We design low-cost, unobtrusive, readily mass-scalable psychological and behavioural 'interventions' that shift the behaviour of your consumers, employees, or citizens, typically around issues of efficiency, productivity and sustainability. Our interventions improve service delivery; secure compliance; minimize fraud; lift employee morale and productivity; reduce absenteeism; induce uptake of technology; enhance customer engagement, loyalty and satisfaction; create more impactful communications and offers; and boost campaign effectiveness.
We help you overcome the peculiarities of human decision-making.
Humans regularly fail to choose the option that is (objectively) in their own best interests, or fail to exploit their choices in ways that maximise the utility they can derive from them, or avoid making any decision among the alternatives at all ('status quo bias’). These propensities grow still more marked as information, choices and complexity increase.
As people negotiate the many decisions and alternatives that confront them each day, making smart choices is inevitably way behind figuring out how to use TikTok, or finding the soccer boots for training.
Humans cope with this vast “wall of noise” by 'satisficing' rather than 'optimizing'. They revert to simple rules of thumb, heuristics and cognitive biases, mostly below the level of conscious awareness. They over-weight losses relative to gains, go to excessive lengths to avoid any kind of risk, and heavily discount the future. They are unduly swayed by the first thing, the last thing, the tangible and the concrete, the emotional and the personal. They pay close attention to norms, follow the crowd, and bring their behaviour into conformity with others. They are influenced by irrelevant problem framing. They procrastinate, or avoid making a decision altogether.
With behavioural economics, we make the 'irrational' work for you.
The good news is this: human decision-making is irrational, but it is “predictably irrational”. The ways in which people deviate from the cost-benefit analysis and utility maximization attributed to classical ‘economic man’ are well-known and highly predictable…. so predictable we are able not merely to avoid or overcome these cognitive and behavioural barriers to the outcomes you seek, but actually use the peculiarities of human decision-making to your advantage. For example, if people tend to stick to the status quo and like to follow the crowd, make the outcome you seek the 'new normal'. Show them what they will certainly lose by failing to act, rather than potentially gain by acting. Make the thing you want them to do the very easiest thing to do, and inaction hard or costly. Above all, simplify everything. Normal human beings prefer white space to words. Though many still find it hard to fathom, the empirical evidence is clear: less information and fewer options make for more, and better decisions.
Whenever your budget and timeframe allow, we recommend pre-testing behavioural interventions employing RCTs (Randomised Controlled Trials). And for good reason!
1). RCTs are widely accepted as the scientific ‘gold standard’ for testing the efficacy of any intervention (behavioural or otherwise), relative to a randomised control group (e.g., compared to continuing with BAU).
2). An RCT directly tests the relative impact of alternative behavioural interventions (e.g., campaign A vs. campaign B vs. BAU). This means we can quickly home in on your best performer among the viable options.
3). Since we typically conduct such testing unobtrusively within your normal business processes, we can ascertain precisely the real-world impact of implementing that change, compared to just continuing with BAU. The ROI of each alternative you're considering (e.g., some change in your process, materials or strategy) can then be precisely determined.