How to motivate people to do good for others Erez Yoeli
How can we get people to do more good,
to go to the polls,
give to charity, conserve resources,
or even to do something as simple
as washing their mugs at work
so that the sink isn’t
always full of dirty dishes?
(Laughter)
(Applause)
When I first started
working on this problem,
I collaborated with a power company
to recruit customers for a program
that prevents blackouts
by reducing energy demand during peaks.
The program is based
on a tried-and-true technology.
It’s one the Obama
administration even called
“the cornerstone to modernizing
America’s electrical grid.”
But, like so many
great technological solutions,
it has a key weakness:
people.
People need to sign up.
To try to get people to sign up,
the power company sent them a nice letter,
told them about
all the program’s benefits,
and it asked them to call
into a hotline if they were interested.
Those letters went out,
but the phones, they were silent.
So when we got involved,
we suggested one small change.
Instead of that hotline,
we suggested that they use sign-up sheets
that they’d post near the mailboxes
in people’s buildings.
This tripled participation.
Why?
Well, we all know people care deeply
about what others think of them,
that we try to be seen
as generous and kind,
and we try to avoid
being seen as selfish or a mooch.
Whether we are aware of it or not,
this is a big part of why people do good,
and so small changes that give people
more credit for doing good,
those changes can make
a really big difference.
Small changes like
switching from a hotline,
where nobody will ever find out
about your good deed,
to a sign-up sheet
where anyone who walks by
can see your name.
In our collaborations with governments,
nonprofits, companies,
when we’re trying to get people
to do more good,
we harness the power of reputations.
And we have a simple checklist for this.
And in fact, you already know
the first item on that checklist.
It’s to increase observability,
to make sure people find out
about good deeds.
Now, wait a minute, I know
some of you are probably thinking,
there’s no way people here thought,
“Oh, well, now that
I’m getting credit for my good deed,
now it’s totally worth it.”
And you’re right.
Usually, people don’t.
Rather, when they’re making
decisions in private,
they worry about their own problems,
about what to put on the table for dinner
or how to pay their bills on time.
But, when we make
their decision more observable,
they start to attend more
to the opportunity to do good.
In other words, what’s
so powerful about our approach
is that it could turn on
people’s existing desire to do good,
in this case, to help
to prevent a blackout.
Back to observability.
I want to give you another example.
This one is from a collaboration
with a nonprofit that gets out the vote,
and it does this by sending hundreds
of thousands of letters every election
in order to remind people and try
to motivate them to go to the polls.
We suggested adding
the following sentence:
“Someone may call you to find out
about your experience at the polls.”
This sentence makes it feel
more observable when you go to the polls,
and it increased the effect
of the letter by 50 percent.
Making the letter more effective reduced
the cost of getting an additional vote
from 70 dollars down to about 40 dollars.
Observability has been used to do things
like get people
to donate blood more frequently
by listing the names of donors
on local newsletters,
or to pay their taxes on time
by listing the names of delinquents
on a public website.
(Laughter)
What about this example?
Toyota got hundreds of thousands of people
to buy a more fuel-efficient car
by making the Prius so unique …
(Laughter)
that their good deed
was observable from a mile away.
(Laughter)
Alright, so observability is great,
but we all know, we’ve all seen
people walk by an opportunity to do good.
They’ll see somebody
asking for money on the sidewalk
and they’ll pull out their phones
and look really busy,
or they’ll go to the museum and they’ll
waltz right on by the donation box.
Imagine it’s the holiday season
and you’re going to the supermarket,
and there’s a Salvation Army volunteer,
and he’s ringing his bell.
A few years ago, researchers in San Diego
teamed up with a local chapter
from the Salvation Army
to try to find ways to increase donations.
What they found was kind of funny.
When the volunteer
stood in front of just one door,
people would avoid giving
by going out the other door.
Why?
Well, because they can always claim,
“Oh, I didn’t see the volunteer,”
or, “I wanted to get
something from over there,”
or, “That’s where my car is.”
In other words, there’s lots of excuses.
And that brings us
to the second item on our checklist:
to eliminate excuses.
In the case of the Salvation Army,
eliminating excuses just means
standing in front of both doors,
and sure enough, when they did this,
donations rose.
But that’s when things got kind of funny,
even funnier.
The researchers
were out in the parking lot,
and they were counting people
as they came in and out of the store,
and they noticed that when the volunteers
stood in front of both doors,
people stopped coming
out of the store at all.
(Laughter)
Obviously, they were surprised by this,
so they decided to look into it further,
and that’s when they found that there
was actually a third, smaller utility door
usually used to take out the recycling –
(Laughter)
and now people were going out that door
in order to avoid the volunteers.
(Laughter)
This teaches us
an important lesson though.
When we’re trying to eliminate excuses,
we need to be very thorough,
because people are
really creative in making them.
(Laughter)
Alright, I want to switch to a setting
where excuses can have
deadly consequences.
What if I told you that the world’s
deadliest infectious disease has a cure,
in fact, that it’s had one for 70 years,
a good one, one that works
almost every time?
It’s incredible, but it’s true.
The disease is tuberculosis.
It infects some 10 million people a year,
and it kills almost two million of them.
Like the blackout prevention program,
we’ve got the solution.
The problem is people.
People need to take their medication
so that they’re cured,
and so that they don’t
get other people sick.
For a few years now,
we’ve been collaborating
with a mobile health startup
called Keheala
to support TB patients
as they undergo treatment.
Now, you have to understand,
TB treatment, it’s really tough.
We’re talking about taking
a really strong antibiotic
every single day for six months or more.
That antibiotic is so strong
that it will make you feel sick.
It will make you feel nauseous and dizzy.
It will make your pee turn funny colors.
It’s also a problem because
you have to go back to the clinic
about every week
in order to get more pills,
and in sub-Saharan Africa
or other places where TB is common,
now you’re talking
about going someplace pretty far,
taking tough and slow public transport,
maybe the clinic is inefficient.
So now you’re talking about taking
a half day off of work every week
from a job you desperately
can’t afford to lose.
It’s even worse when you consider the fact
that there’s a terrible stigma,
and you desperately don’t want people
to find that you have the disease.
Some of the toughest stories we hear
are actually from women
who, in these places where
domestic violence can be kind of common,
they tell us that they have to
hide it from their husbands
that they’re coming to the clinic.
So it’s no surprise
that people don’t complete treatment.
Can our approach really help them?
Can we really get them to stick it out?
Yeah.
Every day, we text patients
to remind them to take their medication,
but if we stopped there,
there’d be lots of excuses.
“Well, I didn’t see the text.”
Or, “You know, I saw the text,
but then I totally forgot,
put the phone down
and I just forgot about it.”
Or, “I lent the phone out to my mom.”
We have to eliminate these excuses
and we do that by asking patients
to log in and verify
that they’ve taken their medication.
If they don’t log in, we text them again.
If they don’t log in,
we text them yet again.
If, after three times,
they still haven’t verified,
we notify a team of supporters
and that team will call and text them
to try to get them back on the wagon.
No excuses.
Our approach, which, admittedly,
uses all sorts of behavioral techniques,
including, as you’ve
probably noticed, observability,
it was very effective.
Patients without access to our platform
were three times more likely
not to complete treatment.
Alright,
you’ve increased observability,
you’ve eliminated excuses,
but there’s still a third thing
you need to be aware of.
If you’ve been to Washington, DC
or Japan or London,
you know that metro riders there
will be very careful to stand
on the right-hand side of the escalator
so that people can go by on the left.
But unfortunately,
not everywhere is that the norm,
and there’s plenty of places
where you can just stand on both sides
and block the escalator.
Obviously, it’s better for others
when we stand on the right
and let them go by,
but we’re only expected
to do that some places.
This is a general phenomenon.
Sometimes we’re expected to do good
and sometimes not,
and it means that people
are really sensitive to cues
that they’re expected to do good
in a particular situation,
which brings us to the third
and final item on our checklist:
to communicate expectations,
to tell people,
“Do the good deed right now.”
Here’s a simple way
to communicate expectations;
simply tell them, “Hey, everybody else
is doing the good deed.”
The company Opower
sends people in their electricity bill
a small insert that compares
their energy consumption
with that of people
with similarly sized homes.
And when people find out that their
neighbors are using less electricity,
they start to consume less.
That same approach, it’s been used
to get people to vote or give to charity
or even reuse their towels in hotels.
What about this one?
Here’s another way
to communicate expectations;
simply do it by saying, “Do the good deed”
just at the right time.
What about this one?
This ticker reframes
the kind of mundane task
of turning off the lights
and turns it instead
into an environmental contribution.
The bottom line is,
lots of different ways to do this,
lots of ways to communicate expectations.
Just don’t forget to do it.
And that’s it.
That’s our checklist.
Many of you are working on problems
with important social consequences,
and sometimes you might need
to motivate people to do more good.
The tools you learned today
can help you with this.
And these tools, they don’t require
that you raise additional funds
or that you develop
any more fancy technologies.
They just require harnessing reputations
by increasing observability,
eliminating excuses
and communicating expectations.
Thank you.
(Applause)