#626 - Richard Shotton - 8 Psychology Hacks Behind The World’s Biggest Businesses

30:49And of the 28 they look at, the most effective overall is volume scarcity. There aren't many of these hotel rooms left. Next is social proof. Lots of people have bought this type of hotel room. Third is why I would call time scarcity, what they call urgency. You haven't got long to act. So you're absolutely right for e -commerce people. I think scarcity is probably one of the first biases, time or volume that you would think about testing for your product. But I guess going back to that point made earlier around context is important. What you probably started to see here is, well, commercial and charity, what works the two, you know, they're varied enough that maybe you can't translate some of the findings from commercial settings into charity and vice versa.

31:33I'm thinking about my booking .com experience, which I use pretty regularly. And I'm thinking, ex many people have booked this room today. like, hurry, these rooms are going fast. There's only this many left that we've got in our allocation and all this stuff. So every single being, there's taken all of the boxes that you've spoken about there. So the next one, which I think is really important and it's important not only for marketing, but I think for personal life too, which is framing. Oh, yeah, very good one. So it's essentially the idea that the same fact can have a market leafly different effects dependent on the language of this used.

32:10So the study that I discuss is a 1974 one from Lothstone Palmer, University of Washington, and they play a video and you can get this if you people Google, Lothstone Palmer Experimental Video Car Crash, you will see a 15 second video of two cars crashing into each other. So have a look at that. And then what the psychologists did was get a large group of people and they said to some people, how fast those cars going when they smashed together? Other people, how fast were those cars going when they contacted? Other people, how fast were they going when they collided? So they used six or seven different words and then they asked people to estimate the speed of the two cars in Mars Perrero.

32:57And when the group who heard the words smashed, when they estimate the speed, they think it's 40 miles point eight per hour. The group that had the verb contacted, they think it's 31 .8 miles per hour. So even though everyone is seeing exactly the same footage, there is a variance of 27 % in terms of their speed estimate. Now, the psychologists were interested in police witness statements, how people could be influenced by a skilled interviewer. And so they were kind of concerned with how a dubious police person could manipulate findings. But I think if you're remarketing what you can take from this is the language that they use to sell your products can be varied to huge impact.

33:55So for example, one of my favorite studies that isn't very well known is one from a Texan or a University of Texas psychologist called Peterson and he gets a large group of people shows them an e -commerce site and for every purchaser one of the items they're trying to buy just isn't there. Now sometimes on the site it's labeled as unavailable, some people see out of stock, other people see sold out. When he questions those groups as to how irritate they are with the website, he sees a swing of 15 % with the people who see unavailable being the most irritated people who see sold out the least irritated.

34:39Now everyone is essentially like the law for some Palmer study they're experiencing the same thing on an objective level. It's just the language that's used to describe that situation varies. And if the website emphasizes unavailable, they're emphasizing their logistical magnitude. If the website emphasizes sold out, they're emphasizing how popular this product is. They're harnessing social proof. So the argument here is people do not experience events. They experience the description of events. And You can radically change people's reaction to the same situation. One of my favorite examples of this was from Sam Harris and he says that everybody knows what it's like to finish a workout.

35:29You are sweating and panting on the floor and you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and your heart and your heart rates through the roof. This is a situation which oddly, despite being kind of objectively uncomfortable at the time, is actually oddly enjoyable exclusively because of the framing that you place around it. Now, if you were to spontaneously feel that while you were sat in traffic on your way to work, you would ring the hospital. You would think there is something terrible with me. So, our story of what we tell ourselves around an experience very much is the determinant of the experience as well.

36:03Like, the story that we tell ourselves largely influences what the experience feels like to us. Yeah, so that's a, I've not thought about it that way. That's a lovely example. I'm never I don't think about these experiments in a person, I always think about them from a commercial setting. But I came back from a stank do you want and the fly landed very badly. And I've always been not particularly keen on flying, but that freaked me out and I developed a fear of flying. So I'd have to fly for work, yet I spent the entire flight thinking what would it be like to fall for five minutes from this plane that's bound to explode in the air.

36:38Now, I tried all sorts of things to distract myself, having a drink, getting into a book, doing a crossword, whatever, all these different things to try and get over this. None of them worked. The thing that worked was listening to heavy metal, rap music, anything that has a adrenaline -fuel reaction in normality. So I'd listen to it as we were taking off. And I think it over time changed my response from thinking, this is a signal that my My adrenaline is a signal this is a very dangerous situation. We're going to die to the adrenaline flooding my body. Well, that's just how I normally react to this particular song.

37:16Oh, wow. So I never put the tune two together, but I think you're absolutely right. That's an example of reframing exactly the same decision by putting a different lens on it. Yeah, you'd used... This isn't like a cue that people would play, come, music in order to become. This is a cue from your body. I am full of adrenaline so I will play music which is associated with adrenaline. That's funny. Yeah, yeah So I always listen to exactly the same song. I'm not particularly into rap What is it? I have a workout playlist of one of them is Kanye West school spirit So he's cancel now No, you can still listen to him.

37:57You just can't can't take his views on the juice too seriously Well, yes, I was only his music. So you there was another thing to do with and everybody's aware of this when you buy mints or ground beef as it's called. Yeah, do you want to call it 75 % lean or 25 % fat framing? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a I think that is a leaven study. I might get the name wrong, but essentially it's describing the same situation. But if you say 75 % lead people will think the meat will be tastier They think it'll be less greasy if you emphasize 25 % in fact by drawing tech people's attention to that particular element you get a very different different reaction So you you also had to think about Using the benefit of using nouns rather than verbs Oh, yes, so there is the idea that that if you remind people that they are a voter, they're more likely to follow through and vote on the actual election day, then if you say to them, will you vote?

39:07So will you be a voter? You've got to agree, yeah. Will you vote? And they agree. They are more likely to follow through if they have described themselves as a voter, probably because the voter that now describes who we are, you know, it's part of our identity nature. If you're just referring to an action, that's something that's fleeting and not particularly hypocritical, not to be a nod to the question. So yeah, that's the idea. So we've tried to do, we've tried to apply this commercially and haven't seen any results yet, but reminding people that they had been a subscriber to a magazine and therefore should renew rather than saying to people, you know, you want subscribed, you should renew.

39:52So yeah, I haven't got a day or back on that, but that's, I think it's something that could probably be applied a bit more. That's really interesting. I wonder how you get somebody from not being a thing to being a thing. My point being that what we're talking about here is the and now it allows somebody to have that identity become attached and what you're looking to do is for what the identity becomes attached to to be the action that you want them to take. If you want people to vote, you tell them that they are a voter. But if there was a world in which it was really difficult to be a voter or the only people that voted were people that earned over $100 ,000, I wonder how you get someone to believe in the new now identity if they don't.

40:36Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's a very good point. I mean, the tactic, I think we might have talked about this last time, one tactic in this area is what's called the foot in the door technique, which is if you want people to adopt a new behaviour, try and make the first request ridiculously easy. So there's a 1966 study where sometimes the experimenter's Friedman Fraser asks people to put a giant sign saying drive carefully in their front garden, no bellium and does it. Other times they do a two -step process where first of all they are supposed to put up a tiny little sticker saying drive carefully, loads of people do it, the cyclologist leave, wait two weeks and then they come up with a giant sign.

41:21And in that second scenario, three or four times more people put up the big sign. And there are communities, well you make the first request really easy so people feel like they have to do it because it would be a churlish not to such an important thing as road safety. Once they've put up that sign, you can then use that in the principle of consistency. Once they've put up the sign, you then go back with your genuine ask and people will remember their past behaviour. They'll want to be consistent with that past behaviour. They'll think to themselves I've put up the sticker and must be interested in road safety.

42:00To be consistent with that, I'd better put up the giant sign. So I wonder if that, if you want to kickstart this identity, start small would be the big thing. Just in ironically. Fanos. Oh yes, this was one of the most interesting areas I think when I was researching the book. And it's the idea that people's reaction, even in commercial situations, is remarkably driven by fairness. We're not just interested in a good deal and an absolute sense. We are interested in being treated fairly compared to others. So the study that caught my eye was, I think it's a 1996 study, it's quite an old study, and it is with students.

42:45So take it with a picture of salt. But it's a blout in baseman study. And when people arrive for the first day at campus, they are asked whether they would help the psychologist the next day with an experiment. They can have to turn up at the psychologist's lab, do 40 minutes of math puzzles, and they will be paid $7. Now the people who are asked that, 72 % of them agree to take part. Next group of people, they are given the same basic request, come to our lab tomorrow do 40 minutes of maths puzzles, but this group are told you will be paid $8. However, they then fall off with a little white lie, they are then told that other people earlier would pay $10, but unfortunately they've spent all their cash and they can only offer 8 now.

43:38Now, in that scenario, there is a 25 % drop in what people are prepared to accept. So you get 54 % of people agreeing to take part. Now, this is fascinating because what a classical economist would say is, well, it doesn't matter what other people are paid, all you should focus on is whether or not $8 is worth 40 minutes of your time. So you should have this increase. But if you think about the principle of fairness, people are enraged by this idea that others have got a better deal. Now that study I think is fascinating because you can apply this in bigger and more ways if you're a brand. You can apply it in a big strategic way and think, how do I reframe my competition as treating their customers unfairly?

44:30And if you can do that, you can tap into this pool of anger that will motivate people to want to switch, come to your brand. Or if we're getting super tactical, you could apply this on your e -commerce site. So think about what virtually every e -commerce site does. You're shopping for a pair of trainers, you've picked these trainers, $100, you love them, they look amazing, you're completely happy, you put them in your basket, you go to check out and then above the checkout button, what is there normally? Normally there is a giant box, throbbing giant white box that says, you know, add your discount code.

45:10Now for that transgress fairness norm is essentially what you've done there is told your customer, you told these people who are completely happy to hand over the money, the other people are getting a better deal. That will enrage and they will go off and look for a discount code, most of them will probably probably never come back. So yeah, fairness, I think he's a interesting area that too many brands ignore. Too many brands think that people are cold, counselling machines, but actually an awful lot of behaviour is driven by. Now, not the absolute benefit of the offer, it's am I get relatively getting good deal compared to other people?

45:50Shopify, interestingly, if you're on mobile, it's not the same if you're on desktop, but I would guess that probably at least 50%, maybe 70 % or more of shopping is done on Shopify and mobile. Yeah. Their discount field is hidden behind a drop -down toggle. Yeah, great. Yeah, that's a really nice idea because I think what that's working on. And I think we would do something similar with like a, you know, if you've got a promo code, it's a very recessive little link you can add. And I think they're working on the principle that people who have a code will be really looking for the right to put it.

46:29People who haven't won't. So that's one time default, why default given the fact that probably fewer people will be shopping with a code than without a code. Why defaults to make the code and this big advert that you're paying more than you probably should do and more than other people potentially are. Yes, yeah, I think absolutely you could have a you could only show the discount box to example for people You've driven their fire affiliates You could put up your prices by a percent and then populate the box with a 1 % off code And then anyone else who has an actual code could override it. You know there's loads of different ways Did you see I'm talking about fairness?

47:05I think this has stopped over the last few years But there was a period especially when black Friday first became big in the UK where fast fashion companies and jewelry companies would slowly creep the price of their product up throughout October, into November, or they would just switch it over one week and then the discount and people were using way back machine and internet archive and stuff to go back and look at what the old price of this product was, what they realised was that with the discount the price of the product was the same as it was when you could have purchased it at the start of October.

47:38Yes, so I mean, I think there is an opportunity there potentially for competitive brands to shine a light on that. I think there is also a self -interested doubt that you should have at the back of your mind about some of these tactics, which is the difference in the short and the long term. In the short term, you will generate extra cash by some slightly nefarious tactics. The danger you have is If people ever feel they have been manipulated too far, then you get this retribution. So you've always got a bit of a balance of how much you should push some of these pricing tactics. And there's a lovely idea from, I think it's an American philosophy called John Rawls, who talks about the, I think it's the publicity principle.

48:32and he basically talks about morality as if someone you you're applying this tactic would they be angry with you and if they are then it should set off some alarm bells at least you can should consider whether it's worth doing. It's a debate I think that the Richard Taylor goes back and forth on the beginning of his book Nudge. Are you familiar with Good Heart's Law? Yes, isn't it something on the lines of once a metric is used as a target, that metric loses all validity. Correct. So, you know that, yeah, it's when a, let's say that your outcome that you wanted to get, the metric that you were optimizing for was email subscribers.

49:17So, you said, I want as many email subscribers as possible. So that's a target. What you're actually looking for, the outcome that you're looking for, is something more like I want lots of people that care about what I say to be interested and receiving my emails in a warm and welcoming way on a weekly basis. Like that's what you're actually optimizing for. But the measure that you're using as the outcome proxy is email subscribers. But if you start to optimize exclusively for that, what you could see is a world in which you said, sign up to my mailing list and every person that does will be given a million £1 million will free parachutes.

49:53And when people sign up and they find out that that isn't the promise that they're going to get on the other side of that, you go, well, look, I achieved the target, which was get lots of email subscribers, but it wasn't the actual outcome that I was looking for. The measure ceases to be a good target. Yes, if there was a sliver of difference between what you're incentivizing and what you actually want you generate some pretty dangerous repercussions. I think you had at a polygyz... Is it Ganesi? I don't know how to pronounce it. Ganesi, yeah. Ganesi, sorry. Wonderful book, Mixing and All's He Talks.

50:28There's a chat during the middle and it's a wonderful coverage of some responses to ill -sets incentives. So one of them he talks about, I think it might have been British archaeologists in China where they, this is not our 19th century, they reward peasants there for bringing them pieces of fossil, and they get a set amount of cash per piece. So what happens is those people are very interested in maximizing their income. So rather than bring a complete fossil bone, they find those fossil bones, they smash them into 20 pieces is when they take each piece one at a time to the the archaeologist to maximize their income.

51:18So yeah, you've got to be very careful about what incentive you set. Talking about fairness, COVID toilet roll prices in the UK. Oh yes. So gosh, that's a study I ran back in the midst of COVID when people were hoarding toilet roll. And what I asked was I said people a little thought experiment I said imagine you in local supermarket was charging a pound for toilet roll they've put up the price to say two pounds what it was during the shortage do you think this is fair and it was a phenomenal proportion of people who said it was very unfair or unfair it was saying of the order of like 90 percent most economists would say this is just a reaction of supply and demand but people don't treat prices in that manner, they feel that the exploitation of a surge in demand with excess pricing is unfair and there's a danger that they will punish that supply.

52:23You also spoke about how you could use righteous indignation to compel people to do stuff. Yes, I kind of think this is something that isn't really used enough. I'm interested in fairness because we've talked about the Blount and Basement study. People would rather have a smaller fee that everyone's getting than a large fee but which is less than others. Now, you also see that in animals, there is an amazing video online that I was strongly recommend people Google afterwards. If you put in Franz DeWall, Captain Monkeys, Fairness Video. What you'll see is a pair of monkeys happily performing all sorts of tasks for a slice of cucumber.

53:10But if one of those monkeys is paid in grapes which they rate as a better treat and one is paid in cucumber, the monkey that is now being paid in cucumber will lose their rag. They will not perform for this payment. Again, it's a bias that you can see in humans and something we shared a common ancestor with three million years ago. When you see these drives of behavior, straddling the species, you'll know you're on some powerful. If I was a brand, I would look at ways of reframing my competition as behaving unfairly. So if I was launching a competitive taxi brand to Uber, surge pricing I think is their Achilles Seal.

53:59Most banks, if I was trying to compete with them if I was a new FinTech startup, I would be talking about reaching people when they have just been hit by a fine. They've got two pounds over their overdraft limit, they've just been hit with the 20 pound fine. That's a rare moment when people are so enraged, they're probably open to switching. So how How do you reframe what your competition are doing as a fairness transgression? Very nice. Freedom of choice. Mmm. So this is an interesting area. And my pronunciation is never very good. I was always horrendous at languages at school. So it is a French psychologist.

54:41I think called the game. And he came up with an idea called the But You Are Free Principle. So, one of many bizarre psychology experiments where it involves the psychologist dressing up as a beggar. There's another one by a guy called Santos called the Peac effect, all around how surprising requests generate more donations. But on this one again goes up to people at a or near a bus stop and he says can you give me some coins so I can get a bus? And I think it's 10 % of people give them some coins. Next group of people, we go up exactly the same request to begin with, but then at the end he says, but you are free to accept or refuse.

55:24And the proportion of people who give money jumps to I think 48%. That's a huge swing in behaviour. What's so interesting is of course everyone in both of those settings always had the ability to save no. All that's changed is the requester has drawn attention to the other person's ability to say no. So the argument here is one of the things that we love is to retain a sense of agency, a sense of control in the situation. So if you are trying to persuade someone to take out our subscription to give you a rise, what you should be doing is drawing their attention to the fact they can say know what again study suggests is that will increase the probability slightly paradoxally of them agreeing to your demands.

56:17So you want to involve people in the decision process in a way? Yes, but I think remind them of their right to say no. So it's not just involving them. I think it's give, remind them their sense of control. It's the key thing. And of course, you know, situations with beggars are a little bit bizarre. That five -fold increase is a very, very large one. So it's not just that situation where this but you are free principal works. I think it was carpenter who ran a meta analysis about 15 studies, I think, where he looked at lots of different people at run experiments where they had emphasized the other person's freedom to refuse.

56:59And there is a consistent increase in compliance. Now it might not be as high as good games study, but it's a consistent consistency. Very reliable. So something else that seems to make sense here is if you are overly assertive when communicating with customers and there was a place in Austin, a recovery centre that had some internal strife and it was going to change and all of the management was going to drop. And they also decided to along with that. So there was sort of a, how would you say, a foundation, a baseline of ambient sort of discontent because there was some social murmurings in gossip about what was going on behind the scenes.

57:41And then one Saturday morning, every single member of this recovery place got an email that said prices are going up and it was going up by maybe two X or two and a half X and And you will be built and the new prices kick in in 48 hours, reply if you want to cancel something like that. And the number of people that I know who were really, really sort of upset put off by that. And one of the main things that happened there was it was the kind of language that was used. It was basically like, prices going up, like it'll lump it, you know, if you reply if you want to cancel type thing. And that over these native language, I think didn't do them very many things.

58:23Yeah, yeah, I mean, it seems like they've got a kind of perfect storm of problems there. I think the one thing they did or the couple of other things they did, they said that the price rise was going to be immediate. There's a lovely set of studies by people like Liam Delaney at the unit. He was the University of Sterling into what's called the present preference bias. So I think in one of his his studies says to people, do you want to pay me 13 pounds now or 16 pounds in a month's time? And that's of the order of 60 % of people would rather pay the larger amount in a month's time. Now if you turn that into a monthly interest rate, I think it's 23%, if you turn it into an annualized interest rate, it's over a thousand percent a year.

59:01It's a phenomenal interest rate, but people would prefer to pay it than give over the money in that instant. So what he argues is what he calls present preference bias. we overweight, pleasure in the pain in the now, and we discount pleasure in pain in the future far, far too much. So if I was going to push that price rise through, I would give people loads of notice and tell them it's happening in two or three months' time. Because spending an extra 10 pounds a month in that distant time period won't affect me, knowing I've got a hand over 10 pounds tomorrow, that's accurate. So give me the justification for charming versus cajoling an audience member, it seems like charm is always going to work.

59:46Yeah, there were always, with all these, there are a few nuances. One of the interesting ones is the original kind of experiment, so far earlier than Gagane was a guy called Brehm, I think it was Jack Brehm, and he came up with an idea called reactants.

1:00:03It's the argument, if you feel your freedom is being curtailed, you can often push out against this. And one of the early studies was by a guy called Pennybacker at the University of Texas. And so he puts up signs in a men's washroom that either says, please don't graffiti or do not graffiti exclamation mark, exclamation mark. And he sees, I think, of the order of twice the amount of graffiti on the authoritarian sign. But what's interesting, so that's the same basic finding as you'll discuss in, we've got with again that if you're overly authoritarian it can backfire. But one of the interesting nuances is the extent of that backfire effect depended on the authority level of the communicator.

1:00:49So if the sign was positioned as coming from the head of security, it really aggravated people. If the sign came from the groundsment, it didn't have much of a negative reaction. in the authoritative manner. So the point being here is reactants is far more likely to occur if the message comes from someone in a position of power. So if you are doing peer -to -peer communications of equal people, it might not be too much of an issue. If it is a letter coming from the tax office and they are behaving authoritarianly, it's much more likely to create this negative reaction. So think about who the message comes from.

1:01:30Is an important one. I'm trying to work out why this effect would exist. Fairness makes a lot of sense. It's reciprocal altruism. It's not being taken for a ride. We could see how that would be adaptive. Having, I don't know, this pushback against a tyrannical leader almost, even if the tyrannical leader happens to be a badly -worded poster or a poor email. 48 hours don't just about a price rise. I find it fascinating that it seems like embedded in our psychology is a way that we react to the local ecology in terms of how tyrannical it is, how authoritarian it is. It's mediated by the person that is giving that request in a way which also suggests that that we have some kind of softness bias toward people that are lower down the totem pole.

1:02:23I think the implications of this are really interesting. Yeah, if it's an interesting question about why it happens and I wonder if you often look to some of these biases, is could there be an evolutionary explanation? And maybe it's a sense of well, if we fear that we are losing control, that reduces our life chances, essentially, if someone else is in charge, they're probably gonna look after themselves rather than us, maybe we are queued up to respond in that way, but that's slightly speculative. There is some good evidence that talks about two different types of leaders that would have happened to access really.

1:02:57So one that rises due to prestige and another rises due to dominance. The one that rises due to dominance is preferred during times of warfare, times of strife, chaos, because you need the strong, no nonsense. We are going to go and do this. We charge forward. You don't listen to anybody else. Like, let's just get this done. And those leaders don't perform anywhere near as well during times of peace. In fact, they're often killed. Homicide was one of the most common forms of death. From within the tribe, not from outside of the tribe, it was within homicide. And yeah, I wonder whether there's, I don't know, would we have been at war or at peace most of the time, and cesterly perhaps we would have been in times of peace, which means that we have almost this kind of authoritarian radar or like a tyrannist radar that means, oh, if the way that I feel at the moment is if I'm in a bathroom and I'm just trying to take a piss in peace, this isn't the environment in which I will respond particularly well to someone that is using dominance to try and get me to do something.

1:03:57That's interesting. So the next one, which I learned from Rory Suddhaland the first time actually was the Red Sneakers effect. Oh yes, yeah, so a lovely set of studies from Francesca Gino at the Harvard Business School and the basic idea is if we see people breaking conventions we assume they are higher status. So my favourite part of her study is a pilot study she did. So when she's testing out the basic idea she goes out to academic conferences and this is early 2000s and the norm of behavior at these conferences, the convention is you should dress smartly. So if you're a bloke, you'd be expected to wear shirt jacket.

1:04:39So as people arrive at the conference, she monitors their smartness dress and she notes it down. She then goes and finds those people and says how many publications you've got, how many citations you've got. So citation is one review of your, or one mention of your work, work, the academic work, and appear review paper. So more citations, the more successful you know crude metric book, pretty accurate. When she crosses the two bits of data she sees a very clear inverse correlation. So the super successful academics, you know the people who go and talk shows, you know write newspaper columns, they're the ones who are most likely to be breaking the convention and dressing really scruffily.

1:05:26Whereas if you go down to The other end, the people with barely any citations, the people who have barely published anything, people who haven't got tenure, people who are just starting out in the career, they are much, much more likely to abide by their conventions. Now, Gino's argument is that you need status to break a convention. So imagine a situation in which you're at work. The CEO turns up wearing Bermuda shorts. Well, in that scenario, no one is going to send that person home, no one's going to criticize them. But if the intern does it they get sent home they get pillared. So what Gina argues is you need a degree of social capital to afford or to be able to break the invention you can ignore some of the punishments and what or they won't be applied to you.

1:06:14And what she says is that people and this is what I later study show is people are remarkably well achieved this. So we see people breaking the inventions we assume they must be higher status. So I love this because many advertisers have heard the argument that if you behave distinctively, you're more likely to be noticed. What Geno ads is another layer, which is if you behave distinctively, if you break convention, you're more likely to be seen as higher status too. So it's a bit more, could have new news to most brands, to most businesses, to most communicators. How would you apply this? So I think for most brands there are an awful lot of conventions in their category.

1:06:59If you think about how watch ads behave, how perfumes ads, how cars behave, most of them are abide by the same conventions. Think about a press ad for a car. Nine times that of 10, it shows a beautiful mountainous scene, bendy road, and then there's the car and a profile shot. What Gino would say is if you, unthinkingly just repeat this convention you're advertising, you'll be seen as low status. What you should do is think of your category, think of all the different conventions, split those conventions into two groups, some of which are there for a very good reason, leave those well alone. Others are just there for a tradition sake.

1:07:47If you break those conventions, firstly, the one rest of the effects as you'll be noticed, but also the red sneakers effect says you're likely to be believed to be higher status, admired more. And this is mediated at least a little bit by the existing awareness, the positioning of the brand. If Kia decides to break convention, it's different to if Audi decides to break convention. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, absolutely right. With all these studies, there are nuances and Gino looks a few. I think one of them is you need to be... Or the audience needs to know you're breaking this on purpose. If they think you're breaking a convention through ignorance, it can backfire.

1:08:30And then secondly, yes, if someone is already perceived to be high -status and they break convention, there are more and much, much greater if you get down to someone who is perceived already to be low status and they break a convention it can again backfire. So yeah there is a variance on those two criteria. The halo effect. Ah the halo effect. So this is an interesting one. It's essentially the idea that people do not evaluate each element of another person discreetly. If they feel that someone is superior in one respect, it ripples out to all their other attributes. So the classic study, well there are classics that is going back to the 1920s, but the one I really liked, the 1977 study by Nisbit recruits, 118 people and they all see a video of a Belgian academic giving a lecture.

1:09:32Now half the people see a video, same content but the academics a little rude and comes across a bit cold. The other half of people see the academic being more friendly and warm. Now as you'd expect when the two groups rate the likability of the academic, the group who see the warm friendly academic rate the most 72 % more likely. So just as you expect you behave in a nice way, you're more likeable. What's interesting though is Nisbit also asks about loads of other attributes of the lecturer. What's their appearance like? How he retains their accent. And he finds that when the lecturer is behaving in that friendly manner, people are twice as likely to enjoy the accent, think that he's good looking as in the other scenarios behaving like a big idiot.

1:10:26So the argument is here if you have one dominant positive or negative characteristic that will affect how your other unrelated characteristics are interpreted. So what's interesting here is if you are a business and you're trying to communicate how amazing you are, how trustworthy you want to be, how high quality you are, You don't have to just communicate those things. You could pick another area, which is easier to impress people on, and then the expectation would all of your attributes and your metrics would improve. So it's almost a different way of thinking about what you should communicate.

1:11:08Don't necessarily communicate what matters, communicate what is easy to impress people on. And I think one area here for brands is think about, well, coming across as witty and charming. You can actually do that, and have it. You can actually be funny. How you convince someone you are trustworthy or high quality. Well, that's a nebulous thing that it's harder to do in an advert. So work with the limitations of the kind of communication medium, and try and emphasize the metric that you can move, not necessarily the metric that you think matters. That's very interesting. I like the fact that with the halo effect, which in pop psychology is traditionally to do with pretty privilege, basically, that you have good -looking people and everybody presuring everything that they do is better.

1:11:58What you're saying here is that there are a number of different vectors upon which you could win if you were charming, if you were funny, if you were polite, if you were good -looking, if you were tall, if you were reputable, if you were whatever, whatever, like educated, well -informed, so on and so forth. You can use whichever of these you can win at to trickle down and try and cascade all the rest of them. And I would imagine as well that there are some that are longer leave as the others. I would imagine wit, humour, personality, sort of charm, politeness, pleasantness, generally, from an interpersonal perspective are going to be things that will trickle downstream more effectively because they're much more universal.

1:12:38Yeah, I mean, from a communications perspective, I think, and this is where So I'm going to move into speculative territory. So it would be interesting in challenges on this one. But I wonder if something like behaving witterly, you can do that in an ad that you can make a joke. You don't just have to claim that you're funny. The problem with when it comes to attributes like trustworthiness or premiumness, it's very hard to absolutely demonstrate. You have to make a claim. And the problem with claims is why would anyone believe them? Because if you are low quality or high quality, you're both going to say you're amazing quality.

1:13:22You know, a claim is completely empty. Much more powerful to focus on things that can be demonstrated rather than claimed. And I wonder if that's why you'll write on on areas like WIT. It's something you can demonstrate rather than just state. What about being too clever? It must be such a thing as that. Oh, that's interesting. So I mean, the closest study I've seen there is the Prattful effect, the original 1966 study by Elliot Aronson. So he recruits a colleague of his taking part in a quiz, and the guy is given secretly the questions and the answers by Aronson. So does amazingly well, I think gets 90 or 92 % of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles.

1:14:06Now, when people are played a recording of that amazing quiz performance, he and they're asked how much they like the conquest contestant, the listeners give us so, so rating. Next, group of people, they're played the same recording of the amazing quiz performance, but there is an additional 30 seconds. And in the final moment to quees, the contestant makes a cock up he spills a cup of coffee down himself in that scenario the listeners who get that recording rape the contestant has 40 or 45 % more appealing so I think you're right there it can be this thing of perfection can be irritated if someone comes across as this amazing Genius well You know our reaction is maybe to hate them somewhat because we feel worse in comparison if If they spill a cup of coffee themselves, they're no longer seen as maybe quite so much of a threat and therefore they can come across as a bit more appealing.

1:15:11So I think there is, there might be, yeah, I think there is something in what you say. In the world of online content creation, there's a number of people who are really struggling at the moment because they never show vulnerability. People know that they've got vulnerability. People know that they're self -righteousness or the fact that they are unperturbed by whatever criticisms come from the internet. And a lot of these people are quite worthy of criticism. But that has galvanized huge Reddit threads. There's hundreds of thousands of people in certain sub corners of the internet that basically are trying to find the vector on which they can finally get this person to show that something is actually bothering them.

1:15:53And I think that it's almost that sort of two -perfect concern that we've got here. If someone never shows any weakness, vulnerability, we become skeptical of that, because we see it for ourselves. First off, we're skeptical because we think everybody has this. Secondly, we are untrusting of them because we presume that they must be hiding what it is that they've got behind it. Thirdly, we would say, well, I'm going to continue to poke and poke and poke, because this is a fun game to see how much this person can take before they do end up breaking. Yeah, it kind of creates a perfect storm to galvanize people to try and take someone down.

1:16:28And I've seen this multiple times and it's basically the same formula. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There is a lovely study by Northwest University where they look at likelihood to purchase products after reading a product review. So it's all numeric product reviews, 0 to 5, by FibingPerfect, zero -bend crap. And what they show is, as the review gets better, people become more like to purchase. They look at 100 ,000 different offerings. That's a huge sample. But what they find for every of the 2025 categories that they look at, for every one of those categories, the highest rate of purchase is not a five out of five reviews.

1:17:12It's somewhere between, I think, 4 .2 and 4 .5. Now that's where purchasing peaks, if the reviews get any better, purchase rates decline. Their argument is exactly as you say, which is that perfection is too good to be true. If you find a random supplement brand that you've never heard of and it gets 10 ,000 or 5 star reviews, what's more likely that it's actually perfect or something's being manipulated? People, if they see 4 .7 or 4 .8, therefore they're more likely to believe these are honest

1:17:58Okay. And, if堪 if we ask you, the cover of C진 Wow, it is the best. Yeah. There are some workouts involved with That was a remote the genuine patients going for colonoscopies, every patient is given a hand -held device that buzzes every minute and when it buzzes, the patients have to turn a dial to say how much pain they're in, zero nanotool, 10 excruciating. So average colonoscopy lasts 15 minutes, so they get 15 ratings from what they call the experiencing self, these are in -moment ratings. Next, they get a rating from the patient as they're leaving the hospital and then two months after the operation.

1:18:46And that is another rating reflect on how paying for overall the operation was. The expectation before the study was that the average ratings from the remembering self, those reflective ratings, should be roughly the same as the average rating from the experiencing self. But that is not what happens. The average amount of pain people experienced is only a poor guide to what people remember. What's a much better guide are two moments in particular. The peak moment, the single worst moment of that operation is disproportionately important and the final moment. So you could, for example, have a low level of pain for 13 minutes and then a medium level of pain for two minutes and that person would remember the experience worse than someone who had a medium level of pain for 30 minutes in a low level of pain for for two minutes at the end.

1:19:44It's the final moments that are disproportionately important. It's the single worst moment that's disproportionately important and shaping memory. Now that's fascinating because that can be applied by brands. You might think Konoz is far too different a world but that idea that some moments matter more than others can be applied to any brand experience. So a couple of examples I love a restaurant in London called Flatiron, steak restaurant, reasonably priced like £15 for a steak $20. You have your steak, well after they've given you the bill they give you this tiny little pair of miniature state knives.

1:20:26They say, I'll just hand these in as you're leaving. You hand them into the person at the cloakroom, buy the door, and in return they give you a salty caramel ice cream. Most restaurants end on the worst moment. They end on the bill, the pain, the faffing around, the splitting, the cash, all that kind of stuff. What Flatline do so cleverly is they create a high for that final moment as you leave. I bet you most people who remember, who mostly visit a flat and I remember that single instance. Is there something to do with the effort of it not just being everybody on the way out, gets a salted caramel ice cream?

1:21:03It's that you have to take the thing, get the thing, give it in. Oh, that's interesting. So I was thinking, I wonder if some of the appeal is, it's unexpected, It's surprising. It's also done after the bill. It doesn't feel like it's some kind of commercial transaction. Well, if you come into my restaurant, I'll give you an ice cream for free. That's just a negotiation. This seemingly is done out of the largest... It's done out of the beauty of their soul as it were or whatever. They don't seem to have an obvious financial benefit. I wonder if that makes it so positive. Have I told you about the thing we did with lollipops at nightclubs?

1:21:41Oh, I don't think so, go on. Okay, so I learned about the peak and rule six or seven years ago. And we were encountering a number of challenges. One of them being that a lot of nightclubs are in high built up city centre, neighbourhoods, places. Noise abatement orders come not only from the sound of the speakers, but also from the sound of egress when people leave. And if you dump a thousand, eighteen year olds on the street at three in the morning, they start chanting things, they were around in scream and laugh and fight and kick each other. So we needed to come up with a solution and I tried my best to come up with a peak end rule that did both of the things that we needed.

1:22:21So what we did was as people were leaving, we had two good -looking girls stood with buckets of lollipops, like just little sweet lollies, giving them a lolly meant that they had something in their mouth, which meant they were much less likely to start chanting and singing. Yeah, the sugar high Seemed to have a reduction in the number of people that hung around afterward because it gave them enough of a little bit of energy To get them into a taxi in home It meant that they didn't hang around the takeaways and do that stuff for quite so long and hopefully it gave them a Oh, that was wasn't that nice.

1:22:53Do you remember that lollipop that we gave or whatever sometimes we give people

1:22:59Pound coins that had stickers on and the sticker was a flyer for our club night and if they came back with just the one pound coin they could get in for a pound with that one pound coin but they had to hold onto it. That was something else we tried doing. But yeah, that lollipop thing that was pure peak under. That's a lovely idea. Do you know what I mean? Who should talk to? There is an amazing guy called Stephen Colgan. I might have got that pronunciation slightly wrong and he was the the Met I think for 20 years and he was became fascinated with behavioral science and he used all sorts of behavioral science tactics to reduce crime and yeah so the Lollipop idea reminds me of saying that that he wants talks about this whole idea if you give someone a Lollipop coming out of a nightclub you know also makes them feel a bit like childish and obviously they're less like to punch someone else in the face so that no one's ever had a fight while they've got a lollipop.

1:23:56Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What about someone that's doing something that's less experiential than a flat iron or a club night in terms of peak and rule? I mean, the other one that I've seen apply it and it's not all about kind of sweet, I feel like we've come to ice creams, lollies and haribo. Wiggle. So, there are cycle brands in the UK. One of the things they do, you've ordered your fancy helmet and lycra. they'll put into the order without telling you, you know, five pence bag of haribo. Now it's an unexpected delightful thing at the end of the journey. Now what I think is interesting about this is most brands think about how do we make a brilliant first impression.

1:24:43What wiggle, what you were nightclub example, flatline, what they're doing you're saying, well yeah maybe first impression is important, but actually if we want people to come back to our restaurant on nightclub in a few months time, if we end on a high, they're much more likely to remember it. So I think it reorders people's prioritisation of where they put their efforts. And the second thing it does is in some organisations, and this is the peak part, what they do is they think we've got these hundred different areas of our experience, our hotel or our restaurant. Let's try and make them all a little bit better.

1:25:20What the peak The key in rule would suggest is while you fritter away your budget and it won't have much of an impact, what you should do instead is think about, well, let's put all our budget, our creative budget into the, our lollies at the end, all our budget rather slightly better uniforms for the people that fly around, slightly fancy cutlery, let's put it into the Salted Calum Manel idea. You know, you pick one moment of excellence rather than trying to do everything a little bit better. Very interesting. I think there are awesome broad implications. I imagine that both the peak and the end could be the same thing as well.

1:25:51Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you ideally could argue well that if you're going to create a peak moment, best it's at the final. Because you get to you two multipliers on that. Yeah, there's a restaurant called Teaky Tatsuyu out here in Austin and it's a sort of Teaky Hawaiian themed thing. And every, I think it's every hour or every 30 minutes, all of the lights shut off and this huge show occurs where like projection runs across the ceiling and this teaky head bursts into flames and all sorts of stuff happens. And it's actually quite intrusive if you're in the middle of an interesting, but it's done in a really charming way and it's kind of fun.

1:26:26And I want to say it's maybe every half an hour to 45 minutes. So it maybe happens twice during a typical meal. And Frankenstein's in Edinburgh, which is on, I want to say it's just at the top next to the vodka revolution. They have every hour or every 90 minutes, a automatic Frankenstein gets lowered from the ceiling and electric lightning sounds come and then he sits up and all that shit happens. And it's kind of cheesy and kind of a bit shit. But at the same time you go, that was nice. I've remembered it. I've remembered both of those things to you. If you told me when I went to Dean's Italian what the peak part of it was, was it's like, well, the mashed potato was pretty nice, I guess, or whatever.

1:27:14There's nothing there. Yes. You can argue whether or not you want the main memory to be the Frankenstein. I try to come down from the ceiling. But what you've certainly shown is, you know, that that is something that is at least memorable. So the P Ken rule, I think, suggests the tactic of doing one thing accidentally rather than not things go well and made an ideally putting that at the final part of your experience. How you then create that kind of highlight moment. Well, that then I think is a little bit of subjectivity. Beautiful. Richard Chotten, again, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you're doing at the moment?

1:27:54Well, I've just released the book, so a book called The Illusion of Choice, so get that in Whenever I see an interesting article or experiment about psychology or behavioral science and how it can be applied in marketing or advertising, I'll post it up there. Either of those places are good. You have one of the coveted 99 follower spots on my Instagram, Richard. Very well deserved. I really appreciate you. I love the stuff that you do. I can't wait to see what you do next. And when it is ready, you will be coming back on and we will talk about it again. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Chris. Much appreciate.