Change needs more than just your wellreasoned arguments
[Music]
everything we do
influences other people around us so
each and every one of us
is probably bigger than instagram now i
want to take you on a journey of the
surprising choices that people make
and we use behavioral insights to
understand those choices
and understand how we can turn some of
those choices around
now my journey on behavioral insights
started
when a surprise literally ran into me
i was dressed from head to toe in a
canary suit
that’s not the surprising choice i was
riding my bike
and a van ran into me at about 80
kilometers an hour
the driver of which had his dog
on his lap between him and the steering
wheel
that’s the surprising choice now i was
studying economics
and i decided that i could use my time
more productively
looking at the things that perhaps drove
risk for cyclists and pedestrians so i
started to plot everything and work out
what the associations were
and what i found was that as seat belt
wearing went up
from them being fitted in cars and
people gradually getting the idea and
then being
encouraged through advertising and then
made compulsory when
almost everybody started to wear them
that the rate of deaths and serious
injuries for cyclists
on those same roads followed that trend
so the surprising choice there is that
people consume
risk as we make things safer people do
more risky things
it’s okay if you’re the person with a
seatbelt in the dog in the car but it’s
not
okay if you’re on the other side the
idea i’d like to share
is that the hands lead the heart leads
the head
so that’s back to what we do is
important for us
and for others and for systems there’s a
lot of social research that tracks
trends and through our community and
what we find is that people
do what other people do businesses
follow behind in terms of time and
government follow way behind
because they’re really conservative and
they don’t want to lose the votes so
back to what we do
is the the start is the tap on this
system
now my contention is that we’ve been
slow in making progress on climate
change
because we’ve started from the head
we’re dealing with the facts
and people find that overwhelming so you
shut down
and sort of work out well if it’s too
overwhelming there’s nothing i can do
and you start to perhaps argue the
opposite or just avoid
and perhaps shut down the things that
you do so if we’re going to start from
the hands instead of starting from the
head we’re going to need some tools
to help people change and the three
tools with in three stories that i’d
like to offer you
are firstly framing if we can get people
to bring their best
selves into a situation they can they’re
more likely to get their best
outcome and the next is norming where if
there’s a set of choices
we really need to know that those
choices are safe
we’re going to be okay and not alone if
we do this thing that feels a little bit
different
and finally we need to have an ask
change won’t happen if it’s all
theoretical it needs to be direct
will you change this now which will you
choose now
so the first one on framing is a story
that’s been in a number of psychology
and popular
economics books it’s a real world story
of a child care center that had a
problem
parents turning up late to pick up their
kids and they did something that was a
very obvious solution
none of us want to pay more for
something and none of us want to pay a
fine
so they introduced a fine for turning up
late to pick up your kids
now the surprising choice response to
this was that
more parents turned up late to pick up
their kids after the introduction of the
fine
the problem needed solving at least get
back to where we started so they took
away the fine
and what the response was that the level
of parents turning up late stayed at a
higher level than where it had started
so what’s going on here um is that
we find that doing the right thing by
the person looking after your kids
so bringing your values with you is
really important and really powerful
but we can break that if we shift to a
transactional frame of thinking so we
shift from
values to transaction and then we can’t
put it back together
you know something has shifted in that
relationship that’s a clear example of
how changing the frame changes the
outcome
now i had one in a project i worked on
where there was a group of people
knocking on doors around a waterway
trying to ask households to let an
expert to come to their home
and help them find ways of using less
fertilizer having less impact on the
waterways
and they got about six people to accept
this free offer
and that was a problem so what we did to
solve that problem
was do a community survey and ask people
why do you live here what do you like
about it
are the waterways important do you care
about their future and overwhelmingly we
got yes to all of that the environmental
values are there they’re front and
center and yet people have been saying
no to this free service
to help so we reflected those findings
back in a letter to the community and
said hey this is what you think is a
community
so people could feel validated and not
alone in having their environmental
views
we then rang them up and said hey what
do you like about living here what do
you think about the water
waterwise are you concerned and
can we have somebody come to your house
take away your old fertilizers and find
an alternative for you
and we went from six signed up to 400
and we only stopped to 400 because we
ran out of budget to get the gardeners
in to have the discussion now the next
area is if we’ve got people to bring
their best selves
is to make the choices safe so this was
a
an academic experiment where they went
around the neighborhood and randomized
to randomly put different messages on
people’s doors
all of the messages we’re asking for the
same thing use your air conditioner less
intensively
um so we can reduce energy use um but
the messages that were randomized were
different so one household would get a
message that says
look you can reduce your energy use by
29 another would get hey
if you do this you can reduce your
energy bill by 50
the next house might get a message um
that says look you can do this
and reduce your carbon footprint by a
certain amount and another set of houses
and got a message saying look about
eight out of ten people in your
neighborhood
are modifying the way they use air
conditioners that was put out there and
then the research team went back
and they knocked on people’s doors and
said do you remember getting something
on your door and the recall for the
facts-based ones was
was high it was good that people did
respond to those messages which were
based in facts
and the recall of the message which i’m
calling norms is that what other people
are doing was weak
so this seems opposite to where i’ve
been going with this for the last few
minutes
the surprising outcome the surprising
choice was that the messages
that people remembered got no change
they didn’t reduce their energy use
the messages that people did not
remember got the change
now that doesn’t seem to make sense but
people internalize it
yeah so i’m following a norm that’s safe
i don’t need to think about it
and oh this is what i do it’s really
simple change
and one of the other takeaways from this
is if you’re designing a campaign
never ever believe a focus group because
they will pick those first three
they are big sexy messages they strike
home they say something they just happen
to not work
now that was a positive norm saying look
we can modify our conditional use very
few people are going to argue strongly
with that
you can flip that and things get even
more interesting so this was
a famous keep america beautiful campaign
run in the 1970s
um there was an indigenous person on
land surrounded by litter crying
and other people were seen littering
around it
everybody cried everybody responded to
this advert it was
had very high recall it won the town’s
international advertising award
but researchers years later started to
look at how people respond to seeing
being exposed to listed environments
and what they found was as a base level
of people littering if you show people a
littered environment
the amount of littering goes up about
three times if you show people a little
environment with somebody littering in
it
it goes up about four times so there’s a
strong possibility that this campaign
which wasn’t evaluated formally
had the opposite outcome so we can play
with norms
but they need to be positive ones if we
norm the problem
we get the problem so we’ve brought
people the best selves
in the frame to our discussion we’ve
offered them some self-choice
safer choices now we have to ask them to
change now what you ask
matters and i was working on a project
recently which was the
plastic bag ban for western australia
and the social research in the lead up
showed that there was only
a weak net positive support across the
community for the ban so it’s a big
slice of the community who’s saying
we don’t want the ban the brief was
go and convince them why we need the ban
okay so talk about the issues in the
marine environment and what gets choked
and how the micro particles
you know end up you know in the fish and
so on go and convince these people who
are opposed to the ban
why we need the ban then we looked at
the data
and we found there was no association
between people’s environmental views and
whether they did or didn’t support the
ban
whether they did or didn’t take their
own shopping bags with them already
so we started to talk to people who
opposed the ban
and what we found was they understood
and
agreed and supported all those
environmental concerns
they were concerned about how they’re
going to get their shopping home
that was what made them opposed to the
ban they could not see a way through it
so we flipped the campaign from why
to how so the campaign became
what’s your bag plan this is happening
and you can be a bagger you can take
your bag
if that fails which was the big pain
point for people you can be a boxer ask
the shop for a box
or you can go naked just put the things
in your trolley make a rush for the car
if you’ve driven the car there or you
can juggle it there’s a small amount of
stuff
so the solutions were available to
people
but what’s interesting about this is not
that we had to campaign
on the how is that the why what’s
interesting is that the support for the
ban
post campaign post ban went up by about
50 percent
of that net support measure so what
people do
changes what they think and what they
say and what they support
so it could change how they vote so the
hands are clearly leading the head
so if i’m trying to put this together
and execute a campaign perhaps to reduce
volumes of waste
we move away from this first picture of
a big pile of waste
because it’s saying hey the problem’s
bigger than us it’s bigger than you
there’s nothing you can do about it it’s
a big problem
we’d move through the second one which
is some solutions we can sort things out
and get
waste managed more appropriately and to
the last one where we see
people doing the waste sorting correctly
so we shift through
those ways of telling the story so
the idea i’d like to share if you’re
lucky enough to work in the space of
helping to change the behaviors of
people around you is that the hands
lead now we’ve seen from our stories
at the river it was the framing not
shaming that brought people to the party
bring your best self i’m not going to
judge you for what you’re doing to the
river
we can see from uh what was going on
with the littering that it’s the
solutions not the problem that get
people inspired
we could see what was going on with the
door hangers and a little bit with the
bags as well
that it’s the how and the who rather
than the why
that gets people to to make change and
when we offer them
an ask when we ask for change we have to
offer choice
because people can people love control
so perhaps another contention is we
should ban
environmental education because
the truth is just too inconvenient and
if you’re not lucky enough to work in
the space of changing others
then remember how powerfully the hands
lead that what you do other people see
and then they do and then other people
see them and they do as well
and you in doing what you do in living
an authentic life
living your values making environmental
choices you’re more important than
thank you
you