#19 Zeigarnik Effect: Why you want to know what happens in this episode

What happens when memories or tasks are unfinished, and why is it that they seem to stick in our heads? In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the Zeigarnik effect and how we can use it to create stronger memories, stop procrastinating, and keep customers thinking about us long after our ads have run.

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Mel: 00:00 What do we know about negative emotions?

Dan: 00:03 They're bad?

Mel: 00:04 You haven't learnt anything. What we know is that when we feel negative we're highly motivated to relieve ourselves of that feeling.

Dan: 00:12 That's where we got the phrase, "Shitting myself."

(Music)

Mel: 00:32 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan: 00:34 The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel: 00:36 Why we think what we think.

Dan: 00:37 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel: 00:40 Ethically.

Dan: 00:41 Of course, always ethically. I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat a creative agency built for today.

Mel: 00:46 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg, I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:48 And this is Kops about to press play on the best audio ever.

(Music)

Dan: 00:58 We're going to do something different this episode.

Mel: 01:00 Oh, mix it up.

Dan: 01:01 We normally start with "Dan has a weird life anecdote." Then we stumble into a heuristics, and then we stumble into advertising.

Mel: 01:09 Either that or we go, "We're going to mix it up this time."

Dan: 01:11 Yeah. It's definitely either we do the normal thing or we do something different.

Mel: 01:14 Well, or yeah that.

Dan: 01:15 So, I want to start today talking about an ad. It's an ad-

Mel: 01:18 What a surprise.

Dan: 01:19 Well, I know, now I don't have to wait 15 minutes to do it for a change. So, I want to talk about an ad that I kind of ... The inner ad nerd in me loves. It's one of the greatest and most successful and most imitated ads of all time. In the 16, 17 episodes we've done up until now we've talked about a lot of heuristics that have hints of themselves in this ad, but nothing that really explains it properly.

Mel: 01:43 Okay.

Dan: 01:44 So the ad that I'm talking about, of course, if you're an ad nerd playing along at home is an ad from 1926. So almost 100 years ago. A guy by the name of John Kapel, so maybe it's Jon Kapel's I don't know, he died in 1990 so I'll never get to ask him.

Mel: 01:58 RIP.

Dan: 01:59 Right. So, he wrote an ad and the ad came out in the era of lots of print advertising, obviously, and lots of direct response print advertising. So, ads where you want somebody to send in a coupon or mail in to get something sent back.

Mel: 02:13 Okay.

Dan: 02:13 The ad was for piano lessons. Rather than doing ads about, "Learn to play piano in 30 minutes a day," or "The easiest way to learn how to play piano." He wrote this ad for which the headline was, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play ... "

Mel: 02:29 What?

Dan: 02:30 Yeah. So that's the headline, then there's a few hundred words of copy underneath it. Like most ads from the 1920s there's this beautiful illustration that takes up probably the top third of the page, which looks like a very 1920s style dinner party with a whole bunch of people sitting around in suits doing what they do.

Mel: 02:46 Okay.

Dan: 02:47 So, this ad might sound familiar. The structure of it might sound familiar. It has kind of been imitated countless times, and is actually the blueprint for most of what we'd consider clickbait these days. “Something happened and you'll never believe what the outcome of that was.”

Mel: 03:05 Okay. Yeah. I see where you're going. So, tell me, how long have you been sitting on this? How long have you been sitting in this state of discomfort and just not understanding this ad that you love so much?

Dan: 03:14 Well, you know I feel in one respect I do understand it because it's suspense. It's getting people to buy into an idea and then not know how it's resolved and then they have to read something else to find out about it.

Mel: 03:25 Yeah.

Dan: 03:25 It's why a lot of TV shows work, and it's why a lot of movie trailers work. But why is suspense a thing? Why do we care? Why do I care about some illustrated guy from the 1920s sitting there on the piano?

Mel: 03:37 You know what? We should talk about this more.

Dan: 03:40 We should.

Mel: 03:40 We should solve this problem for you in this episode.

Dan: 03:41 Well, we have a whole podcast for that. Let's do it.

Mel: 03:43 All right. Well, I'm thinking that one of the ways, or something that might help you to understand, is a psychological phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik effect.

Dan: 03:54 The Zeigarnik effect.

Mel: 03:55 Right. And it sounds like a really cool word, but it was really just the name of a Russian researcher, or psychologist. I'm not actually sure. We should probably clarify.

Dan: 04:03 Yep.

Mel: 04:03 Anyway, it was in 1927, so whatever it is she's probably not that anymore.

Dan: 04:11 1927, and if we just were to wind back the tape, this ad that I'm talking about is from 1926.

Mel: 04:15 Whoa.

Dan: 04:16 Which is just further proof that ad guys are always one step ahead of psychologists. You guys just kind of turn up and put a fancy name on something that we've actually worked out.

Mel: 04:24 Are you finished now?

Dan: 04:24 Yeah. I'm finished now.

Mel: 04:25 Okay, good. So, back in 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik observed, while she was dining in a restaurant, that waiters were more likely to recall details of orders that were not yet paid for.

Dan: 04:41 Uh-huh (affirmative).

Mel: 04:41 So, basically you're taking orders, and for some of them they've finished the task and they've been paid for and complete. Those people have left, but orders that were not yet finished were being recalled more. The waiters were able to recall the details, they were able to tell exactly what you ordered, what dishes you ordered, what drinks you ordered with it. But once it was paid, see you later. Out of sight out of mind almost.

Dan: 05:02 And this happens today, almost 100 years later. You go into a good café to order brunch and there's like nine of you. Everybody makes their order. Not only do they make their order but everybody has weird variances of it. Menus are now just listed ingredients and people can just assemble whatever they want out of that apparently.

Dan: 05:17 So, you see waiters somehow not writing this stuff down, and often getting it exactly right. Then you wonder how long are they carrying this stuff around in their minds for?

Mel: 05:27 Yeah. So, this stuff was sort of happening before we had a good understanding of how memory works. We have working memory, and short-term memory, and long-term memory, right. So Zeigarnik was little bit ahead of her time. But basically what the Zeigarnik effect says is that we recall incomplete, or unresolved tasks, more frequently than we recall complete or finished tasks. So there's something in this idea of something being unfinished, or something being not yet complete that motivates us to actually remember it more.

Dan: 06:02 So, it's not so much the guy in the suit at the piano and what happened so much as it is just something that has started and my brain just wants to complete and finish?

Mel: 06:11 Yeah, your brains exploded because you've got some information and you're like, "I don't like having only some information. I need to have all the information. Finish this story for me, somebody please close this story and relieve the state of discomfort that I'm in by not knowing."

Dan: 06:23 Yeah. I guess my brain is running through all sorts of different possible ways that this thing could end, or that could explain this thing that I have incomplete information for.

Mel: 06:31 Exactly, and as you're doing that you're actually devoting a whole lot of mental energy to it, aren't you?

Dan: 06:35 Yeah.

Mel: 06:36 Right.

Dan: 06:36 Which it's not inherently positive. It's kind of, I feel uncomfortable. I feel like I have this itch. Like somebody has given me an itch. That sounds like a weird STD story. I feel like-

Mel: 06:46 Save that for another episode.

Dan: 06:46 I have a psychological itch that I'm expending energy trying to scratch.

Mel: 06:51 Right. So, Lumen said it maybe a little more eloquently than that.

Dan: 06:57 Than that-

Mel: 06:57 And what he said-

Dan: 06:58 No mention of sexually transmitted diseases or infections.

Mel: 06:59 What he said was, "The intention to carry out a task generates a state of psychological tension that keeps the issue alive until the task is complete and the tension is released."

Dan: 07:11 Basically there's an itch in my underpants and I don't know how it got there.

Mel: 07:13 Right.

Dan: 07:14 That's basically what it's saying.

Mel: 07:14 That's one way.

Dan: 07:15 Yeah.

Mel: 07:16 Now, the interesting thing about that is that the reference cited for this quote from Lumen is 1935, and then 1951, which tells me that Lumen was thinking about this for 16 years.

Mel: 07:27 So it was a big problem for him that needed to be resolved.

Dan: 07:29 Yeah. He definitely didn't have anything else going on in his life. He was just thinking about this.

Mel: 07:33 Certainly a long time, yeah. Not a lot happened in the world between 1935 and 1951. So it's not like anything else could have interrupted.

Dan: 07:38 Mainly people trying to resolve this issue.

Mel: 07:42 Okay, so this issue of the Zeigarnik effect was picked up a lot later on by Baddeley in 1963. Baddeley's name today is associated, you'd read it in like 50 psychology textbooks, with working memory. What Baddeley did to illustrate the Zeigarnik effect in a sort of round about way, or that phenomenon that Zeigarnik noticed in waiters, was that he devised a test that involved anagrams of five letter words.

Dan: 08:08 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mel: 08:08 So, an anagram is-

Dan: 08:10 A jumbled up word.

Mel: 08:11 Yeah, like a word where the letters are all jumbled up and your task is to solve the anagram by putting the letters in the right order to create a word. So, he presented participants with 12 five letter words, right. Basically you've got a few seconds to solve each one. So let's play along at home.

Speaker 3: 08:24 “Tonight, on Australia's biggest bargain sale we're offering a-”

Mel: 08:27 The letters are-

Dan: 08:30 Oh, we're not doing this.

Mel: 08:30 Yeah we are, here we go.

Dan: 08:30 Come on.

Mel: 08:30 Come on. Put your thinking hat on, right.

Dan: 08:32 Let's see how smart-

Mel: 08:33 I'm giving you five letters, make a word.

Dan: 08:34 Only one of us is a doctor.

Mel: 08:35 All right.

Dan: 08:37 I'm an auditory learner, this is very difficult.

Mel: 08:38 You're already making excuses before we've even started, right.

Dan: 08:41 Okay.

Mel: 08:41 So, the letters are-

Dan: 08:43 You're giving me letters, I make them into a word.

Mel: 08:45 Correct.

Dan: 08:45 Any word I want?

Mel: 08:46 Well, a word that's part of the English language.

Dan: 08:48 Oh fuck - you and your technicalities. Okay, let's go.

Mel: 08:50 W-E-O-T-L.

Dan: 08:50 W-E-O-T-L. Towel.

Mel: 08:56 Correct. See, the fun part of this is you can play along at home and you can see if you can solve it before Dan!

Dan: 09:01 That's not what we're doing.

Mel: 09:02 Are you smarter than Dan Monheit.

Dan: 09:02 That's not what we're doing.

Mel: 09:04 R-A-P-T-Y.

Dan: 09:07 Party.

Mel: 09:08 Correct. Look at you.

Dan: 09:09 Also, Rapty.

Mel: 09:10 Right. But actually party.

Dan: 09:12 Yeah.

Mel: 09:12 All right, let's try a harder one. E-V-O-A-B.

Dan: 09:16 E-V-O-A-B.

Mel: 09:19 Times up. Okay?

Dan: 09:20 Above?

Mel: 09:21 This is how the experiment works. Yes. It's above.

Dan: 09:23 Yes.

Mel: 09:23 Okay. Right, but you were too late.

Dan: 09:24 Oh.

Mel: 09:25 So I'm going to tell you the solution, it was Above. Okay. But, unfortunately, you didn't get it in time.

Dan: 09:30 Aww.

Mel: 09:30 Okay. So this is what the experiment involved.

Dan: 09:34 Focus on the negatives-

Mel: 09:34 It wasn't like that-

Dan: 09:34 I got the first two.

Mel: 09:34 It wasn't something-

Dan: 09:34 The first two I did really well on.

Mel: 09:36 Very good, keep remembering that.

Dan: 09:37 Thanks.

Mel: 09:39 So basically in the experiment participants were given 12 of these and they were given a certain amount of time in which to solve it. If they failed to solve it in time they were told the answer. Okay? 12 times, all right. So then afterwards the participants were asked how many of the words they could recall. Obviously the solved words, the English words, that were not the jumbled up letters. But how many of them they could recall? What Baddeley found was that people were twice as likely to recall the words that they actually failed to solve than the ones that they did.

Dan: 10:10 Right, because they're unresolved.

Mel: 10:11 Yeah.

Dan: 10:12 Right.

Mel: 10:12 Well, they were unresolved. They've since been resolved. But at the time people were devoting a lot of mental energy to it.

Dan: 10:17 So, it stuck.

Mel: 10:17 It stuck.

Dan: 10:18 So, for an ad guy like this is very interesting. Because obviously when we're making ads and comms for people we want to be noticed, and we want to be remembered.

Mel: 10:25 Hmm.

Dan: 10:25 So, knowing that leaving people with a little something unresolved can help us be remembered for longer, is an interesting thing for us to play with. I guess when we think about that headline, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play ... " it's totally doing that because I don't know what did happen when you sat down to play.

Mel: 10:42 It's giving you something unfinished, right. You sit there and you think, like you said before, all the things that possibly could happen. All that time you're putting a lot of attention to it, you're essentially rehearsing this.

Dan: 10:50 Yep.

Mel: 10:51 You're going to remember this for a long time. Once you actually do finish the story it's going to stick with you.

Dan: 10:54 Yeah, like 98 years people have been trying to work this out.

Mel: 10:57 You're one of them.

Dan: 10:57 96? Yeah.

Mel: 10:59 So, you're not alone.

Dan: 11:00 Thank you.

Mel: 11:01 You're not alone in your state of psychological tension.

Dan: 11:03 Thank you.

Mel: 11:04 So, if we think about why this happens, there are a couple of reasons. We'll talk them through. The first has to do with how we process memories. I often talk about this with clients in relation to trauma. But it doesn't necessarily, I mean this isn't a traumatic memory it's just a memory. We can use the same analogy.

Dan: 11:18 This episode is going to be a traumatic memory. When you lead me into trying to do a live piece of research.

Mel: 11:23 No, it's just gentle encouragement.

Dan: 11:25 You weren't very supportive of my efforts. Anyway-

Mel: 11:26 So anyway. The way that we process memories, I like to think of our brain having this section that’s sort of like a repository for all of the memories and experiences of our lives. It's like a library. Imagine you're the librarian, yeah?

Dan: 11:38 Okay.

Mel: 11:39 So, when something-

Dan: 11:40 Can I be a hot librarian and I take off my glasses and let my hair out?

Mel: 11:42 Whatever you want. If that helps you.

Dan: 11:44 I don't wear glasses and I don't have hair. This is going to be difficult. Anyway.

Mel: 11:46 Try to create that image.

Dan: 11:48 Yeah.

Mel: 11:48 Anyway ... So, you're the librarian and you are given a book and your job is to find the place in all of the shelves of your library that this book belongs.

Dan: 11:57 Yep.

Mel: 11:57 Right, what could you do? You could sort it by author. You could sort it by theme. You could sort it by-

Dan: 12:03 Colour.

Mel: 12:04 Alphabetical or title. You could sort it by colour.

Dan: 12:06 All the blue books go together.

Mel: 12:07 Yep.

Dan: 12:07 That's a very good way to find things.

Mel: 12:08 Hey, it'll keep things nice and ordered and neat.

Dan: 12:10 Yeah.

Mel: 12:11 That's what your brain wants to do. It wants to store things neatly.

So you've got all these different strategies that you can use to try and sort it. When you acquire a new piece of information your brain basically has to do the same thing. It has to figure out in which shelf of the library this piece of information belongs. Does it remind you, we're talking about the Zeigarnik effect, how do I store that? “Hmm, that reminds me of a heuristic, so let me put that with all the other heuristics in my brain and put it there, okay.”

Dan: 12:33 Reminds me of “this can go in the words that sound like the garlic” section.

Mel: 12:37 You come in and-

Dan: 12:38 It now has one book in it.

Mel: 12:39 Look, everyone has their own strategies for storing information. Okay, you could put it there.

Dan: 12:43 It's like how someone with English as a second language would say the garlic. “Ze garlic!”

Mel: 12:49 We're totally going off track. Can you please-

Dan: 12:51 You don't have that section?

Mel: 12:51 Stick with me here.

Dan: 12:52 This is weird.

Mel: 12:53 Stick with me. Right. So, once you've got a piece of information that's unresolved - "They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play ... " That's sitting there like a book and your brain is going, "Where on earth do I put that?"

Dan: 13:05 Yeah.

Mel: 13:05 It doesn't even rhyme with anything.

Dan: 13:07 It's like, does this go with the happy books?

Mel: 13:09 I don't know where to put it.

Dan: 13:09 Or does it go with the sad books?

Mel: 13:10 I don't even know.

Dan: 13:12 Does it go with uplifting?

Mel: 13:13 So confusing, right.

Dan: 13:14 International drama?

Mel: 13:15 So what do you do with this book that comes in that you don't know where to store? What do you do with it? Putting it anywhere, it's not for somebody else to clean up later, that's not how your brain works.

Dan: 13:26 Yeah. You just leave it. Yeah. You just leave it out, right.

Mel: 13:28 What you do is you leave it on the desk.

Dan: 13:30 Yeah.

Mel: 13:30 Every now and then you'll sort of pick up the book and go, "Hmm. Do I know now where to store it? No. I'm just going to keep covering it up with other books." But it's not going to magically find its way to the shelf by itself. At some point you are going to have to finish this memory, or this book, and put it back and figure out where it belongs.

Dan: 13:47 Or my wife is just going to throw it in the bin.

Mel: 13:50 Either way, that would get rid of it at least.

Dan: 13:51 Yeah.

Mel: 13:52 But it's not going to help. That's not sort of how our brains work.

Dan: 13:54 Right.

Mel: 13:54 Okay, our brains aren't just going to discard it.

Dan: 13:56 Lucky she doesn't have access to that. I would literally remember nothing. Everything's an unresolved issue on the desk in my brain.

Mel: 14:01 So what's happening is the longer that this book sits there, the more you're thinking about it, the more you're rehearsing it, the more you're becoming familiar with the actual properties of the book. Once you eventually do solve it the easier you're going to be able to recall that when you need to, right?

Dan: 14:14 Yeah.

Mel: 14:15 You're going to be able to find it much easier because you know exactly where it went, and you've spent a lot of time thinking about it. So that's sort of strategy one. That's got to do with how the way that we process memories, and the way that we understand information and store it for easier retrieval later on.

The other element of this is that there's an emotional side of it. There's always an emotional side to everything, right.

Dan: 14:34 Always with you.

Mel: 14:34 That's what I'm here to talk about.

Dan: 14:34 Can't just be about the facts.

Mel: 14:34 Right, no it's all about the feelings. So, the idea that we are in this state of psychological tension when something is unresolved, we experience that as a negative. It has a negative emotional tone to it. We don't like it. What do we know about negative emotions?

Dan: 14:49 They're bad?

Mel: 14:49 Oh, God, you haven't learned anything. What we know about negative emotions is that we don't like them, yes. They're bad.

Dan: 14:54 See?

Mel: 14:55 So it motivates us to alleviate the situation.

Dan: 14:57 Yeah.

Mel: 14:57 But we're motivated to do something about it because we no longer want to feel this state of discomfort.

Dan: 15:01 We want to heal the world.

Mel: 15:03 Yes.

Dan: 15:03 Michael Jackson was on to something.

Mel: 15:06 He was. We want to make the situation better. Okay, we do not like feeling unpleasant.

Dan: 15:10 Yep.

Mel: 15:11 We feel unpleasant, we feel uncomfortable, and we have incomplete tasks so it actually motivates us. So this Zeigarnik effect actually has a very helpful aspect to it.

Dan: 15:19 Sure.

Mel: 15:19 It motivates behaviour.

Dan: 15:20 So, what I find kind of challenging about this … as an ad guy I'm trying to craft experiences for my clients, and my clients consumers, customers, humans, whatever we call them. Am I better off, then, trying to create for them a closed loop experience, which kind of feels positive but is then forgettable because we've just filed it. Or am I better off trying to create an open loop, like an unresolved theme, which I know is going to hang around in their attention for a bit longer but kind of feels inherently negative?

Mel: 15:52 Dan.

Dan: 15:53 Yes.

Mel: 15:53 What if I told you that through the magic of psychology you could do both.

Dan: 15:56 Oh, I would say sign me up right now!

Mel: 15:59 Let me just wave my magic wand and let me tell you how this works. You can create a positive experience. You can take a person from an emotionally neutral experience to a positive one, and they feel good and they like you and they like your product and they want to buy more. Cool. But, we've talked about with emotions, there is the emotional tone. With memories it's really important to create that emotional tone.

You can intensify the positive emotion by first taking a person down. All right. So first you create this state of psychological tension. You create this discomfort and then you solve the problem for them. You take them not from neutral to positive, but from negative to positive and that has a much more long lasting effect. Great memory created, problem solved, podcast over.

Dan: 16:43 So, upset people first and then make them happy.

Mel: 16:46 Now you're starting to understand. But no, no. No wait-

Dan: 16:48 I don't want to upset them by giving them something incomplete that's going to irritate them.

Mel: 16:53 Create a state of tension that bothers them, makes them think about it more.

Dan: 16:56 Yeah, okay.

Mel: 16:57 Yeah.

Dan: 16:57 I can do that.

Mel: 16:58 Then give them all the answers.

Dan: 16:58 Yeah. I guess one of the challenges here is probably as advertisers we often over state how much we think people are going to be invested in a challenge that we put out for them, or a story we start to tell them they then fade away from.

Mel: 17:09 Right.

Dan: 17:10 So I think it's pretty important to be real about how much we're asking people to solve, or how much we're asking people to give a shit.

Mel: 17:16 Right. I mean, none of this works if nobody cares.

Dan: 17:18 Yeah.

Mel: 17:18 If I give you a problem you don't care about and leave it unfinished, you're like, "All right, I'll see you later. Don't care."

Dan: 17:23 Yeah, whatevs.

Mel: 17:23 Yeah, you have to have some attachment to it.

Dan: 17:24 So, not to go completely off track but if we think about game shows like 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' we always find out the answer after the break of whether they got it right or wrong. They spend a lot of time trying to get you invested in the story, and the person, and they phoned a friend, and how are they going to spend the money. So you actually do care long enough to hang around to the other side of the ad break to find out how it all ends.

Mel: 17:43 Yep. To be continued, right.

Dan: 17:45 Cool.

Mel: 17:45 Three powerful words in advertising.

Dan: 17:46 Yep. Thanks, I'll write that down.

Mel: 17:49 Yeah. So how do we actually use this?

Dan: 17:52 Okay. Me first, you first?

Mel: 17:53 You first.

Dan: 17:54 Me first. Okay, what I think is really interesting about this, and it's very topical so this is probably going to date the show a little bit. But, one of the really hot issues in creative advertising at the moment is the six second format. So for those of you outside the industry 30 seconds used to be the default time length for a piece of creative. You could tell a reasonably nice story in 30 seconds. Then it got down to 15, and now really through social media and digital channels, six seconds is kind of what we get.

Mel: 18:19 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dan: 18:20 So there's a lot of conversation about how do you tell a story in six seconds? Can you get somebody to feel happy or sad or motivated or inspired or challenged within six seconds, which is an insanely short period of time.

Dan: 18:32 What I think about off the back of today's episode is that maybe we don't have to tell the whole story in six seconds. Maybe what we have to do is just elicit enough curiosity in that six second window that we get. Because I could make someone curious in six seconds. I can do that.

Mel: 18:45 Can you? Because that's still hard.

Dan: 18:46 I'm sure I can. Do you want to hear how? … Aha!

Mel: 18:48 You got me.

Dan: 18:48 Right. So I can do that in six seconds.

Mel: 18:52 You just did it in two.

Dan: 18:55 Exactly. I could do it three times in six seconds. Then pick up the story somewhere else. So I think from a brand that's an interesting way to think about using our short form media, whether that's a print ad or a billboard or a short video. Not trying to tell the whole story, just enough to hook people and then you can close the loop for them later.

Mel: 19:12 You've also repackaged the whole idea. The whole idea is not to tell a story in six seconds.

Dan: 19:16 Yeah.

Mel: 19:16 The whole idea is to garner emotional investment in six seconds.

Dan: 19:22 It's to write a headline.

Mel: 19:22 Right.

Dan: 19:22 Six seconds is a long time to write a headline.

Mel: 19:23 That's what you’ve got.

Dan: 19:24 And we're back to 1926. All right, and what about as just people? Trying to get by in this world?

Mel: 19:30 So as just ordinary people trying to navigate our emotions in a distressing world. I'm going to give you, I guess, a bit of a hack to use this to your advantage.

Dan: 19:38 Good. That’s uplifting.

Mel: 19:38 How do you use this to help you? Yeah. I'm going to talk to the procrastinators out there.

Dan: 19:43 Never met one. Never been one.

Mel: 19:46 Right. Well, I am one. There's a whole lot of work that I'm not doing right now while I'm sitting in here podcasting with you.

Dan: 19:52 This is important.

Mel: 19:52 Very important. But, it can also be serving as a procrastination tool. Anyway. So what's actually happening when we procrastinate, for some reason we're failing to initiate a task for some reason, or complete a task. Something’s going on and for some reason we feel like we're actually safe in not doing anything at all than actually moving forward.

Which might work in some instances, but when you actually have contracts to fulfil and things to complete you actually need to get these things started. So, the most effective way to use the Zeigarnik effect to actually motivate you to get work done is to start that task. No matter what. Even if it's as simple as opening a document and writing the title and your name on it.

Dan: 20:31 Yeah.

Mel: 20:32 Right. Bad Decisions, a podcast by Dan Monheit and Melissa Weinberg. If we were to write a book, hey there's an idea. If we were to write a book that would be how we would start it.

Dan: 20:39 Oh, now we've started it. That's annoying.

Mel: 20:41 Once we've started it we have created this state of tension that motivates us to relieve it.

Dan: 20:46 Yeah. So when I make a to-do list the first thing I should do is write, "Make to-do list." Yeah?

Mel: 20:53 Yeah, actually initiate that task. I guess you could do that.

Dan: 20:56 I can tick that off and I'm already on my way.

Mel: 20:57 Yeah. But you were telling me some way that you even do this with PowerPoint presentations.

Dan: 21:01 Oh, yeah.

Mel: 21:01 Even before you write the title.

Dan: 21:03 Yeah. Sometimes I would just take the previous presentation that I did, duplicate it and save it as the name of the new presentation that I need to do. Now it's started. For some reason, now my motivation instead of telling me to avoid doing that thing, it now just wants to dive in and do it.

Mel: 21:19 Yeah. You've opened a new box and you need to solve that box before you can do anything else.

Dan: 21:22 Oh, I'm so smart and such an idiot.

Mel: 21:24 So, you know people say you just have to start. You really do. You just have to start. It doesn't matter if it's the smallest start but you need to sort of click go. You need to initiate that task. It will create a state of discomfort that you do not like, and that will motivate you to actually get the work done.

Dan: 21:38 I think, off the back of that, a really great advertising line for somebody might be, like, "Just do It." So I might try and pitch that to somebody. I think it could really work.

Mel: 21:46 Yeah. That could be big. I can imagine that, I can see that. Yeah. Cool.

Dan: 21:51 All right. I think, is that everything for today?

Mel: 21:52 You know what would be good?

Dan: 21:53 Whoa, sorry.

Mel: 21:53 I was just going to say if you added to that by adding some sort of a tick to say that you've completed the task.

Dan: 21:58 Oh, yeah, yeah. I like it. We should start like a sports company or something.

Mel: 22:01 Yeah. Interesting.

Dan: 22:02 All right, maybe next time.

Mel: 22:04 All right, so Dan I'm just wondering how you feel now? Because we started this episode with you having a problem that was unresolved.

Dan: 22:09 Well, first of all I feel good that you care about my feelings.

Mel: 22:12 What you might have noticed, I mean I obviously do. But what you might have noticed throughout the episode was that I took you on an emotional journey, didn't I?

Dan: 22:18 Yep. Is that what just happened?

Mel: 22:20 You just got totally Zeigarnik'd here.

Dan: 22:21 If I had emotions that is definitely the journey I would have been on.

Mel: 22:25 I made you feel a little bit bad about it. I helped to escalate and emphasize those feelings of discomfort so that now that we've solved the problem, don't you feel amazing?

Dan: 22:34 Amazing. Do you bulk bill?

Mel: 22:35 No.

Dan: 22:36 No, okay. Cool. Well, I think we're good?

Mel: 22:40 Yeah.

Dan: 22:41 Well done.

Mel: 22:41 Yep. We've solved the problem.

Dan: 22:42 The Zeigarnik effect.

Mel: 22:43 Yeah.

Dan: 22:43 Solved it.

Mel: 22:44 Completed. Finished. Feel good. Wonderful.

Dan: 22:46 There actually is one other bit that we didn't tell people about, which is really the key for how this whole thing works.

Mel: 22:50 Which is what?

Dan: 22:51 Oh, they'll have to find out next episode.

Mel: 22:52 Oh.

Dan: 22:52 See what I did there?

Mel: 22:55 Did it. Did that take six seconds.

Dan: 22:57 Maybe. Peace out.

(Music)

#18 Focusing Illusion: Why we don’t really need a pay-rise

If you won the lottery, would you be happier? Although the answer may seem obvious, our perceptions of what’s important to us don’t always match the reality. In this episode, Mel and Dan consider how we can use the magic of the focusing illusion to capture consumers’ attention.

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Dan: 00:01 What has happened to you?

Mel: 00:04 I just don't care anymore. I Google things for research (laughs), and Kops don't cut that at the end.

Dan: 00:09 And that was the day Mel lost her accreditation. Okay.

Dan: 00:32 Hey, and welcome to Bad Decisions. The show that helps us understand why we choose what we choose-

Mel: 00:36 Why we think what we think.

Dan: 00:38 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel: 00:40 I'm Doctor Mel Weinberg. I'm a Performance Psychologist.

Dan: 00:43 You know, you always used to say "ethically of course" at the end, which you've stopped saying-

Mel: 00:47 I've given up, what does that say?

Dan: 00:47 Hey, I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat, a creative agency built for today.

Dan: 00:58 Funny story on the weekend.

Mel: 01:00 Tell me all about it.

Dan: 01:00 You love hearing my parenting stories.

Mel: 01:02 Always.

Dan: 01:02 All right, so my daughter is two and half now, very cute, daddy's girl, love her. It's great. Love my son too. Anyway, she’s got a lot of toys, as kids today do, like a whole room full of toys. Used to be a study, now it's a toy room. And she's got a cousin, so my nephew who's a boy, and he's maybe three months younger than her-

Mel: 01:19 Hoping he's a boy if he's your nephew.

Dan: 01:20 Yeah, that's how it works. So he was over on the weekend, and these two adore each other. They love each other, they've literally grown up all over each other. And they love each other, but they fight like crazy. And what usually happens is my nephew comes over, and he walks into the toy room, and there's a hundred toys in there, and he just picks a thing, so this week it was this stroller. Some random stroller that he wanted to play with.

And my daughter, who really has not touched this toy stroller for weeks, maybe even months, decides for a moment that this toy stroller is now the single key to her happiness. It is the sole reason for her being on this planet, and she needs this toy stroller in her hands and in her life, right now.

So as you can imagine, they start having a grab off with each other. They're screaming. They’re crying. There's very rational me trying to explain to my daughter that there are so many other toys in here, many of which are also strollers, some of which are substitutes for strollers, some of which are nothing to do with strollers at all, but could also be a source of happiness. She didn't want a bar of it. She just wanted the damn stroller.

Mel: 02:25 Her two and half year old brain was focused on getting that stroller, and that stroller only.

Dan: 02:30 Yeah, and it didn't matter how much I wanted to tell her about all the other great toys in the room, she couldn't give a shit. She wants the one thing that her cousin has picked up and he wants to play with as well.

Mel: 02:38 We're also going to need to work on your parenting strategies, because trying to rationalise with a two and half year old is probably not gonna get you very far.

Dan: 02:43 No, it's going to be fine. At some point she's going to be old enough to understand, by which point I will be so well practiced at rationalising with her, I will kick her ass.

Mel: 02:50 Just watch out.

Dan: 02:50 Yeah.

Mel: 02:51 All right, so how did this whole situation resolve? What did you do, as Dad, to get through this?

Dan: 02:56 Well, I decided that the stroller was the only thing that would add happiness to my life, so I confiscated it, took it for myself, and left the two of them to play with something else.

Mel: 03:05 And it worked?

Dan: 03:06 Yeah, well, define worked? No, don't define worked. It worked. But you know, kids … come on guys.

Mel: 03:12 Kids, right? Kids brains, right? How silly that they can only focus on one thing at a time, and that becomes the object that completely dominates their attention, that they just refuse to look at anything else.

Dan: 03:23 Idiots.

Mel: 03:23 Yeah, see the funny thing is, adult brains sort of work the same way.

Dan: 03:28 Oh, come on.

Mel: 03:28 Sorry to tell you, but that's one of the things that we just don't outgrow. In adults, we refer to it as the Focusing Illusion.

Dan: 03:39 Ah, sounds far more grown up, “the Focusing Illusion”, than “having a tantrum.”

Mel: 03:46 Yeah, so the Focusing Illusion is basically the idea that we have a limited attention span. Or we have a limited tank of attention, so only one thing can really dominate our attention at any particular point in time. And we convince ourselves that that is the most important thing, at the time, because we're thinking about it, so obviously it has to be important, or we have to at least tell ourselves it's super important.

But at the time that we're thinking about it, it is actually the most important thing. We actually don't have the capacity to think about too many things at one time, so multi-tasking is a terrible idea. We have one thing that we can really focus on, and we think that it's way more important than it is.

Dan: 04:22 This sounds like something that's going to get us into trouble.

Mel: 04:24 Well, like every illusion that we talk about, it does. And the fact that it's called an illusion makes it sound even more-

Dan: 04:31 It's mystical.

Mel: 04:31 Yeah, mystical, so let me tell you a little bit about some research.

Dan: 04:37 No you do not have, you do not have research about this!

Mel: 04:38 Oh yeah. Oh I do.

Speaker 3: 04:39 “Merlin’s beard, you must be Harry Potter!”

Mel: 04:48 You know what, cause I love research so much I'm actually going to give you two research articles about this.

Dan: 04:52 Whoa!

Mel: 04:54 They sort of lend into one another. So the first we're gonna talk about is one of the most well known research articles in the field of understanding happiness. Which is pretty much what dominates most of my research career. It's a study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman back in 1978.

Dan: 05:10 The Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman.

Mel: 05:13 Often known as the Brickman et al study, right? So the Brickman et al study was looking at the happiness of lottery winners and comparing them to the happiness of paraplegics. So you have people who either have the best thing that you could imagine happening to them, as in winning the lottery, or one of the worst things that people could imagine which would be to become a paraplegic. And what they did was they assessed the happiness of these groups of people and-

Dan: 05:38 These have to be a binary grouping? There are no paraplegics that win the lotteries?

Mel: 05:41 Well there was a control group. (laughs) That would be an interesting group then.

Dan: 05:45 Yeah you guys are neutral! We've worked it out.

Mel: 05:47 We've balanced you out. What they found was that after a not particularly extensive period of time the happiness of both lottery winners and paraplegics returned back to their pre-event state. So even though you would think that, and I guess this is what made the study so remarkable, is that ordinary people looking at this would go "Wait, surely lottery winners are gonna be way happier than paraplegics right?"

Dan: 06:11 One would think.

Mel: 06:11 The best thing that could happen to you and one of the worst things that could happen to you, you would think that over time that would stay the same. But actually the research found sort of counterintuitively that both of their happiness states returned to what we call their normal or baseline levels not that long after the actual event.

Dan: 06:27 So basically what's the point of doing anything?

Mel: 06:29 Well this changed the way that we think about happiness, because it speaks to the fact that we adapt to things. We don't think that we adapt to things so when we think about events happening, we think about winning the lottery “wow that would be amazing”, we fail to recognise that we adapt to situations very quickly. We are way more resilient than we give ourselves credit for, and resilience is about adapting to both happy and sad events. So it works both ways. But we don't actually imagine how resilient we're going to be in response to situations. We focus instead on the actual event.

Dan: 07:01 Yeah and I guess a straight away, shoot from the hip example that springs to mind as soon as you talk about this, as a guy who runs an agency, is pay rises. You give out a pay rise to somebody and the first time you do this you think this is going to be amazing, this is really going to give the person the bump that they need and they're going to come into work so excited and motivated. And what you learn very quickly is that people just return to the normal baseline of where they were in almost no time. And I actually went and had a look at some research from this because you know pay rise is a thing you can't really get away from as an employer, and best case scenario maybe you can get a bump for six weeks out of a pay rise. You go and cut somebody a check for five grand, ten grand, fifteen grand whatever, best case scenario you're going to get six weeks out of it and then they’re-

Mel: 07:47 And then they're gonna want more.

Dan: 07:47 Yeah and then they go back to that where it's always been.

Mel: 07:48 So no pay rises for your employees?

Dan: 07:52 So no pay- well lots of very very small pay rises.

Mel: 07:52 Well that's a better way to hack it.

Dan: 07:53 Every six months, yeah.

Mel: 07:54 I'm glad I don't work for you.

Dan: 07:56 Aw come on.

Mel: 07:57 The next study which came out about twenty years later, so taking us to 1998, was by Schkade and Kahneman, do you know that name?

Dan: 08:04 That guy?

Mel: 08:05 Yeah, Kahneman again. So this study was basically looking at what was called the Focusing Illusion. They looked at the Brickman at el study and said, "Well we know what's going on here and we're gonna test why it's happening."

And so they had one of those great titled articles, you know that's the key getting a good research paper. You gotta give it a good title.

Dan: 08:24 Clickbait.

Mel: 08:24 So the title was “Does Living in California Make People Happy?” And what they were doing was prompting people to think about what it would be like if somebody just like them, with their values, their interests at their stage in life, were to move to California what their happiness would be like. And also if somebody just like them with their values and interests and at their stage in life were to move to the mid-west, how happy would they be?

Dan: 08:52 Why would you set up those two? There's nothing wrong with the mid-west. You set 'em up like they're at opposite ends of the spectrum!

Mel: 08:56 Right the thing is-

Dan: 08:58 A lot of good things happen in the mid-west.

Mel: 08:58 I'm sure they do, the thing is that when most people think of California they think about the weather and how beautiful it is especially when you've been prompted that you're involved in a study that's looking at the impact of climate on happiness.

Dan: 09:09 Ah, that was a thing.

Mel: 09:09 Yeah so that makes a bit of a difference as well.

Dan: 09:11 Yeah.

Mel: 09:12 And then what they did was they compared the results to the happiness ratings of people who actually live in California and who actually live in the mid-west and what you find is that when people self rate their own happiness the overall happiness of people who lived in California and lived in the mid-west were the same, there was no difference. The reason is people don't typically think of the climate when they're thinking about how happy they are-

Dan: 09:36 It's like one of many things.

Mel: 09:37 But when you put that as the point of contrast between two groups and you ask others to report how people will feel in those situations, they over exaggerate the importance of climate in their estimation so they think, "Oh well a person living in California would be way happier than a person living in the mid-west."

Dan: 09:56 Right so let me get this straight, so they asked a bunch of people in California and a bunch of people living in the mid-west how happy they were. And then they asked a bunch of people who lived in neither how happy they think they would be if they lived in California or the mid-west?

Mel: 10:05 Or someone like them, yeah.

Dan: 10:06 And so what people thought was if they moved to California they would be way happier than if they moved to the mid-west.

Mel: 10:12 Yeah.

Dan: 10:13 Because the weather is so much better in California? That's an easy jump to make isn't it?

Mel: 10:19 Yeah.

Dan: 10:19 But I guess what you're saying is it's completely incorrect.

Mel: 10:21 It's due to the fact that they're focusing on a particular aspect, i.e the climate, which actually isn't as important as they think it is.

Dan: 10:27 Right and why is that?

Mel: 10:29 Because when people are estimating their overall happiness they think of a number of different things and climate is not something that takes priority. It's like how people also think that money will make them happy. There are a whole bunch of things that go into contributing to your happiness and how you rate your happiness and overall money is not at the top of the list.

Dan: 10:46 So I guess what we're suggesting here is that we sort of do this gross simplification and when we're trying to forward project what will make us happy, we look at one thing and think “yeah that's the lever.” So if I just had more money or if I just had a six pack or if I just had that particular car, I would be so much happier than I am now. And maybe what we fail to understand is that in the future it's a very multifaceted world with lots of variables that contribute to our happiness and those things are probably nowhere near as important as we think they are.

Mel: 11:16 Yeah, I mean it goes a long way to explain why people make bad spending decisions. Like “I need to have those pair of shoes, if I had those pair of shoes in my life then everything would be better. I would be happier, I'd be walking around in those shoes. God it would feel so good to be in those shoes!” But three hours after you bought the shoes the effect fades, it wears off and all of the sudden you're not as happy as... They don't have the power to make you as happy as they did from the start.

Dan: 11:39 Right, small potentially side note but I just remember hearing this idea that when you really lust after something for a long time and then you go and buy it and in that tiny little window where it's come into your possession, the joy that you feel is not actually the joy of owning that thing, it's the joy of not lusting for something.

Mel: 11:55 It's relief. (laughs) You don't need to lust after it anymore.

Dan: 11:59 It's just the joy of actually not wanting for anything and then after half an hour or two hours, a sort of fire gets stocked again and you start lusting for things. Anyway kind of a weird idea.

Mel: 12:10 It takes us to an interesting discussion around attention and about our capacity to attend to things. We've mentioned multitasking, but this idea that we have a certain amount of brain fuel? There's only a limited amount that we can spend at any moment so we actually can't focus on multiple things at any one time. We're using our brain most effectively if we're just focusing on one particular thing at any given time.

Mel: 12:33 And this is the reason why magic happens.

Dan: 12:37 Right. I was right with you and-

Mel: 12:42 And then we went to magic, cause in my next career I'm going to be a magician. I'm going to take everything I know about how people's attention works and then I'm gonna become the next David Copperfield.

Dan: 12:52 But you already are a magician, you're a magician of the mind.

Mel: 12:53 That's a nice way to put it but I can entertain people with it. At the moment I don't use it for entertainment purposes.

Dan: 12:59 Yeah, what do you call this show?

Mel: 12:59 (laughs) Yeah, you got me.

Dan: 13:03 Edutainment?

Mel: 13:04 Something like that, infotainment. But the whole thing with magic, look I'm not going to go into a discussion on whether or not you believe in magic and I like to believe in some magical things, but a lot of magicians work by manipulating your attention.

Dan: 13:19 Yeah when we talk about magic you're not talking about fairies and tooth fairies and pixies and that.

Mel: 13:24 Not in this context, but I do believe in fairies.

Dan: 13:26 We're not doing that now. But you're talking about Vegas, magic shows, magicians-

Mel: 13:30 I'm talking about card tricks, yeah that sort of stuff-

Dan: 13:33 Card tricks yeah, and I guess things that rely on that idea of misdirection. Where a magician is doing something with their left hand that is very interesting and distracting so you don't notice what you're doing with their right hand. Or they have beautiful girls doing stuff with hula-hoops so that you're kind of watching that and you've just neglected to see the guy put something in his pocket or pull something out of his pocket.

Mel: 13:50 Yeah, see that's the trick whenever they bring beautiful girls out, and if you're like me and you don't get distracted by the beautiful girls you're like "Oh what is the magician doing right now?"

Cause I wanna watch exactly what he's doing at every moment in time, I don't wanna miss a thing.

Dan: 13:59 Yeah and maybe it's actually the beautiful girls who are doing the trick.

Mel: 14:02 Oh wow.

Dan: 14:03 Yeah see double misdirection. So I guess this focusing illusion or focusing bias makes a lot of sense right, if we just talk about being humans trying to cope in this world. Because if you said to me, "Hey think about what would make you happy in five years from now or ten years from now." And I really thought about that as a legitimate question that is like really hard. It's multifaceted, there's so many things that I have to weigh up it makes sense that my brain would just wanna pick some cheats or substitutions and go “well, more money would be good so I'll just pick that.”

Mel: 14:34 Yeah like too hard basket just give me something simple.

Dan: 14:36 Yeah just throw me a frickin bone here.

Mel: 14:38 So I mentioned with your marketing hat on that this could come into play-

Dan: 14:42 It's the only hat that I own let's be honest.

Mel: 14:45 Well given it's a big hat then, you've got something in there I'm sure this would apply to finding your point of difference in the field, something like that with a new product?

Dan: 14:57 I love this bias because this is what great brand positioning and great advertising is all about. So it's saying somebody's gonna have to make a decision and most decisions are actually, if you think about them, quite complex. So just think about something that's completely run of the mill like going to the supermarket to buy cottage cheese. What is your decision making criteria for buying cottage cheese? If the brands don't give you one, you've just got a whole bunch of cottage cheese lined up it's hard. Are you looking at price? Are you looking at packaging size? Are you trying to guess what they taste like based on the packaging?

Mel: 15:27 Which one looks the nicest.

Dan: 15:29 Yeah, or you looking at salt content, or fat, or who knows. As brands and advertisers what we get to do is to give people a thing to focus on and say, "Don't worry about all that, this one has protein in it."

Mel: 15:41 Right.

Dan: 15:41 Or “this one has no sugar, or this one has low salt.” And it says to people that's the thing to focus on, don't worry about trying to weigh up everything else. So this is why you see things with no sugar but they're loaded with fat. Or things with no fat but they're loaded with sugar because marketing brands know people can't do all the calcs so we just give them a thing to hook onto.

Mel: 16:01 So what you're talking about is using that smartly in the sense that you can understand that when people are in this situation they're gonna have to think of something that's gonna make their decision easier, right? And they might automatically go you know what. Price. I'm just gonna go with the cheapest. Which I imagine is what a lot of people will do-

Dan: 16:15 If nothing else yeah.

Mel: 16:17 What you're saying is that what you can do is actually you can prime them to have a specific thing that they focus on. They're going to focus on something and rather than letting them do it off their own bat, which could take me anywhere and I may not win in that sense, I'm gonna be like this is what you're focusing on. This is what is important to you right now.

Dan: 16:32 Probably one of my favourite sayings about advertising or thought bubbles about advertising is the idea that there is no such thing as a low interest category, only low interest brands. For those of you outside of advertising, a low interest category is a thing people wouldn't spend much mental energy thinking about. So you might say that buying cottage cheese is a low interest category. Who's gonna think too much about that?

Mel: 16:54 Yeah who cares?

Dan: 16:55 But that only exists when there's low interest brands because no brand has turned up and said "Ah we'll give you something to think about!" And you see this all over the supermarket. You see the creation of whole categories like sugar free cola. All the colas were the same and then there's one that's sugar free and it's like “oh god is that a thing I'm meant to think about?”

Dan: 17:12 Free range eggs which is a great thing, don't get me wrong, but was not a thing that people think about as a decision criteria. Now we're starting to see meat and poultry with things like antibiotic free. That's a thing? Is that a thing I need to think about? Well I guess if it is I need to pick the one that's antibiotic free and not worry the other 15 attributes that I might make this decision based on.

Mel: 17:31 Yeah and it doesn't even have to be interesting. Like something being antibiotic free I don't actually care it's just something different. And anytime you're presented with something different your brain has to dedicate attention to understanding it, to processing it.

Dan: 17:43 Yeah, and it's a really great way... A product calling itself something free, antibiotic free, completely throws shade on the rest of the category. The rest of the category might also be antibiotic free, they just never thought to say it so by one brand saying that's the thing that we're going to focus on and we're gonna direct your attention mister or misses consumer at focusing on as well, it makes you question what everyone else is doing and hopefully pick that product off the shelf.

Mel: 18:08 Yeah, have you got any other examples in the marketing field?

Dan: 18:10 So examples of this are basically any time that a brand gives you a new way to shop a category, a new way to think about a purchase decision. So in supermarkets are this is everywhere but if you think about things like even the world of workouts. At the moment we are in the middle of this F45 explosion. F45 decided that of all the different ways you could evaluate a workout, portion of aerobic to anaerobic activity or where it happens. Or how it happens, or how much fun it is or how mindful it is.

Mel: 18:38 Or how much weight you can lose and how quickly.

Dan: 18:39 How much weight you can lose yeah. Their thing is 45 minutes. F45 they're like focus on 45 the F might even be for focus I don't know. Maybe it's for fitness, maybe it's for fun … I don't know. Anyway the thing that is not ambiguous is that it's 45. So they're saying, " Hey people out there looking to buy into some sort of a fitness routine slash cult, if 45 minutes is important for you that's a thing important for us. Focus here."

Dan: 19:02 And then it makes you wonder yeah well how long does Zumba take? How long does crossfit take? I don't know.

Mel: 19:06 And maybe I don't have time for it but I have 45 minutes.

Dan: 19:09 Definitely have 45 minutes because that's less than an hour.

Mel: 19:11 Yeah.

Dan: 19:12 So that's what us ad guys do but what can the poor consumer do to defend?

Mel: 19:16 Yeah, well I see this in my line or work as well right. You know how you talk about F45 being like a thing of the moment? Another big thing literally of the moment is the whole mindfulness craze or phase or whatever you want to call it? And the whole idea of mindfulness could be said to be based around the Focusing Illusion. The idea that mindfulness for example is a cure for anxiety. Right when people are anxious most of the time they're anxious about something that may or may not happen in the future. Mindfulness works by directing peoples attention to the present with the understanding that you have a limited capacity to only attend to really one thing at a time. If you're attending to the present it's actually impossible to be anxious right then because anxiety is about projecting into the future and if you're focusing on what's happening here and now, then that is all that you can be.

Mel: 20:03 And that is all that your brain has the capacity to think about. So mindfulness is a therapeutic method you know. We've got the Focusing Illusion coming into market, coming into psychology … it's everywhere.

Dan: 20:13 Yeah feels like we've kind of gone the long way around but actually what we're saying is in this whole crazy, complicated landscape of things that you could spend your time and attention focusing on, sometimes a thing will just wave its hand and say, "Hey look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" And that's really all our brain is capable of doing.

Mel: 20:27 Yeah and the flip side of that for you to sort of counteract it is to realise that you can actually control the object of your attention. You can choose what you want to focus on at any given moment and that is going to be the most important thing to you at that time.

Dan: 20:39 Right, well that sounds kind of profound.

Mel: 20:41 Do you like it?

Dan: 20:42 I like it.

Mel: 20:42 Cool. So there's something more profound.

Dan: 20:44 Yeah?

Mel: 20:45 That was the Dr. Mel way of saying it but Danny Kahneman said it differently.

Dan: 20:49 Danny?

Mel: 20:50 We're friends now. (laughs)

Dan: 20:52 D.K? Yeah what did he say?

Mel: 20:55 His quote when he was asked pretty much what's like the most important information that you could give, the most useful information that you could to a lay person, he said, "Nothing is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it."

Dan: 21:08 Nothing is as ... wait.

Mel: 21:10 (laughs) That's not what he said. He said, "Nothing is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it."

Dan: 21:16 Yeah so the thing you're thinking about right now is the most important thing that you think it is but it's really not it only is because you're thinking about it.

Mel: 21:23 Yeah!

Dan: 21:24 Yeah? (laughs)

Mel: 21:25 It sounded more profound when he said it.

Dan: 21:27 Yeah well I've remixed it for a new generation.

Mel: 21:30 And I think that's a really good way to sort of sum it up. When you're thinking about something it is the most important thing, it's dominating your focus. And you know when people say don't respond in the moment, take 24 hours and respond after? It's because you've got perspective and you've got a different context in which to see it afterwards. And it doesn't seem as important 24 hours later as it does at the time that it happened.

Dan: 21:50 Always save your rage emails as drafts first and it you still think it's a good idea to send it the next morning go right ahead.

Mel: 21:55 There you go. (laughs)

Dan: 21:56 Yeah that's my profound wisdom.

Mel: 21:58 Yep so that's where we're at, I think we've covered the Focusing Illusion.

Dan: 22:02 Yep!

Mel: 22:02 We've focused on it for long enough and we know it has been the most important thing for the last 20 odd minutes of your lives as it has for ours.

Dan: 22:09 Yeah I think we've also just explained how all magic works as well so that's a pretty good episode.

Mel: 22:13 Yeah tune in for more magic next time.

Dan: 22:15 Yeah alright where do people find us?

Mel: 22:17 They'll find us on the internet @DrMelW

Dan: 22:20 Oh that's you and they'll find me at also on the internet @DanMonheit

Mel: 22:23 Search the internet.

Dan: 22:24 Yeah.

Mel: 22:24 Google things.

Dan: 22:25 Can we say, I mean it's going to timestamp but, can we say that you're also going to find us at South by Southwest next year?

Mel: 22:29 Oh my god.

Dan: 22:29 Yeah!

Mel: 22:30 Dan is so excited guys.

Dan: 22:31 Yeah Mel and I are going to be presenting at South by Southwest, Austin Texas, March 2019. Come and see us in the flesh.

Mel: 22:40 So much magic, it's going to be so much magic.

Dan: 22:42 Yeah, I've got my cowboy boots ready.

Mel: 22:44 Can't wait.

Dan: 22:44 Peace out.

#17 Ben Franklin Effect: Why we should all be asking for way more favours

Social convention suggests that if you want to make a new friend, you should do something nice for them. But according to Ben Franklin, we’ve been doing it all wrong. In this episode, Mel and Dan explore how we can use non conventional techniques to gain our customers’ trust and loyalty forever more.

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Dan: 00:00 Feels like our emotional brain is the real world, and then our rational brain is the PR department, that just tries to explain what happened here.

Mel: 00:08 We could look at it that way.

Dan: 00:09 It's like “no, no, this was a very strategic decision that this human being has just made here”

Mel: 00:10 Of course.

(music)

Mel: 00:29 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan: 00:32 The show that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel: 00:35 Why we think what we think.

Dan: 00:36 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat, a creative agency built for today.

Mel: 00:42 And I'm Dr Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:45 A performance psychologist who loves this track?

Mel: 00:47 Loves this track.

Dan: 00:48 Play the track. (music)

Mel: 00:56 Welcome back. Well, welcome back to us, really.

Dan: 00:58 Yeah, it's been a minute.

Mel: 00:59 It's been a little while, we've been doing some things.

Dan: 01:01 Yeah, some conferences.

Mel: 01:02 Yeah.

Dan: 01:03 Good to be back in the booth.

Mel: 01:04 Alright. So, we're bringing things back with a heuristic that is actually named after somebody ... Have we done one of these yet?

Dan: 01:14 I think this is our first.

Mel: 01:15 The heuristic actually has a person attributed to this.

Dan: 01:18 Yeah. So, maybe if we take people behind the scenes. Yeah, we did a little bit of research. What are the heuristics we want to talk about in the next few episodes? And this one just stood out like dog's balls.

Mel: 01:26 Before I even knew what it was I was like, “this is the heuristic we're doing today.”

Dan: 01:31 Yeah, and what is the heuristic we're doing today?

Mel: 01:32 It is the Benjamin Franklin effect.

Dan: 01:35 The Benjamin Franklin effect. (music)

Mel: 01:42 Dan, who's Benjamin Franklin?

Dan: 01:45 Yeah, because this is what I was thinking too. I mainly know Benjamin Franklin from the ‘It's all about the Benjamins Baby' right? So, this guy gets to have his face on the $100 bill of the US currency, basically global currency, right. And as if that was not a great enough accolade, he also gets his own heuristic named after him, and I was thinking, this guy must be pretty seriously talented, and I was ready to be disappointed.

Mel: 02:13 Because that's how you know you've made it, right? Once you get a heuristic named after you, you are set.

Dan: 02:17 What? A heuristic, but there's only one $100 bill, that job only goes to one person, and it's him!

Mel: 02:22 Yeah, but he got a heuristic named after him, surely that's better.

Dan: 02:24 He has a rap song! There are rap songs! Anyway, so I was like, you know what? I'm definitely going to be hating on this guy. I'm going to go do some research because there is nobody that deserves to be on a $100 bill and have a heuristic named after them. But if there was, I admit, it was Benjamin Franklin.

So, this guy is basically just a freak. He was born one of, what, like 17 children? Very poor family, very miserable upbringing, not great prospects at life, and you know what? I was going to try and paraphrase this off Wikipedia but look, they've done a pretty good job here. If we just rattle this off, right-

He was an American polymath, which for those of you unfamiliar with the term polymath, I mean, that's basically somebody who is exceptionally knowledgeable about many, many areas. So that's pretty good start-

Mel: 03:08 One day I want to be a polymath.

Dan: 03:09 Yeah. I'd just be happy to be a unimath, just to know a lot about one thing ...

One of the founding fathers of the United States. Yeah, good for him. He was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, Freemason, postmaster, scientist, investor, humorist, civic activist, statesman and diplomat.

Mel: 03:27 What have you done in your life?

Dan: 03:28 Yeah. Well, he didn't have a podcast, I can tell you that much. Though he did basically help commercialise electricity, which means that we can have podcasts.

Mel: 03:36 Got you there.

Dan: 03:37 As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American enlightenment and the history of physics and, look, basically the guy just invented everything and did everything so, you know what? He deserves the $100 bill. Good on you Benny-boy.

Mel: 03:49 Well done. But bringing us to the heuristic, here's the thing for all the wonderful things he did, there was this one asshole who just didn't like him.

Dan: 03:49 Yeah, I mean look, everyone's got haters.

Mel: 03:49 Everyone's got haters.

Dan: 03:49 We've got haters. Kanye's got haters.

Mel: 04:02 Yeah.

Dan: 04:03 Benny-boy Franklin had haters.

Mel: 04:05 He had this hater, right? And he actually realised that at some point he was going to maybe need this hater to be on his side, and so he thought, I need to figure out a way to get this hater to like me, right? He was known for having a way with people and understanding sort of the way that people work.

Dan: 04:22 Yeah, apparently that for all of his accolades he was also like an extremely gifted interactor.

Mel: 04:22 Interactor?

Dan: 04:27 Interactor. He was like a really-

Mel: 04:30 He was really good interactor-

Dan: 04:32 He was really good with people, and I'm going to say, you go to look at the photos of him, he is not the most handsome guy in the world. Full respect for the bald on the top, mullet at the back, but mate, he had a way with words and probably-

Mel: 04:44 And a way with people.

Dan: 04:46 ... A way with people.

Mel: 04:48 So, what he could have done is he could have gone to this hater and offered to do something nice for him, right? Or given him a compliment, flattered him, said, “You're awesome, I actually want to be friends with you.” But that's not what he did. He went about it in a more subtle and indirect way. What he decided to do was to ask this ... He wrote a letter to this hater, and he said, “Listen mate,” which I'm sure is the way that he said it. We sound like the two most naïve Australian podcasters when we're talking about US history, but anyway-

Dan: 04:48 No, no, no. This is what happened.

Mel: 05:16 He said, “Listen mate, look ...”-

Dan: 05:17 Mate.

Mel: 05:20 “... There's a book in your library that I understand is really rare and it's actually really hard to get and I know that you've got it. Look, could you do me a favour? Is there any chance that you could let me borrow that book?”

Dan: 05:32 Yeah, so let's get this right. So this guy dislikes Benjamin Franklin?

Mel: 05:35 Yeah.

Dan: 05:36 Benjamin Franklin has the audacity to ask this man for a favour of the loan of an extremely rare book from his personal library. And how does the man respond?

Mel: 05:45 Well, how do you think he responds? He says, “Wow, Benjamin Franklin wants to borrow my book! Wow. I've got something that he needs. I'm going to wrap it up really nicely, put a bow on the top and send it by horse and carriage to Mr Benjamin Franklin.”

Dan: 05:59 Right. And then what happened?

Mel: 06:01 The hater, who will be known as the hater in this story, sent it-

Dan: 06:04 Yeah. Doesn't even get named.

Mel: 06:05 No, we don't even know who he was.

Dan: 06:07 Hater.

Mel: 06:07 But he sent the book, right? And Benjamin Franklin, who knows whether or not he read the book, but he returned it about a week later and when he returned it he wrote a note saying, “Thank you so much, that was so lovely of you. I really appreciate it.”

Dan: 06:22 Wow. What a dreamy guy.

Mel: 06:23 And then what happened was that the next time that they actually met in person the hater, who had never spoken a word to Benjamin Franklin in the past, or never a kind word at least, all of a sudden wanted to be his best friend.

Dan: 06:35 What do you know.

Mel: 06:35 He came over, he spoke to him, and from then on they were the best of friends. It's a beautiful story of friendship and a little bit of deceit.

Dan: 06:44 So, I mean this is weird, right? Because what the Benjamin Franklin effect basically tells us is that, if you want somebody to like you, rather than doing something nice for them you are far better off asking them to do something nice for you.

Mel: 06:58 Yeah, hey Dan, on that note could you do me a favour?

Dan: 07:02 No. Yes. When? Money? Am I being played here?

Mel: 07:06 Can you explain to me a little bit more why this happens.

Dan: 07:08 Yeah. So, we've sort of been digging around because this does seem really weird, because we would like to think that because I think in a certain way, I would act in accordance with that, but this would suggest that it's actually maybe even completely backwards, that because I've acted in that way, that changes how I feel about something.

Mel: 07:25 Yeah. So, we see this ... There's obviously some research that I'm going to talk about.

Dan: 07:28 Of course there's research. Do we have research music?

Mel: 07:30 We have research music. Play the research music.

(music)

Okay. Of course whenever these heuristics come into play they're in situations of uncertainty. Okay? So there has to be some element of uncertainty and in this case it's the uncertainty around the intentions of the other person.

Dan: 07:56 Right.

Mel: 07:57 Okay, so let's remember that while I tell you about the research. So, the research for this is actually pretty old in research terms. It dates back to 1969-

Dan: 08:06 Summer of '69.

Mel: 08:07 The summer of when all good -

Dan: 08:09 Someone should right a song about all this research.

Mel: 8:11 - when all good research was happening. Like all the cool people in that time were really doing research.

Dan: 08:16 Yeah, and other people had some guys from school and they started a band and tried to real hard.

Mel: 08:21 Anyway, Jecker and Landy were two researchers who-

Dan: 08:21 Not in the band.

Mel: 08:26 Not in the band. They were actually the cool guys doing the research, and they set up this study where they had three different groups. They were given some menial tasks, it doesn't actually matter what the participants were doing as part of the experiment, but there was an experiment to involve, to explain, the nature of the study to all three groups.

At the end of this study, like on their way out, that's where the experiences of the groups differ. So, on the way out one of the groups is basically asked by the experimenter to do him a favour. The experimenter says, “Look, we’re having some trouble in terms of the funding for the department and I know you were just given 20 bucks to participate in this study, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd consider donating it back to the department.”

Dan: 09:10 I know you kind of glossed over it but what did they do that they got paid 20 bucks for? Just loosely. Like you said it was a menial task, what are we talking here?

Mel: 09:16 It was just like something boring, they're either just like turning things on a wheel or sorting cards. It doesn't actually matter what they're doing.

Dan: 09:22 For an hour?

Mel: 09:22 Yeah.

Dan: 09:23 Scientists are cruel. Poor people.

Mel: 09:26 But that wasn't the point.

Dan: 09:27 Turn these wheels for one hour for science-

Mel: 09:30 Be a monkey for us.

Dan: 09:31 Yeah, seriously. Alright.

Mel: 09:34 I feel like we have talked about way less ethical forms of research though that scientists have conducted.

Dan: 09:38 Yeah, there were no anal probes in this one, that's a good-

Mel: 09:38 A good start.

Dan: 09:41 A good start.

Mel: 09:42 So that's the first group, right? They're asked on the way out by the experimenter to donate that twenty bucks to the poor lab.

Dan: 09:48 Right. “Couldn't even afford interesting tasks for you to do. All we could afford was wooden wheels.” Yeah.

Mel: 09:53 The second group on their way out, they come into contact with the receptionist of this lab and the receptionist asks them on the way out, “Look, would you mind donating back your money?” Or, “Could you do us a favour, could you donate the money back to us?”

Dan: 10:08 The cheek.

Mel: 10:09 Yeah, and the third group just left with their money. They weren't asked to donate it at all. So, the thing they're actually measuring was a post-study questionnaire of how much they liked the experimenter.

Dan: 10:26 Right. Not the receptionist. She was like the decoy.

Mel: 10:30 Not the receptionist. Yeah, she's just there. We're assuming that she was a female as well. But anyway-

Dan: 10:35 1969, let's be honest.

Mel: 10:36 So, what happens is they actually measure the liking for the experimenter, and what they found was that that middle group who were asked by the receptionist to donate the money at the end, they had the least amount of like for the experimenter overall. Okay? They were just like, “Don't really feel much for this experimenter at all.” Interestingly, the group who reported that they liked the experimenter the most were the group who were actually asked by the experimenter to return the money that they had been given. And so, again this just speaks to this idea of this is weird, right? The experimenter has just asked them to return the money that they'd been given and that makes them like him more.

Dan: 11:16 Yeah. It's weird, right? It feels like you should go on asking people for shit and making friends.

Mel: 11:20 Yeah. This is my new way of making friends. “Hey everybody, could you all do me a favour?”

Dan: 11:25 Do me a favour.

Mel: 11:26 “If you do it you're my new friend.”

Dan: 11:28 Yeah. In so thinking about how this kind of works, and I know this is probably the bit that you would normally do, because it's kind of sciency, but I found this interesting that there's this notion of cognitive dissonance, which we've spoken about in previous episodes, which is just what fancy people call confused, and it's this idea that we think to ourselves, “I did something nice for this person and I only do nice things for people that I like. I can't take back the thing that I've just done, so therefore I must like this person.”

Mel: 11:52 You must.

Dan: 11:53 Alright.

Mel: 11:53 There's no other reason why you would-

Dan: 11:55 This is my only logical explanation for why I just did something for someone I didn't like, and now I like them more.

Mel: 11:59 Yeah. So, this is what happens when we do things when we're in conditions of uncertainty. We've talked about how our emotional brain acts in times of uncertainty and then our rational brain kicks in after the fact, and it's like, “Hang on a second, what did we just do and why did we do that? Ah, because I like them. Right, I get it.”

Dan: 12:13 I don't know if we've spoken about it like this before, but it feels like our emotional brain is like the real world and then our rational brain is the PA department that just tries to explain what happened here.

Mel: 12:25 We could look at it that way.

Dan: 12:26 It's like “no, no, this was a very strategic decision that this human being has just made here.”

Mel: 12:30 Of course.

Dan: 12:31 Okay, so this is weird, right? So, I want somebody to like me who doesn't like me. I ask them to do me a favour, they do me a favour and now they like me more than they did before.

Mel: 12:40 So they like you and they've done you a favour.

Dan: 12:40 And they've done me a favour-

Mel: 12:40 You've run twice.

Dan: 12:43 They've done me a favour. I'm totally winning.

Can we unpack this a little bit? Like, maybe from a psych perspective. Why would this work?

Mel: 12:49 Yeah. So, we can think about it from the perspective of the person who's asked to do the favour. The person who doesn't like you, like what's wrong with him for a start-

Dan: 12:58 For a start.

Mel: 12:59 But they're asked to do you a favour and what happens? What's their experience like?

What's happening for them is that they're getting ... When you ask somebody to do you a favour, you're actually suggesting to them “hey actually you've got something that I need.” Like Ben Franklin was doing at the start, you've got something that I need, which puts you as the favour-askerer in a position of vulnerability, right? You're saying, “I'm actually vulnerable because I actually don't have it all.” Right? “I'm a really cool person, I have a lot of things going for me. There are a lot of reasons to like me, but you know what? You have something that I need.”

Dan: 13:31 Yeah. So, Benjamin Franklin doesn't have the rare book and the researcher doesn't have the 20 bucks.

Mel: 13:36 That's right. And so there's something that you need. And typically in these situations it operates when there's an imbalance in power. Okay? So, the experimenter is obviously in a position of power over the people in the experiment. That's just the way it works.

Dan: 13:52 Benjamin Franklin was probably in a position of power over this random hater because he was already quite prominent and powerful by that point.

Mel: 13:57 He was more powerful, yeah.

So, this is all about addressing the power imbalance and actually evening it out. So, the person who's on the other side, the participant, is usually the person who feels vulnerable. And what happens is when the experimenter shows vulnerability, all of a sudden they've got something in common. All of a sudden they've got something that they both understand and all of a sudden there's a basis for them to form a trusting relationship going forward.

So, it's all about evening up that power balance.

Dan: 14:22 I guess the second half of it ... Number one, the person has showed some vulnerability, but I feel like there's also a kind of subverted compliment or an acknowledgement of expertise. So, not only am I showing you that I'm vulnerable, but I'm asking you to help me with something that you clearly know about. So, objectively I'm asking you for a favour, but really what I'm doing is I'm saying “Hey, you know something that I respect and could you share that knowledge with me.” So, if we think about asking a colleague to proof-read something before it goes off to a client, you are objectively asking them a favour but in a backhanded kind of way you're acknowledging that they have some value to contribute, or some expertise that you would like to tap into.

Mel: 15:03 It seems so deceitful when you think of it like that. Like, the person who asks the favour gets that person to like them and also gets the favour done for them. Like, it seems like there's a clear winner in this situation, but the other person thinks they're winning.

Dan: 15:15 Yeah. What I've concluded today is doing favours for people is a losing man's strategy. Losing person's strategy.

Mel: 15:22 But it's also the basis of functioning communities. And we actually need to have those interactions in order to build what we call social capital and to build trust.

Dan: 15:32 Yes, because, what? Trust is built on vulnerability?

Mel: 15:35 Well, in order for a trusting relationship to ensue, somebody at some instance has to start off by taking a back seat and showing vulnerability. Somebody has to say, “I'm vulnerable, I need something. Can you help?”

Dan: 15:47 Yeah. It is interesting thinking about it in a pitching situation. When you walk in to pitch to a prospective new client, the prospective client has all of the power. Basically they're the judge. If you've never pitched for anything in your life before, it's basically like going on some terrible reality TV talent show where you have a panel of judges and hopefully you impress them.

Mel: 16:07 Now you're talking my language.

Dan: 16:09 And an interesting strategy I read about for a pitch, which to be honest I've never executed before, is to open the pitch with the reasons why the client should not pick you, which obviously are going to be things that you're going to fix up later in the presentation. But if you start on the front foot by showing a vulnerability, where if you say, “Look, if what you guys are looking for is an agency that has delivered more aged-care campaigns than anybody else in the country, we are definitely not the guys.” So, you sort of declare your vulnerability first and maybe that forms the basis of a trusting relationship.

Mel: 16:43 Yeah. I mean, if you've looked at any TED Talk, that's why they're effective.

Dan: 16:47 They all start with a story.

Mel: 16:48 They all start by offering vulnerability.

Dan: 16:50 Story about my childhood.

Mel: 16:51 Of course. Because you think that the person who is up there giving the TED Talk is an expert. That's why they're there. You think that they know way more about whatever it is they're going to talk about than you do, and hopefully they do if they're standing up there. But the first thing that you do, the script for a TED Talk, is tell your personal story. Make yourself vulnerable to the audience first. Reel them in, and then hit them with what you actually are an expert in.

Dan: 17:12 I'm going pants-less. That speech. You want to see vulnerability, people?

Mel: 17:18 So, when you talk about how it works with your clients, it makes me think of the way that I work in practise as well. So, if you think about a client/therapist relationship, there's a clear power imbalance there, right? A client comes in feeling pretty vulnerable and feeling like the therapist is there to solve all of their problems and has all the knowledge and expertise in order to do that effectively. One of the most important things that you can do as a therapist in order to build rapport is to become vulnerable to the client, to sort of balance out that power, by actually saying, “You know what? You're actually the expert in your life, or in whatever it is that you're doing. Can you tell me a little bit about that.”

So, I work a lot with athletes, right? From all different sports. And I like to think of myself as a pretty sporty person, but there are some pretty weird sports out there.

Dan: 17:18 Unique. Interesting.

Mel: 18:01 Unique and, you know, every sport has its own little culture and psychology and nature attached to it and I do not claim in any way to understand all of that. So, one of the tools that I can use is to actually, and of course I'm actually genuinely interested, but by actually asking the client to explain their sport to me, or explain the technicalities, or talk to me about that, they actually have the opportunity to feel empowered and feel emboldened and actually feel like they're not as vulnerable or they have something they can teach me. And hopefully they like me and they come back for more.

Dan: 18:33 Also probably a better strategy than you going pants-less, because that's not right.

Mel: 18:36 It doesn't really work so well.

Dan: 18:39 I don't know how it's going to work for me either, but one of us should try it before next episode.

Mel: 18:43 I'm pretty sure there's some ethics against that.

Dan: 18:45 So, a lot of this is about human to human interaction and with human to human interaction it's important that things seem genuine. Like, we're not just asking for favours just for the sake of asking for favours. That the favours actually show some level of insight into something people could help us with, right?

Mel: 19:02 Yeah. I mean, the whole thing totally backfires if it seems disingenuous.

Dan: 19:04 Yeah, like the fact that Benjamin Franklin knew this guy had this book in his library definitely played into the whole effect. It wasn't just a random request for a Peanuts comic, or something like that.

Mel: 19:14 Yeah.

Dan: 19:15 I think while that's kind of natural in a human to human relationship, when brands want to get involved with this, when brands want to ask favours of people to get them to like the brand more, there's really automated versions of this. So, if you imagine you've just bought something off of Amazon and you get an email three days later saying please rate your experience. They're asking you a favour, but it feels kind of ...

Mel: 19:39 Well, I know why they're asking me a favour. It's because I've obviously just made a purchase and they don't really care about me, they're actually doing it because they want their feedback because they've got some ratings that they need to, you know, meet.

Dan: 19:49 Yeah. Whereas you can imagine, and obviously this is maybe not practical for every brand, but you could imagine if instead of doing that if somebody from Amazon called you and they're like, “Hey Dr Mel, we just noticed that you've bought your fourth psychology book and we're really interested in trying to improve our psychology offering, could you just spare a few moments to give us your thoughts on what we could do to improve our collection of psychology books on Amazon?”

Mel: 20:13 “Oh you want my expertise now to help you. Oh, of course!”

Dan: 20:17 “That's a favour we'd like to ask you, would that be okay with you?”

Mel: 20:19 “Oh, of course. I'd love to help.”

Dan: 20:21 And you could just imagine how good you would feel about Amazon as a brand after that.

Mel: 20:25 Well, I really like them because they actually valued my opinion.

Dan: 20:28 Yeah, which is nice. And we see this client agency world as well where, you know, somebody senior from a client might call me to ask how their team is going, and if we go back to our things about showing vulnerability and acknowledging expertise, like when a senior client asks me how their team’s going that does acknowledge vulnerability. It says how “I'm not really across all the details of everything, and hey you have some expertise because you're seeing how my guys are going and you're smart enough to know when guys are going well or not going well.” And of course I feel completely in love with clients that do that. They want my opinion, it’s great.

Mel: 21:01 Yeah.

Dan: 21:02 Alright, what do you reckon? Is that a wrap for big bad Benjamin Franklin effect?

Mel: 21:06 I think we've done it.

Dan: 21:08 Alright, so what's the moral of the story?

Mel: 21:10 If you want someone to like you ask them to do you a favour, and also recognise, and this is something important just as a little side note, there is strength in vulnerability, right? We often think that the things that attract us to people are strength, when actually what attracts us to people is their vulnerability.

Dan: 21:24 Oh, that's deep. We're going to end it on that.

Mel: 21:26 I think we should.

Dan: 21:27 Alright. Why don't we do our social media handles?

Mel: 21:29 Okay. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever, @DrMelW.

Dan: 21:34 Yeah, and you can find me @Danmonheit, like just generally on the internet, type it into Google, I'll be there somewhere.

Mel: 21:41 You'll find him.

Dan: 21:41 Cool.

Mel: 21:42 And when you do, ask him to do you a favour.

Dan: 21:43 Yeah, I'd be happy to.

Mel: 21:44 See ya.

#16 Framing Effect: Why we like our milk fat-free and our luxury cars full price

Would you enjoy your beef more if it was 75% lean or 25% fat? That’s weird. In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the framing effect - and how what we’re presented with is far less important than how it’s packaged.

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Dan: 00:00 And then this, why do you keep hiding my Lamborghini card, alright it’s only a matter of time before we start irritating each other.

Mel: 00:28 Hi. And welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan: 00:30 The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose,

Mel: 00:33 Why we think, what we think,

Dan: 00:34 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel: 00:36 I'm Dr Mel Weinberg. I am a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:39 And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat a creative agency built for today.

Mel: 00:42 Play the music.

Dan: 00:50 Alright, Mel I want to offer you a deal. Okay. So I've got this amazing new piece of technology I've been working on. It's quite the revolution.

What this technology is gonna do is it's going to improve our quality of life in a way that you would not believe.

Mel: 01:05 Sounds great.

Dan: 01:05 It's going to make us more efficient, more productive, more fun. It's basically going to make us more everything.

Mel: 01:10 Yeah.

Mel: 01:11 And I'm going to offer you this technology, but I have one condition. Alright so it’s going to do all these amazing things, but once a year I need to turn up and randomly kill 1,200 people.

Mel: 1:21 [laughter]

Dan: 1:23 What? What do you reckon?

Mel: 01:25 Look it sounds good, but I don't think I'm in.

Dan: 01:30 So no?

Mel: 01:32 What why would you do that? 1,200 people at random.

Dan: 01:36 Well sucked in. You already bought it. My innovation is called the car. Yeah. So, why that's just in Australia. 1,200 people die a year from car accidents and probably two times that are actually seriously injured or become disabled as a result, which is kind of morbid way to start the show. But it does illustrate something particularly interesting.

Mel: 01:55 Yeah. That we shouldn't be driving cars.

Dan: 01:57 Well yes, we should not be driving cars. Bring on the autonomous vehicles, but also.

Mel: 02:01 But also what you've talked about and what you've mentioned is something called the framing effect.

Dan: 02:05 That is correct.

Mel: 02:06 Yes. See you're introducing the one?

Dan: 02:08 Yes.

Mel: 02:08 You know the heuristic this time.

Dan: 02:09 I'll give you this one.

Mel: 02:11 So the framing effect is pretty basic when it comes to heuristics.

Dan: 02:13 Well, sorry for bringing a basic heuristic with me today. We can't all be doctors.

Mel: 02:17 No, but it's important because it does signify a pretty bad decision. The framing effect is the idea that our brain makes decisions not based on the raw information, not based on what information is presented, but on how that information is presented.

Dan: 02:30 Yeah. And look, let's be honest, not only is it just like a basic heuristic, but this really cuts into the core of marketing and advertising and positioning.

Mel: 02:39 I mean, it's all about context.

Dan: 02:40 Exactly. How are we gonna tell our story.

Mel: 02:42 So look, by now it's probably no surprise to our listeners to hear that the framing effect was originally brought to our attention by Kahneman and Tversky back in 1981.

Dan: 02:51 Those guys.

Mel: 02:52 Yeah, it was a really good paper. But some other researchers, did us a favour. More recently in 1998. This is Levin, Schneider and Gaeth where they provided us with a typology of framing effects and what that does for us, is it nicely frames the way that we're going to lay out this episode.

Dan: 03:13 That's very meta. It's framing the way we talk about framing?

Mel: 03:16 Yeah.

Dan: 03:17 Wow.

Mel: 03:17 Wow. So here we go. So there were three types of framing. The first is called risky choice framing-

Dan: 03:22 Can I just ask? There's always three, do you reckon they find two, and they're like “there must be one more here somewhere.”

Mel: 03:27 I think if we've learned anything with regard to how to pitch an idea, get three of it.

Dan: 03:31 There's always three. If you found two keep looking there's always a third one there and if you four, one of them is probably bullshit.

Mel: 03:37 So the first one is risky choice. So I'll give you an example. All right, so let me ask you. There is about to be ... Let's say you're the health minister, there's about to be an outbreak-

Dan: 03:47 I feel like I'm wearing a bad suit.

Mel: 03:48 Yeah, you are.

Dan: 03:50 Or a good suit compared to other health ministers.

Mel: 03:52 It's all about the confidence.

Dan: 03:52 See what I did there?

Mel: 03:54 So there's about to be an outbreak of a deadly disease and 600 people are going to die. We've looked around and we've asked all these professionals about how we’re going to combat this and you've got two options.

The two best options have been presented to you. Here they are.

Dan: 04:06 Hit me.

Mel: 04:07 Okay. The first treatment A, you're going to save 200 lives, 200 lives will be saved if we implement treatment A.

Dan: 04:13 Okay that's good.

Mel: 04:15 Treatment B, there's a 33 percent chance that everybody's going to be saved and there's a 66 percent chance that no one will be saved.

Dan: 04:27 So hang on. We’ve got 600 people affected by this. Option A, 200 people definitely gonna live. Option B, 33 percent chance people are going to live.

Mel: 04:34 33 percent chance that everyone will live.

Dan: 04:35 Everyone lives, 66 percent chance that everyone dies. 66 percent chance everyone dies is enough for me to say no thank you. I'm going to go with option A.

Mel: 04:43 Okay? And that's what the majority of people in fact, 72 percent of people presenting with this problem would say.

Dan: 04:49 What's wrong with the other 28 percent of people?

Mel: 04:52 Well maybe they're realising that actually the two instances are pretty much the same. If I'm telling you that a third of people are going to be saved. So you're saving a third of people, 200 people. The difference is that I could also tell you, and I could pitch that to you in a totally different way. What if I say to you, if you do treatment A 400 people are going to die all of a sudden it doesn't sound like a great option, does it? It's been reframed.

Dan: 05:19 And I guess when you have the misfortune of being in hospital and the doctor comes up to you and says, "oh, we've got to do some surgery on you" They're much more likely to tell you “look, this has got a 95 percent chance of success” than saying, “well there's a 5 percent chance this is actually gonna be complete waste of all of our time”.

Mel: 05:31 Correct. So, that's risky choice. The next type of framing is when we frame the attributes of something. So you know, when you go to the supermarket and you've got your beef options and you've got the choice of beef that’s 75 percent lean beef, would you rather that? Or would you rather the 25 percent fat beef?

Dan: 05:52 Well I mean if we just accept just for a moment, and this probably relates to the previous example as well, that basic statistics and probability is beyond most of us in our day to day lives, we're just looking for the quickest answer. And so clearly looking at something 75 percent good is a far better outcome than looking at something that's 25 percent bad.

Mel: 06:09 Well, it's framed more positively for you if you're after the leanest meat and you're going to get 75 percent lean meat, well that sounds great. Here's the kicker with this one is that when we frame the attributes in this way, even though what we're actually evaluating and the attributes of it are being presented, are exactly the same. What actually happens is that people will rate their enjoyment of the 75 percent lean meat higher than the 25 percent fat meat even though it’s the same meat.

Dan: 06:35 That makes sense. I guess like buying the most expensive wine on a wine list, will probably make you think that wine was more enjoyable than if you bought that same wine at a better restaurant and it was kind of somewhere down the bottom of the list.

Mel: 06:47 So it's about the context.

Dan: 06:48 And frame differently. If we stay in the supermarket aisle, I mean telling we see in Australia is that most dairy products are promoted as fat free. So 98 percent fat free, 99 percent fat free, 95 percent fat free, which kind of makes sense. That's what people want to know about. I always find it interesting when you go overseas, especially when you go to Europe. I think maybe even the States have it as well and they'll have like two percent fat milk. It's like, even though two is a very small number, it's still like you're telling people that there’s fat in there.

Mel: 07:14 Yeah. You could flip the whole dairy industry on its head if you went to the northern hemisphere.

Dan: 07:19 Yeah, it's like they rolled out the whole industry before anybody had a chance to go ”wait, no no no, don't do that. Don't make the industry standards talk about how much fat …”

Mel: 07:27 You could just say that it's 98 percent fat free.

Dan: 07:29 How much not fat. That is far more exciting-

Mel: 07:32 And everybody will be will be like two percent.

Dan: 07:33 This actually makes me think of another example, something that happened not long after the GFC, which I remember at the time thinking, wow, that's really clever how they've done this. And in the same way, it's taking the same information but presenting it completely differently. So this was something with super luxury car dealers. I think maybe I'm just going to talk about Lamborghinis as an example. I can't remember if it was them, but let's just assume it was. And let's say these guys are selling $400,000 cars and at the best of times selling a $400,000 car is difficult. Selling it off the back of the GFC is like really almost impossible. So what these guys are doing is they're sitting on stock of cars. They've got new models come in. They have to get these things out.

And in the normal law of supply and demands and normal economic theory, if you have a $400,000 thing that you want to sell more of, what do you do? Reduce the price. Right? Price goes down, demand goes up.

So I mean you can imagine going up to a Lamborghini dealership and seeing like 25 percent off stickers plastered everywhere. Like it was JB Hi-Fi or something. Clearly not going to happen, but they still have to move the car. So what these guys ended up doing was reframing the discount so instead of marking a $400,000 car down to a $300,000 car, they managed to keep the price at $400,000, but we basically overpay people $100,000 for their trade ins. So you turn up with a whatever, $100,000 car to trade in. They say “no no no, the Lambo is a $400,000 car and we never discount the $400,000 car, but you know what, instead of giving you $100,000 for your BMW you've brought in, we're going to give you a $200,000 allowance for that car because it's a good one.”

Mel: 09:06 So it's really interesting what they've done there because they're actually retaining the perceived value of the Lamborghini.

Dan: 09:11 Exactly. So what they've done here is a really cool job of reframing because what they've done is they've left the $400,000 Lambo as a $400,000 Lambo, but instead of giving you $100,000 discount off the retail price, they've given you $100,000 bonus on your trade-in car and at the end of the day you've given your car in for the same amount of money and walked out with a $400,000 automobile.

Mel: 09:29 Very clever

Dan: 09:30 Win, win, win.

Mel: 09:31 The third type of framing effect is when you frame the goal of something or more like the outcome. Okay. So think about it in terms of if you needed to pay a registration fee for something. And an example is that when people are presented with a registration fee and there's a penalty for paying late, 93 percent of people paid on time.

Dan: 09:57 Okay, that's pretty good. It turns out late fees work.

Mel: 09:59 The flip side is that when you're presented with a discount for early registration, how many people will pay it early, and you only get 67 percent.

Dan: 10:08 Which is interesting, right?

Mel: 10:09 Yeah, I mean that's why I said it.

Dan: 10:12 Well, I mean it's interesting because I think in a previous episode we talked about this idea of loss aversion and so maybe we perceived the fine as an extra loss and we’re far more motivated to avoid loss than we are to get a gain, which would be why more people would want to avoid the loss than to get the gain of paying early.

Mel: 10:27 Right. That's perfectly consistent with loss of vision.

Dan: 10:29 Yeah. Which is actually kind of weird though because when I look at how energy bills come, we know it's more effective to charge people a late fee. But most energy bills, and certainly my energy bills, don’t have late fees but they have discount fees if you pay early, which according to the research I guess you were just talking about is a less effective way.

Mel: 10:49 So here's the thing, it's effective in terms of compliance, yes. So if you want people to pay their bills, pay their fines on time, instituting a late fee or a penalty for not paying it on time is going to be effective. But here's the thing, if you are a brand who wants to maintain an ongoing relationship with the customer, well how much are they really going to like you if you keep slugging them with late fees?

Dan: 11:09 So it's like slightly worse in the short term, but far better in the long term for the energy provider.

Mel: 11:09 Right.

Dan: 11:09 So, in a discount.

Mel: 11:14 That's right. The energy provider wants to be your preferred provider. And if they keep slugging you with late fees, at some point you're going to say, ah, you've got a choice in the market and you're probably going to shift to something else.

Dan: 11:24 So good take out here is if you're in a government sanctioned monopoly, just slap people with late fees because what are you going to do? Go “I hate this council. I'm taking my house somewhere else” obviously not an option. So they don't really care if they get hated. Unless you're listening to us from a council and I'm sure everybody loves you.

Mel: 11:39 Love you.

Dan: 11:40 Love you. Please don’t give me parking tickets. People don't have a choice so they just got to put up with it. Whereas if you're in a competitive market, whether it's telecommunications or gas, electricity, whatever, that long term relationship is more important, so we're better off giving a discount than offering a late fee.

Mel: 11:53 So it's a trade off. Yeah, that you've got to trade off. You got to understand that if you are going to push compliance and if you're gonna push compliance in a way that's going to make it most effective, it's going to come with a compromise of your ongoing relationship and your customer satisfaction.

Dan: 12:05 There's another thing, just maybe tangential to that, but there's a weird ... look at me I want to know about the psychology. There's a weird thing that happens in my head where I think if I didn't pay early and end up paying on time, so I missed the discount. It's like, oh, that's my bad. I'm an idiot.

Whereas if I was about to pay on time and I kind of got distracted and I ended up paying a day later and they slugged me with a late fee. I'm like,” these guys are assholes”

Mel: 12:26 So it's an attribution as well about who's actually taking the blame, who's taking the responsibility for it.

Dan: 12:31 Yeah. I'm responsible for good things in my life. Other people are responsible for bad things in my life. Completely normal.

Mel: 12:37 Yes, you are. So we're going to shift gear for a moment and look at an ad that has given us a really good example of the framing effect in action.

Dan: 12:45 I love ads let's look at more ads. It's very hard in the auditory format, not a lot of good radio ads, but we're going to describe a TV ad, right?

Mel: 12:52 Right. And it's an ad from the transport accident commission. The TAC.

Dan: 12:55 So for those of you not from around here, TAC are the guys in charge of making sure we’re getting home safely and nobody dies on our roads. And this was brought out as part of a big sort of repositioning or reframing from them.

So a number of years ago they actually adopted a road safety system or philosophy out of Scandinavia, out of Sweden. And it's the idea of moving towards zero where there's this inherent sort of understanding in things like terminology, like road toll that some number of deaths on the road are just inevitable, like road toll, there is a toll you have to pay for having roads as a society. And maybe even at a deeper level, if you heard about someone who was drunk behind the wheel wrapping themselves around a pole, people would think, well then they probably deserve to die anyway. They weren't really doing the right thing. They were breaking the law. But it is harsh, but probably what a lot of people think.

This new philosophy says, well look, humans aren't perfect, so we have to wrap a whole system around them. If we really believed that zero deaths is the only acceptable number of deaths on the road. So anyway, it's a very interesting way of reframing what they're about-

Mel: 13:58 They're in a tight position, like you say.

Dan: 14:00 Exactly. And I think this guy sad that you're about to talk about is a wonderful illustration of that.

Speaker 3: 14:05 “In 2016, 291 people died on our roads. What do you think would be a more acceptable number?”

Speaker 4: 14:13 “Uhhh - acceptable? 70 maybe? Probably 70.”

Dan: 14:13 70?

Mel: 14:13 70.

Dan: 14:18 70 would be good.

Mel: 14:21 Compared to 291 deaths. Hey, 70 sounds like a win. 70 is pretty good.

Dan: 14:25 Imagine if we could have 220-somethin- one less deaths on our road this year. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Mel: 14:34 Sounds like a massive win for road safety. Yes. Here's the reason the ad’s effective and here's what happens next.

Speaker 3: 14:39 “Can you save 70?”

Speaker 5: 14:43 “Actually this is what 70 people looks like.”

Mel: 14:47 All sudden what happens is this conception of 70 abstract people who I don't know and who I can’t put faces to and have nothing to do with me dying on our roads, yeah I'll wear that. All of a sudden you've put faces and names and persons. Literally real people. People who are close to this man in the view. And you've presented 70 of them and you've said to him “you still think 70 is acceptable?”

Speaker 3: 15:15 “Now what do you think would be a more acceptable number?”

Speaker 4: 15:24 “Zero. Zero.”

Dan: 15:27 “Well, actually I don't really like my second cousin who you’ve brought out …” No, he says zero. I guess to highlight what you're saying, I mean they've reframed a reduction in 291 anonymous people to 70, reframed from that zero people you know, to 70 people you know.

Mel: 15:43 Exactly. It's completely reframing something and first of all, in the first instance, it's seen as a gain from 291 down to 70 massive wins. But when you've got 70 loved ones lost, all of a sudden that's about the biggest loss that you can get to lose your entire family, including your 8th cousins. That's a lot of loss.

Dan: 16:01 So I'm not sure what you meant to do as a result of seeing the ad, other than believing that it is a worthwhile positioning for the organisation to be going after. But a beautiful illustration of literally seeing framing unfold before your eyes.

Mel: 16:12 Yeah. And what makes it more powerful is that what they've done is they've primed this guy. They've pretty much set him up to give that answer. Because they started with 291 people died in on our roads, last year.

Dan: 16:24 Which kind of harks back to the idea of anchoring that we've spoken about in a previous episode as well, where you give somebody a number first and then get them to guess and their guess is always sort of relative or pegged on that first number that they hear.

Mel: 16:36 Yeah. So priming pretty much provides people context by setting themselves up by giving them information on which they can base their next response or statement.

Dan: 16:44 Exactly. And I think priming if we talk about the framing effect as being the how something is presented, not the what is being presented, priming has a huge role to play in that because priming is almost a thing that happens almost immediately before the observed behaviour. Which is why I really like have no faith in most survey results that are published in things like newspapers because you don't know what the one or two or 10 questions they asked before the question they’ve actually reported back on.

So if you're going to do a thing on gun control as just a random example, and you wanted to publish whether people thought we should have tougher gun control laws. If the proceeding five questions were about ... “did you know that x number of people were killed in the last 12 months because of our current gun laws? Do you know that you know more than 70 percent of these people with children and did you know that ... “ Whatever. And then you just ask the question, “do you think we should have tighter gun control laws?” You think that that's going to prime people to say yes, as opposed to if you started your line of questioning about “did you know that our freedom of rights and freedom of speech are now more suppressed now than they've ever been in any time …”

Mel: 17:45 So you're saying you don't have faith in the research that’s published in newspapers.

Dan: 17:48 Correct.

Mel: 17:48 Here's the difference. Just like to fight back for research, when research is done in science and printed in proper scientific journals we actually-

Dan: 17:56 Proper scientific journals.

Mel: 17:58 Real as opposed to the newspaper. Researchers are actually aware of these sorts of things. We call them item order effects. And so whenever I ask people questions, even if it's research study or whether I've got a client in my office and I want to know how they feel, I’m first of all not going to ask them, “how much pain did you feel today? How uncomfortable are you right now?” I'm not going to prime them to think of other things before I say, “and by the way, how wonderful is your life right now?”

Dan: 18:23 Yes. I guess if you said to me “give me a list of all the things that are upsetting you at the moment” and then said “so how are you?” I've probably just primed myself into saying I'm not very good.

Mel: 18:32 So we're aware of these things and there are contingencies that can be made in terms of the planning of surveys to ensure that people are not primed prior to entering questions

Dan: 18:40 But is not priming even a possibility?

Mel: 18:42 Well, what we know is that there are examples where you can deliberately prime people to think a certain thing. And there are things that can happen that can precede a question that will automatically prime somebody to think something. So what we can do is do our best to reduce any effects of priming. At least any effects of deliberate priming.

Dan: 18:59 Yeah, but I guess you can't control where someone had a great morning. You know, somebody got stuck in traffic trying to get to their appointment with you or trying to get to the place where they're going to complete the survey and they bumped their toe walking in and their phones just cracked the screen or whether they just got a call from some lost relative telling them that they'd like to write them a check for $2,000,000.

Mel: 19:19 It's true. But I can get a pretty good indication by the look on their face as to whether they've just busted their toe and broken their phone or whether somebodies just given them $2,000,000. So I can incorporate that into my interpretation of their answers.

Dan: 19:31 And by that you mean just throw their answer in the bin.

Mel: 19:33 I mean, if it's not an accurate representation of their general state or general mood, then yeah. So to summarise where we've come to so far, so in terms of framing effects, we've talked about the three different types of framing effect. We talked about risky choice, we talked about attributes and we talked about goal, then we throw in a bit of priming information. So now that we know all of this and now that our listeners are so much wiser to all of this, what do we do with it?

Dan: 19:56 So it's a good question because a lot of this sounds really fundamental. When you look at the first two ways that framing works. A lot of It is just to do with putting your best foot forward.

We don't need to tell people that if you have a product that's got a 85 percent chance of succeeding and a 15 percent chance of failing, we're better off telling people that it's an 85 percent chance of success.

Mel: 20:14 I think people get that.

Dan: 20:15 People get that. But I mean this really cuts to the core of branding and positioning of businesses. So some of the things we might talk about is, I don't know if you pick a beverage, pick a vodka. Do you want to be the best vodka from New Zealand? So you're the best of all the vodkas to come out of New Zealand. This is the number one.

Mel: 20:36 New Zealand big for vodka, hey?

Dan: 20:37 Well yeah, or do you want to be the most New Zealand vodka in the world? So like where are you setting your frame, are you looking at the global stage and how you going to do that? Or are you looking at a smaller local stage? Similarly, one of the things we'll often ask about a new product or service is, is this product more like a paracetamol? Like is this the thing designed to take pain away and we're going to frame it all around all of the pain that you're currently suffering, how this product's going to fix it? Or is this product more like a multivitamin and it's gonna not take you from negative to neutral, but it's going to take you from neutral to amazing, wonderful, skipping through the fields in the sunshine.

Mel: 21:09 Got it. So that's what we can do with brands. From a consumer perspective, it's really simple. We know that our brain is making decisions based on how information is presented. Your job is to try to neglect as best you can, all this information that is distracting you and make the good decision by focusing on actually what information is being presented.

Dan: 21:28 So if you're a consumer on the receiving end of the vodka example I gave before, just try and work out if it’s good vodka.

Mel: 21:34 And do you want vodka?

Dan: 21:35 Well let’s assume you do, right. Goes with most things. Great breakfast, drink. Don't drink vodka for breakfast.

Mel: 21:40 Not always.

Dan: 21:42 But just focus on, is it a good product?

Mel: 21:45 Do you actually enjoy it?

Dan: 21:46 But don't do that too much because then I won’t have a job.

Mel: 21:48 All right, so that's pretty much a wrap on the framing effect.

Dan: 21:51 That is true after listening to this podcast. If pain persists, please contact Dr. Mel, you’re all over the internet Dr Mel Weinberg.

Mel: 21:58 @DrMelW.

Dan: 21:59 @DrMelW, and I'm also in some parts of the internet @Danmonheit.

Mel: 22:04 See you next time.

Dan: 22:05 Yeah see you next time. When is next time Mel?

Mel: 22:09 You know, I think will do for a little bit of a break actually.

Dan: 22:10 We have been working pretty hard.

Mel: 22:11 And we've pretty much exhausted all of Kahneman and Tversky’s 1981 paper.

Dan: 22:15 You are going to need to get back to your research, we're going to take a little break. We've got some side projects we're working on here, but we will be back.

Mel: 22:21 We'll be back soon.

Dan: 22:22 More bad decisions.

Mel: 22:23 There were definitely more bad decisions to be made.

Dan: 22:25 Thanks for listening.

#15 Hot Hand Fallacy: Why we love seeing hot streaks

You’ve just made your last three shots, won your last three hands or closed your last three deals. What do you think will happen next? In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the fallacy - and reality - of ‘catching fire’ in games, business and life.

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Mel: 00:14 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan: 00:21 The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel: 00:24 Why we think what we think.

Dan: 00:25 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel: 00:27 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg, I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:30 And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat, a creative agency built for today.

Mel: 00:34 You did it.

Dan: 00:34 I did it, now you do it Kops. [music playing]

Mel: 00:41 So Dan Monheit for this episode, I want to welcome you to Mel's Casino!

Dan: 00:44 Hey hey, it's great to be here.

Mel: 00:47 So here's the situation alright, we're flipping coins.

Dan: 00:50 This is a decidedly low-budget casino.

Mel: 00:53 This is a coin toss game, and I have just flipped the coin three times, and it has resulted in three heads. Your job, for a million dollars is to tell me whether you think that the next coin will be a head or a tail.

Dan: 01:10 So we've had heads, heads, heads?

Mel: 01:11 Yup.

Dan: 01:12 Due for a tail, I'm going with tails.

Mel: 01:13 You think you're due for a tails.

Dan: 01:14 Due for a tails.

Mel: 01:15 Willing to bet your life savings on it.

Dan: 01:19 I thought I was betting a million dollars that wasn't mine.

Mel: 01:22 Well we can go either.

Dan: 01:22 Either way.

Mel: 01:22 So you ready-

Dan: 01:26 Let's keep the show moving. I'm going with tails.

Mel: 01:26 Heads, heads, heads, tails. Alright. Okay so now I wanna switch things up a little-bit, and I want you to go in your crazy imagination, to the NBA playoffs.

Dan: 01:36 Okay, I'm there.

Mel: 01:37 You are, Dan Monheit. You are a fifty percent shooter from the field.

Dan: 01:42 Wait, I'm playing in the playoffs?

Mel: 01:43 Yeah.

Dan: 01:44 Oh, this is good. Okay yes.

Mel: 01:45 This is easy for you to imagine?

Dan: 01:46 Oh yeah.

Mel: 01:46 You're right there.

Dan: 01:47 Yes.

Mel: 01:47 Okay. You're a fifty percent shooter from the field.

Dan: 01:50 Yes.

Mel: 01:50 You've just hit your last three shots.

Dan: 01:50 That's good. Yes.

Mel: 01:52 Yes, it's NBA playoffs.

Dan: 01:52 So normally when I think about playing basketball I'm on the bench, but this is good. I'm in the game. I'm hitting shots, I've hit three in a row.

Mel: 02:02 Very realistic.

Dan: 02:03 Okay, so I've hit three in a row, feeling good.

Mel: 02:05 Alright, Coach Mel calls a timeout. Gonna draw up a play. We need a shot to win. You've just hit your last three. Should I put the ball in your hands?

Dan: 02:14 Gimme the ball, "get out of the way."

Mel: 02:17 Dan Monheit for the buzzer beater to win?

Dan: 02:17 Absolutely.

Mel: 02:18 You will back yourself every time?

Dan: 02:20 Oh I've just hit three in a row.

Mel: 02:21 Yeah, but you see, when we just flipped three heads in a row, you were pretty convinced that the fourth one was gonna be a tails.

Dan: 02:28 Because we're due for tails.

Mel: 02:29 We're due for tails, and this time?

Dan: 02:30 Yeah, well it's different.

Mel: 02:32 Okay, I can tell, why?

Dan: 02:33 I'm not a coin.

Mel: 02:34 Right, who are you?

Dan: 02:35 I've hit three in a row.

Mel: 02:35 You're super star bench player Dan Monheit right here.

Dan: 02:39 I'm no longer bench player.

Mel: 02:40 Sorry.

Dan: 02:41 Yes, this is my coming out party.

Mel: 02:42 So, what we're talking about here, what we're talking about today, what we've tried to just illustrate, is the idea of the Hot Hand Fallacy.

Dan: 02:50 This is not a fallacy. I actually had a hot hand. I hit three in a row, and I'm gonna hit the fourth.

Mel: 02:55 Remember this was your imagination, let's come back, let's bring it back into the podcast.

Dan: 02:58 Alright.

Mel: 02:59 The Hot Hand Fallacy, is the belief that we're going to be more successful in future attempts, if we've been successful in past attempts.

Dan: 03:06 I think NBA Jam has a lot to answer for, in this fallacy.

Mel: 03:10 Queue the audio.

Dan: 03:12 “He’s on fire. Razzle-Dazzle. It’s good!”

NBA Jam Audio: 03:12 Boom-Shaka-Lacka! Kaboom!

Dan: 03:18 So I tell you what Dr. Mel. I mean, I'm not a doctor but I don't know, I have some thoughts about this.

Mel: 03:23 Yeah, you're allowed.

Dan: 03:24 I'm allowed to have thoughts? With the fact that it's a fallacy, I totally get it for your first example, when we're tossing coins, or doing other completely random games, so maybe roulette or, something else like that. Where anybody that's done, you know, in maths, understands each event is completely independent and has nothing to do with the previous event and we kinda construct this story that, we're on fire. And I think, actually, casinos kinda know this and tap into it where at a roulette wheel they'll actually put up, what the last twenty spins or the last forty spins have been, to sort of help people construct a story.

Mel: 03:57 Yeah, that's not to actually give you information. It's actually to mess with your mind.

Dan: 03:59 Yeah, got it. So, you know that's a thing that we do, but, isn't sport different? In sport it's not completely random like if I have just hit three shots in a row, there's probably some things working in my favour. So like, my confidence is probably feeling better, my teammates might be looking for me, and maybe something's working against me as well. Like maybe the defence, trying to close out.

Mel: 04:19 100%.

Dan: 04:20 Or maybe taking stupid shots, cause, my confidence is up?

Mel: 04:22 Yeah well, your shot difficulty changes right?

Dan: 04:25 Yeah.

Mel: 04:25 With each one. What you're saying is that there's two different scenarios here. Right? One when we're talking about casino type stuff, mostly down to chance. Right? So the odds are fifty-fifty in those scenarios no matter what. Whereas, in the heat of a game, yeah there's so many other things that could influence whether or not you're going to make the shot.

Dan: 04:41 Exactly so with the casino stuff I'm sure there was research, but we don't really need research to know if that's a thing. We know it's completely random and we all know that we make up stories to tell ourselves that it's not cause we're all special snowflakes and we need to construct a narrative where the world makes sense around us.

Mel: 04:54 Well see that last bit, I'm not sure about being special snowflakes but we certainly do need to construct narratives how the world operate. Because we need to have meaning in our world it gives us a feeling of familiarity, predictability, it would be really uncomfortable for us to live in a world where we had no idea what was gonna happen next. So we tend to make patterns out of random things.

Dan: 05:13 Yeah, like how people see Jesus on toasted cheese sandwiches.

Mel: 05:16 Yeah.

Dan: 05:17 Yeah.

Mel: 05:18 We see faces. We see them in the clouds.

Dan: 05:20 Yes, and we're wired to do that, you know, even as a baby one of the first things you get to do is recognise what a face looks like, so, it makes sense we see patterns and repeated things everywhere we look.

Mel: 05:30 So, next time you see Jesus in the back of a tree, you're completely normal.

Dan: 05:34 Exactly, but with sport I guess it's, it's kinda different. Right? Like is there a fallacy or really is there a hot hand?

Mel: 05:41 Well so now we're going to enter ourselves into an argument that has been going for, about the last 35 years. Alright it started with a piece of research in 1985 by Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky

Dan: 05:57 Did you say Tversky?

Mel: 05:59 Yeah.

Dan: 05:59 Because if there is a hot hand in research, this guy has it. He's basically on a Bad Decisions hot streak. He's been mentioned in every single episode.

Mel: 06:06 But here's the thing. When you get to be as good as Tversky was, you get to do really cool things with your research.

Dan: 06:11 Such as?

Mel: 06:12 Well, they spent their time, this is so totally different to my experience in Academia. Well it's a little-bit, cause I did watch a lot of basketball when I was in Academia, but they basically just got to look at and analyse the statistics of basketball games. So in 1985 they were looking at the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers.

Dan: 06:30 Jordan's rookie season.

Mel: 06:31 And what they were trying to do was look at whether shooters were more likely to make a shot, depending on the result of their previous shot.

Dan: 06:39 So they were trying to determine, if I just made a shot, am I more likely or less likely than average, to hit the following shot.

Mel: 06:45 Yep, and here's the thing, when they asked both the players, and the fans watching the game, if they were more likely to make the next shot after just hitting, the previous one, everybody was like, "Yeah, definitely more likely to."

Dan: 06:54 Yeah.

Mel: 06:55 Actually what the research found, was that there was no evidence for the influence or the suggested idea of a hot hand. The hot hand was a fallacy, and the hot hand didn't actually exist.

Dan: 07:09 Well that's upsetting.

Mel: 07:09 Isn't it?

Dan: 07:09 That's like, really upsetting.

Mel: 07:10 Sorry imaginary Dan in the NBA playoffs, apparently you are not a thing.

Dan: 07:14 I bet also, just like as a guy watching sport, you kinda like to think that this is happening right?

Mel: 07:19 Well yeah, it makes it entertaining, it makes it fun of course. The crowd goes nuts when somebody's hit three in a row.

Dan: 07:23 Exactly. So it may lead to the question I mean, you said this is a contentious issue, we’ve got a paper in 1985 that says no, his is absolutely not a thing ... surely it can’t end there?

Mel: 07:32 Well so then there was a whole-bunch of other studies that came out to replicate it, right? And then all of a sudden you got all these coaches going, "Na uh," and elite sports people going, "Na uh. I don't believe this. I don't care what your statistics show. I know that if I'm feeling hot, God damn it I am feeling hot!" Right? Now for 30 years this research stood, right? There was no such thing as a hot hand, in basketball or in sport.

Dan: 07:55 Well maybe not according to academics and statisticians.

Mel: 07:57 Right. According to everybody else and so a couple of researchers came out and they're like, "Not uh, this has got to be a thing and, we are gonna show you that it is a thing."

Dan: 08:04 "We're gonna keep researching this until we get it right."

Mel: 08:07 "And, we are going to keep watching basketball games and calling it research for as long as we possibly can."

Dan: 08:10 I see where you're going here.

Mel: 08:13 And so, in 2014 some researchers from Harvard, came out with a study.

Dan: 08:18 Well they're smart. They're smart right?

Mel: 08:18 Right, I mean they're from Harvard right? They came out with a study where they looked at 83,000 shots in the NBA.

Dan: 08:22 Tough gig.

Mel: 08:23 Yup, and they incorporated all these factors that weren't included in the earlier studies. So they were looking at factors that contribute to shot difficulty, like the things we were talking about like is another defender there, how far are you from the ring, etc. etc. What point in time is it in the game? And what they found was that there was, actually some evidence for the idea of a hot hand.

Dan: 08:41 Hey, see?

Mel: 08:43 If you look long enough. You'll find something.

Dan: 08:44 Exactly, you will find it’s in the data somewhere.

Mel: 08:47 So, currently, apparently, as it stands, the hot hand is not a fallacy. The hot hand is actually an effect.

Dan: 08:53 Right like what are we talking here. How much more likely am I to hit my 4th shot if I just hit the last 3.

Mel: 08:58 So here's the thing the effect sizes were marginal. I'm talking like an extra 1 or 2 percent. But look, if you think about in the contents of sport, like I always say in sports sometimes it's the smallest differences that have the biggest impact.

Dan: 09:12 I guess thinking back about what we were saying earlier about our desire to want to create stories around this stuff. Maybe the reality is you only have 1 or 2 percent difference in likelihood of hitting a shot but when you add on to that bit of extra swagger from the player, the crowd going off and cheering the person’s name because they just hit 3 in a row, the commentator starting to talk up that they have seen not seen a shooting streak like this at this count since December 1987 and this is one of the greatest performances likely to see. All sudden the story fits, even if the reality is questionable.

Mel: 09:44 Right the perception is way more fun.

Dan: 09:46 Yeah, and we want it right? We want the story. It's a much enjoyable experience to watch a game where there is actually momentum and hot streaks. Then when it’s just a bunch of random shot attempts.

Mel: 09:57 Right, so let's break this down in to a couple of reasons why we might fall for this. Okay, why we might think the Hot Hand Fallacy is a thing? In addition to it just being more fun to believe in. I will give you a couple other reasons why we tend to think this way. The first is the fundamental attribution era. Which is the idea when good things happen we attribute them to internal characteristics of ourselves. Right? So, when you've just hit 3 shots in a row you're thinking, "I'm hot, I'm on fire." The flip side of that when bad things happen we don't think that has anything to do with us. Right we’ll put things down like chance or bad luck.

Dan: 10:30 Exactly and so if we think about that example. Like in the casino where, you know if we are losing, oh you know, oh we get 3 heads in a row we think. We think we're due for tales..

Mel: 10:39 Yeahs, it's not because there's something wrong with us. It was bad luck.

Dan: 10:42 Exactly.

Mel: 10:43 We are due for a win.

Dan: 10:44 Due for a win. Totally.

Mel: 10:44 We're a good person. Good people deserve wins in life.

Dan: 10:47 Exactly, whereas if I just won 3 hands in a row. I'm probably due for a 4th.

Mel: 10:51 Of course. Because it was you.

Dan: 10:52 It was a skill. It was all skill.

Mel: 10:54 So, the next thing that comes in to place the idea of the law of small numbers. Basically, it's the idea when we know that something exist in the population. We assume it's gonna also apply in the small tiny little sub section of the populations. When we have small numbers. So, for example if we flip a coin 100 times we expect that we get 50 heads and 50 tails. Right? The law of small numbers said if I would of flip a coin 4 times. You would of expect to get what.

Dan: 11:22 2 heads and 2 tails.

Mel: 11:23 2 heads and 2 tails. Right, there’s just the same likelihood that we would have 4 heads in a row as if we would have head, head, tails, tails. That sequence “head head head head” is exactly the same likelihood happening as “head head tails tails” in a small sample.

Dan: 11:44 Right. So what you're saying about this law of small numbers, we failed to see the sample is merely part of a much much bigger experience. Much bigger population and we think that's the whole universe.

Mel: 11:50 Correct. If you go back to your hot streak in basketball. Right, you've just hit 3 out of 3 of your previous shots right, even though I know that you missed the last 20 before that and you're not really a great shooter. I'm looking at the little streak and I'm only looking at that and I'm neglecting all the information prior to that. I'm neglecting your overall shooting percentage which really, let's be honest isn't that great.

Dan: 12:12 High 40's probably.

Mel: 12:13 And I'm just looking at the small numbers. That little small instance that I’ve got there making my judgement  based on that.

Dan: 12:19 So you're not assessing my skill as a shooter over my lifetime. You're saying in the last 3 minutes this guy is a 100 percent shooter.

Mel: 12:27 Yep. Whenever we restrict the available range of data, we are going to make errors in estimation.

Dan: 12:32 Sure

Mel: 12:33 The last thing that comes into play is something that we have spoken about in previous podcast episode, which is the idea of availability basis. Which is if I want to think the likelihood of the next thing happening is, my brain is going to search for the most recent available information and “oh you hit your last 3 shots? Well of course you're going to make your next one.”

Dan: 12:48 Yeah and probably made shots more memorable than missed shots unless I missed a really critical shot or missed a layup or something like that. Chances are made shot that are memorable than missed shots. So that playing into that as well. So I guess we have all those things working in our favour or against our favour. It does seem pretty clear that we are excellent constructing stories where we want to. Maybe it's further evidence of that.

It seems funny that we only make the stories where we want them to. So we talk about hot streaks for shooting but we don't talk about hot streaks for other statistics like nobody gets on a steal hot streak or a block hot streak or a successful inbound pass hot streak.  

Mel: 13:24 And look that is one of the key criticisms of this sort of research when it comes to sport, that we only look at sort of one metric, one indicator of success and we make all of that judgements about future success based on that. Where as you say there's a whole-lot of other things that could come into play that we just don't pay attention to.  

Dan: 13:38 So the question for you Doctor Mel. The Hot Hand Fallacy is it a thing or is it not a thing?

Mel: 13:44 Look I think as long as we believe it's a thing. It's a thing.

Dan: 13:48 Right.

Mel: 13:48 Which is the point of the whole thing.

Dan: 13:50 So, Doctor Mel, the truth fairy. It is a thing or is it not a thing.

Mel: 13:52 Do you believe it's a thing?

Dan: 13:54 Well.

Mel: 13:54 If you think it, it is real.

Dan: 13:56 Okay, so the Hot Hand Fallacy is not a fallacy. The hot hand attribute is an attribute.

Mel: 14:01 According to the latest research there are some evidence for a hot hand effect.

Dan: 14:05 Alright, well I think we should go with that and I mean at the core of it, it’s because people like stories and a few consecutive shots made or few consecutive hands won at a poker table, or roulette wheel give us all the ingredients we need to construct a story about how wonderfully awesome we are.

Mel: 14:19 They also make good for Hollywood blockbuster movies. Right?

Dan: 14:22 This is true.

Mel: 14:22 About sports.

Dan: 14:23 Nobody's going to see a movie about a series of random shots that may or may not go in.

Mel: 14:28 So how do we take this and how do we apply this understanding of a Hot Hand Fallacy whether it exists or not. What does it mean in brand world?

Dan: 14:35 So if we look at that underlining ingredients for the Hot Hand Fallacy it’s people's desire to create a story and a story about somebody winning. And so, brands it makes sense to do whatever we can to look like we’re on a hot streak. Right. I guess often times with brands, and with agencies and other types of organisations we will look for big news and big wins to talk about our momentum moving forwards. But, probably a great lesson out of these is we should be looking for any sorts of wins we can talk about. Whatever that is individual performance reviews, or PR marketing we do out to the audience. The more made shots we can get out there the more we're contributing to the stories people are creating in their heads about our organisation or us as an individual being on a hot streak.

Mel: 15:20 Yeah, you're just trying to set the tone. Write the narrative.

Dan: 15:23 Exactly. So talking about this there are a couple of industries that come to mind straight away. Alright, maybe the umbrella over all of these is the awards industry, and how many awards are there that are set up just to give people good news to get themselves on hot streaks. So, I have not done the research maybe you would want to do the research but it would seem that there are more awards for cars available than there are cars, available in Australia. It seems that every car has won car of the year award for something. They've usually won it at least 4 or 5 times in a row. Total hot streak get on board with that.

I think superannuation is another one where you know, all of these different funds have been voted or recognised as a top something fund for the last x number of years and of course past performance is the best indicator for future performances, the fund is on a hot streak, make sure you get involved with that.

Mel: 16:10 See it’s funny that, right? Where past performance is the best indicator for future performance. It totally depends.

Dan: 16:15 Yeah who knows but I mean, actually it doesn't really matter because we like to believe that it is, and if you look at the ads, not picking on superannuation here but you will have the first 28 seconds of the ad talking about how amazing how their past performance been, and the last 2 seconds of the ad saying “past performance is not the best indicator for future performance” basically this whole ad was bullshit.

I should just say the ad is not bullshit. It's just the conclusions that we know people will draw from that are probably bullshit. The ads are true. Don't sue me.

Mel: 16:43 Alright so to bring it back and to really sum what we have been talking about. In circumstances where we don't have a whole lot of information or complete uncertainty. We have to understand our brain is going to look for patterns.

Dan: 16:55 For hot streaks.

Mel: 16:56 We're going to look for hot streaks. We're going to look for any information that can make us feel like we're in control of whatever is going to happen next but at the end of the day it's a story that our mind just made up.

Dan: 17:05 Right and clearly for completely random events, it’s 100 percent a story and for not completely randomly events, maybe sport, investment, buying and selling shares. It's like 98 percent a story. And 1-2 percent real.

Mel: 17:20 It's pretty much a story, our brain is making up stories.

Dan: 17:24 Alright it's all bullshit. It's a good way to end.

Dan: 17:26 No, actually you know what's a better way to end?

Mel: 17:28 What?

Dan: 17:29 How do people find you on the internet?

Mel: 17:30 Well they will either Google Melissa Weinberg or they can find me @DrMelW.

Dan: 17:36 Cool and if you finish talking to Mel and you would like to talk to me you can find me at @Danmonheit

Mel: 17:42 @Danmonheit #NBASuperstar.

Dan: 17:45 Yes. I think that is it for today. What are we going to talk about next time Mel? Are we going to keep the hot streak going?

Mel: 17:49 We are going to have to keep the hot streak going.

Dan: 17:51 Yeah I reckon we definitely talk about another bad decision making heuristic.

Mel: 17:54 It's a good chance. It's a good chance that will happen.

Dan: 17:57 Good chance. Seen you then.