Every day, you're making choices that you think are yours, but what if they're not?
What if a single word, a subtle frame or subconscious programming is actually what's steering your decisions, without you ever noticing?
That's where today's guest comes in.
Richard Shotton, best-selling author of The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice, has built his career exposing the secret psychology behind why we buy, why we say yes and why we follow the crowd, even when we think we're being rational.
In the next few minutes, he's going to hand you the keys to that hidden machinery of human behavior.
And by the end of the episode, you won't just understand decision making.
You'll see the world differently, like stepping out of the matrix.
And you'll know how to use these insights to persuade, to influence and to win negotiations in ways most people will never even realize.
And now let's jump into the episode.
Do you know what?
And there's an awful lot of psychological principles that i think lead to very simple solutions that, exactly as you say, get ignored because of the simplicity.
So one of the best things to get something to stick in a mind other than concreteness, is probably using a rhyme.
Yeah, there's an awful lot of work that shows if you take proverbs like kind of lesser known ones or fake ones and you rewrite them.
So some people see a rhyming version woes unite foes.
Some see a non-rhyming version Woes Unite Enemies.
And people are about twice as likely to remember the rhyming version as the non-rhyming one.
But communicators don't want to do that because it feels a little bit 1970s.
It feels like a children's school book.
But it's that ease of processing that fluency that sticks in the mind.
You know, something that's helped me recently when it comes to embracing the power of simplicity is you know, every once in a while I've got an ego, it shows up.
And I think it's a lot of times that ego that makes me make bad decisions, because I'm like I want to be seen as smart.
So I need to complicate this strategy so they appreciate the intellect.
Then I said to myself OK well, so if your goal is to look smart, overcomplicating a strategy in a way that makes it fail, that doesn't seem very smart, does it?
No, but there's been a difference between short term, long term.
In the meeting, I think it's undeniable that that tactic of complicating might get a few plaudits.
But in the long term, when the results come in, it is a very different story.
And I think too many people optimize to what makes it.
A meeting goes swimmingly.
Well, stop saying Britishisms and forget about the long term too much.
I think that's an absolutely classic behavior.
Thank you.
Yeah.
It's one of those things where sometimes it's it can be really humbling to realize that you are a human too.
All of us are fall victim to these things.
Right.
None of us are safe, none of us.
No no no no definitely definitely, but but partly because i think some of these biases, they have a value.
Like um, if you are in the shampoo aisle and you were to behave like a kind of a supercomputer, you're gonna behave like a, a calculating machine, and you looked at every shampoo, weighed it all up, looked at the cost, worked out what you thought the benefits might be.
You'd be in that aisle for an hour.
So that's not a sensible decision.
It might be rational in inverted commas, but it's not sensible.
Picking something because you saw it on TV, or picking, you know, the middle price one, or picking the one that is super popular.
They might be supposedly irrational, but they come to quite good decisions very, very quickly.
And often people prioritize time over perfection.
Yeah, I remember this one book where they talked about the value of They called the term satisficing.
So it satisfies and suffices in the moment.
And I realize that sometimes overthinkers can tend to want to hyper optimize every single decision to the point where it doesn't have any real merit or value practically speaking.
So finding these heuristics that allow us to shorten the decision making process can be really, really helpful.
Absolutely, i think that phrase is a brilliant one.
I think it's um herbert simon who came up with it originally.
He won a nobel prize um, and in history, like most of the time, most people are, but in all our lives there'll be something that we are maximized.
There's something that actually, when we go to that aisle, we do want to spend 15 minutes or 20 minutes.
Maybe we absolutely love coffee and having a thousand variants and actually mulling over all the details is amazing, But those are rare instances.
Most products, we just want a quite good thing.
We want to avoid an awful decision.
And the simple rules of thumb that psychology categorizes are often – those are the things that we use.
This is a major source of conflict within relationships too, because I can think about with my wife.
There are certain things that she'll care about a lot.
And she'd ask me, hey, Kwame, what do you think about this?
And I say, OK, yeah, pick option A. And she's like, well, option B seems good, too.
And what about this?
And I say, OK, pick option B. She's like, I think you're just telling me what I want to hear.
I think so.
I think I've made my decision and I don't want to allocate more energy to this.
But on the other side, there's certain things that I really care about, that she doesn't care about either.
But if we had these words, then we could actually communicate actively about what's really causing that friction.
I think you're right there.
And often we are blind to that difference.
So there's an amazing set of studies by Lee Ross.
He came up with this idea of the false consensus effect.
So...
Lovely thought experiment.
He says to people imagine you're driving down a road 35 miles an hour, but the speed limit is 30 miles an hour.
Policeman spots you, gives you a fine.
When you get home, you notice that the paperwork is riddled with errors, wrong dates, misspelt your name.
And they say there's probably a case that you might get off in a technicality.
And the question he says to people is, would you accept the fine because you were actually speeding?
Or would you contest the fine because of these technicalities?
Now, that's just the first part.
The clever bit is then he says once people have made their decision, what do you think other people would do?
And the key finding is that people who would object to the fine, they'd go and contest it.
They thought most other people would as well.
Whereas the people who would accept the fine they thought the vast majority would also accept the fine.
And he said it's this idea that, whatever our behaviours and our attitudes are, It's not that we think they're universal, but that we massively overestimate their popularity.
So you know, Democrats might think lots of other people agree with them on a particular policy matter, whereas Republicans would think that their view is much more popular than it is.
I think sometimes these clashes are thinking that our way of operating is the only or is what the other person is thinking as well.
That's so fascinating.
And you're absolutely right, because every election season, everybody is shocked.
Like, oh, my God, they're humans.
You think in a different way that what a novel concept.
And it's it's so consistent.
But you're somebody who studied this.
Where does that come from?
I mean, I think, probably because we are constantly aware of our own thoughts and for most of life.
You know, if you let's say, we're on the the savannas of africa 200 000 years ago, you know, if you spotted a gazelle every day, it was a regular occurrence.
If you spotted a?
Uh elephant once a month, it was an irregular occurrence.
How often something appeared was a pretty good guide to its frequency.
That works with physical objects and their relative um frequency.
It's not so good when you start comparing your internal beliefs with others.
We're constantly reminded of our beliefs.
We're not constantly reminded of everyone we walk past and what they're thinking.
I think we have that discrepancy because of this kind of frequency illusion.
You're so right.
It's really interesting.
And I think we can all kind of think about some social interactions where somebody says something off the cuff and they assume that everybody else thinks the same thing.
And then they're horribly embarrassed in the process.
I won't share any of mine, but I will tell a funny story.
I heard on the radio one time.
How long ago was that?
Well, I was listening to the radio and it was a woman.
She was like a professional in a professional space, highly respected.
And they were talking about animals that were in either in danger of becoming extinct or extinct.
And she said yeah, I mean the unicorn, for example.
I've been a while since I've seen or heard anybody even talk about those.
And everybody laughed and she didn't.
And she realized that it was one of those things from childhood that just never got corrected.
You just assume that it always would at some point naturally.
And it's because we have rhinos.
We have nor walls.
We have things that are far stranger than unicorns.
But it's weird that unicorns don't exist.
I mean, yeah.
Without too much attention.
I've always thought it's quite weird that unicorns are perceived as such a weird thing.
It's just a one-horned antelope.
If you're going to invent a fictitious animal, invent a dragon that can breathe, fire and fly, not an antelope that's had one antler fallen off.
It's pretty poor for an imaginary animal.
Right.
This is funny.
I'm wondering too, when it comes to relationships in general.
One joke that Whitney, my wife and I we have.
We've been married forever.
We say that when it comes to compatibility, one element is when one person's brand of weirdness matches another person's brand of weirdness, and then they can be weird together in private and feel accepted right.
I think you're onto something there that maybe the way the false consensus effect doesn't hit us every single day is we probably pair up with people who also share many of those opinions.
Because, although you know we might be more accurate in our belief system, if we live with someone who had completely different point of views, I don't think necessarily be a pleasant situation, Because sometimes discovery of knowledge comes through antagonism and clashing and embarrassment.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
And I think this also speaks to just the way that we, as humans, could navigate the world, because we could live a life where we want to have our beliefs reinforced consistently.
And that would definitely feel good, but we wouldn't really advance progress or learn through that process.
Absolutely.
And this is true. a study I read a long time ago.
So the details are a bit hazy on, but there was a psychologist called Catherine Phillips.
I think she died a couple of years ago and her research area was diversity.
So sometimes that might be ethnic diversity.
It might be class.
It might be political affiliation.
And what she would do with lots and lots of experiments was get people together and they might be given a murder mystery game or a puzzle.
And what she found was, whichever metric you look at, If you have a heterogeneous, diverse group, they're more likely to solve the problem.
And it kind of makes sense, because if I had five doppelgangers myself helping, we've just got this small little part of information.
If you've got five very different people, you've got overlapping information.
You've got this broader totality.
So she shows again and again, the more diverse group solves problems better.
But when people are asked how well they think they did and whether they enjoyed the experience, then the results flip.
Then it's the homogenous groups that enjoy things more.
And her explanation is, well, that learning and knowledge comes at a price.
There's often clashing because you've got divergent opinions.
So you have a debate and that can be a little bit socially embarrassing.
So her argument was you know, if you are an organisation, you know Encourage sometimes these clashes.
They aren't negative things.
You've got to get people comfortable with them, because that's the way that you get to full knowledge.
So I think you're right.
There's often a difference between what's comfortable and what's effective.
And if you're a business, you want to be leaning on the effective end.
That's brilliant.
That's really interesting, too, because you're right.
It makes sense, when there are those clashes, that that fluidity that we would often like leads to some resistance or friction.
That does not feel great, even if we achieve a better outcome.
And that's so interesting.
And it also speaks to the diversity in the truest sense, when we're talking about diversity of thought.
Right.
Because we're saying all right, when it comes to actual decision making, you can have people who on the outside look very different, but all think the exact same way.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean there's.
There's a brilliant book by Matthew Side SYED And he talks about different levels of diversity.
So you've got almost demographics, which might be your age or your gender.
Then he talks, as you mentioned, about cognitive diversity.
Someone could be born in Hyderabad from a poor background, someone born in London from a very rich background.
But if they've both been educated at the same college Oxford they might end up being very similar in their cognitive style.
So he says there's this second layer.
But then the third layer he talks about is diversity.
You can have demographic diversity.
You can have cognitive diversity as well.
But unless you break the human tendency to conform as a company, you have a problem.
If you have this hierarchical culture and everyone is just mimicking what the boss does well, all those benefits of diversity have gone out the window, but you might be left with some of those clashes still.
So I think that's the bit that's really interesting that a lot of companies don't talk about.
How do we make people secure in the fact that they can challenge the CEO or the managing director or their line manager?
How do we encourage them to know that that challenge will be appreciated rather than damage their career?
That's tough because it seems like you would need two things.
First, you would need a culture that embodies this, that is structurally created to facilitate this, but also leaders that are low ego enough to accept that and not feel challenged.
And also too, this sounds like something that would need to be reinforced with consistency, because it goes against everything that we know about human psychology and the desire, whether conscious or subconscious, to conform.
To me, the scariest study on that is a classic, the Ash Line study.
And for those of you who are not familiar, it is a study where they had people in a big room.
Well, let's say like 12 people.
I'm going to mess up the numbers, but the general premise is the same.
And so then they would have these three lines and then you're supposed to say which line is longer.
And this was a dastardly experiment.
They just had the real person who was being experimented on at the end.
But everybody else, the first 11 people were all part of the experiment.
They were in on it.
So the first two rounds.
OK, the one the line that's longer.
Yes, that's the longer line.
This seems silly.
But then they started intentionally getting it wrong in the exact same way.
The one line that is clearly the shortest, they would say that's the longest one.
And people would be perplexed.
But then when it came to them, they would conform.
They would rather be wrong with other people than be right and stand alone.
Yeah, so as you said, absolute classic study.
But there is a variant that he did which holds out a bit of hope.
So, as you say in your example, you've got this one active experiment and then 11 stooges and the 11 confederates, the students of who work in psychology.
They all get the wrong answer on occasion and you know the the participant copies.
Solomon ashton did another one where he goes around the room and it starts very similarly, people giving the purposely wrong answer, saying the short line is actually long, but just before the participants about to give their answer, someone else, um gives a different answer.
It's not a right answer.
They say the short one is the middle one, but they give a different answer, and what ash found was that single person who's prepared to make the conformity license the real participant to give a proper answer.
So there is something there, i think, for all of us to take on board, which is, even if you're in a meeting and everyone seems to be agreeing, even if your interjection is objectively wrong, if you're challenged, that idea is objectively wrong.
What's so good about it is it might license other people to bring their opinions, so breaking conformity.
It only takes, you know, a handful of of people to do that to inspire the others.
So even a mistaken um, anti conformist intervention can be super useful.
That's fascinating.
So essentially this this does give a lot of hope because it's almost like the emperor's uh, emperor's got no clothes story brought to life, you know.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's so interesting.
Humans are, are funny creatures.
I, and for you, let's, Let's let's change it a little bit, because I've never talked to anybody on like a podcast about this.
And you're a psychology nerd.
I'm a psychology nerd.
We love this stuff.
Randomly quoting things.
Audience, we did not plan to quote studies like we did.
We just like this stuff.
Now I want to get your perspective on what's been happening in the social sciences in the last five to 10 years, where there have been some replicability issues.
Like where there is a study that we might latch on to and then we find out years later that we cannot replicate the study, which then calls into question the veracity of the claims of the study from its inception.
And then, when you find out about p hacking, where statistically you might have a researcher who wants a specific outcome, and then they do the experiment, they don't get it, so they don't publish it, and then they just keep on running the experiment until it works because random things happen, and then you publish that and then it becomes um accepted knowledge.
What?
What's been your perspective on all of this?
Yeah, so you're actually right.
Across many scientific disciplines there's been this problem of the replicability crisis, which is essentially, as you say, people rerun a study and they find contradictory results.
So there was a psychologist called brian nosek who has, in the world of psychology and behavioral science, he's got together a huge group of academics and they have systematically tried to reproduce the findings from old experiments, And what he's found is a worryingly large number don't replicate.
But this isn't something that just affects psychology.
It's something that affects economics.
It affects all disciplines.
Oncology, for example, the study of cancer.
And I think when you think about some of those other areas and I'm not saying this glibly it helps you think about how to deal with it in psychology.
So Imagine a situation in which a person has just found out they've got cancer and they know that some studies don't replicate.
What I really hope they wouldn't do is think well, because some studies are bogus, I'm going to reject the entire corpus of Western knowledge and I'm going to turn to homeopathy.
That would be a crazy reaction.
What you hope that person would do is think OK well, if some of those studies don't replicate?
What I want to do is either make sure the advice or the studies that I follow have been replicated, or at least I'm working with a middleman, a doctor, who knows which ones replicate and don't replicate.
And I think thinking about it in that more personal circumstance makes it easy to know what we should do in psychology.
What we shouldn't do is think well, because some studies don't replicate.
Let's ignore all of psychology and behavioural science.
But what we also shouldn't do is be too naive and accept anything.
What we really want to be doing is making sure that we are, as I suppose, an industry.
We are whittling down that body of knowledge, and we should stop repeating bogus findings and be much, much tighter on only making recommendations that are based on studies that have been shown by multiple different academics in different contexts in different parts of the world.
And I think if you focus on that kind of subset of psychology experiments, then you're in a good place.
Yes, I love that breakdown.
I agree 100%.
And I think really what it comes down to a lot of times is just being willing to give yourself the license to think critically.
I think a lot of times people can.
Whatever the thought leadership is, whether it is potentially maybe religious or academic or political or whatever, we latch on to that authority bias.
And then we say, well, this person said it.
Then it is then true across the board.
So the critical thinking is the antidote.
Yeah, there's something, and I'll probably butcher it slightly, but there's a quote from Bertrand Russell, who said something in the lines of every now and then, it's quite healthy to stick a question mark on the end of things that we've believed for a long while.
And I think that's true with the psychology experiments.
Treat them with a little bit of caution.
If you come across a study that was done a year ago from a university you've never heard of and it's never been replicated, treat it as an interesting hypothesis but don't treat it as as fact.
If there is a study that was conducted, let's say, 70 years ago, and it's been repeated 50, 100 times since, in multiple different circumstances, then i guess science is never certain.
But it's pretty darn darn close and i think having that like nuanced approach, not thinking of science as this kind of giant black and white entity, there are shades of gray and shades of robustness.
Agreed.
Yes.
And I think also we need to give ourselves a license to have that N of one type of mentality too right.
And so when you think about it statistically and through psychology or whatever the study might be, The N is the sample size.
And so then you know, the bigger the sample size theoretically and randomized, et cetera, the better the results will be.
But at the end of the day, it's your responsibility to study yourself.
A funny example.
That's outside of psychology and I don't know the numbers, just understand the premise again.
But they said, for instance, throughout LeBron James's career, he's averaged like –
27 points, eight rebounds and eight assists every like that's his average, something like that.
But what's interesting is that throughout his whole career he's never gotten that specific stat line.
You know, something really interesting.
So with with these studies, think about it.
There might be this news article that you read that says OK, apparently seven point six hours of sleep is the optimal number of hours of sleep you could get.
But nobody in the actual study got seven point six hours, because it's an average of all of the people who are participating.
So really, there are going to be some people who are good with five hours.
There are going to be some people who need eight.
Right.
And so it's your job to realize OK, there's some optimal amount of sleep, and it's probably somewhere in this range.
So I need to figure out what it is for me and what works for me.
I think you're absolutely right.
I think there's two ways of looking at this.
As you say, just because this bias affects most people, it doesn't mean it affects everyone.
So I think that's certainly true.
And then I think, the second bit of if you read a study and you're just deeply suspicious of the findings, that should set off alarm bells.
I think if it feels unbelievable, it's a pretty good guide to whether that study is genuine or not.
You look at a lot of the studies that have been replicated and they always start to me smelt a bit dodgy, like things like um priming.
Oh, you hold a warm cup in your hand and if you're talking to someone, you'll be you'll, you'll think they are warmer.
Uh, in terms of personality, they often felt a little bit of a leap.
I couldn't see an explanation of why they would be true, whereas you talk about something like conformity or social proof.
Well, that you see happening all the time.
There are hundreds of examples.
If we think back from an evolutionary perspective, you know um being very well attuned to what other people in our, our group thought and felt was a way of staying on side of that group.
And for most of human history, if you were ostracized, if you were thrown out, for the group it was, it was a death sentence.
So we have evolved to be highly attuned to what others think and feel, so something like social proof.
Not only are there multiple experiments, you can, I think, a very plausible explanation about why it occurs, why it would have been useful for most of human history.
I agree.
It still is a passion, but I love learning it deeply.
And one of the things that was really hammered home is the reality of bias in our decision making and saying hey listen, this is how you engage in critical thought.
A lot of times the biases, they're rooted in your amygdala.
It's not legitimate thought.
Think about, you know, Kahneman thinking fast versus thinking slow, et cetera.
And it's almost as if there has been this sometimes explicit but largely implicit bias Push towards the anti-intuition movement whereas, like hey, your gut feeling.
If you're having a feeling in your gut, it is, by definition, psychologically illegitimate.
And so I want to think about from your perspective, someone who studies this deeply.
How do you balance the reality that hey, biases do exist, and sometimes our gut instinct can take us the wrong way.
But also there's a lot of legitimacy to our intuition as well.
How do you balance it as you're navigating the world and making decisions?
I think it often comes down to, we talked about this kind of shampoo aisle example earlier.
How important is this decision?
And if I'm picking I don't know 20 travel insurance well, maybe just picking the brand that i've heard or i know super popular using that bias, that's probably a reasonable way of getting to a reasonable product.
If you're making a super serious decision, that's when you maybe want to be aware that you could be falling for some of these principles and therefore give yourself pause to um, Stop and think twice.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And I guess it goes circles back to also satisficing as well, because the majority of our decisions the day to day are pretty minimal.
They don't have consequences that extend too far.
But if you can say OK, this is a decision that would have some level of long term ramifications or the impact could be significant.
Let's slow it down.
And one of the things that I started to do was say all right, because I'm trying to regain connection to that gut instinct, because for all these years decade plus I've been intentionally exhausting myself with constant critical thought.
And I realized, what am I doing?
I think I could have made this decision a lot faster.
And so what I started to do is say, OK, what does my gut say?
Just like intentionally exhausting, honing into that so i could feel it.
And if it's a longer like an important decision, then i'll say i'm going to log, i'm going to actually explicitly write down what my gut was saying.
I'm going to put that aside and now i'm going to engage in critical thought, and not not in order to substantiate, to just to strengthen my confirmation bias, but let me actually see pros and cons versus both sides.
A lot of times the initial gut decision was correct.
But i think it's good to have that self-check.
But I like that mentality that you have where it's when we say how important is this decision?
How long are the consequences or the ripple effects?
And then adding more critical thought as necessary in those situations.
Yeah, yeah.
And often when I'm looking at these biases, it's often to help businesses or governments use them to change behavior effectively.
So we talked about social proof, and that's essentially the idea.
If you make something look popular, it becomes more appealing.
Now a flip of that, very related, is negative social proof, which is if you make an unwanted behavior like an anti-social behavior, drunkenness or theft.
If you make that behavior look commonplace, it also becomes more common still, and there's some lovely work by Robert Cialdini from, I think, 2003 that he that shows this.
So, for example, he does this experiment with a or with the Petrified Wood National Park in Arizona, And he's picked this park because loads of people are stealing mementos.
They're taking tiny pieces of petrified wood home with them.
So he finds this deserted path.
He sprinkles bits of wood along the path.
And then he sticks a CCTV camera behind a rock pointing at the path so he can monitor theft rates.
Now, when there's no sign, about 3%, I think it's 2.9% of people steal a bit of wood.
That's his control.
When he puts up a sign saying don't steal, it's wrong, theft rates drop to 17, so showing you can change them in the right direction.
But his real test is he says, what would happen if I purposely emphasised the scale of the problem?
So he puts up these signs saying 14 tonnes of wood are being stolen and it's ruining the look of the park.
And theft rates go from 2.9% in the control, with no sign, to 7.9% in that setting.
So reason i'm going through this is that is a very powerful study which shows if you stress the scale of an unwanted behavior, you remove a sense of transgression and then that behavior becomes even more likely to occur.
It backfires.
Now, if i'm ever working with a government or, you know, trying to what like in britain maybe we don't want you to carry knives.
The first thing you've got to do is make sure In your ads you don't inadvertently create the impression that lots of other people are misbehaving, because if you do, you're using this bias in the wrong direction, not the right direction.
So often that's how I kind of tend to use these biases.
It's in.
How can I use this principle to make a bit of communications that much more more effectively?
That's so fascinating.
Humans.
I tell you one of the things that's helped me.
Richard is just accepting how weird we are as humans.
Because a lot of times the common sense responds where we say oh, let's just give details about the problem.
That would persuade a rational person to do X Y Z, But it shows just how sometimes fundamentally wrong our understanding of human psychology can be.
Yeah, and I think you're right that it's a repeated mistake, because how people, and especially companies, identify what their audiences think?
The most common route is to ask them.
They send a survey or they run a focus group.
But the problem is people's explanations of their own behaviour are completely different from what actually happens effectively changes the behavior.
Now, if you say to people which of these signs would influence you, would you be influenced if you knew lots of people were stealing?
Everyone says no, they say no no no, no.
You know i'm a moral person.
I wouldn't be influenced by that.
Uh, you know, i'd just be influenced by what's right or the size of the fine.
I wouldn't be influenced by what others do.
So a lot of the mistakes in communication come from the problem of this uncritical belief in what i would call claims data, surveys and focus groups.
This is it's really interesting because I I'm thinking about that reality as it relates to surveys and focus groups, things like that, and then bringing it into our own lives, just for ourselves and for other people, because a lot of times action precedes understanding.
So we will take an action, make a decision or something like that.
And somebody might say, well, why did you do that?
Now I got to make shit up.
I don't know why I did it, but I don't want to sound stupid.
Humans have a reason for doing things.
And if if I just did this thing for no reason, people are going to think I'm unhinged.
I can't have that.
And so now we start to create this narrative and then we start to believe that narrative, too.
And so it makes me wonder when we're having conversations with people and then they start to explain their behaviors, then should we listen with a little bit of skepticism as well?
Absolutely, i think you're right.
I think bring it back to kind of personal examples.
I'm thinking last time i bought a car, so i bought a second hand bmw, and if someone said to me, why did you buy that model i've talked about, you know, the miles on the odometer or whatever it is?
Uh, the fuel efficiency, all this this stuff.
Probably why i did actually buy it was i quite like the silver color.
Uh, i like the logo.
It looks quite cool.
I think it was about 4 pm at the time and we'd been in this car lot for about five hours.
And frankly, whatever anyone had suggested, I was probably at the right stage of buying.
But I'm not going to tell people that.
I wouldn't have told people that in a survey.
I'd feel like a complete idiot.
So, yeah, you're right.
When we describe our behavior, it's almost, what would I like my motivations to be?
What would the right thing to have been? to have influenced me.
We're describing this kind of perfect ideal of a person rather than what actually influenced us.
Yeah.
And you know, I'm wondering, especially from a persuasive perspective, how many times, based on the way that we ask questions or challenge people, we actually created the resistance that frustrates us so much.
You know where we have this phenomenon of again somebody does something they don't have a good reason.
Then they explain it.
And doesn't make any sense.
Now they feel cornered, they're like, oh my gosh, i know it doesn't make sense, but i can't just say you know what?
It doesn't make sense, then i'd be stupid.
So i need to really double down on defending myself, because now i'm stuck here.
I didn't want to be here.
Now i'm stuck here and it's because of the way that we approached it that made that, pushed them into a corner, and they don't even feel comfortable enough making an adjustment.
Completely agree with that, and i think there's two bits there.
So there's firstly, as you said, the kind of language that precipitated the original response.
So there was a really famous study from 1974.
And if people are interested and they Google Loftus Palmer car crash experiment, what they will see on YouTube is two cars colliding.
Let's say it's a white car and a black car.
They just drive into each other.
And Loftus and Palmer get this 10 second video.
They take it to lots of people.
And the first group They say, how fast are the cars going when they smash together?
And the average answer is something like 40 miles an hour.
Next group of people, they show them exactly the same clip.
That's the crucial bit.
It's exactly the same footage.
And they ask that second group, how fast were the cars going when they collided?
And the answer there is more like 31 miles an hour.
So I think the figure is there's a 27% difference in speed estimates.
So even though people see exactly the same footage, what they estimate about the speed is wildly different.
So the argument here is we don't experience reality neutrally.
We experience it through a lens of the language that's used.
And if you talk about a word like smashed, it implies speed.
If you talk about collided, it implies slowness.
Now the original experiment was done to try and cast out on witness testimony, because Loftus and Palmer thought a skilled policeman could, by the language they used, change people's memory of an event to fit with whatever case they were building.
So they did it for a very, very specific reason.
But that same principle you can see in society today.
Frank Luntz is a pollster, and in Britain we call it inheritance tax.
I think in America there's a debate about whether you call it death tax or estate tax.
And if you go out and the Republicans always want to call it debt tax very, very low support, because you're emphasising that this comes at an inopportune time.
But the Democrats refer to it as estate tax.
And if you refer to it as estate tax, you get a higher level of support because estate creates this impression of you know someone living in a giant mansion.
It's only the super wealthy that are going to pay.
So the very choice of language you use can affect people's feelings about a particular situation.
So I think you're absolutely right.
That initial use of language will change people's behavior.
And then, once they have made their first statement, they've stuck a flag in the ground.
Then they will feel beholden to that.
Absolutely.
That's so fascinating.
And listeners.
If there's ever a time you want to lose faith in humanity, just look up any study by Elizabeth Loftus as it relates to memory.
It is disturbing just how pathetic and pliable and malleable our memory is.
And especially when you think about it from a legal perspective, that is a significant drop down with the car crash example.
Because especially when you consider in America, a common speed limit is 35 miles per hour.
That discrepancy could be the difference between the legality of the issue.
And then with Frank Luntz, he's been incredible for the conservatives when it comes to messaging.
And then the work that he's done in industry is great as well.
Because think about gambling.
Gambling is a vice, right? but everybody loves gaming.
And one of the key things that led to the legalization of gambling in America was renaming it from the gambling industry to the gaming industry.
And that was Frank Lutz as well.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
The less nefarious but perhaps funnier example is and this is bizarre because this happens again and again, and again.
It's something we cover in the book, How Can a Human Mind?
It's fish.
So the most famous example is a 1970s example by Lee Lance.
So he was an importer and he's got rights to buy lots of fish in Chile.
Goes to New York restaurants and says, you know, do you want to try this fish?
It's really, really tasty.
It's the Patagonian toothfish.
Do you want to buy a few kilos?
And the restaurant's like, no, eat a Patagonian toothfish.
It sounds ugly.
No one's going to buy that.
So Lance goes away, and he thinks to himself, well, I've paid the money for these fish.
I need to sell them.
So he then goes to the next lot of restaurants and he says would you like to buy some Chilean sea bass?
He renames the fish.
It's exactly the same fish.
It tastes exactly the same.
But suddenly, people are focused on the flavor, not the unappealing name.
And the Chilean sea bass over.
I think it was the 80s and 90s.
Sales of it go up 30-fold since that renaming.
So You know, it's not like Shakespeare says, a rose by any name would smell as sweet.
You know, you change the name of something, you get a very different reaction.
And fish importers or salespeople have done it again and again.
So Mahi Mahi used to be dolphin fish.
But who would buy dolphin fish?
It reminds you of like Flipper.
You know, who wants to be tucking into that? um these are more this one's more american so i'm probably thinking it wrong but i think crawfish some people used to call it a mud bug wow you know what a mud bug linguine crawfish linguine sounds amazing so you absolutely get these really big changes in behavior based on what label you decide to put on an event on an event wow i i knew about the sea bass i didn't know about crawfish that's that and there are loads of them there's probably another Unbelievable.
I tell you, it's scary, but also encouraging too, because it's – I feel like this episode took us to Hogwarts and we learned some new spells that we can utilize.
Really, once you understand psychology and how much of an impact it can have, especially with framing and the word choice and all of these things, it can be like a magical tool.
But then at the same time, we can see how it could be manipulated for nefarious purposes.
And for you when you see it, especially with your work, because you work with companies and governments on this.
When it comes to the ethical element of this, how do you draw the line?
Yeah, so I completely agree with you.
And again, I think an analogy helps.
Absolutely.
I think there are ethical watchouts.
But then if you think, don't think about psychology.
For a second, think about rhetoric.
You know rhetoric kind of study of how to put a persuasive speech or presentation together.
Those skills could be used for good or ill.
You know, some people have used rhetoric to get humanity to love each other.
Some people have used those same skills to get different groups to hate each other.
Now no one would say the study of rhetoric is immoral.
It's the ends to which you put it.
And I would say it's exactly the same with these psychological principles.
They are a tool, a neutral tool.
Whether they are good or bad very much depends on what use you put them to.
If you try and get people to gamble more than they can afford, that is a very dubious use of behavioural science.
If you try and persuade youths not to carry guns or knives, that's a positive use.
I'm going to guesstimate on your persuasions, but generally it's a pretty positive use.
So to me, it's not the behavioural science that's good or bad, it's what you do with it.
And that is definitely not a get out of jail free card.
I think people have got to think is the intervention that you're doing?
Is that to the benefit, or reasonable benefit, of the, the audience that you're trying to persuade?
Yep i, i agree 100, because that's a question that i get quite frequently.
What's the difference between persuasion and manipulation?
It just it comes down to intent, and i i give the example of a knife.
A knife is not inherently good or bad.
I, i cook, i use a knife to cook, and then somebody might take that knife and do dastardly deeds with that knife, And so is it the knife maker's fault.
No, it's the user of the knife who's at fault for that.
And, I think, a lot of good people.
They put themselves in a position where they don't learn these skills because they can't get past that ethical side of it.
Where they say oh, I could see how this could be used for evil, and therefore I don't feel comfortable learning that.
And it's like well, I mean everything can be used with evil, with enough creativity.
So absolutely, and also you can't opt out.
In a way you know there is no neutral position.
Like you, you literally use the words persuasion or manipulation.
People often say to me after talk, you know, is this manipulation?
One of the things I would say is well, let's talk about the Loftus and Palmer experiment.
How words are really important.
That's a behavioral science principle.
You have just picked the word manipulation because you wanted to persuade the audience that this was a negative thing.
You know, you could have said instead of, is this a manipulation?
We could have said, you know, do you think this is morally positive or morally negative?
That would be a less extreme way of avoiding the sentence.
We're all influencing, we're all choosing what words to use.
You can't opt out, i think, of persuasion.
It's just whether or not you do it effectively on.
You're so right.
You're so right.
Because then to that same part.
Yeah, you're right.
Because then you would say well it's it's, it's not, it's.
I'm even think I'm trying to come up with an example to speak with pure, like an, a purely neutral way, all the time.
If somebody were to go to that extent to be extremely neutral, they would sound so weird.
I would not run them off and run them off.
Yeah, literally any situation.
You have to give a subset of the reasons to act and once you're picking a subset of reasons, there's a degree of um partiality, there's a degree of bias.
You you know you've moved away from neutrality and and you have to do that in the for the sake of brevity, Thank you.
You've given me a great way to respond to this question.
It's like, have you ever at any time tried to change somebody's mind?
We all have.
So you're one of us.
OK, so don't come at me about manipulation.
I'll probably say it a little bit softer from the stage.
This is great.
Well, I know we're coming up on time and I want to make sure that we give Simone an opportunity to pop in, because he always listens.
He always has great questions.
And so, Simone, let me let me call you to the stage.
What's coming to mind for you?
Well, you know that.
I've heard you saying that a subtle change can happen.
Make everything different.
Um, i would like to know if you have an example about how a small word or anything small small, very small, can have a huge impact.
Yeah, so one that, because we've been talking about social proof today and we've been talking about um, the word choice.
The one that springs to mind is a study i think it's the university of texas by peterson, and he gets about a thousand people to go through a e-commerce site and they're meant to be buying an item.
So they've got this list of items they've got to buy and one of those items just isn't there.
You know it's out of stock.
Um, i was trying to avoid using that word and then he asked people afterwards how irritated were they because the item wasn't there.
Now, the twist in the experiment is sometimes the item is labeled out of stock, sometimes it's labeled unavailable, sometimes it's labeled sold out, And what Peterson finds is that irritation levels with the website and the product are about 15 lower if the word sold out was used.
Now his explanation is if you, as a brand, if you go out and say you're out of stock or unavailable, you are drawing attention to a logistical mistake.
You're showing that you've been slightly inept.
But if you say things sold out, you're drawing attention to that item's popularity.
And we know that whatever item we think is popular becomes more appealing.
That's the whole principle of social proof.
So that is a tiny word change.
Uh, it doesn't cost the business anything because they've got to label the product in one way or another, but by using the psychologically powerful term they end up with happier customers than if they used any old word that sprang to mind.
So very, very small change, statistically significant and sizable result that you're so right.
And something else that i've been thinking about and this is a little bit more uh philosophical, but more metacognitive as well When it comes to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives, I think word choice matters in a similar way, right.
Because somebody who's running a business that's successful and then you run out of product, you could say man, I am inept.
I knew I should have ordered more.
I didn't order more.
This is my fault.
I'm bad at business.
Or you could say I've created a product that is so popular that it exceeded my own expectations and were sold out.
People are craving this.
This is exciting.
And I think about so many times in my life, there is like a negative way to read any story.
If you even think about the American version of The Office, I know the British version was very different.
But the American version, they have Michael Scott, the leader of the office, as this lovable, incompetent boss.
Who's really, really funny.
You could, with the exact same character doing the exact same thing, just change the narration and change what people are saying about him and turn him into an evil character who is laughing all the time like a maniacal criminal who needs to be out of this office, right?
And so...
I'm thinking about everything that we talked about word choice and these small differences that we can make in the way that we describe things to change the perceptions of others.
We could use that same psychology internally for ourselves.
Absolutely.
There is an absolutely amazing book called The Expectation Effect, which is by David Robson.
So he's a brilliant writer.
I came across his work first.
He wrote for the BBC, did a kind of science regular regular blog.
And he looks at lots of different areas in life, but it's all around how our expectations become self-fulfilling.
So, for example, I think one of the studies he mentions is by Ragunathan, who's at the, I think, McCombs Business School.
And he gets a group of Americans and who aren't very familiar with Indian food.
So lays on a big buffet lots of different items samosas, curries and crucially, a mango lassi.
They are asked their viewpoint on all the different foods.
Rate the taste, doesn't care about most of the results.
The only thing he cares about is how people rate the mango lassi.
He's just asked about the other stuff as a bit of a smokescreen.
And the point with the mango lassi is some people he says this is a health drink.
Other people say it's an other people.
He tells them it's an unhealthy drink and what he finds is that the people who think it's unhealthy, they rate the taste about 50 55 percent better.
Now, according to raguna thing he says in america and it is.
This will be the same in britain but different in france.
In america there's this association with unhealthy food being tasty.
So if you tell someone it's unhealthy, they think it's going to be tasty and therefore they look for confirming evidence.
But vice versa, if you tell them it's healthy, they they think it's going to be horrible and they look for confirming evidence.
So he says that it's our expectation that that partly affects the experience of the product.
Now, that's true for health foods, but it's true in your small business example.
It's true in so many ways.
How you label something, the way that you frame it then becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Okay, now we went there, Richard.
So I'm playing around with this idea with myself that everything is placebo.
Everything is placebo.
And when you think about it it's like the, isn't it the one, if one, if not the most powerful and consistent pharmacological effects is the placebo effect.
That's what we have it in every study.
Right.
Because it will register in some kind of way.
And so I realize OK well, as long as it does not my belief, as long as this does not fly in the face of objective reality, then why would I not choose to believe something that is more positive about myself or society, if there is enough evidence to substantiate that belief?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
My mum's got arthritis and someone sent my wife a paper saying oh, I know Richard's mum takes turmeric.
This paper suggests it might have a placebo effect.
And I'm like, well, my mum thinks this works.
Why would I tell her this?
I mean, if it's the placebo or the chemical ingredient that's causing her a reduction in pain, she doesn't care.
I don't care.
Like, why would I break this spell?
Now, I think there are obviously limits to that.
If she was, I don't know, drinking a bottle of whiskey in the morning, thinking it's going to ease her pain and it's having a placebo effect, you might want to intervene.
But if there's harmless situations like that, use this bias to your benefit.
I agree.
And I've been laying these breadcrumbs for Whitney because I would just say man, I wish somebody would use the placebo effect on me.
I'd believe it.
Exactly, at least to my knowledge, she hasn't done it, but just anybody out there.
If you have any beliefs that you would like me to believe, you know, just make it.
Make me feel good, or well.
Hopefully Whitney's out there and she's, you know, I don't know if you've got a caffeine addiction, she's now.
If she ever makes you one, she's just giving you a decaf without telling you and They're getting all the benefit without the side effects.
Hopefully she has done it.
That's the hope.
That is the hope.
Richard, this is great, man.
It is a pleasure as always.
And let me know let listeners know about the new book coming out, because the majority of our listeners are in America and I know they'd love to hear from you.
Yeah, so it's a joint effort.
Michael Aaron Flickr and I have written Hacking Human Mind and it's out September the 30th.
And in it, we look at 17 different brands, So Haagen-Dazs, Amazon Prime, Liquid Death.
And for each one, there's a little history about the brand, very short history.
And then we say look, the success of that brand has partly been driven by these two or three psychological principles.
And we tell people how they could use those principles in their business or their communications.
I'm so excited.
And, uh, Simone, just a quick note.
Um, we need to have some kind of content with the, like a split screen of the three of us.
Cause Simone and I literally had the exact same response as you described the book.
I cannot wait.
This is so good.
Thank you very much.
Good to see you.
Thank you.
