads doing to our chocolate you've changed the taste you make it more creamy and more sweet that was exactly what we predicted would happen the year or two before by knowing these surprising almost aesthetic connection the new rounded chocolate bar made dairy milk seem sweeter even though the chocolate itself hadn't changed the look of a word chocolate or can of coke can change our perception but it's not just sites it's music too back on the very first episode of nudge i interviewed adrian north for professor of psychology at the curtin university and i asked him about one of his best known experiments so so we we just borrowed the island display of of literally mutually our local supermarket and the the wines spirit section and on the end there we just had a shelf oh sorry four shelves which showed on one side of the shelf french wines and on the side of the shelf german wines adrian wanted to see if music could alter the wine shoppers picked on each shelf the two wines were basically the same price the supermarket in question had a a scale that it used to put on by the price ticket which showed you know shoppers just how sweet versus dry the wine was so we try to hold that constant and and so on and then on the top deck of of all the top shelf of this display we had just a little music player which played either very stereotypical french music or very stereotypical german music we were keen to avoid people being exposed to any sort of marketing messaging in any confusing impact that would have so for our stereotypical french music we had for example the french national have played on an accordion you know almost anyone exposed to british culture at that time would have spotted yeah that's french similarly our our german music was basically beer kilo you know read one about literally it was about drinking vice and then ryan yeah it's really stereotypical german at least you feel you know brought of been britain rant about that time i what did then was this display was was essentially facing the checkout it was only about maybe ten meters from the back end of the checkout so we sat there by a little free taxi phone you know with bag stuff with shopping them of you know inviting people to draw the assumption that you know we were not psychologists observing what they're doing in fact we're just shoppers waiting for our taxi tour like literally sure we were just counting the number of bottles of wine sold and yeah what we found was is that when we played the the very stereotypical german music then german wine sells french by five bottles to on in other words it it averaged out at about three third bottles to one in favor of whichever country's music was playing there and then when french music played forty bottles of french wine were sold versus just twelve bottles of german wine but when german music played thirty bottles of german wine sold versus just twenty two bottles of french what's more eighty six percent of the customer surveyed after said the music had absolutely no effect on their choice i've mentioned this on dutch before but the same finding holds true for food sales in twenty seventeen deborah z and her colleagues from the monte multiplayer state university in new jersey found that playing for men music in a north american university canteen led to increases in sales of pi while playing italian music led to increases of the sales of chicken parmesan adrian north went on undefined that picking the right music for an ad can make the ads claims more memorable so for example not long after that that study with wine cells in the supermarket with said okay well if the music is activating the thoughts of certain things and making people think in a certain way what that should mean is that if the music that's playing in the background to an advert is very clearly linked to some feature of the product it ought to make it easy to recall those features of the product itself and so that's that's the next thing we read where set up basically five dummy adverts with different musical backgrounds in some cases the music was clearly promoting a particular aspect of the products and in some cases it wasn't and what we found is that when when the fits a particular aspect of the product people are more likely to recall that specific feature of the products itself so if you want your service to appear more luxurious you might play this or if you want your tech product to seem higher quality you might play this all of a sudden you go for this mother file statement that you know play french music in a shop people by french stuff a big deal so what who have thought it so all of a sudden say okay so now we've got a direct tool that's theoretically driven it tells us exactly how it should be using music and advertising but that's just music charles spence in sense hacking rights that smells alter our purchases too according to the results of a preliminary study by doctor alan hi from chicago participants in the laboratory were willing to pay ten dollars more for a pair of sneakers with the center of flowers hanging heavy in the air while the self reported purchase intent increased too what's more a new car smell will make that car appear to run smoother spence writes that his all time favorite example of smell influencing perception comes from anecdotal reports of rolls royce owners in the uk who would send their car off for a service or a repair more often than not the car owners would get the car back and say wow this car is just like being brand new it had had a good tune up it have probably had a polish but charles writes that the key change was the new car smell an aroma mixture of leather and wood designed to capture the distinctive scent of a vintage nineteen sixty five silver cloud this new car smell is sprayed into the cabin just before the car is returned to the customer according to hugh hud managing director of s c gordon the coach builders of rolls royce his cars he said people say they don't understand what we've done but but their cars come back different and better in fact it's not just the smell of your car which is precisely engineered alter your perception spent rights how some super car manufacturers alter the volume of the engine to make it appear louder than normal there was good reason behind this in two thousand and eight researchers harsh employ altered the levels of realistic car noise some hurt this and some heard the same car but with the volume decreased by five decimal the quiet car made those who are watching a video of it driving underestimate the actual speed it was traveling at by ten percent this doesn't just affect cars research sighting the wall street journal found that it's very difficult to convince people that a silent vacuum cleaner is picking up anywhere near as much dirt as a no model the quieter the vacuum the less powerful it's perceived indeed increasing volume could solve all types of issues including long but environmentally bad hot showers in one twenty fifteen study shower users experienced an artificially no shower head this subtle change convince people that the flow was higher thus potentially helping remind them of all the water they were using now listen to this clip from a two thousand and eleven tennis match and try to estimate how hard each of the players are hitting the ball in twenty eighteen spencer and his colleagues ran a similar experiment on a number of participants they showed participants to tennis game which was paused as a player was just about to hit the ball they asked a participant to estimate where the ball would end up but here's the twist spence artificially made the noise of hitting the ball louder for some participants but quieter for others when the loudness of the noise made by the racket contacting the ball was amplified people were convinced that the ball would bounce further into the opponent's side of the court then if the contact sound was made a little quieter it's important to note that the participant could clearly see the ball being struck and all they were asked to do was indicate on a drawing of the court where they thought the ball would land the sound of the ball's contact with the racket was technically irrelevant to the task but it changed where they perceived it to be hit i imagine that if a player grunt like za did in that earlier clip it'll only enhance that perceived power of the shotgun and perhaps that is one of the reasons why so many players scrapped sights sounds and smells really do influence what we buy but we're only just scratching the surface after the break you'll hear professor north explain why slow music makes customers buy more and why this jingle increased sales by twenty nine percent everybody loves i don't all of that coming up the podcast i'd like to recommend today is the d pod brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the d pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products if you're an e commerce if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to if you're interested in learning the stories behind your favorite d to see brands then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories so go and listen to the d podcast wherever you get your podcasts if your job is measured by the effectiveness of the content you create then you have to check out the audience connection podcast hosted by ol atkinson and lydia chan they've got over thirty years of real world experience between them helping brands connect better with the people that matter each week they are joined by marketing and communication leaders from the world's largest brands as well as behavioral scientists to reveal how great content box action and build lasting connections and i was one of their guests on one of their most recent episodes so if you need your content to stick go and subscribe to the audience connection wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back to you are listening to nudge with me feel ag at the start of the episode we heard how a white coke can decreased sales because it altered the taste only when turning back to the distinctive red that coke start to taste normal again but that doesn't mean that red is always best because that color has connotation with speed the color red might therefore be a bad choice for your car research cited again in the books sense hacking suggests that red cars are perceived to go faster and make more noise than cars of any other color which might be nice if you're trying to impress someone but not good if you're trying to avoid a speeding ticket if you wanna avoid being pulled over by the police perhaps a white car would be a better pick and if you're serving a meal think about how you're serving that meal and what you're serving it on according to the results of a study published in twenty twenty diners rated a bowl of tomato soup as tasting significantly better when it was served on a white table cloth compared to when that table cloth was removed the four researchers has found that the same simple tomato soup tasted ten percent better with the table cloth but above all make sure your dining room smells nice smells seem to have a major impact on our behavior dutch researchers in twenty nineteen documented a fifteen percent increase in sales when they diffuse a synthetic mel scent throughout the supermarket and spence rights and sense hacking that according to one industry report coffee sales at a service station can be more than tripled by simply spritz drivers with the synthetic aroma of freshly ground coffee while they're filling up at the pumps although charles does go on to clarify that such industry sponsored findings should probably be taken with a hefty grain of salt given that independent research rarely shows such large effects that said some of the industry results are quite interesting especially the prize winning flavor radio campaign executed by dunkin donuts in seoul south korea here intelligence sent dispensers were installed on a number of the city's buses and these dispensers would recognize when the dunkin donuts jingle was played on the in vehicle radio when that was played the dispensers would release a coffee aroma so when hearing something like this everybody loves i don't commuters would also smell coffee the idea was that after stepping off the bus the passengers would soon stumble across one of the chain stores and hopefully make a purchase the evidence suggests that this multi sensory marketing strategy did really work with a sixteen percent increase in the number of visitors to dunkin donut branches situated close to a bus stop as well as a twenty nine percent increase in the sales of coffee jingle combined with sense made koreans buy more coffee but professor adrian north has more evidence for me that music alone can alter behavior it was done by a guy in the states called ronald miller and what he did in in two studies in nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty six was look at the effects of music in first of all supermarket and ben a restaurant and he found that when he played this the fast music people took less time to get from point a to point b in the supermarket you know you know he effectively timed them like it was a running race play fast music they go around quicker whereas he found it when they played slow music people take longer to go around the store but because they take longer to go around the store they're browsing more and because they're browsing more they spent more and it was significantly for memory it's around about a third more when they played slow music versus the fast music it's a classic study by ronald e mill a marketing professor from new orleans he monitored the flow of people in a supermarket in an unnamed southwestern us city and analyzed the till receipts in one of the biggest studies of its kind extending over a period of nine weeks shoppers were shown to spend thirty eight percent more when slow music just like this was played that is compared to faster music like this in the study the slow music was at sixty beats per minute while the fast music was at a hundred eight beats per minute and adrian north says the same finding was seen in restaurants then this follow study in the restaurant you know just basically did the same thing again and if found in that case when you played fast music people finish their meals more quickly i happen to remember that you know the groups in the fast music commission took only forty six minutes at the table whereas when he played slow music groups took well over fifty minutes i think it's about fifty five minutes to you know get away from the table and again crucially be in the slowly music condition not only did they sit there longer but the ended up spending more money on drinks from the bar this is because music can alter our perception of time further for that well another wonderful bit of researchers done and the this isn't the cycle james polaris exactly what he did was he is another one of these tricks which we it's the so called discrete event model of time which say if after the event you're trying to reconstruct how much time has passed what you do is because you can't quite remember accurately how many minutes have gone by instead what you do is your default position then they say okay i don't know exactly how much time has passed but three things have happened or four things have happened and so if four things have happened more time must have gone by than if instead i recall two things having happened so with regard to james stuff what he did whereas he just got people even this was admittedly in the laboratory but he got people in there for sixteen minutes and while there were the waiting in there he'd played them either two types of music one group of people here four pieces of music each of which is four minutes long so four by four is sixteen another group of people know here eight pieces of music each of which is only two minutes long so eight by two still sixteen but the crucial difference is the first group of people only four events had happened for songs whereas the second group of people eight events had happened eight songs he then asked people afterwards how long has he been in here for and the people who have heard eight songs think they'd been there for longer because eight things have happened whereas the people have heard four songs they after the event events say only four things happen so yeah probably not as long as those other people i've heard anecdotally that this works for this very podcast on the show i cut up my interviews with guests into short clips this allows me to make the shows around twenty to thirty minutes in length but with lots of different cuts some listeners have told me that this fast cutting slightly different from some podcasts makes the show seem longer than just the twenty minutes it really is all of this happens because our decisions are shaped heavily by the sights the sound and the smells we see here and smell your car will seem faster if it's louder and red it'll drive smoother if it's got that new car smell a tennis player seems more powerful if they grunt a little louder and a white cola bottle will put you off your favorite can of coke the smell of mel makes supermarket shoppers spend more as the slower music and a french accordion song might just persuade you to buy a sa blanc over that's all for today folks thank you so much for listening the episode would not have been possible about charles spencer fantastic books since hacking it's one of the best books i've read this year and i highly recommend you check it out the book encouraged me to go back and listen to the very first episode of nudge with professor adrian north i've used clips from that show in today's episode is insight still very relevant even though they are now six years old so thank you adrian again for agreeing to come onto to the show all those years ago there are two big updates from nudge coming up over next weeks and month i plan to launch two different things the first is nudge vault it is a database containing four hundred insights into consumer behavior it will contain all of the different studies i've share today but all of those studies will be stored and catalog in a way that you will be able to search through them and research them when you're working on your own marketing so if you're interested in learning about nudge vault please do go to the website just go to nudge podcast dot com and click nudge in the menu that is nudge podcast dot com and click nudge faults in the menu there you'll be able to sign up to the waiting list where i can send you more information about what we're doing the other thing i'm working on is another cohort of the nudge unit that is my one month training course where i teach twenty business professionals exactly how to improve their brand product or service using behavioral science if you're interested in that go to the link in the show notes where you can sign up for the nudge unit waiting list i'm planning on launching that course in november alright that is all for this week folks thank you so much for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode of nurture cheers

bruce t was an educational psychologist and he came up with this model of group development which had these rh phases forming storming norm performing and later ad joining now everyone then started teaching this model and it didn't really apply very well to a lot of groups and organizations i had been taught this model at university i'd seen it applied at every single company i've worked in and i followed activities relating to this model in multiple team forming events yet today's guest on nudge says that this forming storming model is entirely wrong keep listening to hear why cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hub hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow today on nudge i am joined by one of the world's leading experts on group dynamics i'm colin fisher i'm an associate professor of organizations and innovation at university college london school of management and i'm the author of the new book the collective edge unlocking the secret power of groups in his book colin researched the man behind the forming and storming model bruce tech was an educational psychologist and he came up with this model of group development which had these rh phases forming storming norm performing in later ad joining you know the the kind of quality of the rhymes sort of declined over time at the time you know there there hadn't wasn't much thought to you know systematically how do groups develop over time and he studied these groups that were known as tea groups which were training groups for post world war two soldiers coming back who needed to kinda be retrain and and find you know other kinds of of roles besides being being a soldier being whatever their function had been in the military and they ran these groups it was the tradition was very psycho dynamic at the time and they ran them in this kind of odd way where there'd be a facilitator who was running these tea groups and all these kind of former military people were gathered in the room and the facilitator wouldn't say anything just stand there you know eventually know these a lot of these people had been officers they were you know leaders in their own right they they'd get kind of upset with the facilitator and say like why are you not saying anything why why are we all just sitting here doing nothing and they they kinda gradually get mad at him and and then somebody would say oh maybe this is part of it maybe we're supposed to you know be doing something ourselves and they kind of come up with some way to operate and then the facilitator would step in and say okay now you guys have got that you're ready to go and you can see in there how if you study those groups you would see forming storming when everyone gets mad norm when they say oh wait maybe this is part of it and let's figure out what we wanna do and and then performing when the facilitator steps in now everyone then started teaching this model and it didn't really apply very well to a lot of groups and organizations colin writes how using this model on real teams causes all sorts of problems and one study highlights these problems quite well connie ge did some classic studies where she you know she was top this model the same way a lot of us were in graduate school she had worked in in a lot of real teams as an executive and said that's not my experience i don't think that's what teams do and she went out and gathered data from work teams that have a set deadline in time and found that they did not follow this pattern instead what would happen is groups came together and that in that very first meeting norms would emerge and they emerged almost instantaneously so you know where people sit that you we're we've all been in meetings where everyone comes in and then we kinda sit in the same seat every time you're in this particular group or this particular meeting for some reason whoever speaks first tends to keep speaking first whoever speaks the most tends to speak the most whoever speaks the least doesn't talk very much whether we make small talk at the beginning of meetings or whether we're you know kind of all on our phones pretending we don't see each other though those kinds of norms they tend to be very sticky they emerge very quickly and they emerge you know really without much conscious awareness and then they just kinda persist until about halfway through any task when we look up at the clock calendar and go oh my god half the time has gone we'd better do something different and then there's kind of this opportunity for change and then those new norms stabilize and we keep doing that until the end the study suggests that into personal trust is not really needed before working together that all types of groups can perform well without this forming and storming stage and all you really need is social norms these norms form naturally in all groups in fact the keyboard you write on is a result of a giant shared social norm it's a great example of how social norms guide our behavior colin writes that if you open the settings on your iphone keyboard you will actually find more than one keyboard option you will find the default q keyboard which is probably what you use is it's what most people use is what i use as well but you'll will also find the dv shack keyboard so the quota keyboard which is the most popular one it wasn't actually designed to make finding letters very easy the configuration arose in response to telegraph operators outdated morse code habits but the university of washington professor august da dv thought there was a better way in nineteen thirty six he created an alternative layouts for letters and numbers that he claimed increased the speed because it reduced finger motion essentially the the main difference was that uncommon letters that these are letters like l f k and x if you're familiar or sc the are uncommon he put those in the bottom row so that most words only required using the top two rows which just made it easier to type and there was good reason to think he was right because in nineteen seventy six barbara blackburn earned the guinness world record for fastest ty typing two hundred and twelve words per minute but specifically using the dv shack layout nobody is beaten that using the q layout and yet we all still use the quality layout not because it's best but because it became the norm colin links this story about keyboards with how groups operate they find a norm and stick to it usually very early on much before any storming forming and ad joining could even take place and so this this was a very different model tour from a kind of gradual change in groups to saying now actually groups in in organizations when they have deadlines they tend to meet and they get right to work and however they end up working from the beginning tends to persist for a while and then there's usually some point of punctuation where there's some you know important into interim deadline or important event that allows change to come in and then we keep going that way so this this kind of tuck model influenced a lot of team training develop and and what we've now refer to as team building that kinda of works on this assumption that we need to develop really good interpersonal trust before we can work together and that to me is is the kind of problem of the legacy of the tuck model and it's not that interpersonal trust is bad that of course it's better when we trust one another but that the meaning of trust has kind of two different facets and that one facet is you kind of the common use of the word where it's like i trust you with my deepest darkest secrets or i i kind of trust that you have my best interest at heart and that's what we would call relational trust but there's also task based or instrumental trust which is i trust that you're going to deliver your part of the work at a certain standard to a certain quality at a certain time and that those two kinds of trusts the relational and the instrumental they don't always go together with the same person that if you think about you know your closest family and your closest friends and then say well would i trust them to be part of my work team like well yeah sometimes right but not not all the time i can certainly think of lots of people i'm i trust relational that i would need to see some evidence that they can do with certain kind of work and and i could collaborate with them and so this idea that we need to do trust falls that we need to you know kind of share our deepest darkest secrets before we can work together is this kind of negative legacy of tuck model there's a famous barry straw study that colin coincides in his book to prove this point in experiment group solved a financial puzzle and were randomly told that they even did very well so that they were in the top twenty percent of performers or that they did very poorly so they were in the bottom twenty percent of performers and that was regardless of their actual performance so group one there's average but they are told they performed really well group two also performs that average but they are told they performed extremely poorly objectively there is no difference in the group's performance they both actually achieve the same output but the perception of the individuals in the group is drastically different groups that thought they did well reported being far more cohesive reported being better communicators they reported being happier with their teamwork even though nothing about their actual group process differed those who thought they did badly reported being far less cohesive reported having worse communicators even though their actual performance was the same this challenged tu famous forming storming norm a performing model which suggested that teams must build trust before achieving results in reality it is the success that creates the cohesion not the other way around winning teams tend to like each other more because they have so much success while losing teams because they are losing often fight and blame one another the evidence is that the best teams either they get right to work and they just have lots of points of reflection and learning built in where they're talking about what's working what's not or that you have high fidelity simulations and you see this in sports and you see this in music you see this in the military where there's a lot of practice there's sometimes there's training camp there's rehearsal and that that's usually how teams get better and that's how teams get built not by you know going off to a a ski resort and hanging out for a week with our teammates that that that can be great and that can be fun but if you're counting on it to improve team performance you the evidence is just that there there's not a lot of data behind that assertion and colin had a real world example of the tu model failing it's the story of an olympic basketball team that tried to build interpersonal trust followed the to model but ended up as an unprecedented failure in nineteen ninety two the rules for olympic basketball and this but specifically for the us changed where professionals were allowed to play in olympic basketball at the time you know the the us professionally league the nba national basketball association was really dominant in the world that basketball hadn't caught on to the extent around the world that it has today and so once professionals were allowed in in nineteen ninety two the us assembled what was called the dream team with all the most famous players that michael jordan magic johnson larry bird all playing together on one team this group birthday on me the greatest team never assembled in a history our team sports and you know it was the the talent disparity between the us team and and other teams was so wide that there was there was just no contest for a little over a decade then in two thousand four the us assembled the team you know they'd won every gold medal between nineteen ninety two and and that two thousand four olympics they assembled the team that you know not not everybody a degree to sign on for that one there were some of the best players that said no thanks i'm not gonna be a part of this olympic team but it was still a very accomplished team that you know by any measure of individual talent was still by far the most talented team in the olympics and this team lost its first game to puerto rico which is a a much smaller country obviously with much less accomplished basketball player individual players it finally happened united states loses olympic play with nba players and you know the us this was a huge embarrassment lots of people are talking about the american men's basketball team this morning it was by any stretch of an imagination a complete upset and an embarrassment they they ended up losing a couple more games which is more than the us team had lost still for for quite some time their third loss of these olympic games prior to athens the united it's that's basketball team that only lost twice in its history they lose three times in less than two weeks even though they won the bronze medal it was seen as this huge failure and a huge embarrassment for for us olympic basketball and it was called by some comment yeah they were called the dream team but now some people are calling them the scream team how this relates back to the idea of team building is they did a lot of things that if you believe in this kind of we need to build trust and get to know each other to succeed they were doing a lot of those things so they did you know the kind of off site living in training they they had this big yacht where they they lived on and they work there and they had a basketball court where they could practice at all hours they really got to know one another much better and became good friends during this process but it really didn't help them during the tournament and in fact as things were kind of going south a lot of there was a lot of public sq that came out the the coach and some of the players weren't getting along a lot of people at the time were like well does this team just have bad chemistry why does it have you know bad chemistry what happened i think that explanation is you know a little bit mistaken and it kinda shows again how we kinda have this theory of of what works and until it doesn't work and when we see a team fail then we start to kind of look for why why it's failing but the same things happening within the team that the idea that the team had bad chemistry and therefore played bad may or may not be true that there's a lot of evidence that instead we when we're on the team we can see how we're performing especially with something like basketball that you know we can observe whether we're playing well or not and when we're not playing well when we're performing badly were more prone to negative attribution of one another to saying negative things and that it's not chemistry first performance second that the two are not never ending circle especially when collective performance is observable colin in his book explains a study by the legendary researcher a sheriff that highlights what actually happens when groups form there's not really a forming storming performing mode it's just norman sheriff in his nineteen thirty studies sap participants in a completely dark room and asked him to estimate how much a tiny dot of light in this dark room was moving now in reality this light didn't move it never moved in any version of the experiment but there's a solution called auto that makes these small dots of light in a tiny room appear to move a small amount it's why sometimes if you're looking at a star you might think it's moving when in reality it's not for the experiment half the participants sat in the room alone and they were asked to estimate how much the dot was moving the estimates made by those who were alone were wildly different from those who made estimates in a group so those who made the estimates alone would say sometimes that it moved eight inches and others would say that it just moved one third of an inch the other half of participants were placed in groups like i said and here share found that whoever spoke first in the group would then heavily influence the group and all the others would quickly cluster around that initial estimate if someone said eight inches first all would agree with that answer this remained even when the individuals were taken out of the group and asked to estimate the movement of the dot again by themselves they would still follow whoever spoke first in the group people quickly and unconsciously adopt group norms even for weekly held beliefs but colin records that that two thousand and four american olympic team didn't have time to build the right norms you know not only did that team building not work but it was starting way too late that by this time in two thousand four the rest of the world was improving at basketball quite a bit they had set national teams that practice together not for a few weeks but for months or for years and international basketball had some quirks that were different from the nba and that a couple of those quirks were it emphasized three point shooting more and that there was kind of a different kind of zone defense that was permitted in international competition that was not permitted in the nba but the us olympic team wasn't composed with these differences in mind they did not load up on three point shooting they didn't have players who understood or appreciated the differences that these kind of different defensive rules would make and so even though it was a talented team on paper it was more of a talented collection of individuals that didn't really do this diagnosis of what skills does the task demand and and have we made sure that we've assembled the team that has all of those skills and so the you know this lessons were then taken into the two thousand team which became known as the redeem team they then assembled the team much more carefully that they trained together for much longer and so the the two thousand eighteen was able to succeed where the two thousand four team failed by kind of taking some of these lessons on board the tu model doesn't really apply in the real world high performing groups don't all have to go through a forming storming norm and performing stage and team building exercises that try to guide groups through these phases seem to fail because of that however this leads to a good question which is what specifically makes a group perform to its highest level well later colin says that to perform to a high level groups need a lot of emotional intelligence and he gave me a test to measure how effective i would be in a team you'll hear all of that after this quick break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is the d pod brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the d pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products if you're an e commerce if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to if you're interested in learning the stories behind your favorite d to see brands than this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories so go and listen to the d podcast wherever you get your podcasts if your job is measured by the effectiveness of the content you create then you have to check out the audience connection podcast hosted by oli atkinson and lydia chan they've got over thirty years of real world experience between them helping brands connect better with the people that matter each week they are joined by marketing and communication leaders from the world's largest brands as well as behavioral scientists to reveal how great content box action and build lasting connections and i was one of their guests on one of their most recent episodes so if you need your content to stick go and subscribe to the audience connection wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me for like so far we've heard that the tu model for building a group won't make the group more effective but what does make a high performing group well colin says it's something called social sensitivity social sensitivity is a facet of what some people call emotional intelligence which is our ability to detect the emotions of other people without being told so it's tested with actually a really fun test that you can find online called reading the mind in the eyes and you're given just a picture of somebody's of these eyes and own only their eyes and then an option multiple choice of how that person was feeling at the time and of course the the researchers know how the person reported actually feeling and the you know you've given like thirty of these and then your score on that is is your social sensitivity score okay i thought i would take this test myself live on the show to see how it works so in front of me i've i've loaded up the website i've dropped the link to this website in the show notes if you if you want to take the test as well and like colin says i can see a picture of someone's eyes all of the pictures i think on this website are are black and white i'm given four options four individual words i could pick to describe these eyes all all the expression that these eyes are giving off the options are jealous panicked arrogant or hateful it's not i wouldn't say it's totally obvious to me what the expression is i think it could probably be jealous or arrogant and i i'm guessing that most will be like this that it will be quite hard to tell that there'll be two potential answers that it could be but to get started i'm gonna go with jealous alright i'll now answer the remaining thirty six questions and let you know how i get on okay well i have my results the test took me two hundred and eighty seconds they purposely measure the time it takes i think that's part of the test it helps you understand how quickly you're sort of understanding people's emotional states and they also tell me how many correct answers i got i found this a bit interesting because i assumed that there wouldn't be one correct answer that there could be multiple correct but no apparently there are individual correct answers and i've got a score based on that so i got thirty one out of the thirty six faces correctly i correctly stated the right emotion i guess thirty one times now i've since googled what this means because it wasn't very clear on the website and i've read that it means that i am slightly above average at reading emotions which is lovely i'm very happy to hear that i'm not exceptional that would be getting about thirty four to thirty six but it's a good score however this score does not just mean that i'm i'm i'm good at reading emotions colin says researchers have found that a high score in this test can actually make individuals more effective integrate there were researchers led by anita wool carnegie mel who were looking you know what predicted collective performance team performance and so what what the researchers did is they you know measured individuals on almost every trait that anyone had ever hypo might affect team performance so you know big big five personality traits and things that a lot of people thought might matter you where things like conscientious things like the balance of introverts to ex on the team those were things prior research thought about even intelligence you know itself individual intelligence is something that you might think helps team performance across a variety of tasks but surprisingly none of these traits when you looked at the average level on the team or or even the maximum level on the team predicted this collective intelligence which is the team performance across a wide variety of tasks and the only thing the researchers found that predicted was the average level of social sensitivity on the team this is thought to be the case because one of the big problems and teams is staying coordinated and communicating enough about what our current state is what our current understanding is what we're excited about what we're not excited about whether things are going well and going poorly and so when we have a high level of social sensitivity on the team that means we don't have to communicate explicitly about all these things that we have a pretty high level of members able to intuit oh you know that phil un think things are going so well right now i better slow down or check him with him without us needing to explicitly tell one another that and that appears to be a really useful thing when a team has a high level of social sensitivity william and her offers measured every trait they could find to predict team success and every way to combine them they looked to averages minimums maximum variation and of all these traits only one emerged as a predictor of group effectiveness and that was social sensitivity social sensitivity is our ability to detect others emotions through nonverbal cues in other words if you were good at reading other's emotions intuitively and quickly you're probably very socially sensitive that's what the reading the mind in the eyes tests looks to measure colin writes that as far as we can tell social sensitivity doesn't have much to do with individual intelligence but it is the key to collective intelligence a group's ability to perform effectively across a variety of tasks in the book he makes the point that a group with many members of high social sensitivity will probably outperform a group with individuals that have higher intelligence now that said i don't wanna this to start a trend of organizations all measuring social sensitivity and trying to assign teams based on it because you know as with a lot of these statistically significant effects in studies it's still more important that you get people with the right knowledge and skills to do the task and if you don't get the right knowledge and skills to do the task know the social sensitivity isn't gonna matter that much so you you really need to focus on that first and that you need to focus on kind of other structural elements of the team like not making it too big like making sure you have this kind of diverse set of perspectives there that creates a potential force so social sensitivity won't guarantee success a group full of people who have never played basketball but scored well for social sensitivity will not win the nba but a high quality basketball team with good social sensitivity will probably outperform a similarly matched team but that assuming we've got that right social sensitivity then makes a difference above and beyond those things but it's also if you feel like you're not a socially sensitive person all hope is not lost you're not doomed to be a bad team member or or poor collaborator that if you don't know how other people are are feeling you don't know what they're thinking there's an easy solution which is ask questions are kind of the superpower substitute for social sensitivity and that a team that ask a lot of questions listens to the answers that other members give can do just as well as one that people can read each other and more easily without telling one another so don't redesign your whole organization and around this finding just yet but do you know give some thought to the importance of paying attention to what other people are thinking and feeling and adjusting your behavior in response and if you don't know there's an easy way to find out colin writes how socially sensitive people can adjust their own behavior to accommodate their fellow group members feelings if someone is they've overwhelmed they can see that they need help if someone is really enthusiastic they can follow their lead although there are other ways to be a ast stellar teammate social sensitivity is the trade scientists have found that seems to predict the best group effectiveness across a wide variety of tasks and and gaining social sensitivity can be easy maybe you can just intuitively tell how an nav feeling but if you can't or even if you think you can you should probably just ask cal others as a feeling however social sensitivity isn't the only thing that boosts performance to end our discussion i ask colin about his old mental mentor richard hack and hack work on studying how the type of task or job we are given can dramatically alter our performance so task characteristics this is actually where richard hack research went and came up with what what's become known as the job characteristics theory or task characteristics theory and it's exactly the same things that make work inherently motivating so it's not just about whether the person's motivated it's not about whether there's a leader shouting at you it's not just about rewards and punishments that we find some kinds of work more motivating than than other kinds of work and that there's predictable characteristics for what we would call well designed work and that one is it's not simple in the sense it's not routine doing the same thing over and over so it has what we call task variety it's the difference between you back when we had to stuff letters into envelopes or we're just y out out shoveling the snow in the driveway these are things that there's not a lot of variety to the task there's also task identity which is we need to be given a whole piece of work so when you give groups you know an assignment like is common organizations like hey write a report and you're going to you know submit this report by this date but then you know what happens to it you don't know what its impact on the world is you know i've certainly been a part of these kind of committees of the university you you really you never find out right like you're asked to do something and you don't don't know what happens to it this is inherently less motivating work then work where you can see the contingency between your labor and some end user of that research or some impact on the world so we wanna have task identity in in our task we also need to have perceived importance or meaningful that if we think our our work is not meaningful we're of course gonna work less hard than if we think it it's important and often at work that importance you know is something we need to talk about make sure everybody understands similarly and then we also need to give people autonomy especially we need to give groups autonomy on how they do the work and that's because when teams are given a process for exactly how they need to do something and they become focused on that process they're no longer accountable for the results of it so if something goes wrong and you we're a team that's been really micro managed and told we need to do you know steps one through twenty three in order to get to the end and we're you know judged on whether we complete those steps if the product's is not good we can blame whoever may gave us that process we don't experience our own accountability for the outcome and therefore we work less hard on it to recap a task that motivate us in a task that is so effective that it will increase our performance needs to have four components to begin with it cannot be simple it has to be challenging shoveling snow isn't enough there needs to be some complexity there second we need task identity in other words we need to see the results of our labor for a cook that's probably watching someone enjoy the meal that they have cooked or for a podcast to like me that's reading review of this show thirdly we need the task to have perceived importance or meaningful and finally we need autonomy we need to fill ownership over both the task and the results when we have these elements of tasks it makes work more motivating for teams and that when we give teams you know simple tasks or things where it's not a whole piece of work or things where we're telling them exactly how they have to do their work they're going to be less motivated than if they're given better design tasks colin in his book provides research that backs this up piece sites a meta analysis by hack and old covering two hundred and fifty nine different studies including studies on two hundred thousand actual human beings it found that these task characteristics are extremely powerful they explain thirty four percent of the variance in job performance and fifty five percent of the variance in job satisfaction in other words you are gonna be far more happy if you're in a job or doing tasks that have those four components colin writes that these are ginormous effect sizes he says that many well known scientific articles feature effect sizes of one or two percent task characteristics have a stronger effect on the collective effectiveness than smoking has on cancer risk for example to make someone better at their job it's best to change the task characteristic to make a team perform better it's best to develop social sensitivity and when you form your next group do not assume that you need trust exercises and storming workshops just spend more time setting norms that encourage social sensitivity asking how your other group members are feeling will be far more effective than a trust that's all for today folks i really hope you enjoyed today's episode of notch if you did you will love collins fantastic book the collective edge here he is sharing a bit more about the book the book is about all the way the groups and teams our influencing our lives and that they're influencing our lives in both really obvious ways like we're part of groups like our families our friend groups and our work teams but group dynamics are also influencing us in much more hidden in invisible ways and so i wanted to write a book that really tells the story of group dynamics because i think right now so much attention is given to how we think as individuals how we can improve ourselves as as individuals or occasionally we get these really high level books about you know whole organizations or society as a whole but these this kind of small group level really gets skipped over and there's been so much great science about this i feel like people just don't know the the whole story about we've shared a lot of that great science in the past two episodes but there is much much more in his book i've left a link to the book in the show notes before we wrap up a quick recommendation if you want something to queue up after this check out the podcast the audience connection it is a brilliant new show i recently was a guest on the show and i really enjoyed the conversation oli the host is outstanding our conversation was one of the best i've had on a podcast i've guessed it on in a long time so after this if you've got now more updated of nudge to listen to you pop open your podcast app and search for the audience connection you can find my episode on there which i really enjoyed but you can also find other episodes that i think are fantastic give it a spin i think you'll find it more than worth your time today alright that is all thanks thank you for listening to today's episode of nudge i've been a little slow getting back to emails and working on the podcast several the past few weeks i got married last saturday which takes up a surprising amount of time but has obviously been a a wonderful and incredible and really enjoyable experience that said because that is done i can put a lot more time back into the show now so expect some really exciting episodes coming up researcher adam gil i've got richard shot talking about his new book sun anita sa coming on talking about her her best bestselling book and i've got michael h from the payroll insights team on as well lots of really good guests coming up and lots to enjoy over the next few months so so i really hope you enjoy nudge if you are please please do leave me a review and let me know what you think as i mentioned earlier that really does help me enjoy my job more and give me more task characteristics to help me perform better but even if you don't leave review thank you for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode cheers

the story of the discovery of the double helix structure of dna is a pretty famous science story it's a story you may know quite well and if you do you probably think the answer is watson and quick james watson and francis cri who were kind of a dynamic duo it became a really popular story because watson wrote a book about you know this discovery and it it was an excellent really entertaining book it got turned into a movie starred jeff gold bloom playing watson and it it was quite popular for for a long time any other dimensions not that i remember didn't you take notes no but that's a problem because this well known story might not be completely true and in watson account he tells the story of really getting the idea for the double helix structure because he was able to sneak a peek at what was called photograph fifty one we're just sitting there yelling out information like a speaker weight machine alright jim just just be very calm tell me only what you're sure you saw double diamond pattern empty in the middle helix no doubt about that there was a big reflection just here ten flare definitely the tenth will give us a pitch of about thirty four an drums in photograph fifty one was developed by a different duo including rosalind and franklin who was kind of the lead researcher on on this yeah in his telling he sort of tricked franklin supervisor into showing him photograph fifty one and then he saw it and realized what he said this is the secret to life just tell me one more time you're sure about this i'm sure the double helix structure of our dna which kind of unlocked everything it's a dramatic story you can see how it became a movie but it's false and the real story actually teaches us much more about how small groups really function it explains why sometimes we perform better in small groups and why occasionally we're far better off performing alone all of that coming up in today's episode of notch cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow today on that i'm joined by one of the world's leading experts on group i'm colin fisher i'm an associate professor of organizations and innovation at university college london school of management and i'm the author of the new book the collective edge unlocking the secret power of groups colin looked into the double helix origin story for his book and he found that the popular tale isn't completely accurate thing about that story is historians have found that it's really not true and a couple of important points the first important point is that watson didn't really trick anyone into showing him this photograph that it was showed willingly and that documents that have been uncovered since then show that there was a collaboration between you know four scientists who was working on this discovery of dna and they were all presenting it together and all their names were on it as authors and it was really only in the in retrospect where watson was kind of re retailing a more drama eyes version of this story that he was able to you know come up with this where he's the kind of clever hero of the story the real story reveals some very good insight into how humans actually behave in groups now what this tells us about groups is a a couple of really interesting things the first is our tendency to want to as prescribe authors and credit to individuals our brains love narratives and stories in those narratives and stories the protagonist is almost always an individual but not only is that not true in terms of establishing causality especially for things like scientific discoveries where when you dig underneath the surface it's not just this loan genius who's you know toil alone in the basement it's almost always a team of people who need diverse expertise information and perspectives to come together to solve really tricky problems this was the case with the discovery of dna wasn't just watson and quick it was a team of four experts working together to solve the problem but it's also true broadly of science there is evidence that teams have a huge advantage over individuals in almost all stem subjects and colin shared studies to prove it so this article in science is one of my favorites because what they did is they grabbed almost every patent every scientific paper and so they've got millions of in of data points where they could trace how many individual authored patents inventions scientific papers there were and kind of create a ratio of team products to individual products and they could also kind of look across different disciplines in total they analyzed nineteen point eight million research articles and two point one million patent and found that those created by groups were more impactful than those created by individuals there was such a clear trend that you yeah the you almost don't need to to do much of the data analysis to see this where team products were becoming more and more common over time the size of those teams was growing this trend held for basically every subject except for the arts and the humanities so you see this trend in all scientific domains you see it among inventors by the end of their their sample teams were about six times more likely to come up with a break through scientific discovery than were individuals working alone specifically they found that a team offered paper was six point three times more likely than a solo authored paper to receive at least one thousand citations and yet this goes against the commonly held view that scientists perform better alone it goes at against the idea of these individual geniuses the einstein's newton da vinci making breakthroughs by intellectual rigor and and their individual genius colin says this false world view comes from a bias known as the fundamental attribution error the fundamental attribution error you it's called fundamental because it it really is at the base of how we make sense of the social world and what the fundamental attribution error is our incorrect explanations of our own and others behaviors in terms of traits so when somebody's late for a meeting we assume it's because they're not very conscientious they're flaky they don't care we don't think about the situational influences that might have caused out we underestimate the situational factors behind all of our behavior one nineteen seventy three study titled from jerusalem to jericho proves this very nicely in the study forty trainee catholic priests were asked to complete questionnaires explaining their reasons for becoming a priest after they are so same priests to record a five minute lecture for students about the virtue of helping others the priests had to walk across the campus from the building they completed their questionnaire to the building they would give the talk that walk would take them about a minute just before they left each priest was told how much time they had before the presentation one third were told that they had plenty of time and there was no need to rush another third we're told to please head over now as as you're due to give your a talk and a final third we're told you're actually quite late you better hurry as the priests headed over they each passed a s pretending to be an injured man in distress he lay in a doorway he coughed very loudly he groan all of the priests would notice him but which would stop you know remember these are priests about to give a lecture on the virtue of helping others and each said they had the same reasons for signing up to be a priest they wanted to make the world a better place but the number who stopped was heavily dependent on the situational factor see only ten percent of those who were told they were in a rush stopped while sixty three percent of those who were told they weren't in a hurry stops themselves so our behavior it isn't totally dependent on our personality on our traits on our values more often than not it is based on the situational factors we face it turns out that this underweight of context and situations includes groups we don't do a good job of sort of registering groups as collections of individuals and then especially when those groups are more distant from ourselves we kind of view them as this under differentiated mass of situation and that leads us again to struggle to see them as causal agents we don't see them as determining their fate as much as we see these kind of individual traits you know mo and hard work and talent of of people and that again leads us to kind of misunderstand how good stuff is coming into the world good stuff like scientific discoveries and inventions and new businesses and so we end up with these you know biographies of of you know great founders of businesses that really drill into the traits of the individual and it's not that that's completely wrong that there's some there's some truth there of course but that we really underweight the influence that groups have on almost everything that that's happening in the world our brains dismiss the effects of groups and exaggerate the impact of individuals but that is not reality and this obsession with individual is increasing individual and collect activism are these kind of like fundamental ways of talking about how much we value individual autonomy and sort of think of the self as being separate from other kinds of of proxima identities the self is separate from the family from a community from the nation from the culture and collect activism is a belief that those things are more intertwined and cultures are becoming more individualistic now when you measure indications of individuals and collect activism i i was actually really surprised by this research it wasn't stuff i was aware of before i started researching the book we usually think you countries like the us like the uk are quite individualistic countries and that you know some some things about individual are unique in these more individualistic countries as opposed to more collect countries like you know china is usually the the kind of core example a lot of east asian cultures are more collect but it turns out when you look at indications of individual and collect activism that individual is rising all over the whole world there's a lot of indications of this things that are like the percentage of people who live alone things like marriage and and divorce rates the uniqueness of baby names the language that we use in our cultural products and how much we use kind of individual sick language like i and me versus we and us and so they looked at you know just a a really comprehensive array of indicators and that they really saw this very clear trend of there's more and more individuals now the reason for that you know rising kind of standards of living and soc economic stand standards over the last century really frees us up from depending on first our immediate family in our immediate community because of course used to be that you know when when we were more agricultural societies you know you grew up and you worked the farm and food production or and you know even further back in hundred hunting and gathering and that the family depended on you and you depended on the family but that in our modern world that's just less true and that as we see this kind of rise in soc economic development we see a rise individual so that's recap colin started by telling us the real story behind the double helix it wasn't an individual's discovery it was a group discovery he cited a study which looked at nineteen million research papers and found that the best are almost always written by groups and yet due to the fundamental attribution era we undervalued groups and society as a whole is becoming more individualistic there is a common view that working in a group just isn't that effective but here's the strange thing in some scenarios that is true in some scenarios individuals in a group are less effective you have probably experienced this yourself whether it's sitting in a big bloated meeting where far less gets done or working in a committee where you can never agree on anything this feeling that being in a group will make you less effective it has a name it is called the ring effect the wrinkle effect the the basic idea is the more people you add to a group the less hard any one individual will work within that group maxim ring was a french agricultural engineer essentially you in the kind of late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds and he was trying to study you know how many ox should pull different numbers of carts on a farm and saying you it's like should we have you if we have six auction should we split them up you know two two oxen in to three carts or should we split them up three to two or six to one or how should we do this and so as he was doing these kind of exercises with rope pulling it was hard to do these studies on oxen so he did them on humans to kind of see when coordination costs seem to overweight the benefit of of additional people coordination costs are typical within a group with manual labor for example people walk at different paces they have different grip they might not all pull at the same time and these tiny costs come through mis coordination they add up to create this coordination cost but before wrinkle there was this general belief that even in a group despite the coordination costs people would still try their best yet this belief wasn't accurate people didn't try their best he found something that was pretty surprising which is there didn't seem to be this tipping point of coordination costs it was just kind of this linear effect that the more people you add if you had measured how capable each individual was ahead of time they tried progressively less hard with each additional person on average each man in this study could pull when they were measured alone about eighty five kilograms but when they worked in groups of seven the men pulled a mere sixty five kilograms each that is only seventy six percent of their potential and a decline in performance of twenty four percent this is what we know is the wrinkle effect today every individual you add to a group as group size gets larger the effort of each individual gets smaller ring ran these studies over one hundred years ago but social scientists have proven their validity in more recent follow up experiments the kind of open question from this research was how much of this is actual coordination costs and how much of it is kind of a psychological decrease in felt accountability and effort and so in the nineteen seventies psychologist led by bi pla we're trying to kind of tease these two two kind of great parts of group process apart there's coordination and there's collective effort they did these really clever studies where again you have to be able to kinda measure each individual's capability ahead of time and so what they did is they they put people into recording booths and they put really noise proof headphones on them and they would first have people clap and cheer as loudly as they can and measure you know how many decibels of noise they were generating and then after they have this kind of like individual max measure they would tell the same people that they were in groups of two or groups of six now in some conditions in these experiments and there were a lot of these but in some of them these groups weren't real that you were just imagining you were in a group or a group of two or a group of six and here there's no coordination anymore right that we're we're doing a task where there can't be any coordination costs so this is pure effort and what he found was again this same decline from depending on the number of people you thought you were clapping along with you'd try progressively less hard in the study groups of just two performed at seventy one percent of their individual capabilities and groups of six performed at just forty percent and so this is what became you know known as as social low was this psychological d in effort that didn't have anything to do with the coordination cost of the group it's just purely due to our belief that when more other people are accountable for doing some task we don't have to try as hard and that we know our brains are always looking for excuses to conserve energy and the presence of more other group members working on the same task is one of those excuses to conserve energy social low thing is widespread a meta analysis of seventy eight different studies have confirmed that people try less hard in groups the bigger group the less hard they try colin writes that social loaf occurs in physical tasks like rope pulling shouting and rowing it also occurs in mental tasks like brainstorming new ideas and rating job candidates resumes it happens in all kinds of groups regardless of culture and demographics and this it begs a question should we even bother working in groups shouldn't we just work alone well not always there are times when groups are needed find out exactly when after this quick break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is the d pod brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the d pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products if you're an e commerce if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to if you're interested in learning the stories behind your favorite d to see brands then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories so go and listen to the d podcast wherever you get your podcasts if your job is measured by the effectiveness of the content you create then you have to check out the audience connection podcast hosted by oli atkinson and lydia chan they've got over thirty years of real world experience between them helping brands connect better with the people that matter each week they are joined by marketing and communication leaders from the world's largest brands as well as behavioral scientists to reveal how great content box action and build lasting connections and i was one of their guests on one of their most recent episodes so if you need your content to stick go and subscribe to the audience connection wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me phil acne so far colin has shared how groups can cause social loading how being in a group can make us try this hard than we would if we were on our own and colin says that back in the seventies this finding this idea about social living led most researchers to believe that group synergies simply didn't exist there was so much attention kind of in the nineteen seventies to what they call process losses the loss in both coordination and effort that came from working in the group and it got to the point that ivan steiner who's kind of a a theorist of groups at the time had an equation it's ap equals p minus p which is the actual productivity of a group is equal to its potential productivity as measured by adding up all the individual capabilities minus these process losses of coordination and and effort and steiner was going around teaching this for quite a while and that one of the students in the room was my mentor richard ta and and richard asked steiner well what about process gains what about actual increases in motivation or kind of benefits that aren't simply just adding up individual contributions that come from working in the group whether these process gains and steiner looked at him and said well i'll add them to the equation when someone proves they exist and this really triggered decades of work from hack and others to try and find if synergies actually did exist in groups if there were times when the sum of a group was actually more than its individual parts if a group could achieve more than each of the individuals alone and eventually they did find evidence times when the groups outperformed the individuals but it only happened for certain types of tasks here's colin sharing those findings which were collected by four mit professors what they did is a created task where you could one individuals could do it so you could measure individual capabilities and that's not true for everything like yeah i i used to be a professional jazz musician and like there's no way sometimes to compare what a group can do to what an individual can do it you literally can't have an individual do the task so you have to come up with a task where it's hard enough that the group could have a benefit but it's not so hard that than the individual couldn't do it and so they have these kind of room assignment puzzles where you know you have a certain number of students in the dorm that you're going to assign to a certain number of rooms and you have a certain number of constraints and there were relatively simple puzzles and really complicated ones and what they would do is a measure again the individual's capability how fast could people do these problems and there was a scoring system so if you made mistakes you have points deducted and so forth how well did you do how good was your solution and how efficient were you you know what was the kind of like points per minute that you were coming up with and then they had people do different puzzles in groups and what they found was that on these simple puzzles groups slowed people down and that they were quite a bit worse than the best individuals on average they were just kind of inefficient on on really simple puzzles but on the most complex puzzles the groups were just as fast as as the best individual and they were quite a bit more efficient that they they were able to get more points kind of per minute invested than individuals were this breakthrough research finally proved that working in groups can have benefits in complex tasks groups were more efficient than the average or even best individual but the reverse was true in simple tasks where groups are less efficient than individuals working alone so complex tasks groups can be better but simple tasks it's best to work alone this study did find that the best individual the smartest individual still did get slightly better answers than the group in the complex tasks but even so it took them almost fifty percent longer so groups really did win across the board when it came to complex tasks and this really was consistent with you know when you when you took this finding and then you looked back at which studies had been finding that an advantage for groups and which studies had been finding an advantage for individuals in the in prior research that it really was when we were studying really complicated especially knowledge creativity learning kinda of work that group had an advantage but when we're were studying you know simple stuff like shouting in a room like pulling on a rope that we're were finding a disadvantage of being in groups so this really helped us get a handle on what you know before i think was kind of a debate among scholars from different traditions groups are incredibly important when tackling complex tasks they're typically more efficient faster and more effective than any individual working alone that is why group led research papers are six point three times more likely to be cited one thousand times and yet if your task is simple if your meeting is about a straightforward topic tackling it as a group as a committee just isn't necessary when groups tackle simple tasks stay full foul of social loaf of that wrinkle effect setting up committees or creating these bloated meetings full of people to address simple tasks only lessen the output of all of the individuals instead group should be used for just complex challenges the takeaway is rather simple if a challenge is complex reach out for help but if it is simple go ahead and work on it alone that is all for today folks i really hope you've enjoyed today's episode of much if you did you will absolutely love collins latest book is wonderful book the collective edge it goes into much much more detail about the power of groups you'll also hear about the behavioral science behind why groups work and you'll learn more information about exactly when groups don't function well i think it's a must read for really anyone who works in a business but if you are a manager i think it's vital to read because it will help explain how your group of employees function best colin will actually be back on nudge next week next monday and on that show we will debunk one of the most popular team forming models in the world it's a model that you've almost certainly heard of it's a model you've almost certainly followed and you'll definitely have to hear it because colin says this model is totally pointless so make sure you do not miss that episode to make sure you don't miss it just subscribe to much wherever you get your podcasts on apple and spotify or subscribe to a nudge newsletter go to nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter in the menu and i'll send you an email next monday as soon as that new podcast comes out but if you're looking for something to listen to after this yeah haven't got another episode of nudge lined up then i would strongly recommend you go and tune into the audience connection it is a wonderful news show that i had the pleasure of appearing on who recently ollie atkinson the host is really one of the best and here and i had a really fascinating discussion covering creativity and behavioral science one of the most enjoyable times i've had as a guest on a podcast in a long time so if you want something to listen to after this go and search for the audience connection and look for the episode i was on or just any of those episodes i think all of them are well worth a listen alright that is all folks thank you for listening to colin and i will be back next monday for another episode of nacho cheers

the song you can hear is called lost in the clouds by oasis it's classic oasis with layered electric guitars jan called simple drum beats and that distinctive nasal gallagher delivery take your time and take a step back it sounds fairly similar to this song this is called the hindu times it's also by oasis it's got the same steady drum similar chords and the man gallagher delivery most listeners other than perhaps the most die hard oasis fans will think lost in the clouds in the clouds is just as good as hindu times but that's until the secret is revealed see lost in the clouds is actually an ai generated song it was created by asus t and sounds ee similar to a real oasis song most listeners won't be able to tell the difference they would rank both the real and fake oasis song as similar for style quality and enjoyment but that is until that he learn that lost in the cloud is ai generated once listeners know a song is ai generated their opinion of that song changes dramatically a stand back and today or nudge we'll explore why cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hub hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow to learn why ai generated music generally falls flat i've invited matt johnson back on the show my name is doctor matt johnson i'm a professor at halt international business school in harvard university and i studied the influence of neuroscience on marketing and behavioral science matt has studied what happens when people see ai generated content so when people see ai generated content it kinda hits this lim space between wanting to to gravitate towards it on a a human level and to to categorize it as as human output whether it's ai generated text or ai generated art or ai generated music these are things that we've previously up until about two years ago of have categorized as human output and there's a a general psychological sc that kind of attracts us and and towards it on the other hand we simultaneously if we do recognize it as ai generated have this kind of alternative reaction to it where we we also see it as not human as as kind of fe human qualities we hear lost in the clouds the ai generated song and we naturally assume it's created by a human it sounds too good to be made by a machine and this means it can have a deep and profound effect on us because all types of art has always deeply moved humans one story that really stuck out to me was this fantastic antidote that bill murray shared so when he was doing the media rounds for a movie called monuments men he shared that very early on in his career when he was a a struggling actor at one audition he had done just so poorly that he had just walked off the stage he was like in his early twenties at that time and he's and he just walked off the stage i'm not gonna be an actor i'm not gonna be anything and he just kept walking and walking walking this is in chicago this is in the winter it's cold it's dreary and he just kept walking down this dreary chicago streets and and it got very dark it got to the point where he was kind of thinking if you should jump into lake michigan but he kept walking and he actually came to the chicago institute of the arts he's just in this kind of mindless numb state just kind of walking aim and he ends up walking into this museum and he's sees this painting and it's this very famous painting called the song of the la this image of a a woman and she's on a farm and the sun is coming up in the morning it's kind of this this beautiful morning scene and bill murray remarks that it was this painting that he feels really saved his life that he felt in that moment that the sun can come up again it came up for for this young woman in this painting and it can come up again for me and so i should you know put these dreary thoughts behind me i should wake up again with this kind of renewed sense of vi and he actually credits the painting with with effectively saving his life and so that anecdote for me really kind of epi the impact that that art can have on us psychologists have a name for this impact it is called essential so essential is this psychological phenomena the observation is that we as human beings were not purely sensory creatures we don't merely kinda take things in through our sights and sounds and hap sensations and kind of build an image of what that is instead when we view an object we naturally unconsciously perceive the soul of that object right the object is perceived to have a a hidden essence which really transcend sends the the physical constituents of that object i've got a rock sitting front of me in my office it looks like any other rock but it means much more to me it means more because i picked up this rock from everest base camp in the pool it reminds me of the two week he did in the pool and that you know a feeling of ore i experienced when i was there to anyone else it just looks like a random rock but to me the essence of this rock augment its value studies have found that this essence really does augment our value of that object it was a fantastic experiment which is done in the early two thousands called the storytelling project and what they did is they bought all of these effectively cheap little generic objects off of ebay so they was like little rubber du and and pe dispensers and they bought them all off of ebay just as generic objects and they did they hired a team of writers and these writers their task was very simple just to come up with a a story of an origin story for each of these little objects i maybe the rubber duck was you know a prized possession of of somebody's youth and they babe with it and they loved it and it taught them the value of compassion etcetera and then what they did is they put them back on ebay now with the story you as the caption for the item so same exact object but now it comes with the story and what they found is that the price that they were able to get to them post story was about five hundred times higher than they had bought it when they were just generic so same exact object but now with the story the value is augmented significantly and essential is one of the reasons why we value art so much you know what detailed pixel by pixel forge of the mona lisa if you'd know it's a forge jury even though visually aesthetically it's absolutely identical you could not tell it apart but it'd be worth you know twenty five bucks you could frame it you could put it on your wall but the real mona lisa is priceless right so it's really about that the story about the essence that the the actual painting holds so it was a great example of this most listeners were remember the the banks see stunt which was pulled at so bees i'm three and sixty now and with commission that's more than a million pounds this is one of banks most iconic pieces but just moments later it seemed to drop through the frame and appear shredded into pieces a stunt that sent gaps through the crowd and what was fascinating about that is that the shredded items ended up actually being worth much more a few months later than the original banks the item even though the art was destroyed the essence was enhanced that banks which originally sold for one million pounds was sold for twenty five million dollars just three years later and it's not just art any object can have its value augmented by essential britney spears is gum right it it's spit out at a con at a concert somebody picks it up they auction it off on ebay fetch fifteen thousand dollars a rocking chair was what sat on by jfk went for something like seventy five thousand dollars there is no utilitarian and value behind a chewed piece of gum or a mid century rocking chair and what there is a bit of value behind a mid century rocking chair but not as much as what was paid it is the connection with the person that increases its a value and this is something that ai content completely lacks there is no connection with a human creator and that may be harming its perceived value and that has a study which investigates and showcases just this yeah it's a fantastic study which is done a few years ago duke university where they really trying to investigate the perception of ai generated arts relative to human art so there's a two different studies here within this published paper so the first is that they just had human participants evaluates pieces of art they didn't tell them where these pieces of art came from or how they're created whether it was human or ai just do you like the piece of art do you think it's beautiful do you think it's valuable and what they found there in this this kind of simple study was that people actually preferred ai art to human generated art without knowing anything about it just on the painting alone people actually preferred a generated art a separate twenty twenty five study found the exact same result but with music participants were played two pieces of calm music one sounded like this the other sounded a bit like this overall most participants picked that first piece of music as their favorite maybe you did as well however that first piece of music was ai generated while the other the second piece of music was created by a human this probably won't surprise you at least it shouldn't surprise you occasionally ai can create better art or music than humans that is not unexpected but what was interesting was how the reaction changes once the researchers reveal that the content is ar made but the second study i think was much more telling so what they did here this was a a between subjects study and what they did is they had qb participants look at pieces of art and in this particular array of paintings there was a a mismatch of somewhere ai created some were human created but what the researchers told the participants is that well these hap over here these are human created and these have over here these are ai created so which one do you like so for example participant john sees a painting of a bridge and it's told it is a human creation while participant jean sees the same painting of a bridge but is told it's an ai creation the interesting result here is that when you think it's created by a human you think it's gorgeous you think it's beautiful you think it's a nine out of ten or a ten of ten but if you're led to believe it's created by an ai these rankings go down in half so you think it's maybe a five out of six you think it's maybe not so beautiful you you know maybe notice flaws here and there but this is not having anything to do with the actual art itself but to do with the perception of ai so the same piece of art looks much more beautiful when we think it's created by human than we think it's created by an ai it's not just art and music matt says the same phenomenon has been proven with email content when you're just judging the email on its own you know you think it's maybe a nine ten or a ten ten and it's clear and it's engaging and it's very very well organized but the millisecond you're told that this email was created by ai then you don't like it so we would actually prefer to have less good emails we would actually prefer to have less clear less organized emails if the created by our fellow humans art perceived as emotionally rich and beautiful when we believe it's human created music is perceived as higher quality and more enjoyable when it's not generated by ai and emails even emails that are less clear and poorly formatted are preferred to grammatically perfect ai generated emails this led matt too i think a fairly interesting conclusion ai has a serious branding product and create superior products but it has a inferior brand and we'll cover all of that after this quick break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is the d pod brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the d pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products if you're an e commerce if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to if you're interested in learning the stories behind your favorite d to see brands then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories so go and listen to the d podcast wherever you get your podcasts in a world drowning in noise only a few stories break through and stay with us on the audience connection podcast hosts lydia chan and ol ad concern bring together storyteller brand leaders and behavioral scientists to reveal how great content sparks action and builds lasting connection each week guests share ideas that you can put to work immediately whether you're growing a brand leading a team or trying to truly reach your audience if you want your content to be remembered and not forgotten go and subscribe to the audience connection wherever you get your podcasts hello welcome back you are listening to nudge with me phil acne before the break you heard matt saying that ai has a serious branding problem i asked matt if he thought that would ever or could ever change could ai content become preferred to human content so there's definitely some evidence now that there there is a lot of individual difference when it comes to the perception of ai and and the perception of ai art and this kinda has to do with our perceptions of technology our perceptions of of human uniqueness so if you are a person that believes very firmly that art is a very special uniquely human enterprise then you're very unlikely to be convinced that ai can do great art and you are very likely to be dis distorted from thinking ai generated art is beautiful or worthwhile and so that the branding problem kind of applies a little bit differently to individuals and and cultures and sub cultures that that view technology and then arcs a bit differently so i do think for people that are open minded towards technology that don't have such firm beliefs about art and who can create it there is opportunity for there to be something of an ai p campaign there is something to be a bit of a an ai branding or a re rebranding there maybe talk about how you know ai itself is a massive technological achievement which is predicated on you know hundreds of thousands of years of human ingenuity and human evolution and technological achievement this is something that we should all share and so when you see something beautiful that's created with ai that itself is a testament to the human condition and a testament to human civilization so maybe there's is argument we made there maybe there's a brand to be built around that but matt went on to say that this issue might soon resolve itself because most of us right now have a very hard time even spotting what is ai generated content we may claim to to really really dislike ai generated art and music and content and there there's a lot of of evidence and we've spoke about some of it where once we've realized that it's ai generated content to music or art then we like it a lot less the issue with that though is that there's very scant evidence that we can reliably tell if an ai generated piece of art or music or content is ai generated and in fact some of the things that we look for heuristic to be able to dis way between is that ar generated is that human generated we can be very very easily led astra and so this one fantastic piece of research out of stanford which did a study with airbnb listings and so very simple initial study some of the they the airbnb listings were created with ai which is something ai can do very very easily artificial images artificial reviews artificial descriptions of an airbnb location and when you're just trying to judge between is this human generated versus ai generated nobody could tell people are basically at chance visual what was really interesting though the wrinkle here is they asked people to identify okay but why did you think this one was human and why did you think this one was ai and so what they found is that people use heuristic when they're trying to decide if something was generated something was human jitter one of the biggest heuristic people use is the kind of emotional tenor of a description so if a description of an airbnb listing is like oh this is our our family home and we grew up here for twenty years and we love this neighborhood we have some many fantastic memories this touches on these very kind of emotional human themes but what people don't realize at least not yet is that of course ai can create human emotional narratives just as easily and some sometimes much more compelling but a human being can and so we think okay yes i love you know human created content because we are the only entity which is capable of creating these these human emotional stories and that's what i look for when i am trying to dis between ai and human content but in fact it's that very element which actually leads us towards more and more ai generated content because that's something that an ai can create just as easily sometimes in a much more compelling way than a human being readily can we have this preference for human generated content but in general we can't tell what's human generated and what's ai generated what's worse the things we look for to determine if something is human created a very easy for ai to fake it is easy for an ai to say that an airbnb listing is family owned or a cake is a a recipe handed down from someone's grandma it's very easy to copy the nasal vocals of liam gallagher and even if we get better at spotting ai generated content matt reckon that our aversion to this ai generated content might weaken as time goes on i also think that this is gonna break down temporarily that we're in this kind of transitional phase right now with the proliferation of ai art and some ai you can just see as as so clearly ai ar has the aesthetic we spoke about whereas others are little bits you know more mixed and we're not really sure and we're in this more lim space but i think in a couple years really that the utilization of ai and create a field is gonna be so ubiquitous that it's really not gonna be something that we are are so quick to identify as ai created or not ai created we're just gonna assume that everything has a bit of ai in it and maybe that moves us towards merely appreciating the the product not so much the concerns about the the brand and where it comes from it's an interesting take perhaps over time our aversion to ai will wan perhaps we'll get used to it and perhaps we'll prefer it which led me to ask one final question here's what i asked matt i'm gonna put you on the spot here matt and ask you've said maybe the subversion to ai generated content is a temporal that maybe give it a few years and just like we will buy coca coco cola today rather than the soda shop man soda maybe people's perception will change but what do you think will happen if you fast forward ten fifteen years do you see us going around our galleries filled with ai art and essentially listening to new oasis albums that are entirely written by computers or do you see actually none of that taking on because they'll always be biased against that or maybe you you sit in the middle what what's your take on that now to hear the answer to that question you'll have to listen to the bonus episode matt and i put together on the bonus episode matt talks about how he expects society to change its perception towards ai he talks about how his job as an author and a writer might change and i reflect on how this podcast might have to evolve as ai continues to develop talks to listen all you need to do is click the link in the show notes enter your email and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode so head to the show notes find the link to the bonus episode type in your email and you'll be able to listen straight away that will subscribe you to the nudge newsletter if you don't wanna stay subscribed you can unsubscribe straight away it's no harm and if you are already a nudge news newsletter subscriber then you can already access the bonus episode just check the email i sent you today announcing this episode and you'll find a link at the bottom of that email to that bonus episode anyway that is all for today folks thank you so much to matt johnson for coming on both of his books blinds sight and branding that means business are fantastic blinds sight is my personal favorite was written quite a few years ago now but it's still absolutely fantastic i referenced it regularly and it's one that i would like to reread i think it's that good so if you like today's show i think you'll like both of those books i've left links to both of them in the show notes thank you for listening i do hope you're going listen to that bonus episode mainly because i go on to talk about one of the best non business books i've read this year and i think it's another book you guys should pick up so do go and listen to the bonus episode that is all from me your host phil ag and i'll be back next monday for another episode of match bye bye

i'm about to play you two recordings from a political debate i want you to decide which of the two recordings you prefer which clip would make you want to vote for the candidate here is k number one i think alan this is one of those rare issues where the the issue is so big and the costs are potentially so great and it affects every family it affects every individual i would say it's worth the politicians just setting aside their political differences for once and trying to come up with a solution that everybody can agree with and here is quote number two i think alan this is one of those rare issues where the the issue is so big and the costs are potentially so great and it affects every family it affects every individual i would say it's worth the politicians just setting aside their political differences for once and trying to come up with a solution that everybody can agree with so hopefully you have all realized that both of those clips are entirely the same the words are identical in both clips and yet psychologists to found the way to take this speech and make it dramatically more effective make people far more likely to vote for that speaker without changing any of the words he uses this principle that these psychologists used is not only used in politics but it's also used to influence the food we eat the cloves we buy the crimes criminals commit and even when you decide to have your lunch all of that coming up in today's episode of nurture cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hub hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow imagine you're sitting at your dentist waiting room you're mindless scrolling your phone while you're waiting to be cooled but then out of the corner of your eye you know to smoke at first it's just a little you think it's probably nothing but then the smoke starts streaming into the room filling the space your eyes water and you start to cough you start to worry but then you look at the people around you they're still all sat down they're acting as if this is totally normal what do you do do you run out and get help well no at least not according to lan and dal who ran this exact study back in the sixties in the experiment they had some s who were in on it who were told not to react when the smoke started to come into the room and then other people who were there who were not aware that what was going on or that there would be smoke and what they found was that ordinarily smoke comes into the room people get up and go what the heck going on but when you've got people who are sitting there and looking like this this is perfectly normal nothing's wrong other people who didn't know what was going on didn't react in the experiment only ten percent of individuals actually got up and left the room and called for help the remaining ninety percent of individuals followed the crowd if others stayed in the room they stayed seated too today my guest on na explains why this happens my name is phil graves i'm a consumer psychologist author through of the book consumer holiday and dal study found something fascinating we follow the actions of others even if that action might be detrimental to us this defer to the group can be found everywhere cha din in his nineteen ninety study found that litter changed in direct proportion to the amount of litter visible the researchers increased the number of pieces of litter on the ground from one piece to two pieces to four pieces and then eight pieces and they saw that litter from other people actually increased starting at ten percent and then to twenty percent and twenty three percent and finally when eight pieces were on the ground it increased to forty one percent with pieces of litter are already present people were far more likely to follow the social norm of just throwing their rubbish on the ground rather than in the bin it's a helpful illustration of the extent to which we are all largely unconsciously tuning in to what the people around us are doing in his book influence at work steve martin shares a study conducted by a tv crew for a show all about helping others the crew filmed footage at a busy junction where commuters hu past a street musician at a station entrance at first they found which most of us would expect that very few people actually tipped the musician very few stopped to put money in their box and then halfway through the film a s drops some money quite a lot of money into the performance hat in full view of many approaching travelers immediately the tv crew counted an eight fold increase in the number of commuters who donated amongst those who actually saw somebody else doing it the crew then interviewed those additional donors and said why did you donate but they gave entirely incorrect reasons they said oh it's because i'm a generous person or oh it's because he was playing a song i like rather than the correct answer which is i did it because i saw someone else doing it first you know i use it i use a kind of a an evolutionary psychology example of this of the berry on bush so it's like you know you're wondering what you can eat so you're wondering what you can do you see someone walk up to a bush and eat one of the barriers well now you get the sense that's probably safe because someone else has done it two you can probably feel closer to that person if you go and need to bury from that bush too and that's important because we survived better when move social creatures and any fear you've got to alleviate because you've seen someone else do it and not react badly in all the rest of it this evolutionary trait can influence us in all sorts of unconscious ways ja again in his book influence rights how a shopping mall in essex in the uk had an extremely congested food court over lunch for help the food court managers turned to a team of researchers who tested quite an interesting solution the idea itself was fairly straightforward the researchers created two posters urging the shopping center visitors to enjoy an early lunch at the food call one poster included an image of a single person doing just that enjoying that early lunch the other poster was identical with the same text except the image was of not just one person eating lunch early but several visitors eating lunch early now reminding customers about the opportunity to eat an early lunch as the first poster did well that did work it proved successfully produced a twenty five percent increase in customer activity in the food court before noon but the real success came from that second poster which lifted pre noon consumer activity not by twenty five percent but by seventy five percent if you want to get someone to eat lunch earlier just show lots of other people following that exact behavior and it's something where i had an experience of this i mean i would regard myself and i i'm sure others would agree as not desperately fashion conscious but i went into my went to my wardrobe was looking for a jumper to where saw this perfectly functional green jumper and i like green as a color and thought yeah don't feel like wearing that and i realized that it was a particular shade of green that was kinda quite fashion when i bought it but a couple years on i had an unconscious sense that i hadn't seen this kind of shade of green around very much and so my reaction to that was to feel you know it didn't feel like the thing i wanted to wear phil jumpers and eating before noon well all of that might sound a little bit inc but following the herd has far more serious implications again in the brilliant book influenced cha cites fbi forensic experts who analyzed the dramatic growth in certain crimes over very short periods so in the nineteen seventies there was a huge increase in airport hijacking in the eighties there was a dramatic increase in product tampering and these forensic experts delved into these spurt of crime and found that each time there was a spurt it linked to a nationwide news story every time a nationally publicized incident of a hijacking or product tampering hit the screen the news spawned on average according to the research thirty more incidents of that exact crime we see someone conduct crime and more criminals are more likely to conduct it but this principle which is known as heard mentality or social proof it's of course found in marketing as well if i see someone drink guinness i'm more likely to drink one too if i see someone buy an electric car i'll be likely to do the same and some smart companies try to trigger this impression of popularity not by just selling more of their products but by making their products more visible one of the brilliant things with the ipod was the white headphones at that time no one had white headphones white headphones are stupid color because you know you're gonna stick them in your ears they'll come out with a bit of brown ear wax on probably but what was the difference anyone who was walking around with white headphones you noticed it and then it's like okay so you're developing this unconscious sense that everybody is using one of the or you yeah anyone anytime anyone is using one of these apple products you're aware of it and that's massive for for marketing people because there is a a sweet spot for marketing communication which is signaling the right implicit associations capturing attention and signaling social proof and if you end up in the middle of that venn diagram you're probably in a pretty successful place yellow lives strong bands ape spritz avocado on toast all of these products gained heightened sales because like the ipod they stand out they stand out compared to other products in that category they're more visible and thus they view a greater sense of popularity because our preferences are constantly adjusting to those around us and if we see others around us consuming certain product will be more likely to do so too just listen to this cracking two thousand and eight study which aim to subliminal influence the crackers people ate the crackers experiment was was more subliminal in a way in that people were asked to watch a video about people talking about i think it was i can't might been an or something but there was a there was there was a primary reason for the watching it's yeah they were talking about steroids ads and actually the people who were being featured in the video that the participants of the study we're watching had been told to pick one type of cracker from two bowls of crackers that were on the table and the people watching also had access to the same crackers and what they found was that the people would mirror the crackers that the people who were in the video were were selecting and so in that situation you you know you could make a complicated decision and yet a simpler way of not having to use your brain and minimize the glucose wasted on this decision is kind of i'll have what she's having ali what they're eating as phil said this as he talked about this study i realized that i do this exact thing all the time i at a restaurant with my friends and i've decide in advance once i look at the menu what i want to order usually that might be a pizza for example and then one of my friends who orders ahead of me asks for a salad or taco bowl or anything else really and i'm suddenly drawn to their choice suddenly i don't want pizza i want what they're getting you know the restaurant example you're talking about you know sometimes that be driven by a fear of missing out that someone else chooses something and you thinking in our i think i'd have enjoyed that more and that loss of aversion is a really powerful drive i mean my wife is you know she always wants to know what i'm ordering and i always refused to tell her and then she kind of orders and i ordered something and she sort mentally kicks herself because she thinks all that might have been better but it's not just loss of evasion that causes us to follow the crowd we also fear being os sized for going against the grain whether that's ordering something order a restaurant or attempting to save a penalty in a game of football dave t in his fantastic book crossover creativity shares stats on nine hundred and sixty five penalties taken across the past ten premier league seasons he said that of the nine hundred and sixty five penalties only one hundred and sixty eight percent had been saved that's about seventeen point four percent by goalkeeper who either dived to the left or the right to save the penalty but the most surprising statistic showed that if they hadn't dived if they'd simply stood in the middle of the goal not try to dive to save the penalty one way or the other they would have actually saved not seventeen percent of the penalties but thirty three percent the penalties that's because thirty three percent of the penalties are hit directly down the middle but most goalkeeper die so the question is why don't goalkeeper just stand still and double the amount of saves they make while dave t concludes that it's down to social norms the goal behavior is dictated by others he says we basically perform to an expected norm and if it works we get greater appreciation if we go against that norm and it fails we get greater disappointment the crowd will be annoyed if their goal just stays down the middle for every single one of the penalties in a penalty shootout out because it looks like they're not doing anything it looks like they're doing something different from the norm if they follow the herd they'll be criticized less so the safest route is to follow the norm the norm for a goalkeeper is to make a spectacular dive and it's definitely not just to stand still we follow the herd even if it's to our own detriment take this classic example by british university attempting to reduce binge drinking the administrators of the university were rather shocked to discover that the average student drank around six pint every time they went out for a night out this was far more than the recommended amount of pint or drinks anyone should consume on a single night so the university created big banners across the the campus saying the average student drinks six pint per night this is far more than the recommended allowance stop binge drinking next time you go out this seems entirely reasonable until you realize that people follow the crowd and all this message did was made those drinking less than six pint or at least those that remembered drinking rest in six pipes well it made them drink more they felt like they were drinking enough of their peers they felt like out cars and they suddenly drank more to keep up with their friends so do not make the unwanted behavior seem commonplace make it seem abnormal ing knew this all too well when the dutch bank emailed customers telling them that they were saving less than most of their neighbors more people became interested in saving more people clicked on the email to open the saving page more often they could have said thousands of people like you aren't saving enough but that would have only backfired instead they made it clear that most people save more and i went a little bit viral on linkedin a few months ago talking about just this i found an advert for skin and me and this is a a lip balm which i believe helps reduce sunburn on your lips and they proudly declared in this advert that ninety one percent of you do not apply enough spf they didn't go on to say we've got you and then they talk about their lip balm and i said in my post this is sort of proven to backfire because all they're doing is saying that the vast majority of people don't use their product and what the science says is that will almost always make people more likely to continue not using that product social norms influence what we eat what we wear how we save a penalty and how much we drink on a night out but perhaps most surprisingly social norms can dramatically influence who we vote for in elections find out how psychologists found a way to take one politician speech and make it dramatically more effective after this quick break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is the d pod brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the d pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products if you're an e commerce if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to if you're interested in learning the stories behind your favorite d to brands then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories so go and listen to the d podcast wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you were listening to nudge with me phil acne so far we spoken about how social norms can affect commercial behavior but my guest phil graves is also conscious that these norms can affect our voting preferences when it comes to the political world and you know how people are making decisions about who they want to run their country there's an awful lot we should be concerned about so we should definitely be concerned about opinion poll results because we often believe that they're accurate because the the close opinion poll to the event is normally close and the exit polls are normally close but they are not always close and the reason they're not always close is because they're using models because you know you ask someone okay are you're gonna vote for one they lie sometimes because of the perception of how they might be perceived by who they say they're gonna vote for sometimes they say they're gonna vote for someone or they don't actually bother to get out of their chair or send their postal vote in so they are they're using models to try and kind of adjust for all of this but models change and models go wrong and and things go aw but of course in the process with those models they are signaling to the electorate oh most people or a lot of people want to vote for party x and what we've seen is that that is influencing so that's a concern phil writes his book how opinion polls like these can also generate results that have proven to be entirely wrong he's got a great example of bayley le liqueur incredibly successful british drink originally when that was released it was shown to consumers and consumers were given opinion polls to rate it and they said they hated it they said i'll never drink anything like this i don't want spirit that's creamy but the team at bailey launched it anyway because of one senior managers gut feeling and obviously it worked it's now a dramatic success but what's perhaps more surprising is it's just how easy it is to swing someone's opinion then there was a very specific study done where during an election debate and i think this just the twenty ten election and they had an election debate with david cameron gordon brown and nick k and what the broadcasters added i guess to try and make it more interesting to the viewers was what was described as a worm which was people showing their live real time reaction they had a group fairly small group of undecided voters about how they were reacting to what the politicians were saying as they were saying it so you know they were unfavorable they were unfavorable whatever and so so a team of researchers decided to experiment with what would happen if you manipulate this worm in favor of one candidate more than another important point the content of what these people are saying is exactly the same the idea would be that you or eye watching it should form marrow and view about what we think about what they're saying but their study clearly showed that wasn't what was happening because they looked at people's overall favor ability where they've manipulated it in favor of nick k seventy nine percent of people said they thought he had performed best in the debate when they manipulated it in favor of gordon brown forty seven percent he performed best in the debate which was the highest score above the other two this is a widely cited two thousand eleven study titled social influence in televised election debates it was conducted on a hundred and fifty participants and it found that the majority of viewers were unaware that the worm had been manipulated and yet their perception of who won the debate was influenced by the worm their choice of their preferred prime minister was influenced too and of course so was their voting intention so they completely swung the the sentiments that arose from watching this discussion by signaling what other people thought and of course no one knew who those other people were or why they were suddenly you know particularly important decide about what was what was what was a good political commentary and what wasn't so it's it's pretty unnerving that the extent which we will be influenced by what we perceive other people to be thinking or doing there is something slightly ominous about how the authors of this twenty eleven paper finish their abstract they write we argue that there is an urgent need to reconsider the simultaneous broadcast of average response data with televised election debates and yet just consider what has happened since twenty eleven social media has made live often quite visceral polarized opinions of politicians instant opinions of politicians well it's made that the norm broadcasters have become i believe far less balanced they're incentivized to throw their weight behind one view because i tends to get more engagement and opinion polls have propagated the latest yu of polling on a politician will often lead new stories we now expect live instant reaction to every political story and yet all the evidence shows that it is this reaction to the story not the story itself that actually fuels opinions changing an opinion really isn't as hard as many of us make out my preferences are largely dictated by those around me i like to believe that my enjoyment of a cold creamy pint of guinness due to my mature taste but in reality it's almost entirely entirely down to the popularity and visibility of that drink if drastically fewer are people drunk guinness there's no way i would and if it's that easy to change what i drink it's definitely easy to change other decisions i make in my life including what i wear what i eat and almost certainly who i vote for that's is all for today folks thank you so much for listening to this episode of nia thank you again for phil graves for joining me on the show this is his last appearance on nudge sai will give a big plug to his fantastic book consumer it's a fantastic read it's been out for over a decade but it is still just as relevant today as it was when it was released if you want to learn exactly how consumers make the decisions stay too and what market research often gets wrong you should go and read that book i've left a copy of it in the show notes go to the show notes to check that out also in today's show notes and in every show notes that i create for the show i cite all of the studies i have referenced today i i realized that you're probably listening to this podcast not looking at your phone at least i hope you're not you may be doing something else having a walk driving car walking the dog whatever it will be and you might want to come back to some of the studies i've spoken about on the show well if that is ever the case just go to the show notes and you'll find them all there you will also find them in the announcement email that i write every monday for my newsletter subscribers every monday my subscribers get an email announcing the latest episode with an image showcasing what the episodes about a bit of a description and all of the sources that i talk about plus a bit of a behind the scenes to look at how the episode was created so if you ever want to get those show notes before the episode even launches or just have a look at how the show is produced make sure you do go and sign up for the nudge news not only do you get that monday announcement email you also get my friday newsletter or i share the best behavioral of science tip i have found that week the newsletter is completely free to sign up to it's loved by many many people i should say that the vast majority of people listening to the show probably subscribe to the newsletter i should probably say that as well and it's very easy to sign up all you have to do is go to nudge podcast dot com that is nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter in the menu or just click the link in the show notes alright folks all for this week thank you so much for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode of notch cheers

in nineteen ninety nine a consignment of four hundred and forty ground squirrels left beijing in china bound for athens in greece on route their k flight stopped at skip all airport in amsterdam here the four hundred also so pet squirrels faced a problem they didn't have the right paperwork usually missing paperwork results on a slap on the wrist for the sender and the worst case scenario sending the package back but here something much worse happened it doesn't end well for the squirrels i want everyone to be prepared for that all four hundred of these ground squirrels apart from one or two who escaped got thrown into an industrial shredder the story sparked international outrage mi whole stark from the squirrel refuge was outraged saying it made him nauseous the case was even debated in dutch parliament and yet strangely no one was to blame the airline avoided any penalty the employees were suspended but almost immediately returned to work on full pay the squirrel sender was never rep and the customers were compensated today's episode of nudge covers how cases like this can happen how large organizations create una accountability machines that abs absorb them from wrongdoing and allow corporations to get away with far more than individuals ever could this is happening around the world in thousands of companies and it's happening more than there ever has done before here all of that on today's episode of match hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this help them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com today's guest wrote the una accountability machine the book was long listed for the financial times book of the year and it won the new statement book of the year as well hi and down this i am a former economist and current writer about systems that i find interesting basically in the bits of the world and the bits of the economy that conventional economics leaves out during his time at the bank of england dan noticed something odd about his fellow economists a lot of economics just work on this assumption of either perfect information or perfect rationality and the create a world in which only prices and quantities exist this isn't the real world the real world is full of our known and un outcomes and what dan calls partial information but actually a whole lot of the rest of the world just really runs on gaps in information partial information and the way that people try to deal with their partial information and simplify the world to make it and manageable for themselves and one of those things of course is you know the whole arts and science of marketing because it is and this is something that really always dissatisfied me when i was doing economics that you've got huge industries in marketing advertising and media and economics has basically nothing to say about any of them because they're all operating in that world of informing and persuading the consumer and you can't really talk about that if you're science is set off on the basic assumption that the consumer already has perfect information and only kind of needs to be given an offer of a price in a quantity take red bull if consumers were entirely rational there would be no need for red bulls tag line red bull gives you wings because of course it doesn't irrational to believe that it would red bull wouldn't need to sponsor extreme sports or football clubs neither have anything to do with what energy drink you should buy and yet everybody listening would surely agree that these sponsorships and add slogan add some maybe intangible value but genuine value to the drink red bull reveals that we will never be able to quantify everything that will always have partial information and that's a problem for businesses who try to quantify everything in a lot of my work i talk about systems which overs simplify the information around them a lot of the time when you kind of reach something that's gone very wrong or gone very badly it's because someone wasn't paying attention to a particular piece of information they were working with a model of the world but was wrong or partial or basically overs simplified and overs simplification is human nature the only people in the world who try to pay attention to every single thing that's happening around them our babies you know and you they they tend to get pretty tired and cranky pretty quickly from doing that and just being an adults and functioning in the world is always a matter of trying to simplify things trying to work on the basis of partial information and a subset of all the information that's out there so let's bring this back to the four hundred scrolls how did partial information and overs simplification lead to this tragedy these poor little squirrels it doesn't end well for the squirrels i want everyone to be prepared for that around the turn of the century there was brief craze for keeping ground squirrels as pets and so they were kind of being imported from breeder in asia and sold as pets in europe in i think around the the the late nineteen nineties a consignment of ground squirrels arrived at the cargo center in ship airports in amsterdam and they didn't have the right paperwork didn't have the kind of bios security safety and veterinary infection forms that would have enabled them to be sent on to the eu but there was also no paperwork explaining where you could send them back so you couldn't send them back to asia you couldn't send them on to the final customer you know what do you do with them you can't keep them in ship on their airports indefinitely it's a real problem it has to be said that there was probably had to be a better solution than the one that k cargo actually found which was that's all four hundred of these ground squirrels apart from one or two who escaped got thrown into an industrial shredder that they had hanging around in the cargo department for shred things this was bad the news got out that they've done this to the squirrels questions were asked in the dutch parliament the reason i found out about this is that when i was at business school the apology press release the k put out apologizing for what they had done is still studied in business schools that's a really great example of crisis p it's studied because it evolved k from any responsibility a bbc news article published back in nineteen ninety nine quotes the p response the article states how a spokesperson for the airline said though on formal grounds the action taken was correct k le admits to having made a grave mistake on ethical grounds the spokesperson goes on to say the shredder was the most humane way to destroy animals k evolved itself from responsibility are still managing to show a bit of ethical remorse they seemed sad but not responsible if you actually look into all this disaster happened no one really seems to have done anything wrong is the strange fact the european union had passed a set of sensible legislation on the importing of rodents from other parts of the world you know which is something that has to be controlled you know you really can't be importing non native animals without plenty of controls over doing that the dutch ministry of agriculture had turned those into legislation and part of that legislation said that imported animals which could not be set on would have to be destroyed or utilized at the expense of the importer k had implemented that dutch legislation into its own policy and all the way down everyone was just following rules everyone was doing what they were told to do the only protection anyone had against something like four hundred lovable c little rodents meeting a horrible death was if someone right at the bottom of the chain decided hang on this is horrible we can't be doing that and that's just it's just imp that that could happen at the end of the day if you work in a shared you are not usually allowed to question orders that come directly from the governments dan calls these systems una accountability machines you can create a system in which nobody is really making the decisions you have kind of decisions taken that don't seem to have any identifiable human being as their own these una accountability machines are far more common than you might expect in fact many of you have faced an una accountability machine probably while going on holiday this summer this was an arrangement that is designed to create a decision with no human owner and you have this weird weird kind of relationship with someone who's giving you bad news like at a train station or an airport departure because you have to talk to them like they're a human being like yourself you know you're a good person you can't kind of get angry at them you have to kind of respect them as a human being but they're talking back to you with something that is not the voice of a human being because they're not actually making the decisions about what they're going to say to you what they're telling you is coming from a script or from a set of policies and information on the screen in front of them and the decisions have been made a very long way away by people you will never miss and often those decisions are actually just coming out of an algorithm and just coming out of a computer in twenty nineteen my partner and i boarded a flight from lima to be on the northern coast of colombia our flights transit through bog now we'd paid for check luggage and we were told that the luggage would be transferred onto our second flight both flights were the same airline in the transit time was less than an hour so there's was really no way that we would even do the transfer of the luggage yourself then in bog by chance we saw our bags on the luggage carousel we frantically pick them up ran to check in to say there's been a mistake our bags are here they shouldn't be they should be at our final destination and we were told check ins closed so they can't do anything and we'll have to pay a hundred dollars to change flights even though we're already checked in and our luggage tags clearly said the items shouldn't have been here they should have been transferred on the next flight this is what dan calls an accountability sync an interaction where a customer is not negotiating with a human that has any agency but instead with a face list system when decisions are pre made you've now the accountability sync because you can't expect the person who's talking to you and telling you you've been bumped off a flight you know they can say they're sorry but they can't really feel sorry about it because it's not their decision and there's no individual human being who's done that and therefore there is no individual human being who's accountable for it and when you see that kind of social institutional arrangements in place it's often interesting that's something that you really need to analyze because when you're seeing that accountability sync you're seeing a decision that hasn't been made by a human being and that means you have to look at those things because lots of those time those institutions haven't been particularly well designed usually because the people who did them were either consciously trying to produce accountability for themselves which is usually something that people do when they're doing something they shouldn't or they just fell into it because it was an easier way to operate and they've not really necessarily paid attention to how that mechanism works and particularly how that mechanism works when it's presented with a unpredictable situation that they weren't thinking about when they set up the policy organizations that become una accountability machines or contain accountability syncs can start to damage themselves when the system makes poor decisions this doesn't just happen with airlines but with all sorts of companies like fox news in twenty twenty fox news did lose the second biggest libel lawsuit in the history of the american courts and against a manufacturer of voting machines because they have you know the the single most disruptive thing you can say about a company that makes a voting machines is that it puts some fraud into the voting machines to fiddle the elections you know that's completely survival level libel against a company and fox news said this a lot talking about the election touchscreen voting machines are common in polling places all across the country but some people complain that the devices can flip votes registering the wrong candidate when voters push the button on screen well what happens if you go vote for donald trump and hillary clinton's name is checked well voters have said in past elections their choices were when jim mona ran for illinois state representative he tried to vote for himself i went and touch the box next to my name and the check mark magically appeared at my opponent's name and and you know it was not true everyone understood that dominion voting machines did not do that and it was a crazy conspiracy theory and so the question is you know why did fox news broadcast this conspiracy theory when you have plenty of internal memos from that time showing the almost everyone there knew that it was false it was crazy and the constantly broadcasting it was stirring up rage in a whole load of people who really shouldn't be inc at that time and now the picture that comes out of those court documents is that every individual knew that they were doing something wrong nobody felt able to stop themselves because every time they started saying you know actually that twenty twenty election results were pretty legitimate and they shouldn't be questioned in this way they lost viewers and there's a great quotes in those court documents from a senior executive saying bad ratings make good journalists do bad things the really crazy thing of course is why were the viewers so fired up why were they so inclined to believe in conspiracy theories why were they kind of so outraged and disrespect anytime anyone told them something they didn't wanna hear and the answer is that fox news had spent the previous two decades making them that way you know they've created this group of at people who were angry who were used to living in a reality of their own political convenience and who were used to being told that they should react really extremely whenever anyone contradicted them and then a time came when they fox found itself having to tell them something they didn't want to and they've created this system that they couldn't control anymore dan points out that fox news libel case and k squirrels they have a lot in common they're both examples of systems breaking down after receiving an input that the system didn't expect what seems to happen or what is that you sent a system of which functions in the way that you want it to are when it gets the kind of input that you're expecting it to get you you set up a system and you kinda go i'm tired of making all these decisions one by one i'm just gonna hire an employee and give them a set of written instructions and tell them that they've got to follow the process follow the algorithm for a while that looks like it's working really well then the system gets some outputs that you weren't anticipating because you know the world is just a weird and chaotic place and it's always changing and the system gets an input that it wasn't really set up to deal with and then all that system is going to respond to that is anybody's guess dan makes the point that many of the most damaging companies today are simply old companies with systems that made perfect sense fifty twenty or a hundred years ago but now function in a very different world the obvious one you know to try and bring this back to a more concrete example because i realized that sounded a bit abstract you might set up a company to extract oil from the earth's crust and burn it for energy which will be a good thing to do and you might decide to run that process on the basis of profit maximization and that works really great for several hundred years at some point you start getting evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could have really bad consequences for all life on earth it's certainly you know as we see now it's very difficult to get that information to change the sis the huge system that you've set up to extract hydrocarbons and build them for profit this happens with all sorts of companies and that's how you get corporations doing things that are really damaging to them in the long term for the benefits of accounting profits or their estimation of shareholder value i ask stand for an example of a modern day company that is imp by simply following a system well the one that really is quite serious which i've us end up speaking to a lot of people about was boeing boeing particularly after its merger with mcdonald's douglas in which the corporate culture of mcdonald's douglas absolutely took over because boeing was an engineering driven company you know it was always a company in which the top management were aero agnostic engineers all of the values were values of aero agnostic engineering they wanted to make a profit but finance was very much a service center to the purpose of that company which was to make great airplanes it was we want to build the seven four seven finance has to think of a way in which we can do that while raising the huge amounts of capital needed to make the airline post mcdonald's douglas finance was in charge it was now think where all engineering decisions were subject to financial constraints and all the engineers had to do was justify themselves to finance all the time and they made some decisions which in retrospect were really incredibly bad they designed the seven three seven max according to non engineering constraints particularly it had to be one that existing seven three seven pilots did not have to retrain on the seven three seven max was grounded worldwide in march twenty nineteen following two crashes that killed three hundred and forty six people they outsourced some of their key production knowledge to other providers and started taking cheapest quotes we spoke to a whistleblower and he said he he often found up to two hundred defects on parts being ready for shipping to boeing and each one of those decisions might have looked great on a spreadsheet but eventually you know they resulted in boeing putting into production and aircraft with a fundamental design floor killing nearly a thousand people and down nearly destroying the company and boeing still hasn't recovered from the consequences of those decisions even in financial terms well problems continue to command for us aerospace company boeing after another string of international safety incidents what's happened there is simply that the company went if the company was a human being you'd say it went mad you know it developed an obsession with something that wasn't really relevant to its purpose and it started pursuing that obsession to the detriment of what it actually wanted to do boeing is a really horrible example in my view of the way that these things can go bad and a lot of the time when companies go bad it's because finance which ought to be a support center has become the highest level of the company boeing k and fox are examples of organizations failing due to diligently following poor systems but i wondered if dan had any examples of marketing functions marketing teams marketing departments that made this same mistake the one that comes to my mind is the great example of the burberry check the burberry check for those who don't know is that beige tart pattern with black white and red intersecting stripes it is instantly recognizable as bourbon iconic design you have this iconic brand it's an up market brand you start selling a few baseball caps you think oh actually we're making some decent money out of those baseball caps five years later you've made a ton of money out of selling all of those goods but you've done serious damage to your ability to position that as a high end luxury brand the story of burberry seems to be that they spent the next twenty years trying to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug themselves into by not realizing that if you start selling something piled high and sell cheap in mass markets fashion retailers on by mike ashley that's going to affect your ability to shift the same product out of boutiques on bond street i mentioned to dan how this reminded me of the ivy a once revered exclusive celebrity dining spot that is now a mass market chain every member's club in soho has always had that problem the issue that a club like the g show has know and the show is the only one that has managed to that managed to solve this problem for more than a short while is that in order to make the club work you need people who spend a lot of money buy memberships but are too busy to really come in there which means that your soho members club really wants to recruit a lot of investment bankers because they've got loads of money and they're always too busy to come in so they're not there much so you can sell loads of memberships which is great except if you do that too much then your club is now not a fun media haunt it's full of assholes in suits crowding up the bar and bragging about their laces porsche so it's not fun anymore and all of the fashion people and all of the media people leave and then after a while the bankers start noticing that they're in a club full of bankers which is the last thing they wanted to do they wanted to be in a club full of models and they leave to and you know that is the long circle of a member's club so that summarizes dan's point organizations run with only a financial or economic goal abound to fall into these traps of chasing profit at the cost of their core offering they're chasing a financial goal isn't the only trap because dan says football clubs often fail because they chase success and actually forget about the finances for a lot football clubs they actually end up getting it wrong the other way around the absolute story of many premier league cubs is you want for all in success so you think well the only way to get football successes to have good players and that means we need to buy good players and that means we need to take on a bunch of debt and they take on more debt and the performance on the field maybe improves a bit but it doesn't necessarily improve quite enough to generate extra revenue to service the debt so you know when they need some more players the next season they take on a bit more and then suddenly two or three seasons down the line you might have taken your club from the top of the championship to halfway up the premier league but you've now got an absolute mountain of debts and suddenly everything comes due you have to cut everything back within a couple of seasons after that you're right down in the you know in the championship or in league league two playing against city or my local club or whatever dan all of these examples burberry soho clubs football clubs coal companies fox news and k m they all for foul of the same problem it's just a matter of a management system which is meant to be an information processing system that doesn't have all of the relevant information going into it in a way that it can be converted into decisions it is not just private organizations who struggle with this after the break dan shares an example of the uk education system who did this everyone was trying to do the right thing the results were terrible hear all of that after this quick break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tomboy boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators are brands explores how storyteller are building brands online from the mindset the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work one of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of in credible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators a brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me feel ag you dan in his book talks about the british education system calling it a great example of how good people doing the right thing produce things they didn't intend i asked him to explain this point if we consider the british a level grades a level grades are at the gold standard of the british education system for those of you outside of the uk the a levels are the exams seventeen to eighteen year olds take before they go to university universities typically require quite good a level results to guarantee entry they are broadly speaking unbiased there is really no soc economic kind of skew a lot of work is spent on making sure that they're not culturally specific to kind of rich people things broadly speaking that is not a biased exam system if your grades are kind of at the borderline between like a b n and a or a c and a b then you can appeal against those grades the appeal system is also extremely fair there is no kind of bias in that it's been really designed with a lot of thought to make sure that it's not culturally specific it doesn't favor rich kids or whatever it's an unbiased system however the combination of an unbiased exam system and an unbiased appeal system creates eights an extremely biased system because the system is now biased in favor of people who are willing able to appeal what it means is that for grades which are on the borderline line for university acceptance which are the only grades that really matter in the a level system you have a system that is very biased in favor of the middle classes you a system that is very biased in favor of private schools because they know and have the how and have the incentive to the appeal system and you have a system which is ludicrous ridiculously comic biased towards the children of teachers teachers are the ones who absolutely know which grades are worth appealing and how to appeal them no one set out to create a bias system but because of insufficient resources and the nature of systems it ended up becoming extremely biased everyone does their best the results are often terrible and nobody seems to know how to do anything about that i mentioned to dan that this reminds me a bit of google reviews google reviews should have really helped create a system that diners cafe goers and whoever else wants to find a good cafe or restaurant could use these reviews to find a restaurant that they actually would like but instead what this system has done is incentivized businesses to gain the system creating offers for those who leave reviews and and leading to a system that promotes brands not purely based on their food and service but actually on how they incentivize reviews well well that's that's a great example of course of something i'm sure people will talked about on podcast before which is good hart law charlie good health another form of bank of england economist like myself considerably more successful at it when you're trying to measure something you need to understand that if you're just measuring something you can measure it if you're using that measure as part of someone else's reward system then you have to take into account the feedback from that to what you're measuring trust pilot ratings in principle a great idea companies tell their staff that they've gotta to get a trust pilot rating above so far they've gotta to get so many reviews per month you're now measuring something which is partly people's opinions and partly the effects of the incentive system that you've put in there as i near the end of my chat with dan i wondered what he thought about ai i wasn't sure if he'd think ai would exacerbate all of these problems make systems even less accountable and create a world where responsibility no longer lies with humans but with ai or i wondered if he maybe be thought that ai could be used for the complete reverse so i asked him what he thought i think it's one more technology that we've got the whole story of organizations and management has always been the world getting complicated at incredibly increasing accelerating rates and us the poor managers trying to do our best to keep up with it and every now and then someone invent a new technology that improves our ability to process information you know even the humble filing cabinet was a massive step forward in its day it really helped make the american railroads possible with ai we've got a technology that can certainly be used to help us process more information to help us take in more information and make up better decisions it's also possible for it to create chaos one of the things that kind of worries me about the effect of ai on the economy is that it improves the productivity of people who create problems as well as the productivity of people who create solutions when you're trying to design a system you have to design it consciously and think about what kind of information it's gonna cope with and what it's going to do when something unpredictable happens i kind of come back to a great quote from a guy called stafford at beer who was around in the first computer revolution when companies started installing mainframe frames and he said you know we have a technology here that really could have changed the way that we use and process information but doing that would have meant redesigning our organizations upsetting hi and it was kind of that sounded difficult and unpopular so what we did was automate all of our existing payroll and accounting processes and he said it was as if american business had got the opportunity to hire shakespeare leonardo and mo art and then put them to work memorizing the phone book so that they could look up telephone numbers a little bit more quickly that's what what is me about ai we've got this incredible flexible system for organizing knowledge and coming up with connections in ways that you know that you know just so much more efficient than any previous kind of information organization system and we're using it to send more emails stafford deer who inspired much of dan's work said companies kind of wasted computer power he said that a nineteen seventy supermarket could have used computers for things like real time sales data to instantly flag shortages reorder stock and highlight unusual demand patterns like umbrellas during reign for example and yet in reality in the eighties and seventies computers were essentially just used for payroll and accounting maybe the fear with ai isn't that it'll remove all accountability for companies but it's that we won't use it to anywhere near its potential rather than using it to cure cancer or create genuine climate solutions we'll instead use it for automating linkedin comments sending cold emails that's all we have time for today thank you so much for joining me phil ag and the brilliant dan davies dan is an incredible thinker his points are eye opening and his books are fantastic i have left a link to his latest book the una accountability machine in the show notes and i've also left a link to his fantastic nudge stock talk where he goes into much more detail about stafford beer so do check both of those out if you've enjoyed dan today you will love his book next week on dutch i'll share my final episode with phil graves we'll cover social norms and the power of the herd that's a really interesting episode and then after that i've invited the neuro economist matt johnson back on the show to talk about why people are put off by ai arts this is a really interesting chat he shows an amazing study i think it's from stanford where people have shown ai art and human art and they prefer the ai version until they find out that it's created with ai it's fascinating and a must listen for anyone who uses ai in their work make sure you don't miss those two podcasts by subscribing for the nudge newsletter if you do get an email announcement every single time in your episode goes live you get instant access to my bonus episodes and i have created a bonus episode with matt johnson as well so you'll get that straight in your inbox you'll also get my free friday weekly newsletter which shares the best behavioral science tip i've come across that week and it takes two seconds to sign up just go to nudge podcast dot com click newsletter your email address that's it and you'll be instantly unsubscribe and you can unsubscribe at any time that is all for me this week i'm actually away for this week i'm running the west highland way in scotland or at least i'll try and run it we'll see how i get on so if you do email me or contact me during that time i might be a little bit slow to respond but i will be back next monday for another episode of match thank you so much for listening cheers

hello folks you are listening to nudge with me phil ag but today's episode of nudge is a bit of a special one firstly it is the second episode of the week it's a wednesday episode rather in the monday one and for a special wednesday episode i've given you something a little bit different rather than a normal episode of nudge i'm gonna play a recording of a podcast i was on a few weeks back it's called the hustle daily show it's a fantastic show and on that show i chatted about the new york city mayor candidate z man amazing campaign i spoke about the marketing tactics that he used to essentially crack the code of modern political psychology by doing things like embracing vulnerability thinking about stuff like react masterfully triggering the psychological biases to basically get people to vote from it's a very interesting discussion a little bit different from what we usually speak about on nudge and it was lovely to be invited on the hassle daily show show i really love the host john is brilliant we talked about attention economy or authenticity and psychological factors that made this campaign win so keep listening to hear my appearance on the hustle daily show hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and unlike most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this helped them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com good morning everybody welcome to a new week it's monday july twenty first i'm john w here with phil ag from nudge podcast and this is the hustle daily show z and mom donny a thirty three year old democratic socialist stunned the new york city political establishment by defeating andrew cuomo in the democratic mayor primary through an aggressive social media campaign his six success best challenges traditional political marketing and approaches and offer some insights into modern voter psychology so in order to discuss that psychology we chatted with one of the best marketing minds i know phil ag from nudge podcast and we'll get all that in a bit but let's give the news in business and tech starting us off here ai vibe coding startup lovable raised a two hundred million dollar round at one point eight billion dollar valuation and they did it all in only eight months other than being extremely new to the scene lovable helps non devs join the fun of building websites and apps and it claims two point three million active users next another company in focal a dutch laser beam tech startup raised five point eight million dollars to expand its specialized food and beverage laser program okay so what is that in info lasers accelerate the process of putting barcodes codes qr codes and expiration dates on cans and bottles but what here could impact most of us down the road it'll also at super fast speed print directly onto avocados apples bananas and all these kinds of fruits ne the need for sticker labels in the future which is a future that i'm excited to live in over to some celebrity news snoop dogg added another business to his growing empire he's now a c owner of welsh soccer club swan city seems like a win win here the team gains further capital and eyeballs from snoop over one hundred million social media followers and snoop adds yet another piece to his one hundred and sixty million dollar net worth and finally as you can imagine from all your friends talking about at superman crushed the box office over the weekend yet again the james gun helm reboot grossed one hundred and twenty two million dollars in its opening weekend and according to com score it has now grossed two hundred and thirty five million dollars domestically and four hundred and six point eight million dollars worldwide i'm sure those numbers will fly even higher pretty soon okay and for more updates on business and tech news you can come back tomorrow we'll have more for you every day of the week monday through friday but now we're gonna have a conversation with phil ag about z mom donny the winner of the new york city mayor primary how did he do it lots of social media lot of psychology we're gonna dissect it right now hey phil great to have you on the show it's been a while since we've seen each other yeah it's nice to catch up again i felt like you'd be a really good authority on this because of your research and psychology and marketing so we of course in new york city have kind of experienced at latest new york city mayor primary and we have a winner of z mom don a relatively new face in the new york spheres beating andrew cuomo who for context has been in the political sphere here in new york for a long long time so it was a pretty surprising defeat so i i wanted to kind of analyze with you the z campaign and then i first thing i wanna ask you that what maybe he did differently that you perhaps haven't seen in a political campaign before in terms of persuasion well john answered the listener fair warning that he probably couldn't have had someone on the show who knows less about politics in general especially new york follow i mean just listen to my accent guys what am i gonna know what i do know however is the the psychology for behavioral science about persuasion about how people are able to persuade others to their point of view and john maybe for the listeners you can share a bit about it as well but like the way he conducted his campaign he used a lot of interesting social media tactics created a lot videos that people feel that they could relate to he seemed like you weren't really voting for a politician you were voting almost for a friend somebody gets to you that was sort of what how he went about it right he was doing a lot of a social media campaigns nicki he's just been very very active in the new york community in it i like something you said there that he kind of approached more as a friend than as a politician and i feel like that kind of swayed a lot of people i'd love to hear more from your perspective about kind of changing tone of voice in order to persuade and what that psychologically means well if you try and persuade someone by telling them what to do it will almost always backfire people feel their autonomy is limited but far less likely to act this is known in psychology as react and the famous famous famous study behind this was from a californian nursery this weird nursery you would call it kindergarten wouldn't it we're with kindergarten in california it's really like wealthy place and all these rich kids go there and they've let some psychologists in over the years to run these hilarious experiments you know like no kids were harmed in the making of these experiments i'll just clarify that for their listeners but they run all these experiments they've discovered all these amazing things about human psychology and one of the things that they discovered one of the experiments they ran was they i had two different classes of children one where the kids can sort of pick any toy they want to play with which toy is the most popular and they find that the certain toy is the most popular i can't remember what it was let's pretend us a little mini piano that becomes the most popular the teddy bear is basically always forgot these rich kids are got to teddy bears and i came at don't even one of them so in a study you always need a variant to compare the two in the variant the teddy bear which was sort of entirely forgotten by the kids in the first version of the scenario the variant the teddy bears put behind per glass in the middle the room they can't act us hip but i can see it and it's driving these kit just like yes i can play with every other toy but i really wanna play with that teddy because you're not letting me play out with my autonomy is limited i i really haven't an urge and so we have this as a child and and the funny basically is that in the scenario where the kids can't play with the teddy bear they always want to blow it in the scenario where they can play every toy they basically forget about the teddy bear and this is the idea of react we don't like our autonomy being limited so a politician if a teacher if a police officer is literally telling me you should do this you shouldn't do that it's gonna cause us that reacting and of the great examples of somebody who's who applied this when politicians today sort of tell you exactly what you need to do you need to eat less red meat we need to stop doing this we need to start doing more of this and actually just to be able to us and and seem like people that we understand and get and we trust they can be far persuasive it's a very interesting concept i mean it kinda har back to what i think is like reverse psychology of somebody telling you something that you can't do and you immediately wanna do the exact opposite and especially in politics where i i feel like you probably in the uk you see a lot of this like a political ads like local ones this especially always like oh vote this person vote that person very direct messaging what you're getting at with it's less react and when you're talking about that middle ground between like vote for me and a mix messaging that doesn't actually tell you to do anything or any call to action what do you think a good balance out of those things i think the balance is a question so people are firm will likely to be dis persuaded when they feel they have come to their own conclusion like what we're saying earlier and my autonomy is not being limited so another set of studies done in the eighties this is a very interesting study because they've presented arguments to students in the study that were seniors some of the arguments were just presented so for example climate change is causing devastating effects in arizona deserts his a list of facts another way they presented the argument is they started with a question they said do you agree that climate change is devastating arizona deserts yada yada what they found was when they started it with the do you agree they far more persuasive than when they simply gave the command politicians uses all the time the famous kennedy ad which some of the listeners might remember is well would you buy used car this matter i can't remember which one it was and there was a picture of nixon and this is so incredibly powerful because it doesn't tell people don't vote for nixon which we know would backfire gets people to think about the question in their own mind would i buy used to car off from this person and if you're doing that mental arithmetic in your head and you feel like you come to your own conclusion it feels like your autonomy isn't being limited you come to a conclusion and maybe you wouldn't buy the used car person or maybe you would but by coming to your own conclusion you are far more likely to be persuaded by that message then if you're are simply told don't vote for this person duvet vote for this person as i said at the i don't know much about us politics you know a lot of the anti trump rick was don't vote for this man don't do it you can't do it you shouldn't do it same was brexit was the one in the uk do not vote for brexit you know ruin an economy i in many ways it has they went wrong but the point is like we were told not to do something do not do something and for many many people i think for actually the majority of people we don't like that messaging and i think the the brexit is sort of hit on something well which was that they didn't tell people not to do something they they gave people the the hint of freedom trump probably does the same thing i think other a politicians still the same thing and yeah i think asking a question is is a very persuasive way of framing it yeah very true i really the framing of used there because especially in the american political system for like the democratic side a lot of the messaging of the past campaign was do not vote for this man do not do this and what do we see the exact opposite happen i wanna know in your perspective what role this kind of like play not only in politics but just in marketing in general for example if you're a brand and you have a spokesperson and that spokesperson as well liked what can that do for your brand that maybe other tactics cannot just that general like concept well this is like the catch twenty two for politicians right they typically are the least likable people on the planet i mean they're literally created their whole career is like i wanna be in chile just like who come on go get get a life so they very likable and yeah they have to persuade people that they're like for and this is where you see all this cringe i mean the uk we've got like politicians doing take tiktok videos who deaf shouldn't be on tiktok like oh my god this is this is melting my brain oh my own but there is a way to become more likable and it actually is it's a slightly different bias us from what we've talked about so far it's very interesting one one all of us can remember and should use in our lives it was a study done by elliot ar legendary researcher this again would have been back in the sixties a very interesting study he recorded a quiz participant answering quiz questions and this quiz participant was insanely talented they're answering all these questions correctly you know what's the capital of tu they get it anyway we they get all these questions right and then at the end for one set of participants who are watching the video of this very smart quiz the video cuts all you see is the quiz answering these questions correctly for another set of participants watching the video they keep the camera rolling and the quiz walks off stage now the quiz is actually an actor paid by eli ar but none of the participants notice quiz walks off stage is handed a coffee takes a sip of coffee or cl spills it all down himself so looks big coffee stay water d oh dear anyway fe hypo was that perhaps an intelligent person who showcases a small weakness cl us perhaps that intelligence combined with with a weakness might make that person more likable and he shows this video to two groups of people and asks him how likable is the quiz and what he finds is that the quiz who is highly intelligent but spills coffee down themselves is seen as insanely more likable that i shouldn't be attractive to somebody might it cause me a fair degree band and yet it's not the case when someone is just purely showcasing their strengths we're it's eternal it's at we actually feel like we like someone when we can see their weaknesses brand uses really well mar in the uk say you either love it or you hate it avi famous campaign we're second so we try harder a buckle cough medicine talks about how horrible they're tasted red bull doesn't hide the fact that their drink isn't particularly nice it works for all these brands because by highlighting weakness alongside the strength you become more popular and i think political campaigns now some might be more populist politicians would steer away from this but i think you could still argue that they have weaknesses in some ways and their fans still embrace those weaknesses but i think the campaign we've seen in new york is a great example if someone is not afraid to hide their weaknesses definitely an intelligent person definitely well spoken and definitely articulate definitely great in debate and yet at the same time seems a bit goofy doesn't really mind making a fool of themselves doing these silly little videos sort of seems pretty genuine down to us i think it's right combination of that strength and that weakness that actually makes someone far more likable if you just showcasing your strengths you'll you won't be seen as very like no very true i think it's a having that factor right and having people say like oh he's like me or they're like me it makes a big difference and last thing i wanted to hit on here is just general messaging because of course i'm sure you hear this all the time right there's a lot of messages out there brands are trying to get in your ear creators are trying to get in your face and everybody wants to tell you something right how would you say a message can break through the infinite scrolling death scape how we're currently in how would you say that somebody's message could actually break out of that and find an audience nowadays yeah million dollar billion dollar question in what behavioral science psychology can tell us is the laws the principles that tend to work that can give you a leg up it won't make me into a us political candidate but there tends to be an idea that distinctive is very effective at getting your message to be recalled now there'll be rolls for listeners here i think a god have heard this before yeah stand out and you'll be more likely to be remembered this isn't just you know go to a conference for real estate agents with a mohawk while everyone else is in suit and tie this is a little bit more nuanced than that which is that in order to stand out you shouldn't just think i need to be different from everyone i need to paint my brand pink or grow mohawk what it actually means is you should look at the messages of those around you and make sure you're not falling into that sea of same great example of this is a nineteen ninety study that was done with he he were looking for a new slogan that would make them more memorable this was in the us just entering the market how can we make people remember our ads and so they tested it was a great av test or abc b c test they test i think twelve different slogan and they measured the recall a month after people heard them and they saw them in the world's of great experiment and the slogan like he the great taste of beer instantly forgotten i think only eight percent of people remembered it he open your world but four percent remembered it hi nick no precious beer you've ever heard unit and the reason that doesn't work is because we've heard it all before we've heard beer brands yeah that way they came up with one slogan us beer fans will understand this it's a little more nuanced for us in the uk but i drink enough beer to even understand it myself hello and their slogan was he the beer that made milwaukee jealous genius slogan very distinct i think they brew a lot of beer in the milwaukee they do they their baseball team is called the brewers so they do be brewing out in milwaukee that is something this slogan and a they do be brewing is another slogan and they maybe should because i love that well that's coming next so was slogan the bill made mill milwaukee jealous was called eighty one percent of people a month later so incredibly high recall and that is not because they went for something totally wacky they didn't do a ridiculous slogan like beer that tastes like coco cola or a beer that tastes like a pink unicorn or something absolutely crazy they looked their competitive marketing and they thought how can we say something which is slightly different from what has typically been heard and if you can do that you're far more likely to stand out i think this campaign in new york is a great example of someone who was trying to say something slightly different wasn't lecturing people trying to talk in their language trying to make them feel positive about the current state of the world in a liberal way which is not typically down in politics six at the moment i think liberals tend to lean on more fear mon and i think you know trying to frame these things in a positive way a slightly different angle and being distinct in that way will make you far more likely to be remembered but it's not always used because he kim what slogan did they go for hi nick can open your world i don't know their own advice they don't even follow their own it's like come on guys it's not that hard phil it's been great talk to thank you for your insight on this thanks for being here and i'd love to have you back and obviously everybody should check out nudge podcast podcasts alright and that'll do it for us today thanks for tuning into the hustle daily show where a proud part of hubspot media our editor is robert hart and our executive producer is darren clark we've got a lot more tech business coverage in our newsletter if you're not subscribed go get yourself signed up the hustle dot c slash email and follows us on instagram at the hustle daily we'll see them tomorrow the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tom boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brands explores how storyteller are building brand online from the mindset that attacked six to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work one of the recent episodes i listened to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators a brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts alright folks that is all for the special episode of nudge where we heard the hustle daily show nudge are be back next monday with a normal episode thank you so much for tuning into this special episode as always i'm your host phil and i will be back next monday for another episode of nudge cheers and

on the twenty third of june i released a podcast titled i told id debunked psychology greatest myth in this episode i took five of the priming studies cited in daniel kahn book thinking fast and slow and i tried to debunk them for example i recreated one two thousand and eight study on creativity that suggested that merely looking at the apple logo would make participants more creative the original study found that those looking at the apple logo even very briefly rather than the ibm logo well those people who looked at the apple logo they came up with more creative uses for a brick the idea being that merely seeing a creative companies logo go will make someone more creative i repeated this study with sixty british people you can obviously use bricks to create garden paths a brick could be used as a weight for exercising i use it for fire pit in the in the garden it did not work in fact those primed with the ibm logo in my study actually came up with more uses for a brick than those who saw the apple logo i also replicated the famous florida effect study this study found that participants primed with words relating to old age walked slower out of the room where the experiment finished simply reading florida forgetful bold grey or wrinkle those old age style words well reading those words literally changed how fast people walk to at least stated in this study i replicated this test in a slightly different way i asked sixty four brits to read out a set of words associated with aging and decay forgetful bold great s faded s and i asked a totally separate group of sixty four brits to read out words relating to you for energy playful loud bright kind swift vivid i measured the actual time it took to say those words see the actual total number of syllables for the whole list of words in both cases were the same so i expected those reading words relating to old age to slow down a bit but they did not they read the words at pretty much the exact same pace as those who read words relating to you for energy there was no priming effect here either over five mini experiments i claimed that i had debunked priming and i'm hardly the first person to do this shortly after thinking fast and slow was released back in twenty eleven researcher dorian failed to replicate a prominent study featured in the chapter on priming and then there was a larger study by three researchers for the site replica index which analyzed twelve studies in condiments chapter on priming and found that eleven were unreliable and then kahn himself quickly published an open email addressing the issues he wrote that while he was a general believer in priming he feared it was a train wreck waiting to happen and yet today's guest on nudge thinks i have missed something he thinks that in some cases priming can work so let's reopen the debate on priming is it a reliable behavioral science principle or is it over overblown all of that coming up hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this help them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com today's guest on nudge the leading consumer behavior expert phil graves i'm a consumer psychologist author through of the book consumer and founder of shift consultancy phil has spent his career studying consumers and understanding their behavior he's not only read most of the studies on priming he's repeated many of them himself and he thinks some are more reliable than others so let's start with one of the reliable ones a study or a couple of studies in fact wine for whatever reason we can only speculate a lot of research in in the field of psychology is done wine and fair enough so there was a study that was done that was again using fm mri imaging to look at people's reaction to wines of different prices and what it showed was that the reward centers of the brain lit up more when the wine was positioned as being more expensive course as with all these things same wine this two thousand and eight study found that the regions of the brain believed to be responsible for encoding pleasure relating to taste and o showed increased activity when the participants believed the prices were higher what's interesting about that is that you know it's easy to observe that we have a price quality heuristic you know we're faced with a range of product it's difficult to make a decision okay well you know do we go for the cheap one where it's probably cheap for a reason do we wanna go for the really expensive one well you know do is that more than we need to pay but it's probably the best because that's why it's expensive and we develop those heuristic over time because they broadly work yeah we develop these heuristic and what's interesting about them you know is that they kind of work in reverse that when when we've spent more this study on wine shows is we actually get more pleasure so you know are we del diluting ourselves are we not when it doesn't really matter you know we believe it to the point that actually what we experience is better as a result of just knowing that we've spent more and then in another study and they manipulated the perception of the wine they gave people in a restaurant by using labels that look fancier and more premium and i'm sure we can all imagine kind of what that might look like and then another one that looked like a cheaper bottle of wine same wine and not only did people think the wine in the fancier bottle was better they also rated the meal that they'd eaten as being superior here diners at a restaurant in illinois were given a free glass of wine to accompany their meal in each case the actual wine used was the same it was a cheap bottle however different bottles were used to signal different wine qualities when the wine was perceived purely from the label as being better quality people rated both the wine and the food as tasting better and they ate more of the meal as well in a second study also cited in phil book people were given a wine they believed from the packaging again that was from a superior region so an old world superior region versus a new world cheaper region and they rated the wine at eighty five percent higher for taste and the food at fifty percent higher for taste as well this reminds me of a twenty seventeen study by charles spence from oxford where a hundred and forty people rated a m wine as ten percent higher in quality when they open that wine in a cork top bottle rather than a screw top the association with cork tops and high quality literally increased enjoyment we're processing all of this but it's happening outside a conscious awareness and what we end up deciding and acting and the decisions we make are influenced by lots and lots of things that are peripheral but how we account for what we found ourselves doing is driven by our own need to post rationalize a narrative that makes us feel like conscious agents even though it largely points the fact that we're not phil says that these quick opinions we form on why aren't you to rational reasoning but instead due to quick heuristic these shortcuts that our brains use to make sense of the world and he has another great example of heuristic that i think everybody listening to this podcast has followed before a classic one is you know reading terms and conditions you know you come up onto a website you're trying to buy something whatever so we agree to our terms and conditions no right thinking human would actually read the terms and conditions because by now you've done that probably a thousand times in your life and nothing bad has ever happened to you so it makes no sense from a human brain point of view to invest the energy in reading what can sometimes be the length of a book of legal speak you know when nothing bad is likely to happen to you and that's not a conscious decision although we can post rationalize it because you click that button in a fraction of a second so that's showing us this is an unconscious response but all of these studies are they actually about priming part of me would argue that the price of the wine is more to do with the verbatim effect that the labeling is maybe down to the halo effect or that opening a cork is input bias is it really the same as having participants read words relating to old age and then watching them walk slower this is a a kind of controversial topic you get into and i would argue there are lots of things going on here so that are elements of anchoring or priming there are implicit associations that people have from past experiences and then mis which we've talked about a fair amount but coming back to the the priming anchoring point as i say this is i know controversial i know it's something you've talked about in your podcast before a lot of the studies that have identified priming or anchoring effects a kind of like par games you know they're sort of giving people little things to do and then you know they walk more slowly or they act more creatively and they're come coming back to the point i made about you know how so much is going on contextual there might be other contextual factors that are influencing them in that particular moment there might be researcher effects all the rest of it forget about all of that i would say i have demonstrated priming effects on numerous occasions particularly numerically so i think this might have been one of kahn and ver but you give people a multiplication of one times two up to eight and then other people eight times seven down to one mathematically it's the same but you get a guest answer when you say people like okay quickly guess the answer to this when it starts with a one you get a lower guess and you get an app appreciable higher one when it starts with the eight i've also done that how many countries in africa where you prime people with an initial number say some school children have thought there were ten countries in africa they didn't know how many their were you think it's more or less big your they it might be more and then other people you say the school from thought there were seventy do you think it's more or less i think would be less than that and what you see is people working from the number they've been given and it's again in some of the experiments even random numbers have been shown to influence that i don't disagree with phil at all i think all of those studies and examples are reliable i also believe the same is true with words in his book phil shares how participants can be asked to consider two people and quickly they need to decide who they think they would like more so for example john is intelligent ind impulsive critical stubborn and jealous mark is jealous stubborn critical impulsive ind and intelligent now it should make a difference since the descriptions contain the exact same words about both john and mark and yet most people unconsciously attach more weight to the words they hear first and thus they say they prefer john over mark richard shot has proven the same as true with product descriptions vodka described as award winning vinegar and weak is preferred to the same vodka described as weak vinegar and award winning but you know if you think about things like the wine example we were talking about where people are getting a perception from in this case how the wine looks when they're having their meal or what they've been told about the price of it well that's opening up this is the way i think about it particular neural paths it's starting their mental journey in a particular place and that makes it easier for the brain to go in that direction and that i have found routinely in marketing situations is a really important thing to consider so where are people starting their mental journey because it can subject to them not having a strong belief about whatever it is and subject to them being involved in one of these sort of more unconscious decisions lead to them feeling very different or acting very differently i don't disagree agree if anything phil has shared here but i did want him to share enough for example perhaps one outside of the lab and in the real world so there was a project i was involved in a few years ago where innocent the smoothie company we're trying to launch a fruit and veggies juice and when we were testing it that i mean and the first thing to say is you know the last thing i would ever do testing product is stick it in front of people and say what do you think about this because wrong part of their brain so we use different techniques purchase simulations to get them reacting in the way they would as shoppers and we had different packs that expressed this proposition in different ways and one of the things that they did was they listed the ingredients on the front of the pack quite prominently good obviously if you're buying a fruit juice you need to know what the fruit is likewise if you're buying a fruit and veggies you need to know what the fruit and veg but what became very apparent in our testing was that if you led with the veg ingredients which in many ways makes sense rationally because that's the point of difference people wouldn't buy them and if you lead with the fruit ingredients they will now you're still listing the same ingredients you're not listing the proportions of them although people are used to seeing the most prominent significant ingredient at first but but it was to do with a priming effect that you know if you see this juice and you see that it's a kale cucumber an apple juice and forgive me i can't remember the flavors now you're starting your mental journey at kale and that's quite a challenge a challenging taste for a drink you've quite challenging taste for a vegetable frank is good for it so we supposed to eat it whereas conversely if you're starting with the apple and then you're getting into the kale it kind of feels alright and that a huge difference you know that was the difference between i'm sure it's very good for you but the only people were ever gonna buy it were absolute health luna and where this product needed to sit which was well you know give people something that's a bit healthier a bit you know can satisfy that health desire they've got without them thinking oh god am i gonna buy this and then feel like i can't even drink it because of course with anything new there's a lot of loss aversion you know i'm gonna buy one thing and me i will have a a strong unconscious fear that i'm gonna get it sit down with my sandwich and just not be able to drink it and that at that point is a massive loss versus the potential upside of well you know i might have something that's new and i like or something that's got some healthier ingredients in it potentially what's going on here why is priming working for phil and not for me what let's break down the differences in the studies it debunked and the examples phil has given phil found that listing the vegetables first on a package for a health drink lowered the likelihood that people would buy compared to listing the fruit first in my studies i found that showing people the apple logo wouldn't make them any more creative than showing them the ibm logo you can make the case that both of these studies are exploring priming after all the stimulus the ibm logo or ingredient list is only briefly paid attention to by the participant however i think there is another big difference about these two studies and that is context you see it is contextual important to know what ingredients there are in a health drink your enjoyment of that drink will directly link to the ingredients inside so being primed by a nice sounding ingredient an apple rather than one which you probably wouldn't say is typically nice kale well that will change your perception not because priming always works but because the prime is contextual important in my studies the contextual relevance either wasn't there at all or it just wasn't strong enough there is no strong contextual link between looking at a company logo and then coming up with uses for a brick there is not a strong contextual link between reading words relating to old age and then walking down a hallway so here's what i think is important about priming and possibly about many other behavioral science biases as well it is the context flashing the color green when i'm looking at a website won't make me more likely to buy because green is the color of money that contextual link is far too weak but smelling fresh bread when i'm walking around the supermarket will make me buy a loaf of sourdough both you could argue are priming but one is far more contextual relevant the smell of bread it triggers hunger it suggests pretty reliably that the bread is fresh it'll attract my attention as well while the color green on a website is just largely irrelevant to a buying journey so that's what i would advise marketers to consider before applying priming is the prime contextual relevant the price of a wine will influence enjoyment because it is contextual important we have a price quality heuristic the bottle of wine will do so too but if i ask people to read words relating to taste before drinking wine i'm not sure that would make them enjoy the wine more it's just not contextual relevant later on in the show phil goes on to give more examples that highlight how context is important including a study that found how art in a restaurant increases enjoyment and how adverts are perceived differently based on the other ads nearby all of that coming up after this short break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tom boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brand explores how storyteller are building brand online from the mindset to the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators of brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me feel ag today we are revisiting priming and looking at how in some scenarios where the context is right priming may work so listing a tasty fruit instead of a healthy veg first on an ingredient list will prime someone to enjoy the fruit drink more seeing a expensive price on a bottle of wine will do the same that works because the price and the fruit a really relevant to the enjoyment of the product here's an another example it's a sort of fairly simple study that was conducted looking at people's evaluations of cutlery in this case as they do in a lot of behavioral or science experiments and i think it's really the gift that behavioral or science has given the world are these ab b tests where we change something without telling people and see what happens and it gives us the opportunity to focus on behavior and get away from asking people what they think because as we keep finding out what people think they think isn't necessarily really what they think and they don't think how they think so they're not great people to ask so in this case looked at some evaluations of as it happened cutlery and the thing they varied was whether or not there was some artwork work next to it so they put a piece of artwork next to it and when they did people thought that the cutlery was more luxurious same cutlery obviously but again this example of we're processing all the information around us with you know there is a framing effect from what we're seeing around the object that we're focused on and you get this mis sense of superiority which actually is coming about by the implicit associations that have been triggered by the artwork which we associate with kind of excellence and sophistication and culture and all those things so all those paths are kind of firing in the brain at the point that we're looking at these shapes bits of metal and the way we feel about them end up being influenced as a result i think the context works here because art implicitly suggests that the cutlery belongs in an art gallery thus improving the ratings there is a good contextual link there now people also like funny jokes they like to laugh but i don't think if you had a very talented comedian telling jokes while the participant rated cutlery that you would see improvement in the ratings of cutlery because comedy just isn't contextual relevant to how you would view a spoon for example here's another contextual relevant priming example shoes and smell the smell of shoes is important to us we've all got old pairs of shoes that just smell a little bit well researchers has found that the smell of a shoe can influence perception in the study researchers put one new pair of night running shoes in a room with a light floral smell and another identical pair in an un uncensored room afterwards eighty four percent of people said they were more likely to buy the pair from the room that smelled of flowers rather than the un uncensored room i imagine this works because there is a subconscious link between smell and shoes i don't think participants will be more likely to buy the night trainers if they're just tasted a particularly nice cookie for example because there is no contextual link between taste and trainers but there is a link between smell and trainers and that's why it works we evaluate products not just on the product alone but also what's around it whether that's to smell or another product phil had a great two thousand and eight study by and yu which proved this so the penn study was looking at product comparisons where what what information people had when they were making a comparison about a product or making a decision about the product and what they found was that where you had a sort of a small competitive set and there was a clearly inferior product then people found it much easier they've they valued the other product more highly so although in theory we would probably tell ourselves that if we were evaluating product we would do it on an objective basis so either this is good or it isn't in fact what they found out was that it's not objective it's driven by what's around in the context and so one of the things i was speculating on was well you know how do how might that apply in advertising say no you've got your product and you're advertising it well if you've just been on air after a product that's pretty mediocre and s you may very well shine more than if you've been up against someone else competitive phil writes that when simmons and immune compared how people evaluated the attractiveness of a series of products including lawn mower food processes and cars the researchers found that the strength for a preference of a product was influenced by the context of choices presented at the time so for example when a pen was selected from a set where it was significantly better than the other it says three pens do a really bad and one is significantly better people would pay more for it and think it actually wrote better than the exact same pen when it was from a more balanced set of options a really good pen next to two okay pence for example we are influenced by all sorts of contextual information even if we struggle to explain exactly what information influences us it's just highlighting this you know the the objective and the rational is so frequently not what matters that there are other contextual and framing effects that are going on that shape our decisions but we're are oblivious to them i get i guess the the kind of the the thing that marketers should know is that consumers are devious lying cheating voices so don't believe everything a customer says all of us struggle to explain how we make decisions i think the studies i ran on priming a few months back i think may hold up of the five studies i replicated they'd had all been diff proven not just by me but by multiple follow ups from actual scientists to a lot more clever than i am but i think there was a mistake i made because i always assumed that priming didn't work because of the the inputs the stimulus i assumed that a small subtle stimulus would never be enough to nudge a a a a person to buy so the color of a website for example wouldn't make me more likely to buy or a company logo wouldn't make me more creative because the stimulus is too small but i think i got that wrong i now believe that subtle inputs subtle stimulus can nudge just like how smelling fresh bread or seeing the price of a wine will influence my decision both of those things are very small very subtle i might not even be conscious that i'm taking them into my decision making process but they will still change my decision so now i don't think it's down to the size of the stimulus that nudge people but rather the contextual relevance it is contextual relevant to look at the price of a wine in the bottle it's in and the location where the wine is from and the year it was made because all of those small things are very subtle they are relevant contextual relevant to your enjoyment of that wine but irrelevant stimulus i don't think will prime you in a strong way and i think that's where priming went wrong too many studies try to prove that largely a relevant stimulants would still trigger a behavior and i just don't think that's true i don't think a green website will make you more likely to buy and i don't think florida or saying florida are out loud will make you walk a bit slower so i still questioned the validity of many many priming studies but i have altered my view it is not down to the size of the stimulus that you should look out for when reviewing a priming study but rather if the stimulus is contextual relevant that is all for today folks thank you so much for listening and a massive massive thank you to phil grace for joining me once again on na was on last week if you guys haven't listened to that episode please do go back and tune in it's a fantastic episode one of the most popular actually of the summer which was lovely to see and phil will actually be on one more time probably in a few weeks to do an episode on social proof and heard mentality his book consumer is an absolutely brilliant read i don't know how i missed it for the decade it's been out said this last week but it really is just an absolutely seven book one that i should have read an awful for a long time ago very relevant to all of the content i create on the show and if you like this show i think you all love that book so if you'd like a copy i have left a link as always in the show notes but also just search for phil graves or consumer wherever you get your books and i'm sure you will find it if you want more for nudge the two things you can do as always is sign up to the three nudge newsletter which comes out every friday just go to nudge podcast dot com click newsletter in the menu and you can sign up you'll also find all of my past essays there so if you just wanna read them before you commit to giving me your email address to see if it's worth it you can do so just go to nudge podcast dot com click news newsletter in the menu and youtube is probably the other way you can get more content from me i do often add videos to youtube which are slightly different from the shows they're edited down snap versions obviously have a lot of visuals on and a lot of those videos tend to do quite well so if you want more from nudge you wanna learn more about behavioral science just search for nudge podcast on youtube or click the link in the show notes one final thing i was on a podcast recently that i just greatly enjoyed it was the indie business club with mel and ben the three of us chatted mainly about behavioral science about how all these different biases affect us really got into a lot of good detail about how small businesses can apply those nudge and it was just a genuinely very lovely talk so if you've got forty minutes after this and you want to listen to something else go in search for the indie business club i think you really like it okay thanks that is all for this week thank you so much for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode of nacho cheers

death and taxes and the picture of george washington and the dollar bill those are among with few constant in a changing world but now another of those constant may be changing coca cola is about to announce what it calls the most significant development in its history this development was rather surprising back in the nineteen eighties coca cola had the dominant market share was leading the soda industry and sales and its overall sales were growing and yet despite all of this coca cola changed its flavor in a better taste there's never been a better coat in producing the greatest case of discovery in a hundred year but why why changed the taste of one of the world's best selling products so new coke was born out of what i guess you could call the coke wars of the seventies and eighties that is phil graves my guest on today's episode of i'm a consumer psychologist author through of the book consumer and founder of shift consultancy phil explained that the coke wars started after an infamous ad by its main competitor pepsi in the us coca cola had the dominant share i think they were about sixty five percent of the market and pepsi was very much a number two and what pepsi came up with with was the pepsi challenge where they went round giving people a sip taste test of blind test of two liquids to see which one they prefer coca cola says it's the real thing what pepsi cola believes that when it comes to cola the only real thing is taste that's why the pepsi challenge has been asking thousands of people across the country to let their own taste decide through their taste test results they came up with the suggestion that actually more people preferred pepsi over and the fact is nationwide more people the taste pepsi over coca i think of something like fifty seven percent preferred pepsi pepsi pepsi and the rational consequences of this weren't lost on the big weeks at ko who started to panic that's a challenge let taste design but this story isn't really about what soda tastes better it's a much more complex story about the effects of branding the problems with market research and ultimately our inability to truly understand what goes on inside our heads all of that coming up in today's episode of notch hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this help them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com back in the nineteen eighties pepsi were creating punchy ads that were gaining a lot of attention ads like this from nineteen eighty one you're about to take the pepsi challenge you know i have two bottles of callback here and you don't know which is which no i don't we have never met before that's correct okay now gonna pick this up and tell you me which way it showed pepsi you know in test like these nationwide more people prefer to taste the pepsi over coca cola pepsi these much better what's delicious because a down nice and smooth the taste is good that's great take a pepsi challenge let you a taste decide right guys right these ads convince coca cola to do something drastic something they had not done in their entire ninety nine year history the people coke decided oh no this is terrible we don't taste nice enough so we need to reform they then did a whole load of work reform coke and came up with a reform reformation or recipe that was preferred by seven percentage points to pepsi in their blind taste tests this product change was a very big deal this has gotta be the bold consumer product move of any kind of any stripe since eve started to hand out apples that was jesse myers the public assist at beverage digest coca cola is ready to launch a nationwide advertising blitz in the company already has sent its bottle of video pep rally in the war of the cola so let's let a rip let's land on the beaches and go all the way and that was coax american president with some inspiring words but did his churchill es motivational speech work and so they julie launched new coke and consumers went nuts but not in a good way there was this massive backlash against it campaign group who were sprung up to say we want old coke brought back you like to sign a station get that fuel quote karen wilson a die for the past week she's been standing on street corners in palo alto california asking people to taste new coke no i like the coke what'd you sign and collecting signatures trying to convince coca cola that the new coke is not it it just goes down your stomach like a a dead glass of water whereas the old coke just for bites including entertaining led by one guy who i think worked in p who then did was asked to do the blind test himself chose pepsi as being preferable but still would say i don't care i still want coke back and in seattle the old cola drinkers of america have set up a hotline hoping to get enough support to file a class action lawsuit against coke charging without old coke they're distressed and injured after ninety nine years it's a national institution and they hit there it's a fraud part of the fabric of the united states and and when they when when they when they don't make it and then prohibit me from getting it by keeping the secret formula then that's not american the backlash to coax new flavor was rather surprising because coca cola had spent a lot of time and money creating this better product they also spent thirty five million dollars on advertising it that's eighty eight million dollars today and they spent that in just over two months they created ads that directly called out the pepsi challenge recently an independent research firm ran a taste test between coke and pepsi and the taste more people chose was the taste of coca cola yes more people call across the country when comparing coke to pepsi chose the taste of coke as the better taste let's look at it this way we gave america choice and more people said coke is in but new coke really wasn't it in fact the thing people really wanted it was old coke at a wine boutique in beverly hills old coke has been c it goes thirty dollars a case right next to the bo and cha and in arlington virginia john hayden his hoarding old coke he's got twenty five cases so far and within three months after all of that development all of that research all of that asking consumers what they thought in blind tests and new coke was withdrawn from the market coca cola is bringing back the real thing its original formula too many cola drinkers had complained the new coke wasn't it so what went wrong well in phil book he writes how many assumed that the problem was with new hoax market research for example tasting a sip of a soda is nothing like drinking a full can that first hit of sweetness might be pleasant but if you're drinking a full can it can become cl just as the first chocolate in a box feels indulge while the tenth in quick succession can leave you feeling a bit que removing the drink from its packaging only compounded this issue with without the can you strip away the branding the influence of that branding and you leave nothing but this anonymous brown fizzy liquid this is all true but phil says there's a point that most analysts missed and that was that the problem wasn't just with coke research process it was that no research of this type could have ever delivered a reliable accurate answer even if the tests had been redesigned say giving participants full branded cans or asking them to drink a month's worth at home the results might have been different but there's no guarantee that they would have matched what would have happened in the real world because rather than asking people what they think phil says you should just observe how they behave behavior is truth so what were people doing well you already had a sixty five percent market share and okay you can say well is there a massive difference in distribution and cut this distribution change that but but people were exhibiting a behavioral preference in lots of stores around the us and it wasn't that well when pepsi was present sixty percent of people were choosing it over coke coke was winning everywhere that both brands were so you've got that going on so you gotta say well hang on a second what's this taste test actually telling us but more fundamentally than that if you spend probably five minutes watching people go and buy soda to use the american poll or fizzy drinks as we would call it you will see them spending almost no time on the decision it will happen in a fraction of a second and as soon as they see coke they'll pick it up and they're gone so in that situation that's a very good example that the unconscious mind is what's driving that it's habits it's a repeated behavior it's probably under underlined by a belief but that belief is a rationalization because i keep doing the same thing i will tell myself i must believe this is better and then you can trash that with what research is doing research is this sort of implicit relationship to make things conscious and so i'm about to ask you to one do an ab b test that you could do yourself easily for the car the price of two cans drink consumers never do or virtually never do that's not the way they make purchase decisions when you are making that decision you are using your brain in a completely different way you're asking yourself question yourself question or you're being asked questions and that not surprisingly me triggers completely different processes in the mind to the one when you're floating through live making accidental incidental decision with minimal thought about what is going to satisfy your thirst or give you a caffeine sugar but sugar buzz you know what you're doing is so to artificial it's like you're asking the wrong people well actually what you're doing is you're asking the wrong part of their brain and you're asking and you shouldn't be you know you should be observing please don't save the face of coal where you wanna fix it in april the real lesson from the new coke debacle isn't just that a major brand can make a mistake it's that coca cola relied on a rational model the consumer behavior that doesn't reflect how people actually think or act and that's a mistake that companies continue to repeat wasting money backing flawed ideas and killing off promising new ideas the story reveals a lot branding shapes perception a sip isn't the same as drinking a full can people resist losing what they love and we're all influenced by first impressions and social proof no market research could have fully captured these unconscious forces yet research remains a default in big companies not because it always works but because it feels like a safeguard but to truly explain why so much market research is flawed we need to look beyond a atlanta beyond new coke and beyond this eighties backlash and instead look inside our heads so after the break phil will explain the psychology behind mis redistribution and why all of us are so bad at describing what we really think don't change taste please don't change taste the code the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tomboy boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brands explores how storyteller are building brand online from the mindset to the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work one of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators as a brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello welcome back you're listening to nigel with me phil ag new coke was an ab object failure within seventy nine days coke could pull the new flavor and wasted eighty million dollars worth of advertising spend but why was their market research so wrong well phil says it's because they didn't really consider what actually happens when someone buys a coke so maybe to start off it's worth just being aware of what the brain is doing fundamentally and this comes down to the fact that we're able to process massive amounts of information through our senses you know visually what we hear what we're feeling all the rest of it something like ten million bits of information per second it's been suggested and estimated consciously we can process about forty bits per second so there's this massive discrepancy see but what the unconscious mind is doing is you know in order to protect us in order to aid our survival it's processing all of that and try to work out well is does this need to be passed into conscious attention or not but in the course of processing it it can still affect how we feel and what we think so we get this phenomenon of mis redistribution where because something is present in the broader environment but isn't isn't related to the focus of our attention we will mis it and think well i must be feeling that way because of what i'm looking at we might think we prefer coke because of its taste that might be what we say in market research questionnaires when we're looking at the can but there could be a whole host of unconscious reasons influencing us the branding a history the mere exposure the social proof and this affects all types of products not just coca cola and that can happen with you know putting sense into retail environments playing music when people are shopping all these things but because we're consciously so limited in our ability to process it what we do is we get the feeling we assume it's entirely down to the focus our attention and then and this is the really scary part for research if we're asked about it we will tell these absolutely convincing stories that rationalize and justify what we found ourselves doing but the everything we see in behavioral science where we do it these ab experiments shows that's not the reason that the purchase ultimately happened we know there was something else there that wasn't talked about phil has a great study to explain just this now it is a study i have recently shared on the show it's one that i took from phil book and honestly phil much better at explaining it than i so i thought i'd keep it in and let him explain this great study timothy wilson who is a psychologist in america set up a study where he had four pairs of types a to d got shoppers in a store to come in and just evaluate them touch them feel and say which ones they thought were best and as it happened d one got forty percent so statistically clearly the best performing pair of tights and when he asked people what it was they liked about them it was their sheer nurse the elasticity the niche you know very tangible qualities that these types had all well and good apart from the fact they were all the same so a lot of people would look at that and say well that's fine because we randomized the order when we do testing and we can negate that and they would all come out the same if we randomize the order it's like but that missing the point the point is people make up reasons and those reasons are not driven by what really drove their preference because the only thing that could have driven a preference was the order effect in which they experienced them or you know maybe something me to do with their own pressure in touching them or something but the fact the reality is what they then do is make up what's seemed like highly plausible justification for the preferences but but those justification cannot be true because they were the same thing so again you've got this this problem that exists where we are brilliant post rationalize with brilliant storyteller but we've got no connection too and this is why technically it's right to call it the unconscious mind we got no connection to the parts of our brain that can be hugely significant in determining how we're making decisions and what we're ultimately doing timothy wilson went on to run a second study on mis attribution in this study college students were asked to watch a film while someone outside the room intermittently operated a power saw part way through the experiment the worker outside was asked to overt stop making that noise thereby bringing it to the conscious attention of everyone present that there was a horrible noise taking place outside the students then rated their enjoyment of the film as did a totally different group who had watched the same film without any outside noise it would be reasonable to suppose that the group who had watched the film with the loud power saw going off outside would have enjoyed the film much less indeed that's what those taking part claimed would be the case when they were asked before you know if you're watching a film with a loud noise outside would you enjoy it less then in a normal film they all said yes however their actual ratings of the enjoyment of the film were no different from those who experienced the film without any outside noise people predicted that the noise would changed their enjoyment they said that is what would happen but their ratings were no different from those who didn't hear the power in other words people's predictions were totally wrong the founding principle of the work that i do in consumer insight is is not to believe anything that consumers say and to avoid asking them questions wherever possible phil this during some market research he conducted in an electronic store in this instance i was observing people in an electrical department to the store and there was an ipod it a few years ago an ipod speaker system that this was before days of bluetooth that was bla out music in the store and impossible not to have have your attention drawn to it lots of people then went up and started engaging with it it seemed very clear to me that these people have been attracted by the sound and not for any other reason but then when i was talking to them i was say to them you know is this something that you would plan to buy as people were picking one up and taking it to the till and they were all say oh yeah yeah absolutely this this was this was on my list of things to get it's men please and then i changed the subject we talked about some other the things and eventually i said well when was the first time you saw this ipod speaker systems because i knew it was pretty much brand new i haven't seen a lot of coverage of it in the magazines or advertisements or anything people said oh yeah seen it's the first time that day all of us do this we make up reasons why we bought something we imagine that it's due to some rational reasons when in reality it might just be because the loudspeaker speaker is playing a song we like or just because it was in our eye while we were queuing and similarly with lottery tickets behavioral i could see this difference in terms of whether or whether or not people bought a lottery scratch card seemed to me to be from what i was observing very dependent on whether or not they were in a queue at the counter or whether or not they went straight to the front of the desk and i realized that when they went straight to the front of the desk they were much less likely to buy a lottery scratch card because the per housing that promoted the cards was orientated to kind of past you if you were looking from the side all you saw was the spool of the tickets it wasn't kind of showing you the prizes and the silver and the gold and all the themes that would draw you in so although people said they were deciding because they were feeling lucky or they wanted to treat or you know this was an impulsive decision of theirs in reality it was driven by whether or not they had their attention drawn to lottery cards and it needed that trigger before that that impulse associated response could be elicit in his book phil quotes daniel van who writes much of what we do seems to surface from unconscious causes and such coordination provides a major challenge to our ideal of conscious agency when life creates all the inevitable situations in which we find ourselves acting without appropriate prior conscious thoughts we must protect the illusion of conscious will by trying to make sense of our actions people simply don't have the capacity to be accurate about what it is that's driven their decision making and in fact my favorite academics study on this is the most known the love on the bridge study where they used an attractive female researcher to interview male students and ostensibly this was about creativity in the environment and they were doing it out in this country park they set it up so that the female researcher gave all the people who were being interviewed her phone number because you know if you've got any more thoughts on this then let me know but what they really wanted to track was how many people asked out on a date and the answer to that was either sixty percent or thirty percent the difference being where people had had the interview conducted on a bridge that was somewhat unstable they were much more likely to ask her out on a date and so what they surmise from this was that people standing on that shaky platform were feeling a sense of you know they've got the adrenaline in their system they're feeling a little bit on edge but they're not assigning those gi feelings to what they're standing on they're as describing it to the attractive person in front of them and therefore thinking well i must be very attractive to you because i can feel it in my body so you know again a great example even with something as fundamental as human attraction where mis redistribution can play a massive part in what people ultimately do but mis misinformation isn't just a problem for coca ko market researchers or blokes looking for a date on a bridge it is a far more serious problem that could ultimately determine whether or not someone goes to prison so in the us where they looked at miscarriage of justice cases which have been overturned by dna evidence so you know you've got clear evidence that this person who's been convicted was not the the person responsible in seventy five percent of cases there was eye witness testimony that had been a key factor in the prosecution which you know self evidently could not have been right but you know we are so used to telling ourselves these stories and believing our feelings that whether it's the fact that you know sort of an element of suggestion from the police during the interview whether it's just as you know our own biases and our own prejudices a whole raft of different things that can be going on mis redistribution the setting that we find ourselves in you know people end up saying things which simply are not true one study set out to test this in a in a really fairly incredible way psychologists at iowa university faked a crime that took place in front of participants of students the students who weren't expecting to see any crime taking place suddenly saw a thief run up to a fellow student and steal their bag this happened right in front of the participants and the thief face was clearly visible when the researchers asked the participant to identify the perpetrator from five suspects none of whom were the actual thief eighty four percent of the participants were willing to point the finger at one of the innocent suspects our memories are fall and our ability to recall our behavior accurately is just as bad we come up with purely rational reasons for behaviors that are largely unconscious whether that's picking coco over pepsi rating a film or picking out a criminal from a line of suspects and yet our actual behavior is often driven by the unconscious mind especially when it comes to coke see coca cola made a massive mistake with new coke the mistake was to assume that customers only picked soda based on the flavor they were told by customers that flavor was the most important element of the drink and they were told that people preferred the taste of pepsi but taste isn't the most important thing the color the branding the icon and the look of the can is is arguably far more important than the taste and there's evidence to prove it in two thousand and three a group of researchers has repeated the pepsi challenge except this time they show the participant the actual coke and pepsi cans they were drinking from well yeah when they when they revealed the brand then they got a completely different response and they were looking at using fm mri to look at which areas of the brain were active when the branding was shown so they could see how the packaging was activating what i think they called cultural influences and emotions when subjects were showing the familiar design of a coke can before they tasted the coke a different area of the brain became involved and the results changed significantly more people preferred coke when they'd seen the brand more than both pepsi and an unlabeled sample even though in that unlabeled sample they were serving coke as well you're probably quite familiar with the new coke story it is one of the most shared case studies on a failed new product launch out there and yet i wanted to talk about it today because what new coke teaches us isn't that market research can sometimes backfire no it reveals that all of us apply rational reasoning to irrational decisions i think i like a certain soda because of firm solid rational reasons but that is not the case my likes and dislikes are largely driven by unconscious factors and if i'm ever asked to explain these unconscious reasons the reason why i prefer a coke over a pepsi i'll probably give a totally unreliable abs the real thing all teach the world to say please don't change the taste of that is all for today folks thank you so much for listening and a massive massive thank you to the brilliant fill graves for joining me on today's show his book consumer isn't an absolutely fantastic read i have no idea how i missed it all this years it's been out for over a decade but it's still a cracking reader still really holds up the examples are very relevant i learned a hell of a lot reading that book if you would like a copy and if you like the books i tend to suggest on this show then i really think you'll like consumer well if you would like a copy go and click the link in the show notes and you'll find a link to buy the book there or just search for consumer wherever you get your books i think you'll be happy to hear that i've invited phil back on the show we are creating another episode on how our unconscious mind dictates exactly what we buy few more tactics that marketers is listening to and apply there as well to make sure you don't miss that episode do go sign up for my nudge newsletter if you do you get a email reminder as soon as the new episodes goes live you get all of my bonus episode straight to your inbox and you get the best behavioral science tip i have found over the course of that week in my friday roundup up newsletter to subscribe just go to nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter in the menu it is totally free and do not worry i will not ask you for any rational reasons as to why you subscribe to that newsletter because i know i won't get any alright thanks that is all for this week thank you for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode of nudge cheers please don't change the taste of coke thought of it just makes me wanna a crow each time i taste a real thing i wanna teach the world see please don't change the taste of

today's guest on nudge can predict how likely someone is to buy a product after seeing an ad without even having to ask them a question we predicted a hundred percent perfectly the best ad in each category to make his predictions my guest doesn't have to speak to customers he doesn't have to ask them any questions no instead he measures their heart rate along with a few other biological measures with that information he can make these predictions and find out how he makes these incredible forecasts and predictions in today's episode of nudge hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this helped them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com i'm paul zac i'm a professor at claire graduate university in california i read a lot of books for this podcast but paul zac book really stands out in my mind it stands out because it made a claim that i almost couldn't believe pool shares a study where he sprayed a hormone up participants noses and that spray increased the participants charitable donations by fifty six percent so how did paul discover this so starting the early two thousands i began to run experiments try understand why people are ever good are the bad behavior gets all the press actually very easy to study experimentally why are people nice to each other why do they help each other why do they cooperate why they trustworthy based on research and animals identified this neuro chemical oxytocin as a key signal neuro chemical signal that i should cooperate with another human oxytocin is a hormone that signals that the person is safe to be around pool calls oxytocin the you seem trustworthy signal and so we develop a protocol to measure which had never really been done before measure the brain's acute release of oxytocin and then how do we prove that that oxytocin is actually causing a behavior developed a way to safely shoot synthetic doesn't into the brain via the nose specifically paul and his team's spray oxytocin into the sinuses and after about forty five minutes enough oxytocin crosses the blood brain barrier to bathe the brain in oxytocin he's quick to add that the team has done this hundreds of times throughout any adverse effects on participants we looked at whether oxytocin administration would in fact increase donations charity participants watched a short video about heart disease and were then anonymously asked if they wanted to donate to the charity one group was sprayed with this synthetic oxytocin before watching the videos while they can control group had a placebo substance squirt up their noses we showed that if we give people sent out of oxytocin they've donated substantially more money they were more likely to donate that is more people donated when prompted average donations were fifty six percent higher than those who received the placebo and the oxytocin receiving participants donated to fifty percent more of the featured charities but why so why is that in subsequent research we show that oxytocin is part of a larger network which i've called immersion which is how the brain values social emotional experiences so if i can communicate to you in a way that's sufficiently valuable to your brain the brain goes oh holy crap apparently the humans care about kids with cancer i'm a human again this is all unconscious therefore i should help kids with cancer and oxytocin is essentially the fuel that feeds empathy paul writes how oxytocin increases and when empathy is rev up people nearly always treat others with care and kindness so spraying synthetic oxytocin does increase donations but you don't need a nasal spray and a lab codes to create oxytocin the brain will create it naturally if it sees the right type of message this is why marketing can work so let's get to the bottom line because we actually if you if you're marketing or your advertising convince me that this thing's important somehow again for me neurological then i'm gonna act on that one way marketing does this is through emotion paul and his colleague jorge hey wanted to test if an emotionally charged message would increase oxytocin in the brain and thus increase charitable donations they showed one group of participants an emotionally hard hitting video of a father talking to the camera while his two year old son ben who whose terminal cancer plays in the background my son has a great tumor we know that ben's tumor is very aggressive and we know there's very little known about it this video is highly emotional who writes how he showed it at a law conference and a number of hardened lawyers cried after watching it pool and jorge thought this video emotional might provoke an oxytocin response for comparison they found another video showing the same and son but this time at the zoo this video does not mention cancer or death but one would probably notice that the boy is bold and the voice over calls him a miracle boy however this video lacks the narrative structure and emotional of the first video there is no crisis there is no emotional turmoil but it has the same characters and it's the same length as the original emotional video one hundred and forty five adults were asked to watch one of these two videos all adults were given the chance to donate money to the hospital at saint jude and paul and jorge processed five hundred eighty tubes of their blood to measure the levels of oxytocin after watching the videos the data showed that one third of participants overall donated money to saint jude and that nearly all of those people who donated had watched the emotional video the emotional video caused the brain to create oxytocin and the high levels of oxytocin typically meant the participant donated the behavior follows from the evaluation by the brain that this is sufficiently important this feeling of importance doesn't just come from oxytocin however it is created by a range of neuro signals to combine to cause what pool calls immersion right so again i'm using immersion with a capitalize a term of art for a combination of neuro electrical signals that we've traced to changes in neuro chemicals that is part of a network through which the brain values social emotional experiences so just to be clear this is a network that took us twenty years to to really discover and clarify you know how it works so two main components to have a neurological immersion which is again a continuous variable can be more or less neurological immersed and experience first is i have to be present or attentive right if i'm looking over here and i'm not looking at you and paying attention to what you're saying it's not gonna be a a valuable experience for me because i'm i'm involved in doing something else and the second is that experience has to generate what to call emotional resonance right it's emotions are how the brain tags experiences with value right it's gotta be important enough to me so the the present part is driven by the frontal binding of a chemical dopamine and the the emotional resonance is associated with the binding of oxytocin so dopamine oxytocin interact with each other in fairly complex ways that induce electrical activity that we can measure every second with technology we've developed so by mapping over the course of marketing or customer experience or whatever you're you're doing that immersion which is generally kind of a sign wave when i see that big peak in immersion the brain again unconsciously this is from the brain old parts of the brain out of conscious awareness so like oh holy crap i really love this thing this is this is sufficiently valuable to you and it didn't take long for big businesses to want to test paul's claims they wanted to use a immersion to try and forecast and predict advertisers wanted to see if their ads generated immersion and for the twenty fourteen super bowl that's exactly what paul decided to test this study came about because the stuff i do gets in the media and once we were doing work the laboratory companies started coming to my lab saying hey we wanna create better advertising more effective marketing can you help us at the time we had these very expensive machines and you know lots of phd students in my lab i said sure you know let's we'll we'll do some work for you and and we would analyze mark materials so they were developing or had released and then show them the neurologic conversion once we start doing more of this commercially i started getting this feeling like gosh you know should you really pay me for this like maybe i've been lucky in the lab and lab is a very controlled setting right so it was coming up to the super bowl which is generally in early february and i'm like oh this is great let's just test our technology against super bowl ads because for thirty forty years they are ranked by how much people like them paul set out to predict which of the twenty fourteen super bowl ads viewers would like the most but he didn't find the results that he expected we ran this and we find the worst result you can ever get which is a zero relationship between these you know hundreds of thousands people that rank super bowl ads for how much they like them and neurologic immersion paul measured a immersion while thirty five people watched the twenty fourteen ads in a random order and then he compared the results to those of the usa today ratings he found zero correlation between neurological immersion and how much the usa today raiders said they liked the ads so then you go home and you go well i suck i gotta get a different job because clearly i don't know what i'm doing and then literally i woke up like three in the morning like having a panic attack and going wait hold on maybe the machines weren't calibrated maybe the thirty five people we measured were insane i mean who knows all kind of things so so let's go back and get all the super bowl commercials from the year before get fresh people calibrate them machines rerun the study we found the same thing as zero correlation between these rankings of super bowl commercials and what we found neurological was had the highest immersion paul found no link between the consciously reported enjoyment and the brain's immersion but paul realized he may have made a mistake he was asking participants what they thought not measuring how they acted in general humans are very bad at explaining how they feel perhaps the immersive ads we're encouraging people to act in unconscious ways so paul set out to measure participants behavior instead let's get some some objective measure of the impact of these ads we what we have is youtube views and youtube comments and we found was that that liking measure self report measure had a negative relationship between youtube views and youtube youtube comments and yet neurologic immersion had a positive correlation so in other words in in human language the more people said they like to add the less buzz it created but the higher their neurologic immersion the more buzz it created so buzz again is our proxy here for sales paul found a link between immersion and youtube views not just for the twenty fourteen super bowl but for every super bowl they measured the values for the twenty eighteen super bowl are typical the correlation between a immersion and youtube views is zero point two seven and the correlation between immersion and youtube comments is zero point two five this means that the commercials with higher immersion receive more views and more comments immersion causes people to take action compare this to how well the usa today ratings predicted actions here you will find a negative relationship between youtube views and comments the correlations for the twenty eighteen super bowl a minus zero point three three for views and minus zero point three eight for comments so what causes this mismatch why do participants say they like ads that don't generate any buzz i also next time you're watching tv or youtube look how many babies and puppies you see in commercials have nothing to do with babies and puppies commercials for toilet paper or i don't know travel to gibraltar why because if you put a baby or puppy in your commercial and you test market it yeah so do you like the well sure puppies who's like a commercial puppies so i think we are living in this what i call the freudian hangover from this whack job freud we think that somehow if i just poke you the right way i can make the unconscious conscious the brain does not work that way just doesn't work like asking your liver how much it enjoyed your lunch feel today and you're like that's just a dumb question well because our brain creates language doesn't mean we have any insight into its inner workings and so by having technology to measure what is most valued and again what is valued is what is acted on then we break that dilemma between what i think and what's really happening in my brain participants in a focus group will say that ad with puppies are always preferred but unconsciously that tends not to be the case the most immersive ad from the twenty eighteen super bowl didn't have any puppies the most immersive commercial neurological immersive commercial from the twenty eighteen super bowl was a diet coke ad for twisted mango diet coke twisted mango because so this is a very weird add of this super tall woman dressed weirdly who's kind of dancing in this weird way it's talking about this new flavor diet coke and diet coke had had had flat sales for about three years they ran this ad their sales went up q one when this ad came out now they had introduced these new flavored diet coke but also had a big ad campaign so again i can't tell you for sure it's the ad that drove the sales but at least they run in the right direction it's a weird commercial so what we've learned from measuring now thousands of thousands commercials measuring immersion is that the brain likes this novelty so it's not a likable commercial i use a lot when i speak to marketers this is not a likable commercial out of the sixty five ads from that year's super bowl diet coke mango twist was the most immersive ad paul tested and yet usa today readers ranked it dead last for l my reply to that is i don't care i don't care if you like it i care that it moves the markets and as listeners know it's emotions that move market so i've gotta capture you emotionally but this case it's like this is a freaking train wreck this woman is weird the music's weird it's got a yellow wall behind it's film based symmetrical the whole thing is like a weird train wreck but it's very valuable neurological but if i ask someone do you like this i i'm not even sure again liking to me is the dumbest question i don't care about liking i care that it shakes up your brain so much go holy crap diet a coke now makes twisted mango flavor i'm gonna try that right that's what i really want from a behavioral perspective right how the woman and the filming are so odd that is kinda hard not to look away from this at the ad is so novel it forces us to pay attention this of course has behavioral science backing novelty might not increase liking but it does boost awareness rogers and newborn in their nineteen seventy six study found that commercials about driver safety are much more effective when they show vivid images of bloody victims rather than of test dummies for instance vivid images of car crashes if far more novel to see in a tv ad you're not likely to see them in an advertisement and they will not make the ad more likable people when they see ads of these vivid images won't say they prefer that ad but it will make the ad more effective perhaps this weird yet quite novel diet coke ad benefited from the same principle when we look at some of the most quote liked commercials this in twenty eighteen a lot of these are beautifully produced they have movie stars in them they have lush scenery they often run too long we find is shorter better amazon in twenty eighteen had a ninety second commercial called alexa lucid her voice in austin it's sixty degrees with its two alexa amazon's alexa lost her voice this morning like the oscar boys how is that even possible in which you had these stars filling in for alexa whatever very funny commercial alexa show me a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich pathetic you're thirty two years of age and you don't know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich its name is the recipe but you it ran ninety seconds that year it was five point three million dollars for thirty second spots they paid seventeen million dollars to fill miss plus triple that for you know these famous stars anthony hopkins it know famous people afraid brandon is already dried up but do let me know if there's anything i can help you with jessica was too long if they had run that for thirty seconds it would have been a great commercial so again for listeners practically i hit me hard hit me fast have a call to action alexa loses voice was kind of like brand awareness but we all aware of alexa why you why are you doing brand awareness give me something to do diet coke twisted mango was like a holy crap this is this is a brand new thing you might wanna try this but let's face it youtube views and buzz isn't really what companies want the reason coke and amazon spend millions on super bowl ads is for sales so does immersion predict sales well paul thinks so in fact he claims immersion is able to accurately predict the sales and ad will generate before it has been released and he has evidence to prove it we predicted a hundred percent perfectly the best add in each category find out how paul made these predictions after this short break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tomboy boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brands explores how storyteller are building brands online from the mindset to the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work one of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators as a brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me feel ag so far paul has explained that a immersion can increase youtube views but can it lead to something a little bit more tangible can immersion immersion for example predict whether or not a customer will give you their email address well paul ran a study to figure that out this is a study in which was sponsored by a large american life insurance company the sort of question there was for people who let their life insurance lapse which often happens when you are between jobs what might influence them to get life insurance again what kind of ad and the behavioral measure was we just wanna get your email so what we found is that neurologic increased radically the number of people who gave their life insurance so very strong positive correlation between neurologic immersion and sharing your life how your emails so life insurance agent could call you paul's team collected neurological data from a hundred and seventy eight people who viewed un branded rough cuts of video and print advertising for life insurance their analysis shows that those who shared their email addresses were almost always more immersed in the commercials so you have to tell a good story and i think what was interesting in that study was that quote good story was quite quite different for different demographics one of the untapped markets for this company was young males and so they don't buy a lot of life insurance and so the only test ad that influence young males to give their email was one of a guy who's talking on road you see his motorcycle underneath the car and he's talking about his girlfriend and their baby and whatever and then you kinda realize that oh he's talk he's killed he's talking beyond the grave and so it's like really in your face like you're a stupid young male you're gonna kill yourself and if anyone depends on you you probably should have life insurance young males didn't report liking this ad but paul's neurological study show that they were immersed in it everything paul's shared so far has convince me that asking people if they like an ad is probably a waste of time if you ask what they like it sure they're all nice they're like and what are you gonna say what what kind of human being were like oh you're having testing some new ads you got oh yeah sure they're awesome they're sure what what are you gonna say and what's your incentive to go that's a piece of crap why would you actually show me that no it just humans just basically don't do that or most humans don't do that so he have to get around that biased self report because we're asking people this impossible question and one way around this biased self reporting is to measure a immersion which is exactly what paul did when he correctly predicted future sales for eighteen different ads when we first started doing this the global edit just see bb a contact to me that's seen the media and they said hey we really wanna pre test some some ads and i said great awesome here's the software and they said oh we are very skeptical of what you're doing and so what we like to do is test these ads have you walks through how to do it measure them on whatever sixty people and our clients these are as have been released now our clients have ranked each of those ads for the sales bump that they induced we want you to predict blind which ads produced the largest sales bump so they send us eighteen ads three from guinness three from visa three from bud light again different companies these are you know six different companies so each company uses a different ranking system on on assigning sales which is already kind a noisy data because depends on weather and prices and advertising by their people and anyway so we there's an ad up there saying from a the head of strategy at p saying that we predicted a hundred percent perfectly the best ad in each category so we did that for five of the six ads they sent us one red herring which was for bud light bud light sales were also driven by concerts stay sponsored and swag giveaways at bars and pubs and and so that was actually in their sales bump data and so we when we picked up the highest immersion ad for bud light it was not the highest sales that because the was the data we're were messy anyway even in five six is eight three percent accuracy which is pretty darn good paul's team correctly forecast which of those ads drug the most sales by measuring a immersion and they measured a immersion not through mri scanners or big complex tools they did it for an app on a smartwatch so we show that we can actually capture these emerging signals from the cra nerves this like the brain's output file some of these cra nerves pass to the heart so what we showed using drug studies so i can use drugs to to manipulate the system that if i get a time series on heart rate i can transform that into this dopamine oxytocin effect that i've called immersion and i can get that from low cost fitness wearables or smartwatch watches apple watch samsung galaxy watch again because the brain and body are talking to each other once we trace out these pathways then we can do this conversion to find these very subtle changes in the rhythms of the heart because paul can measure a immersion for a smartwatch he's been able to run studies out of the lab and in the real world so we had a very high end luxury retailer french company that i won't mention because i might be nda but a brand that people would know they were very interested in solving that eighty twenty problem why are eighty percent of their sales attributed to twenty percent of their sales staff what are the sales staff doing the problem with luxury retail is even if i give you a nice wearable i can't interrupt that sales process say high shopping customer we wanna have you put on a apple watch while you shop but because emotional states are contagious that's how humans learn to coordinate with each other we said hey put the wearable on your salespeople now every store every retail store has cameras everywhere big because of theft issues so you walk into retail store you've consented to be video taped so let's just film every customer in action and measure the neurologic immersion of the salesperson which should be a reflection of the immersion of the customer and what they found was they could predict which customers would buy based on the immersion of the salesperson with eighty percent accuracy and there was a linear positive linear relationship between the salesperson immersion and them amount of money that the person spent the customer spent bull writes in his book that the amount customers spent increased in line with the sale associates immersion the model showed that for an average customer a fifty percent increase in immersion would result in an an additional forty three dollars of purchases now that won't necessarily explain how these salespeople generate this immersion but it did help the store identify their best sales reps immersion does seem to link with sales buzz and engagement i imagine it's exceedingly hard to consistently create campaigns that generate that this is why marketing is so difficult but if there's one important thing to take away from all of paul's work it's that what customers say and how they act are two very very different things i think the punchline for me here what i've learned is that people lie and they lie not because they're malicious but because we ask them this impossible question is this persuasive safety do you like it would would you watch this again it's so easy to say yes and any normal human who wants to be nice so like man you're awesome do i like a or b better i don't it seems great i mean they're both really nice what are you gonna say you gonna say this is all every of the six ads you show me they're all pieces of crap i hate them all what the hell are you wasting my time for most socially adept to humans are gonna be like oh sure they're much i don't know they're great alright so again i think we're asking too much of the conscious part of the brain to inform the underlying under conscious emotional states that really drive sales i'll finish with a study which i quite like is from consumer and it proves this nicely professor timothy wilson from the university of virginia conducted a study with richard knees bet in which they set up a consumer evaluation of four pairs of tights or panty holes for those of you listening in the states respondents were asked to say which they thought was the best quality and to explain why they had chosen the pair they did they were shown these panty holes or tight in order see one first and a second then a third than a fourth and the results showed what the psychologists expected a statistically significant position effect that meant only twelve percent of people picked the first pair they saw only seventeen percent picked the second thirty percent for the third and forty percent for the fourth in other words participants always rated the third and fourth pair of tights as significantly better than the first two now this had nothing to do with quality because the four pair of were identical in this test people preferred the preferred and fourth options due to the serial position effect the choices we review later on tend to be perceived as better quality as we can compare them to something else however when asked nobody said they preferred those versions they saw later on because of their position instead they all invented reasons as we all would people talked about the sheer of the pair type the elasticity the knit no one noticed that the tights were identical and all participants invented reasons why they preferred one pair over another so next time you attempted to ask a customer why they brought to your product maybe hold back asking a customer what they think won't actually help you understand what's going on in their brain that is all for today's episode of nudge folks i do hope you enjoyed it and if you did i think you'll love paul's book in immersion here's paul sharing a little bit more about his book so the reason i wrote the book phil is that i'm a member of a very strange religion called cl customer lifetime value so it's a lot cheaper to wow that customer have him or herb loyal and be a raving fan and market for me then to pay to acquire a new customer so every customer every time i want to wow them and by measuring objectively the brain responses to customer service experiences then we can create that wow experience i've left the link to the book in the show notes also in the show notes you'll find a link to sign up to my friday newsletter about nine thousand four hundred of you read that newsletter every week and each week i share basically the best behavioral science tip i found in all of my reading from that week it's really quick and easy to read you can actually go back and read all of the previous versions just click the link in the show notes to find those it's totally free to sign up so if you want to sign up click the link in the show notes or go to nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter to sign up for free also in the show notes you'll find a link to the nudge youtube channel the latest video i have done with oliver be it is on the three to four hour rule which some of you may have heard about a previous episode but this youtube video is slightly different we go into a little bit more detail about it and it's starting to garner quite a few more views it's clearly being picked up by the algorithm and it's a really great summary of the rule so if you haven't heard all of her talk about why so many famous scholars like darwin and dickens and virginia wolfe worked for just four hours a day and go to nudge podcast on youtube to check out that video you can just search for nudge podcast on youtube and you will find it that is all for me this week folks thank you so much for listening thank you to paul zach for coming on and i'll will be back next monday for another episode of nacho cheers