The Housefly Effect (eBook)

How Nudge Psychology Steers Your Everyday Behaviour

Eva van den Broek & Tim den Heijer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Bedford Square Publishers (Verlag)
978-1-83501-143-0 (ISBN)

Infos

THE INSTANT INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER How do house flies help save millions of euros? How do the layout of casinos keep you gambling? We are not nearly as rational as we'd like to think - every day we overestimate our ability to resist temptation. Effective advertising experts use this to nudge us, making the most of our natural behaviour to get the results they want. In order to process the millions of decisions we make each day, our brains take shortcuts. We are fooled by drugs that don't contain active ingredients, traffic light buttons that aren't connected, and the obsolete 'save' feature in MS Word - these are all examples of placebos that can be surprisingly reassuring. There are countless things that affect our behaviour: reward and punishment, beauty and attraction, and the human tendency to follow the crowd. THE HOUSE FLY EFFECT reveals how to recognize some of the things that affect our behaviour everyday and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage. It offers an accessible, fun and practical introduction to behavioural science and features insightful examples from the laboratory, advertising, and marketing - as well as from daily life. Sometimes the smallest things can have a surprisingly large effect on your behaviour. 'Tim & Eva have written a brilliant book. They explain to the reader the practical implications of behavioural science with light-hearted charm that will resonate with a broad range of readers'. Richard Shotton, author of the bestseller The Choice Factory

Eva van den Broek holds a PhD in behavioral economist and is the founder of Behavioral Insights The Netherlands. She aims to improve policy with a better understanding of behavioral insights and is a sought-after lecturer and events speaker. Tim den Heijer is a creative strategist, copywriter and founder of B.R.A.I.N. Creatives. He has 20 years of experience in advertising and has worked for some of the biggest brands on the planet.

Textauszug

Introduction: The world’s most famous fly

The natural habitat of the world’s most famous fly is Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Male travellers may have seen it many times, whereas women may pass through blissfully unaware, as you won’t find this fly buzzing around in the air, or mounted in a glass cabinet, but in the urinals. That’s right, we’re talking about one of those painted flies in the gents’. The little fly first appeared in the airport in the early 1990s, but the idea wasn’t altogether new. In Stratford-upon-Avon you can admire urinals with bees painted onto them dating back to around 1880, exemplifying typical British humour, as the Latin for bee, apis, sounds rather like what you’d use the urinal for. In the 1950s the Dutch army similarly had urinals with a little target inside. The fly in the airport toilet serves the same purpose: it gets men to aim more accurately, which doesn’t happen otherwise – especially with jetlag, in transit – requiring cleaners to come and go with mops and buckets, in turn raising costs for the airport and inconveniencing flustered travellers faced with a closed toilet. The little fly gives men something to aim at, and it works, reducing ‘splashback’, the technical term for what ends up on the bathroom floor, by 50 percent. The cleaning costs also dropped substantially.1, fn1 That’s why this insect has been emulated worldwide, and in other forms too, from a little goal net to competitive digital games. In Iceland after the banking crisis you could even aim at the faces of bankers.

Nevertheless the fly is far more famous in a field completely separate from hygiene: that of the behavioural sciences. Such a simple fake fly defies every classic ‘rule’ of behavioural change. Since the ancient Greeks and Romans, those rules have read roughly as follows: if you want to change someone’s behaviour, you offer well chosen, clearly worded and carefully structured information and arguments (logos); you package these in an emotionally convincing manner (pathos); and you explain what makes you a credible messenger (ethos). It sounds as if it might work, and sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t. No matter how clearly you explain to people that smoking is unhealthy – no matter which celebrity, scientist or influencer tells the story, or how moving, urgent or funny the commercials may be – a great many smokers continue to smoke. Behavioural change is a massive challenge.

A secret steer

The fact that it’s so difficult to adjust behaviour is a serious problem, because whether you stop to think about it or not, we all try to do it, generally without dishonest or malicious intent. The truth is, humans are herd animals through and through; we need each other to achieve anything. So we have to ensure that colleagues work well together, citizens stick to the rules and customers buy things. It’s the dentist’s job to make sure you floss, the fundraiser’s to persuade you to support the good cause and the DJ’s to get you to throw your arms in the air on the dance floor. People have to spur each other into action. But how do you achieve that when arguments and information aren’t working? Threats? Coercion? Such methods might be appropriate for the army and the police, but not so much for selling shampoo. Bribery, then, with gifts, discounts and bonuses? They sometimes work, but often they’re counterproductive (a matter we’ll return to in detail later), and then you’re left picking up the – devalued – pieces.

So what’s the solution? That’s where behavioural scientists, like Eva, come into play, along with advertising creatives, like Tim. They see that, oddly enough, that silly little fly really is effective. No stick or carrot, and yet that coveted behavioural change materialises.fn2 So how does it work? The fly in the pot is often cited as the textbook example of a nudge, made famous by Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler. Loosely defined, it’s a small change in the environment that makes the desired behaviour easier, more fun or the obvious choice. Aiming at the fly is not the result of a conscious thought process, but seems to follow ‘naturally’.

It’s really not so exceptional when you think about it. In fact, your behaviour is being secretly nudged everywhere all the time, often by things so ordinary you never even stop to think about them. In the shops you take the familiar brand within easy reach. You book the holiday destination with guaranteed warm weather and head for the restaurant where you see the most people sitting. In the supermarket you start out sticking to the plan with lettuce and tomato, but you sneak a last-minute chocolate bar into the trolley when you reach the checkout. You’re willing to pay a bit extra for a T-shirt from your favourite brand. And on your way home you’ll take a detour to come in at just over 10,000 steps. It all seems so normal, but in all those cases your behaviour is influenced by something you barely notice. When something apparently small has a big effect on people’s actions, we call it the housefly effect, inspired by that fly in the toilet, but also by the butterfly effect . You know, that butterfly flapping its wings in Florence and setting off a chain reaction that culminates in a tornado in Texas. It’s reassuring to know that the housefly effect is far more predictable, which means you can learn to recognise it, sometimes avoid it and often deploy it in a targeted fashion.

What we mean by houseflies and housefly effects

It’s worth noting here that a housefly isn’t some complicated mechanism in your brain (although it does start there). It’s simply something researchers see happen in the world. For instance, when the arrows on traffic signs point upwards, there are fewer traffic jams than when they point downwards. When you give that fish a different name, people suddenly eat far more of it! What all these cases have in common is that something small has a huge effect on behaviour. In this book we call that small ‘something’ the housefly. So the fact that students borrow far less money when you remove a little asterisk on a website is a housefly effect. We call the asterisk itself the fly. Often such effects have been extensively researched by behavioural scientists and have received their own labels. In such cases we mention the names, as they help spread the story. Instead of saying we should ‘do something different from the competition to stand out’, advertising expert Tim says we should ‘use the Von Restorff effect’. Sounds good, right? And behavioural scientist Eva would probably struggle to convince policy makers when saying that ‘people like doing nothing’, but gets a more positive reception for ‘inertia causes people to be drawn to the default option’. In short, if you find the terms useful or fun, then hang on to them. We’ve indicated them with a little fly , so you can locate them easily in the text. They can also be found in the glossary at the back.

Houseflies come in all shapes and sizes, and we’ll introduce you to a great many of them in this book, from the sneaky houseflies used by the supermarkets to fill your basket, to the kind houseflies that get you to drive more safely or help you live a healthier life. We show you which houseflies you’re better off avoiding due to their association with politicians, pickup artists and casinos, and which flies you can use to get your friends to come to your favourite restaurant, or your child to clear their plate. All the while we’ll be using these effects on you as well, as you read this book. We’ll (mostly) give you due notice. What do you think of the effect effect , for example? This housefly effect amounts to people finding something more interesting if you call it an effect. That’s right: the title of this book isn’t a complete coincidence.

But first this

In this book we’ll be sharing a whole load of scientific insights with you, and we’ll do our best to share responsibly and in manageable chunks. We want to inspire you and set you alight with our fascination for human behaviour and the science behind it. In order to do that, we sometimes have to simplify things. Not too much, but enough to make the book useful and readable. We do so consciously, although we occasionally have qualms when there’s so much more to say! Still, we always do so with the best of intentions.

So if you know your way around the subject matter and feel we’ve oversimplified things, you’re probably right. Don’t take what we say about the brain, for instance, as a starting point for brain surgery, but you can rely on it in general, everyday situations. Keep a few things in mind. We live in the golden age of behavioural science and new discoveries are constantly being made. Sometimes it’s out with the old, in with the new. No doubt we’ll need to adjust things in future editions. More importantly, behavioural sciences work differently from the laws of physics. The earth revolves around the sun, but not all the time? Nonsense. But such statements are commonplace in behavioural sciences: people want both to belong and to stand out, like familiarity and novelty, love to be given a choice but hate choosing. Behaviour depends on...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.11.2024
• Übersetzer: Anna Asbury and Laura Vroomen
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Behavioural Psychology • Decision-Making • Interactions • nudge theory • Problem Solving • Social Psychology • Social Science
• ISBN-10: 1-83501-143-8 / 1835011438
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83501-143-0 / 9781835011430