Make the Shortcuts of Human Nature Work for You - SBCC Summit 2016 Keynote Speech

“We are all ultimately in the business of choice”.

This Keynote Speech by Matthew Willcox was presented at the First International SBCC (Social and Behaviour Change Communication) Summit in February 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The summit brought together over 700 practitioners representing 50 countries to advance SBCC as a domain of scholarship and practice and link SBCC to positive health outcomes and impact. Matthew Willcox is Founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Decision Making at FCB, a group that was set up to bring the findings from scientists who study human behaviour and how people make choices into the practice of advertising and marketing. His talk is about how human nature drives our choices and what Behavioural Economics reveals about that.

Matthew Willcox starts off his talk by giving his definition of marketing, which he defines as the “creation, management and measurement of programmes designed to influence the choices that a programme, organisation or society needs people to make in order for it to achieve its goals” - a definition that can be applied to trade unions, corporates, as well as NGOs.

He makes the point that the only way you can get people to make the choices you want them to make is to align them with human nature, and by understanding how people make choices. We live in the golden age of decision sciences, so there is a lot of thinking and research on how people make choices. Referring to research done by Baba Shiv and Daniel Kahneman, Willcox explains that our intuition seems to be more important than our rational thinking in making choices. For example, research has shown that our rational brain simply rationalises what our intuitive brain has already decided to do. These findings are very important for those who are involved in understanding how choices are made.

One area that looks at how people make choices is Behavioral Economics. This is an “area of psychology that explores how humans behave and make choices by studying the differences between how we should act from a rational economic perspective and how we really behave.” The gap between the two offers insight into human nature.

Willcox acknowledges that in using the theory of Behavioral Economics, we need to apply some caution and keep in mind that most of the research is done among, what one researcher, Hazel Markus, called WIERD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) subjects. This is however changing as similar research is increasingly being done around the world. We also need to view this theory not as supplying hard and fast rules or silver bullets - but as insights to trigger transformation and power creativity. It is “not science to validate but more science to inspire”. Finally, he notes that the language of behavioural economics does tend to talk down to people. Nevertheless, this theory provides some valuable insights into human nature.

He goes on to explain that choice is a complicated thing and is influenced by cultural context, societal context, situational context (stress), and individual differences (life history, genetics). Overall, however, he believes that in order to understand how people will behave in the next 6 months, one needs to understand what they have been doing for the last 200 thousand years. This is due to the fact that humans have come to where they are today because of the decisions made by their ancestors. These decisions have been influenced by intuitions humans have evolved over the years. In order to show how deeply rooted our intuitions are, Willcox cites some research that showed that intuitively most people in America are scared of snakes, when the threat to individuals from snakes is really not that great.

Looking at what drives choices, Willcox refers to the heuristic approach to decision making or problem solving. These are decisions driven by quick and efficient mental short cuts - decisions that can be made quickly and executed efficiently, without expending too much energy. We are therefore drawn to take short cuts that work. When these short cuts do not work so well, there is usually “cognitive bias” (a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment) at play. There are many different cognitive biases, but Willcox, who has categorised them into 8 separate groups, talks about 2 of them.

Firstly, losses matter more than gains. A lot of behavioural experiments show that the psychological impact of loosing $100 is twice as big as the positive psychological impact of gaining $100. This offers interesting insight for marketers and Willcox shows examples of how this insight has been used by IBM and Apple in their marketing campaigns.

Secondly, he explains that we are not always very good at making choices around things that benefit us in the future. We are short term creatures and have an irrational preference for a smaller rewards now rather than a large reward in the future. A study from the field of neuro-economics, gives some insight into why this might be. In short, the study showed that thinking about the future self is more like thinking about another person, with little relation to the current self.

Based on the fact that people find it difficult to make choices that have long term benefits, Willcox makes the point that changing behaviour may have to be about getting people to do the right things for the wrong reasons, for example, giving cash incentives to get people to take medication. Similarly, if the behaviour change one is seeking has long term benefits, one should perhaps look for a short-term benefit and lead with that. He offers an example from a family planning campaign in Uganda, where the long-term benefits of family planning are made very visceral and immediate by juxtaposing two male characters - one has money and a hearty meal, and the other is broke and is eating a very basic meal.

He concludes that these insights from behavioural economics allow us to understand how human nature shapes people's choices, and that it is important “as it allows one to create choices that align with how the brain naturally works”, and that “allows you to make the behaviour change you need a natural choice.”