Playing with the brain’s plasticity! by Crawford Hollingworth
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Crawford Hollingworth, founder of The Behavioural Architects, explains how simple changes in the presentation and framing of information can lead to radical changes in behaviour.
Behaviour is often deeply ingrained and in order to alter it we need to work extremely hard if we want to succeed. However, this is not always the case, and there are many examples from the behavioural sciences of how simple changes in default settings or the presentation and framing of information can lead to radical changes in behaviour.
In fact the brain is often happy to follow the path of least resistance. Disney captured this knowledge in a simple CSR initiative a few years back. The Disney Corporation altered the children’s menus at its theme parks in 2006 so that healthy items were the default. The company changed the default drinks to healthier choices, such as 100% juice, water or low fat milk (instead of fizzy drinks), and offered fruits and vegetables (instead of fries) as the default side dishes. When guests order a kids meal including a drink and side dish, it now automatically includes a healthier side dish (e.g. an apple) and drink (e.g. milk) as the default.
These changes have been successful (see figure); the majority of families stick with the healthy children’s meal defaults – with the exception of Paris where the lure of French fries is apparently unassailable.
Source: “Walt Disney Company – 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report.” 2008.
Here is a very simple example of how changing the way you describe something or frame it can completely change your attitude towards it. (Although it’s still at the experimental stage you can see how the findings might quickly be picked up around the world.) The wonderfully named ‘Innovative Economics Initiative’ (IEI) in Pittsburgh recently ran an experiment to test how labelling public trash cans ‘Landfill’ would change behaviour on the University of Pittsburgh campus.
They monitored two trashcans and recycling bins in different areas over the course of four weeks. Over the first two weeks the trash cans were unmarked. During the second two weeks, the trash cans were labelled ‘Landfill’.
Results showed that recycling rates rose by 29% and ‘landfill destination’ trash fell by 23%. Observation of the bins also noted that in general, women paid more attention to the labelling than men (although data on this was not collected).
The IEI are now investigating another cool hypothesis; by not just labelling the cans as Landfill but also adding in the address of the local landfill site to which the rubbish will go in order to emphasise the local impact.
I wonder if they could build a couple of other BE concepts into the research as well; first to include some social norm data above the ‘Landfill’ bin e.g. ‘Most people in the University do not put anything in this bin’? And maybe also the Hawthorne effect i.e. the fact that people behave differently (and usually ‘better’) when they know they are being observed. Imagine a pair of eyes above the Landfill bin staring at you.
This also reminds me of some of the simple brain priming experiments which show that what you expose the brain to can frame or influence subsequent behavior. Experiments have shown that people can be influenced to respond physically differently once they have been primed with stereotypical behaviour concepts – in one experiment by psychologists at New York University participants were primed with stereotypically elderly concepts when words like Florida, Bingo, forgetful, wrinkle, knits were scrambled into a conversation they were having. Control participants were not primed in this way. On leaving the room to walk a pre-measured length of a corridor the participants who had been primed with the elderly stereotype walked measurably more slowly than the others, although neither attributes of slowness or weakness had been part of the priming experiment.[1]
The brain is extremely clever but also extremely plastic as these examples show. Spending time understanding unconscious default settings and how they can be altered and considering new ways to present the same options – i.e. using different frames or labels – are powerful applications of BE constructs. They can throw up new innovations and ideas and behavioural change hypotheses, and subtle ways of changing the choice architecture.
Crawford Hollingworth is founder of the Behavioural Architects
[1] Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996) Automaticity of social behaviour: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230 – 244
Posted: January 24th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Makes You Think | Tags: behavioural commitment, behavioural economics, Bias aversion, cognitive biases, Commitment mechanisms, consumer spending, crawford hollingworth, Disney Corporation, IEI, loss aversion, Makes You Think, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, the behavioural architects | Leave a Comment »
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