chart. It looked something like the image below.

Three appointments an hour, every day, for ONE MONTH; that’s a lot, right? A hell of a lot: four hundred and twenty ‘no-shows’ using a conservative

calculation. Therefore, no-shows must be prevalent, and – one can only infer from a large number such as this – are ‘approved’ by the group as a way of behaving. Must be: “We’re all missing appointments, I’m not so bad for missing mine, am I? The hospital are used to it . . . ” you’d think. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

However, this is a strange truth.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (The second version.)

‘Liberating’ (I’m being generous) the number of appointment no-shows “Few people miss them, I’m an outsider for missing my previous one, they’re not used to it . . . ” from the number of appointment shows presents a lop-sided view. While it is true that there were four hundred and twenty ‘nos’ totaling one month, there were four thousand six hundred and twenty ’shows’ totaling the remaining eleven months.

Already, that changes thing’s a bit. But we can do better.

One month out of twelve is 8% of the total. Only 8% of appointments were missed, or, 92% of appointments were kept.

That’s even more powerful; all true, all real, all the same data. Let’s visualize that.

Eight out of every one hundred people fails to show for an appointment. Now, no-shows are not prevalent, and – one can only infer from a small number such as this – are ‘not approved’ by the group as a way of behaving. Can’t be: “Few people miss them, I’m an outsider for missing my previous one, they’re not used to it . . . ” you’d think. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

(For comparison, In 2009/10 the total number of outpatient appointments missed totaled 6.7 million, or 7.9 per cent.)

_______

Delivering one’s message in favour of the intended outcome sits in the epicenter of behavioural communications. Using prevalence to drive that behaviour is not a new thing (as I have written about here and here). But with 84.2 million planned hospital visits per year in the UK (2008/9 numbers), you can see how well-meaning messages can be garbled by ignorance, and how much of a difference they can make (either way).

Indeed, beyond appointments, behaviour sits at the heart of our health issues: Ralph Keeney’s paper in Operations Research cites deaths from individual’s choices increasing from 5% of deaths in 1900 to 55% in 2000; Dr David Halpern [video link] talks about the same. We’re not dying of disease and pestilence anymore – and the top killer isn’t cancer, heart disease, smoking, or overeating – we’re dying from the choices we make about our lifestyles (that have readily available alternatives).

The least we could do is make the communication interface in hospitals fall in favour of cost effective positive health outcomes.

(And we can start by marginalising missed appointments.)

Today, not only can we discuss these things knowledgeably, but we can fillet them with the precision of a surgeon to show how you can create, and destroy, behaviour.

We turn to US drink-drivers courtesy of Charles K Atkin’s ‘Mass Communication Effects on Drinking and Driving’ for a perfect example.

” . . . drinkers underestimate the degree of social disapproval of drunk drunk driving (fully two-fifths believe that others excuse drunk driving, while just 5 percent of the public is actually tolerant) . . . “

Clearly, the gap between the perceived behavour of the average person and the average actual behaviour is large. It is also unknown (to the drink-drivers), which makes it stable – there is no reason for the drinkers to think otherwise.

But this is not the only perception-behaviour gap that drink-drivers have. They:

” . . . overestimate the statistical risks of both crashes and police apprehension (the typical driver perceives that the odds of arrest while driving drunk on a given evening are 1 in 100, while police figures show the chances are 1 in 2,000).”

Again, the gap between the perceived behavour of the average person (policeman pulling them over) and the average actual behaviour (rarely getting pulled over) is large. There is no reason for the drinkers to think otherwise so it’s stable.

They overestimate tolerance, and underestimate getting caught.

With this information you could do two things:
1. You could decrease drink-driving by reflecting the higher incidence of group disapproval
2. You could increase drink-driving by reflecting lower chance of being caught

Turning the mirror on the person’s behaviour relative to the group forces change until a new balance is achieved. This is how normative functions create or destroy behaviour. They are stable, and balanced, unless new information about group behaviour is observed which is different to expectations; quasi-stationary equilibria.

‘Name it, pair it, shape it’ may be the watchwords for inspiring recycling behavior, but they aren’t going to work on TV. You can’t physically reach out through the telly and fiddle with the bins, and simply saying that phrase only appeals to the rational. Don’t bother. (Seriously.)

So what’s left?

The stuff that’s left
Talk to any behavioural communications specialist and they’ll tell you how important norms are in driving behaviour. This is correct. Mostly they mean the descriptive norm (characterized as permissive behaviour that informs by example) and a bit of implicit norms (characterized by unapproved behaviour that curtails action). There are others, but we’ll leave them.

How do they work?

A car park in Texas
Back in 1990 a likely bunch of researchers – Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren – researched littering behavior by dressing a Texas carpark with litterbins, stooges, and handbills (or, flyers, if you’re in the UK). Every car had a handbill placed on the windscreen under a windscreen wiper. “The secret is to avoid validating the . . . actions of a small minority”Many drivers would want to remove this before driving off. We want to focus on two scenarios. The first, a purposefully litter-strewn carpark with a stooge briefed to wait until an unsuspecting car owner returned and walk by in their eye-line dropping ‘their’ handbill on the floor. The second, a purposefully clean carpark with a stooge briefed to wait until an unsuspecting car owner returned and walk by in their eye-line dropping ‘their’ handbill on the floor.

Astonishing results:

- Nearly 55% of people dropped trash when they saw the stooge drop trash in a littered car park.
– Only 6% of people dropped trash when they saw the stooge drop trash in a clean car park.

Seeing someone litter in a littered environment amplified littering as an insider’s activity – it is prevalent, it is approved. Seeing someone litter in a clean environment amplified littering as an outsider’s activity – it is not prevalent, it is not approved.

This ‘double shot’ is powerful.

Take the car park to the telly

In 2003 Cialdini, Barrett, Bator, Demaine, Sagarin, Rhoads, and Winter examined the effects of aligning descriptive and injunctive norms on recycling behavior using specially designed adverts placed on an Arizona regional public service television network. The ad was carefully crafted in two important ways. Firstly, to show a majority of people both engaging with recycling and speaking approvingly of their behaviour – in this way they exposed the descriptive condition (permissive behaviour that informs by example). Secondly, to show the actors speak disapprovingly of a single individual in the scene who failed to recycle – in this way they exposed the injunctive condition (unapproved behaviour that curtails action), and aligned it with the descriptive.

- These ads increased recycling in the areas exposed by over 25% compared with similar areas where the ad never played: Another massive swing in behaviour.

Bring the telly to the trash bin

The ‘Don’t Mess with Texas’ 1980s American littering campaign has been written up extensively (Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick is a good’un). In summary, the 1980s Texan youth continued littering on highways despite fines in the thousands of dollars. Their distain for the law was matched only by

their love of Texas’ sporting and country-music heroes; these were the people the youth aspired to be. A TV campaign was created using home-grown stars such as Mike Scott (pictured), Lance Armstrong, Chuck Norris, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Owen Wilson, and many more who all spoke directly to camera imploring the viewer to stop ‘messing with Texas’ (injunctive – this is not approved) as they were shown throwing litter in a bin (descriptive – this is prevalent).

- Within five years roadside litter was down by over 70%.

The normative representation avoided the negatives of guilt/shame and instead gave positives of pride and group identity.

Influencing intentions: more detail

While the Arizona recycling ad test does not separate pre-existing attitudes, humour, and other factors that may have influenced recycling, they found an intriguing difference. ‘ . . . influenced intentions directly . . .”The injunctive affected people’s conscious assessments of the ads’ persuasiveness. The descriptive ‘influenced intentions directly’. Why?

An overt appeal to behavior – a speaking actor – is routed though our cognitive capacity. It is a rule-governed, calculating, reasoned effort that has to negotiate a cognitive assault course. ” Just as fish school, and insects swarm, the intuitive, rapid, and associative effort rules . . .”Viewing the raw behaviour of others – seeing people recycle – plugs that behavior straight into our brain: we get the answer is if for ‘free’. It is an intuitive, rapid, and associative effort.

Just as fish school, and insects swarm, the intuitive, rapid, and associative effort rules.

How do we codify all of this research knowledge?

Memorable phrase

So, instead of ‘Name it, pair it, shape it’ for preparing and arranging recycling bins in situ, for synthetic representations on television we have:
- Popularise one
- Marginalise the other

Where the ‘other’ is non-recycling behavior. As Cialdini said in testimony to the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education at the US House of Representatives in 2007,

“The secret is to avoid validating the . . . actions of a small minority . . . by making them appear the rule rather than the exception.”

_______

Were the average behaviour of a group is different to the perceived behaviour of the average person, highlighting one or the other can create or destroy behaviour. This is the quasi-stationary foundation of normative behaviour, and where mass communication can do it’s work. It’s why the TV ads popularise one, and marginalise the other.

WIth this so effective, those that write the scripts truly have the power to change behaviour; Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

chatting to friends, or thinking about where we’re going. And it’s this system 2 cognitive load that defers decisions to our impulsive system 1 thinking. How do you deal with that?

Some answers: shape it

Plenty of studies into recycling have been done, but none focused on the shape of the bin. Does this make a difference? Sean Duffy and Michelle Verges (at the time, respectively, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers–Camden, and assistant professor at Indiana University) can tells us. They experimented by arranging bins side-by-side in ” . . . shaped bin lids reduced food-waste contamination by 95%. Ninety. Five. Per. Cent.”groups of three. They were all prominently stickered as ‘Trash’, ‘Aluminum-Glass-Plastic’, or ‘Paper’. Some groups-of-three all had open lids, replicating standard waste containers. Other groups-of-three had shaped lids: the ‘Trash’ option had a push-able flaps; ‘Aluminum-Glass-Plastic’ had a push-able flaps with a circular hole cut out of the centrer mirroring the shape of the expected drinks containers; ‘Paper’ had a lid with two slits. There were two sets of results: the first was amazing.

– The shaped bin lids were shown to increase correct recycling by 35%.

That is a huge jump – rates of increase in the single digits would be received with excitement. But 35% is great. However, it’s overshadowed by the second set of results: if the first were amazing, the second were astounding.

– The shaped bin lids reduced food-waste contamination by 95%.

Ninety. Five. Per. Cent. And it does this by creating cognitive load: you have to stop and concentrate on what you’re doing to select a suitable hole. It requires your attention. This is enough to get to our 95% figure. Duffy and Verges say:

‘Placing an object through a small hole or narrow slit requires guided action and cognitive effort not required when simply discarding recyclables into recycling containers having wide openings.’

If you’re going to do only one thing, then this is it.

No answer (even though it sounds like it)
There are some experiments with ‘talking bins’. In Sweden VW’s Fun Theory built the ‘Världens Djupaste Soptunna’, or the ‘World’s Deepest Bin’. It express a cartoon-style sound of an object falling from a great height with every waste disposal effort, and collected nearly twice as much litter as a nearby un-doctored litter bin (72 kg versus 41 kg). However, this seems to be less about encouraging use than it is about reinforcing use for those who engage: the unheard sound fails to ‘prime the pump’. Perhaps that’s unfair, as in Berlin, Germany, they have aural bins that say either ‘Vielen danke/Thank you’ or ‘Welcome to Berlin’ when you deposit an item of rubbish about which Sepp Fiedler (who works at the company behind the idea) said to CNN: ‘The people like it. They pass them on the streets and start laughing because it’s unusual to have this sort of contact with a litter bin’

However, it’s hard to get away from the fact that they’re only retrospectively functional compared to Duffy & Verges shaped lids which shout ‘Yo! I’m for paper/cans/waste’, simply by the look/shape of the bin.

____________

This research leads us to a clear place:
1. Name it (‘Landfill’ bin, etc)
2. Pair it (with a normal bin next to the recycling bin(s))
3. Shape it(’s appeture to mirror the intended item)

The most important thing about this approach? It works today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and even next decade. Don’t do a green week. Don’t appeal to the rational. Do examine behavioural insights.

(I told you I’ve bin recycling behavour.)

(Hat tip to Civilian Agency, from whom I saw a tweet about the Green Office Week.

prevalence informs our behaviour directly. Seeing a two-sided debate informs us that it is (it must be) a two-sided debate.

And we get that ‘answer’ as-if for free – it hardly touches the sides.

____________
At its most basic, this is normative behaviour at work – the perceived behaviour of the average person usually correlates with actual average behaviour. This is not to say that a normative understanding is inherently wrong – it’s not, as evolutionary psychology tells us it’s pretty useful to correlate the perceived behaviour with actual behaviour because it’s usually a ‘good bet’, and we don’t have to think too hard to be able to act on it. But that is also its downfall; we rarely see it for what it is because we adopt without looking.

This is why the balance of reporting itself informs our opinion of the subject irrespective of actual content. I posit that we don’t realise it: and the evidence suggests I’m right. And by extension, I say that people in the media don’t know realise much presentation affects the understanding irrespective of the actual content.

The only way to deal with this – short of having ninety-seven manmade climate change scientists ‘for’ and three ‘against’ in a debate – is to question the presentation.

Whilst this is a problem of presentation in and for the media, it also a problem outside the media. In fact, it’s a problem unrecognised when presenting choice to your partner about where to eat for dinner as much as it is a problem unrecognised when presenting debate to a nation. You can’t avoid it. (You can only be vigilant.)

No slippage
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute talk about channel factor in terms of physical availability. I am not a fan of adding unnecessary layers to the psychology of situational circumstance, which is already a subset of context, and specifically physical availability feels rather simplistic. However, Professor Byron Sharp highlights a great example of channel factors at work for the UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s. Over the winter/Christmas period of 2010 they had phenomenal sales which saw them beat previous year sales and move from the third to the second largest chain in the UK.

Their CEO thanks one crucial factor – salted car-parks. They spread 12,000 tonnes of salt on the snow and ice to make sure their stores were open and useable. A clever little ‘1-800 Mattress’ for car-parks.

____________
Finding where the ‘river wants to flow’ is a useful colloquial expression for finding large behavioural response to small situational change and serves as a good rule of thumb.
However, I don’t have a cute phrase to encapsulate why we sometimes ignore a lack of situational circumstance and simply force our desire on the context in which we find ourselves – an elegant solution to which is this Hanger Chair. (I don’t hang my clothes on chairs, of course. I don’t! Honestly! Do you?) (Hat tip to a tweet by BJ Fogg, a Stanford innovator & psychologist, and well worth a follow.)

We can see that small differences in situation can elicit large shifts in behaviour – proof that considering context is important. Deriving the location of situational differences, however, is as much the purview of behavioural insights as it is the blind-spot of a traditional marketing.

That much is clear, right?

Asked to write a blog for Green Alliance think tank about communication and sustainability.

Oliver wrote about normative behaviour – more specifically the injunctive norm (what we’re told is approved of) and the descriptive norm (what we see others doing) employed in service of sustainable behaviour.

The Green Alliance blog has many guest bloggers, among them are Duncan Brack, Chris Huhne’s former special adviser, Dame Fiona Reynolds, director-general of the National Trust, Dr Caroline Jackson, a former Conservative MEP, and Val Curtis, an evolutionary psychologist and Director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Read the full post – and join in the comments if you so wish – here.

See what twitter’s saying about the piece here

Scroll back to California in the noughties, and you’ll find Mark Martinez from Southern California Edison dealing with spikes in demand in the same way many electricity generators do – through complex technological forecasting and running costly ‘quick start’ gas fired power stations. He tried a new approach, which involved firing off peak demand price alerts to his customers via email, automatic phone calls, and text messages. It was well meaning. It was sensible. It was hopeless.

Invisible energy
He wasn’t sure what to do. He had seen some ‘Ambient Orbs‘ – a glass globe which glowed different colours based on input – hacked by users to show stock prices, ovulation dates (yes, really), and energy use at home. So – on a hunch – he bought a hundred or so, programmed them to listen to Southern California Edison electricity generation numbers and handed them out to the same customers he’d been emailing, phoning, and texting. The Orb glowed turquoise during inexpensive off-peak hours and red when the price of electricity was high. Among those gifted, peak-hour energy use dropped by 40% according to Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine. (Check out these real-world stats from Ambient Devices)

Attentive
Martinez describes the Orb as being relatively benign until it glows red, which is a perfect description ” . . . we are engaging finally with that ‘in there’ proximal concept of psychology rather than the ‘out there’ distal concepts such as . . . technology.”of pre-attentive processing taking the place of his cognitively demanding emails and phone calls. We all have some brain processing available on a low tick-over, which notifies us of things like the red glow, or our name called-out in a crowded room. You’ll see pre-attentive processing incorporated in the design of aircraft cockpits, too. It is a much better solution to his problem. The psychology wins. And Martinez isn’t the only energy generator to realize this.

Stout savings
Tim Stout, when he was the vice-president of energy efficiency at National Grid in Massachusetts, said in a 2009 article by Grist.org that technological solutions are the default solution to energy production efficiency, but

‘changing consumer behavior is the next wave of savings that needs to be tapped.’

In his opinion, the psychology is required. And it comes in many forms.

Opaque no more
In Norway ‘informative billing’ approaches have seen non-painful reductions in energy consumption of up to 15%. Disaggregated billing (such as pie chart breakdowns) shows use at the appliance level and prompts useful investment by homeowners, which is very logical response. The greater clarity in amount and cost afforded by other ‘informative’ methods such as metering, trailing averages, seasonal comparison, and daily weather-based suggestions, to name a few, bring clarity and immediacy to a traditionally opaque and distant purchase.

Indeed, in 1994 Kempton and Layne said of traditional energy billing ‘consider groceries in a hypothetical store totally without price markings, billed via a monthly statement . . . How could grocery shoppers economise under such a billing regime?’

We’re lost without the psychology. The benefits of aligning reality with our psychology are not the province solely of energy-use.

Favourable government
The UK government coalition’s Behavioural Insights Team was established in July 2010 to use cognitive-behavioural theories to help refine decision making in ” . . . companies that have innovative business models and are based off behavioral economics have proven to be extraordinarily successful . . . “favour of constituents. One strand of work investigated increasing tax compliance (helpful, in that any system without leaks is as fair as intended for constituents), for which they trialed a letter which told recipients that ‘9 out of 10 people in Britain pay their tax on time’. Additionally, some were informed (the truth) that most people in the local area had already paid their tax. This ‘provincial norm’ is a very powerful message structure, and in this case returned a 15% increase in tax, or an extrapolated £160 million to the Exchequer over the six-week trial period.

Halfway around the world, in a similar – and earlier – test the psychologist Michael Wenzel worked on

Australian tax compliance using a similar normative approach where the most successful message was in the injunctive mode stating that although many thought that other people weren’t honest – ‘in reality normal social practice was honesty in tax returns’. This saw the value of the return on the ‘deductions’ part of the tax form where food, travel, and other expenses are documented, drop from $286 to $151. A crude projection of this $135 reduction onto the approximately 5 million Australians who make claims on the ‘deductions’ section would see an extra $675,000,000 of gross income declared. The psychology is certainly valuable.

And as much as you can stop burning cash, you can start burning carbs.

Brain and brawn
Two Harvard undergrads were inspired by their Harvard Behavioural Economics course to start up a not-for-profit gym called Gym-pact, which is designed specifically to combat temporal discounting (a dimension of construal useful to economists) by charging customers when they don’t go, rather than when they do. Why? For all but ” . . . tech hubs are not behaviouralists’ ground zero”the hardiest gym goers, the fight between the instinctive, compulsive, System 1 brain and the rational, planning, System 2 brain means that in-the-moment staying on the sofa watching the TV seems much more attractive than going to the gym, even though we’d promised ourselves (yesterday!) that we’d go. Putting a financial penalty right in the middle of the in-the-moment consideration aligns the financial penalty with the health penalty of not going. This never happens with the ‘sunk cost’ of already having paid gym fees for the month. The psychology helps you stick to your plans.

So where is the epicenter of all these thrusting business-forward approaches?

Hello? Where are you?
Sherry Coutu writes excitedly in Wired UK about growing tech start-up hubs in New York, London, Berlin, and of course, Silicon Valley. But tech hubs are not behaviouralists’ ground zero. (And if you read Alex Madrigal in The Atlantic, even the tech hubs are not the tech startups’ ground zero: “@alexismadrigal we need a new paradigm for tech #startups. Mobile-local-social happened. Now what?”.) Bill Aulet, MD of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center speaking to Susan Johnston in the Boston Globe, recognizes the verve of Silicon Valley in behavioural businesses such as Gym-pack, and yet laments the fact that they can’t grow in that environment

“There [Silicon Valley], they think you solve problems with technology. But these companies that have innovative business models and are based off behavioral economics have proven to be extraordinarily successful.”

He’s right, behavioural-informed businesses are successful – extraordinarily successful. Perhaps because the Howard Stevenson definition of entrepreneurship as “ . . . the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled” is turned on its head simply because behaviourists have the resources ‘currently controlled’ in the form of peer-reviewed psychology and empirical testing. A behavioural business can deliver on its promise from a standing start. Are they a type of ‘entrepreneur+’?

Whether that characterization helps or hinders, it’s thanks to the work on the ‘business of behaviour’ by Gym-pact, Wetzel, the Behavioural Insights Team, Martinez, Stout, Kempton and Layne, and many, many others that we are engaging finally with that ‘in there’ proximal concept of psychology rather than the ‘out there’ distal concepts such as geography and technology. Claude Lévi-Strauss would be pleased.

All we need now is our Silicon Valley.

distinguish from others in category. The secondary effect of these is that they supply another value system on which consumers can lean in order to make a choice. To give this some light and shade, let me take you to Los Angeles.

In LA County in the late 1990’s State officials would inspect the hygiene status of all restaurants (Jin, Leslie, PDF download). They were graded with a letter: A, B, C, etc. and given advice on how to improve their score. Those that fell below the acceptable threshold were shut down. “The hygiene score – just like price – was ubiquitous, consistent across all restaurants, and obviously displayed. This helps restaurants compete on something other than price . . . “In 1997 they made one change: they passed a law to force all restaurant owners to display publicly their hygiene score. Now, this had many effects – including the primary aim of reducing hospitalisation from food-borne illness – including the introduction of a new choice system for consumers not based on price. The hygiene score – just like price – was ubiquitous, consistent across all restaurants, and obviously displayed. This helps restaurants compete on something other than price, and can stop the race to ‘win’ a price war in order to attract customers, which only results in a tight price spread around one price point offering little high- or low-end options (see the Bertrand Paradox for more on this phenomenon). Now the metric of success is price point and consequent profit, not simply crude sales/turnover. (Interestingly, one of the only categories not able to do this is the ‘value range’ so popular in Supermarkets. They communicate to consumers quite clearly that their only measure is price. They must live or die by that claim, too.)

Both approaches describe, diagnose, and treat the problems.

Charles IL Atkin may well have made assumptions about advertising that lead him to conclude it is a weak influencer. As Samuel L. Jackson says in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), assumptions make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘mptions’, but, the cognitive-behavioural theories, and bit of Ehrenberg-Bass, can save you – who wouldn’t want that?