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

instagram

thank you

you