#30 Pratfall Effect: Why you can afford to make a mistake

People and brands often go to great efforts to manage the impressions others form of them, but what if we stopped trying to be perfect, and instead owned our flaws? In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the Pratfall effect, and why tripping up the stairs on your way to a presentation could be a winning strategy.

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Mel:                             00:16                Hi and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan:                             00:18                The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel:                             00:21                Why we think what we think.

Dan:                             00:22                And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel:                             00:25                I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan:                             00:27                And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat.

Mel:                             00:41                Dan, you know what? There's something very exciting today.

Dan:                             00:45                It is Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. It's Corona, I have no idea what day it is.

Mel:                             00:49                It is our 30th episode.

Dan:                             00:51                Woo-hoo, dirty 30. Woo-hoo. Yeah, really testing the levels.

Mel:                             00:56                Yeah, we are 30-years-old again.

Dan:                             00:59                First woo-ing on bad decisions. How do you like that, Kopel? Not so much.

Daniel Kopel:                01:04                Yeah, I'm not in the podcast.

Dan:                             01:07                You should be. It's about time. A third voice. The third voice that makes the first two voices sound much better, which given we're 30 episodes in, we were having a lot of fun doing this. We now have listeners in over 90 countries. So what up, everybody out there, thank you all so much for tuning in. We think it is time that we level with you guys just a little bit.

Mel:                             01:27                Go on.

Dan:                             01:27                Go on. Okay. I'll be leveling. Mel will be spectating my leveling. Well, I mean, you guys just like open your podcast player and you see the new episode come up and you start listening and you get to the end of episode and you think, "Man, that is slick. These guys are just smooth." And I guess we want you guys to know that in between our recording and you're listening, there's actually a lot of editing that happens. Like a lot, a lot, a lot of editing that happens.

Mel:                             01:53                Well, hang on, not the lot. Most of it's pretty good.

Dan:                             01:55                Well, a lot of your stuff needs editing. Mine's pretty good. Yours... It's kind of like out with a weed whacker, just trying to get to the nuggets.

Mel:                             02:03                Thanks.

Dan:                             02:03                But it's important. It's important because we need to come across as professionals here and yeah, we've got to be silky smooth.

Mel:                             02:11                It's true about like you said, we do make mistakes sometimes and it gives Kops our producer a lot of great content for bloopers. Right, Kops?

Dan:                             02:21                There are no bloopers.

Mel:                             02:26                This is the conundrum that brands have made... I can't, I'm just going to... Okay.

Dan:                             02:27                Do you remember the definition?

Mel:                             02:31                Course not.

Dan:                             02:35                Where are you, Mel?

Mel:                             02:37                @drmelw, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Dan:                             02:40                Instagram, that's the number one academic...

Mel:                             02:41                Okay. I'll tell that one again. Fuck me. God, I'm sorry, I'm just like...

Dan:                             02:48                The second thing... What the fuck have I written here. The show that helps.

Mel:                             02:51                The podcast.

Dan:                             02:54                Sorry. I'm slightly confused. Are you telling me what you're about to do or are you just actually recording for the show?

Mel:                             02:59                Okay. Let me start again. Start again.

Dan:                             03:03                What, all the way back from the start? Fuck. Mic check was better.

Mel:                             03:07                It's not always so competitive. There are... Here we go. So... Fuck me.

Dan:                             03:15                What did I miss?

Mel:                             03:17                But also, sorry, I actually don't have a point to make. I was just going...

Dan:                             03:23                Maybe I should be asking you... Oh, sorry. Kops had to see the microphone.

Mel:                             03:26                Monheit calling me a bitch, or what'd you call me the other day?

Dan:                             03:27                Bitch, please.

Dan:                             03:35                They are no bloopers.

Mel:                             03:36                So we thought this would be a good episode to really look at whether there's any heuristics out there that actually celebrate mistakes because I think it's important that we do that.

Dan:                             03:46                Yeah. Because you know what's better than being awesome? Being flawsome.

Mel:                             03:51                Haw-haw.

Dan:                             03:53                Cut that out as well.

Mel:                             03:54                I was going to say, is it too late for that to go into the bloopers?

Dan:                             03:57                What do you got for us, Dr. Mel? What are we talking about today?

Mel:                             04:00                We are talking about the pratfall effect.

Dan:                             04:05                So the pratfall effect. I'm very excited to hear about the misadventures of Mr. And or Mrs. Pratfall. Enlighten me.

Mel:                             04:12                I'm not sure who Mr. or Mrs. Pratfall are. I'm sure they're a lovely couple living a nice life somewhere, but the pratfall effect wasn't actually named after them. Let me tell you what the pratfall effect was and then I'll tell you what a pratfall is. The pratfall effect is the idea that people who are considered to be highly competent, intelligent, or otherwise superior in some way, actually become more likable after committing a blunder. And just in case you were wondering, and as promised, I will tell you what a pratfall is and what it was named after. The dictionary definition of a pratfall is literally a fall in which one lands on the buttocks.

Dan:                             04:51                Who knew there was a specific term for falls which result in landing on one's own buttocks?

Mel:                             04:55                Literally falling on your arse is the pratfall effect. And I think this is interesting because this is really specific. If you fall face-first, not a pratfall.-

Dan:                             05:05                No, it's just a fall.

Mel:                             05:06                ... It's a different type of fall.

Dan:                             05:07                Stack, tumble.

Mel:                             05:09                But there is a specific term for falling on your arse and I really like that.

Dan:                             05:13                Yeah. I feel like it should be more widespread.

Mel:                             05:15                So everybody, challenge for our audience, use the word pratfall in a sentence this week.

Dan:                             05:20                Yeah. I like it. All right. So, hey, I mean, I think pratfalls, or showcasing flaws are a really interesting thing in the topic of brands because much like us two podcast hosts, a lot of brands go to a lot of trouble to make themselves pretty much perfect, pretty much flawless. And what this tells us is that might actually be slightly misdirected. If we think about what brands who show some flaws do is they come across as I guess more honest, or more credible, or more trusted because we know brands aren't perfect like we know people aren't perfect. And so by telling us what their imperfection is, it kind of stops us from guessing.

Mel:                             05:53                Yeah.

Dan:                             05:54                They're like, "I'll tell you what's wrong with me. It's right here."

Mel:                             05:56                Hey, look, Dan, before we get too deep into it, I think it's really important that we look at the research.

Dan:                             06:02                You know what, I'm always doing that. I'm so sorry. Yes, let's look at the research.

Mel:                             06:11                So the pratfall effect was given its name back in 1966 by Elliot Aronson who presented his research in literally an article that was literally two pages long. And when I looked at this, I thought, "Wow. Research was so much easier in 1966 to publish." And if any of my students were to submit a piece of work like that, it would fail automatically today. However...

Dan:                             06:36                Refer to the effort bias. I don't remember what episode that was, but she was real. So the lazy, lazy Aronson, what did he do?

Mel:                             06:43                Aronson in 1966 conducted a study that involved 48 male university students who were involved in introductory psychology course. And basically what happened was all of these 48 students listened to a tape recording. Remember it was 1966. They listened to a tape recording of a fellow student who they were told was trying out to represent the university in a quiz contest, right? And so they were listening to this fellow student answer quiz questions. In two of these groups, the student performed really well. So they were getting 92% of the questions correct. So they gave the impression that they were superior and obviously really competent as a trivia person, the right person to represent the university.

Mel:                             07:25                In the other two groups, the contestant only got 30% of the questions correct. And so they were considered the mediocre student if you will. And then within these two groups, there was another manipulation. So we've got the competent versus incompetent groups. And then within that, the other manipulation was that at the end of the recording, just before the tape ended, one of the groups in either the superior-competent or the inferior-incompetent group heard the student apparently accidentally spill a coffee on themselves and make a sort of claim aloud that said, "Oh my God, I've spilled my coffee all over my suit."

Dan:                             08:00                "Oh, no."

Mel:                             08:01                Yeah. "Oh, no. I spilled my coffee." Right? And two of the groups didn't hear that, they just heard the student answering all the questions. And so then afterwards, all of the subjects that participated were interviewed and they were asked to rate how likable the contestant, their fellow student was. And what the results showed was that those who listened to the contestant who performed really well, who got 92% of the answers correct. They actually liked that person. They rated them much more likable if they had heard him spill the coffee.

Dan:                             08:32                Aw, because he's like a smart klutz. It's cute.

Mel:                             08:34                Moral of the story is if you're good at something, spill your coffee all over yourself and get a new suit.

Dan:                             08:39                I can't wait to be good at something and try this out.

Mel:                             08:43                So this is the idea, the idea that when you're really competent when you're perceived to be really competent in something that actually making a mistake in an area that's really unrelated can actually make you more likable. And the idea behind it is that when somebody seems to be really superior or really competent or really perfect in some way, they're not particularly relatable, but when they show that they are vulnerable in a way that any of us are, we tend to sympathize more with them. And that makes us like them more.

Dan:                             09:10                Yeah, I really like is how the kind of the klutziness doesn't make them more competent. It just makes the same competent person more likable. Where I think this is really good if you've sort of maxed-out on competence, everybody already thinks your brand or your person is really good at something, this is a nice way to start working on it on another attribute around likability by showing some sort of unrelated flaws.

Mel:                             09:35                That's exactly what it is. Yeah. And look, now that I've had my research moment. Yeah. I can guide you back to talking about brands.

Dan:                             09:42                Yeah. Well, I know that's what people are tuning in for, right? It's good to have the research, but let's build on that. And when I think about this pratfall effect, where I absolutely see it coming to life is in the whole growth of the discount airline space, right?

Mel:                             09:54                Okay.

Dan:                             09:54                So the thing with brands is, you don't want people guessing where your flaw is, especially if you are something like an airline, right? Where if you're going to come out and start offering flights at much cheaper prices, you think about a Ryanair who's advertising flights for £5 to different countries. You don't want people guessing that the way you're able to do that is by compromising on safety or they're just using one trainee pilot, or they don't really service the planes very often.

Dan:                             10:20                So by pratfalling, right, by saying, "Look, we're really good at getting you there, but the service is going to be shit or there's no food, or you can't take any luggage with you. Or the seats are not going to be very comfortable." It helps people understand what the real value proposition is and prevents them from questioning stuff that you don't want them to question. You don't want them questioning your safety record, you want them questioning the comfort of your seats because at the end of the day, for most people that doesn't really matter on a short flight.

Mel:                             10:47                It's interesting to think about what they're actually focusing on, which is it forces you to think, "Am I going on this flight to get from A to B, or am I going on this flight to get the best meal I've ever had?" And most people will realize I just need to get from A to B, willing to compromise on the food or go to a nice restaurant when I get there.

Dan:                             11:03                Exactly. And so it takes a brave brand to lean into that. And I think about where this is really relevant. And I think it's most interesting in categories where there is a lot of bravado, right? Because what you want to do with advertising, you want memorability and part of memorability is standing out, saying something different to what the rest of the category is saying. So some categories are really notorious for swag. And for basically everybody saying how awesome they are. So that might be around performance cars, or it might be around luxury hotels, or it might be around beer. Where everybody's just trying to one-up each other. And it's very interesting in those categories where people come at and say, "Well, actually there's something kind of wrong with me."

Dan:                             11:43                So a couple of really famous examples of this. If we look at the car rental space, one of the most successful campaigns of all time was Avis coming out and saying, "We're number two, so we try harder." Right? If we look at Guinness, where Guinness actually takes twice as long to pour as most other beers, and taking that old software adage that, "It's not a bug, it's a feature." Guinness beautifully transformed taking twice as long to pour into the line that it's worth the wait. So they're not compromising the quality of the beer, they're just saying that it's going to take a little bit longer to get it, which in the scheme of things shouldn't really matter.

Dan:                             12:18                Guinness actually makes me think of a lot of the work we did a number of years ago for Little Creatures when they were still an independent brewer. So before they absolutely blew up and became sort of the monolith that they were. Working with that brand through the early stages of their growth, the thing that was on every brief for them, not written but it was kind of subtext for every brief, was everything needed to be a little bit shit, right? So whether you're making an ad or a new website or a EDM campaign, right, it kind of had to look a little bit shit because they didn't want people wondering whether they were any good at beer, right? They wanted people to know these guys are exceptional at making craft beer, so it makes sense that they're not that great at making a website, or they're not that great at designing a menu, or they're not that great at making an ad.

Mel:                             13:01                Right. And I think you've really touched on a point that sort of, we need to emphasize in that, which is that this isn't a heuristic for everybody, right? This is not a universal one-size-fits-all type thing. You need to be really careful when you use this heuristic or if you try to use this heuristic because it really is only for the bravado-type brands. It really is only for the superior, the competent, and the perfect. And as you sort of mentioned, it's not about being better or being the best. It's about being more likable instead. It reminds me... The other side of the research article I thought... Can I go back to the research just for a minute? Would you allow me?

Dan:                             13:35                Oh, fine. Let's go back to the research.

Mel:                             13:37                Because there was another part of it, which is that in the-

Dan:                             13:40                One second, do you want music to go back to the research? Or you just want to dive back into it.

Mel:                             13:44                No, no, I'm fine to just go back into it. That's fine.

Dan:                             13:45                I've already paused us now. I think we should get the music. Come on, Kops, let's get some music.

Mel:                             13:54                The other side of that study that I didn't mention was that when participants were exposed to the mediocre-type contestant, who wasn't very good at answering quiz questions, so who was generally incompetent.-

Dan:                             14:06                The 30% guy? Yeah?

Mel:                             14:07                Yeah. When that guy spilled his coffee, he actually became less likable and less competent. It was like this guy is a moron and he can't even hold a cup of coffee.

Dan:                             14:17                Yeah. Yeah. So you really can't understate that you need to be competent first. If you are not... If you're Little Creatures and you're not already making great beer, making shit ads is not going to help, right? But if you are highly competent, then maybe it's going to make people like you more. Is that fair?

Mel:                             14:33                Yeah. I think that's fair. And remember, as we've said, this is all about likability, right? And not trying to be perfect, but trying to be more human and trying to be something that people can relate to.

Dan:                             14:42                So I think if I was going to sort of sum this up as a recommendation for brands, the thing to do is to be brilliant at the thing that is important. You don't want to pratfall effect the core thing people are trying to buy from you. If you're an airline, don't make jokes about your safety procedures, right? You need to be brilliant about what's important and honest about what is not important.

Mel:                             15:03                Yeah. I mean, the way that I think of it is that if you're a competent sportsperson and you miss a catch, it's probably not going to go well for you because that's the thing that you're supposed to be good at. You got to catch the ball, right? But if you're a competent sportsperson who isn't very good at drawing pictures of animals, then that makes you more likable, right? If you're a lousy sportsperson and you drop a catch, then you're probably just crap at what you do. You're just a lousy sportsperson.

Dan:                             15:28                You should be here in the first place, let's be honest.

Mel:                             15:30                I was going to say, and if you're a lousy sportsperson and you can't draw pictures of animals, then you're probably just a lousy person in general.

Dan:                             15:35                Yeah. You need to find something else to do with your time.

Mel:                             15:38                So Dan, obviously I, as a psychologist, I'm a huge fan of vulnerability. I encourage people to be vulnerable, right? I imagine that this could be a really helpful thing for competent brands to use. Why don't we see more of it?

Dan:                             15:51                This is a wonderful question and I would love to see more brands doing this because it does make for interesting ads. Every ad is basically a brand talking about what they're great at. So there should be disproportionate payoffs for brands that don't do that. I think the biggest issue we have, and I certainly know when I've sort of tried to talk to some prospective clients about this. The biggest issue that we have is something called the principal-agent problem, where you have the principal, which is the brand, right? And you have the agent, which is the marketer, the person acting on behalf of the brand. And often the best outcome for each of those things is not the same.

Dan:                             16:29                So for a brand, the best longterm thing might be to indulge in this pratfall effect to talk about some of its vulnerabilities to build likability over time. But it is a rare marketing director or marketing manager that's going to bet their next campaign and therefore, possibly the next phase of their career on an ad that tells people that their beer is really slow. It's a kind of perceived higher-risk strategy than it really is. And I think that explains why we don't see many marketers take it on, even though I would really encourage you to.

Mel:                             17:01                Yeah. So it's one of those high-risk, high-reward possibly, the type of situations if you play it right.

Dan:                             17:06                Yeah. And the thing with the high-risk is it's high-risk for the individual, but it's not high-risk for the brand. If you get it right, it's great for the brand. If you get it wrong, it doesn't really matter, you'll just switch and do some other campaign later. But for an individual, it's like you're only as good as your last campaign and you do not want to be the guy or girl that did the world's worst tasting yogurt campaign when you're actually trying to sell yogurt. It's just not going to go well for you.

Dan:                             17:28                So with that in mind, I guess what I would say to brands is you got to try and find a way to do this, right? You got to try and find a safe way to do this. Maybe don't commit your whole next wave activity to it. Maybe there's one channel, or one market, or one audience, or one product line where you could just indulge in this idea of trying to be brilliant at what is important and honest about what is not. So find a safe space, give it a crack and we'd love to hear how you go. I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm sure your career will be great. And if not, you can always talk about the failure in your next interview as the thing that you messed up and that'll make you more likable.

Mel:                             18:02                And I think it was really easy for me thinking about this to link this to sort of the human side of things. And as soon as I sort of started reading about the pratfall effect, it immediately reminded me of the structure of a TED Talk, right, where you've got somebody who is usually... I guess, the whole point of them doing it is that they're the expert, they're the most competent person in that area to be giving that talk. And the first instruction of a TEDTalk is to make yourself vulnerable. Nobody does this better, Dan than Brené Brown, right, who-

Dan:                             18:31                Well, maybe Brené Brown's second best. I have seen your TEDTalk and it was magnificent, but following you, Brené Brown-

Mel:                             18:36                TEDx, TEDx.

Dan:                             18:38                TEDx, TEDx, TEDx. Following you though, Brené Brown does do a pretty good job of this.

Mel:                             18:41                I was going to sort of segue Dan, that Brené Brown... I mean, you and I did share a stage with her last year, was it? At South by Southwest? Maybe not the exact same stage, her stage was a little bigger than ours.

Dan:                             18:55                We shared some carpet. I think I walked over some of the same carpet that she walked over.

Mel:                             18:58                But sure nobody does this better than her. Her actual TEDTalk is about being vulnerable. So it's really meta the way that she goes about it. And so she really plays that out. And I think it's part of making her who she is. Yes, she's a wonderful expert in that space and lots of people know her to be that, but she's also very vulnerable. She leaves herself very exposed on there and it's much easier to relate to her. And she's very likable for that reason.

Mel:                             19:24                And I think, just thinking about people in general, we all strive for perfection, right? We all think that we want to be perfect, and we admire people who are perfect, and we want to be admired. But sometimes what we don't realize is that people don't actually like perfect. They might admire it, but they don't like it. People like people. And so it's not that we're saying that we want to see important people stuff up. That's not what this is about, but we want to be the type of person that others can relate to and nobody can relate to perfect because nobody is perfect.

Dan:                             19:56                Very true. And the same goes for brands. So I'll tell you what, how about we... Do you want to put a slightly imperfect ribbon on all of this?

Mel:                             20:03                Yeah.

Dan:                             20:04                We'll wind it back. All right. So today we have talked about the pratfall effect, not named after a Mr. or a Mrs. but instead after the specific word for falling on one's buttocks.

Mel:                             20:13                Correct.

Dan:                             20:14                You want to hit us with a definition, Dr. Mel?

Mel:                             20:16                I can.

Dan:                             20:18                Please. Indulge us.

Mel:                             20:22                The pratfall effect is the idea that people who are considered highly-competent or superior actually become more likable after they make some sort of mistake.

Dan:                             20:29                Right, and the key thing for brands here is you've got to carve out a little space to do this. And when you do it, focus on being brilliant at what is important and honest about the rest of it, right? So make sure you're failing at something that is kind of tangential, doesn't really matter, it could be a little bit funny. And for peeps?

Mel:                             20:45                The takeaway for people is that look, all we want as human beings ultimately is to love and to be loved by others. And so falling on your butt every now and then maybe a better play in the long-run than striving for perfection.

Dan:                             20:56                Love it. Inspirational message. All right. That is a wrap for today. Episode 30. Thank you all so much. I might just take one quick moment to thank our very special producer extraordinaire, Kops in the booth on the wheels of steel making us sound-

Mel:                             21:09                Does an excellent job getting rid of all of our bloopers all the time.

Daniel Kopel:                21:12                Except this episode.

Dan:                             21:14                Just one time we're just going to publish the whole two-hour mess and you guys can sort it out for yourselves. Thank you guys all so much for your downloads, your listens, your ratings, reviews. If you guys have got questions, feedbacks, comments. Good feedback to me, bad feedback to Mel, she's working on her pratfall effect right now. We'd love to hear it. And Dr. Mel, thanks to you. This has been good. Let's do 30 more.

Mel:                             21:35                Oh God. 30 more. You got 30 more heuristics for me?

Dan:                             21:38                Yeah, we just have to make some. It's fine.

Mel:                             21:40                The Weinberg-Monheit effect. Coming up in a future episode. Do you like how I put Weinberg first?

Dan:                             21:47                Anyway, let's do it. If you've got ideas for what that effect could be, send them through and we'll see you next time.

Mel:                             21:53                Bye.

#29 Reciprocity Bias: Why you should always buy the first coffee

It might not always feel like it, but we’re wired with an inherent desire to cooperate and collaborate with others. That means when someone does us a favour, we can’t help but want to settle the score. In this episode, Mel and Dan consider how this social and emotional drive can direct people to pay for things they didn’t even know they wanted.

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Dan: 00:15 Hey, and welcome to Bad Decisions, the podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel: 00:18 Why we think, what we think.

Dan: 00:20 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain. That right there is my co-host, Dr. Mel Weinberg, she's a performance psychologist.

Mel: 00:26 And that over there was my co-host, Dan Monheit co founder of Hardhat.

Dan: 00:30 I'm also the guy that tells Kops to play the music, play the music!

Dan: 00:41 All right. Yo Mel, hey, can I ask you a favour?

Mel: 00:44 Okay.

Dan: 00:45 Let's get right into this. Can you please introduce the heuristic that we are going to be talking about this episode?

Mel: 00:50 I could, what are you going to do for me?

Dan: 00:53 If you introduce the heuristic, I will make this podcast infinitely more fun and entertaining for our listeners.

Mel: 01:04 Sounds like a deal. All right.

Dan: 01:05 What do you got?

Mel: 01:07 The heuristic that we're going to talk about today is the reciprocity bias. The reciprocity bias is the tendency to reciprocate actions that others have done towards us. It's simple in its definition like that, you do something good for me, I'll do something good for you. It's simple as that.

Dan: 01:27 I like it. That's all we've got time for today. No, it's not all we've got time for. We have heaps of time. We have infinity time.

Mel: 01:33 Well, we can talk about the reciprocity bias in so much more detail.

Dan: 01:37 Yeah. It's a big and important one, because really it is the underpinning of most of what we would consider modern society, right?

Mel: 01:45 Yeah. I mean, there are two key reasons, I guess, why this reciprocity bias exists, right? Let me talk you through them. The first is that we have an inherent desire as human beings to cooperate with one another.

Dan: 01:56 Some more than others.

Mel: 01:58 Some more than others, but generally as part of a healthy functioning society, we need to have the system whereby I'll do good things for you and at some point you'll return those favours to me. So putting good things out into the world and expecting that at some point they will be returned, yeah?

Dan: 02:13 This is like the karma bias.

Mel: 02:16 Well, yeah, the whole idea of treat others as you would like to be treated. If I treat you nicely, the whole premise is that at some point in time, you're going to treat me nicely in return. That's part one. Part two, the other reason why we have this reciprocity bias has to do with this inherent desire for balance in our world. So I think about this as this idea of emotional harmony that we seek. Do you like that term? I've just created it.

Dan: 02:40 Emotional harmony, yeah I mean, sounds like a slightly awkward dating app, but we can go with that. What is we call it e-harmony for short?

Mel: 02:48 Oh God, maybe I'll think of something else. However, the idea is that when you do something nice for somebody else, if I do a favour for you, essentially I've put you into this state where you now owe me, right?

Dan: 03:04 Yeah. After watching Prison Break, I see how this works. Now I owe you, yeah.

Mel: 03:09 So I've induced essentially an unpleasant emotional state in you, whereby now you are indebted to me. And this is actually a really good place for me to be in, because I essentially have capitol with you, that if sometime in the future, I'm in trouble or I'm in a situation where I need help, I know that I can call on you because you owe me one. So here's the thing, you're in a situation, an emotionally unpleasant situation, because you feel indebted to me and so you're motivated to try and resolve that emotion, to try and create harmony or emotional balance. And so the only way to do that is for you to even the score and to repay me so that you no longer feel in debt.

Dan: 03:47 Yeah. So the perverse irony here is that you doing a favour for me is actually a real dog act because now I feel bad because you've done something and I've done nothing. Thanks Mel.

Mel: 03:56 This is where we realise the undoing of the human race, essentially is that there is no such thing as altruism. Nothing is for free. If I do nice for you, ultimately it's only because at some point I want to get something in return.

Dan: 04:09 Yeah. And this explains that uneasiness we've all had, whether it's like being out with a friend or going out, when you're grown up and then you go out for family dinners again, and you argue about who's going to pay. And on one hand, the person saying, "Nah, nah, I'll pay, I'll pay, it's fine." Is masquerading like they're doing a really nice thing. But by doing that, everybody else really feels like a loser or awkwardly indebted to this person. It's like, "No, seriously, can you actually just let me pay because I don't want to owe you, friend."

Mel: 04:34 Sometimes Dan, I don't know if you've ever done this and I'm not saying that I have, but what you might do to really take advantage of this situation, is that you might, if you happen to be going out for dinner with a group of people on your payday, when your bank account is all of a sudden is full, you might go, "You know what, I'll take this one." Because next week when you go out for dinner and it's not your pay week, it would actually be beneficial for somebody else to pick up the bill then. But I don't want to talk about manipulating people into-

Dan: 05:01 No, we're not doing that. But it does explain why we feel uncomfortable, if you go got with the same person often and they're constantly buying you coffee, at some point it just feels yuck and icky, which is irrational because you should just feel grateful and wonderful about it.

Mel: 05:15 Isn't it interesting that this whole thing relies on us trusting the other person's intentions. If I don't trust that you're doing something just out of the generosity of your heart, then I'm really going to feel indebted, hey?

Dan: 05:27 Absolutely. And I mean, we did talk about this as being a pretty core attribute of humans. And if I think about one of the biggest differentiators between humans and all other species, is our ability to cooperate with one another at scale and therefore organise ourselves into groups and civilisations and religions and companies and that is all just largely unspoken cooperation between people. And I imagine that the reciprocity bias has a lot to do with that because if you don't trust that other people are going to return your behaviour back to you, the whole thing's just going to fall in a heap.

Mel: 05:59 Well that's right. Nobody wants to be in a society or in a social relationship where they feel like they're being taken advantage of. So that's the downside, that if you continually trust and you don't get anything in return, then you're basically putting yourself out there at a disadvantage. So societies fall apart, relationships don't work, there is no trust in the world.

Dan: 06:16 Yeah. So this feels absolutely right, but I know that feeling is usually not good enough for you. There must be somebody who has done some research to prove that actually we all owe each other. So let's go dig into the archives. What have you got for us?

Mel: 06:28 All right. Hit the research music.

Dan: 06:32 No, I'm the guy that tells Kopel when to do the music. Okay, I thought we established this in the intro.

Mel: 06:36 Could you please?

Dan: 06:37 Kops, could we get some research music please?

Mel: 06:45 So in a study, a 2006 study by Strohmetz and friends/colleagues, they conducted an experiment in a restaurant in New York. And basically what happened was they manipulated participants. Well, I wouldn't say that, I would say that they introduced a manipulation into the study and it happened towards the end of the dining experience at the point where customers are presented with the bill. At random, some of the diners were given a piece of chocolate with the bill, you know that after dinner mint that sits with it.

Dan: 07:18 I'm so full, I'm not that full, I could eat that.

Mel: 07:21 I'll just have that.

Dan: 07:22 Small.

Mel: 07:24 And others weren't, so others were just given the check. And the results of the study suggested that those who were given the piece of chocolate, as long as there was one chocolate for each diner, so you don't just want to have one chocolate for the table, because that's going to make everyone fight over it. But if there were enough chocolates for everybody, then those who were given the piece of chocolate, tipped significantly more than those who were given nothing. And so the implication of that is that they felt the need to return the favour after having been the recipient of the kindness/the chocolate.

Dan: 07:53 Yeah. So I'm not going to lie because I heard about this and I thought this was quite interesting as well, I dived in as well. And when you say significantly more, what I saw that it was like almost 20% more that was tipped just for getting a little chocolate on the dish. Which says to me, if you're a restaurant not giving out chocolates, you got to get your shit together because you're leaving money on the table.

Mel: 08:12 Literally. So it's not just restaurants, we see this all over the place.

Dan: 08:15 All over the place. Yeah, it seems like many, many businesses have worked out that if you can just do a little favour for somebody, even though there is no legal or logical reason why they would have to return that favour, there absolutely feels like there is a moral one. So some of the places where we see this, if you've ever been to a cellar door experience. You go to a cellar door experience at a winery, there's absolutely no obligation for you to buy anything. But I pity the fool that spends half an hour, 45 minutes talking to the owners of the vineyard, learning about the different types of wine, tasting all of the different types of wine and then walking out with nothing. You can't do that, you're terrible person, you are not going to be able to sleep at night if you do that.

Dan: 08:59 We see this in new form retail stores, if you look at the best retailers in the world. So guys like Lulu Lemon who have free yoga classes happening in a lot of their retail spaces, or we see Apple stores putting on events with creators, talking about their work and showcasing films inside Apple stores. All of these create a sense of indebtedness for the person in there absorbing all of that value. And maybe the last example of this I'll give, is the last time I went to buy some running shoes, it was time to actually buy functional shoes, not just shoes that looked cool because I was actually going to use them to run quite a distance. So I thought I better go to one of those proper running shops where they have the real podiatrists and physios and stuff, actually fitting you for the shoes.

Dan: 09:42 And instead of going in and picking a nice pair off the wall, you go in, you have a little chat, they put you on the treadmill, they look at how you walk, they record it, they talk you through it, they give you a proper consultation, try a few different things. And eventually you whittled down hundreds of different shoes they've got into the ones that fit your gait, your heel strike, the way that you like to run. And you know at this point that I could buy these shoes right now, or I could walk out and find them on the internet and probably save $10. And rationally, if we were rational actors, that would be the right thing to do because the time I've just spent is a sunk cost, can't get it back and $10 is $10. But the moral obligation, the indebtedness, the reciprocity that we feel to reward the person who's just spent this time with you, is what keeps the world spinning around.

Mel: 10:25 Wow. Are you saying that people aren't always rational in their decisions?

Dan: 10:29 Occasionally it has occurred to me that people are not always rational in their decisions. In fact, some of the decisions that they make, are even bad.

Mel: 10:37 We should call the podcast after that.

Dan: 10:39 I said, I'd be doing the jokes. I'm doing the jokes.

Mel: 10:42 How about I'll stick with the research because I have another research study for you that speaks to a practical example.

Dan: 10:48 You do the research, I'll do the jokes and the bit where I tell Kops when to play the music.

Mel: 10:52 Right. Stay in your lane Mel, is the message I'm getting. Okay. So we've talked about some examples of where it would be what you call direct reciprocity, where there's a mutually beneficial relationship established where I can do something for you and you can do something for me and we can all work out even. But there are some instances where direct reciprocity isn't actually possible or perhaps appropriate and so there are some alternatives. So here's what we're going to do is we're going to hack the reciprocity bias and just level up a minute. Okay. And so I'm going to use the example in a research study that was done in hotel rooms. So you know when you go into a hotel room and you walk into the bathroom and there's that sign that says, "Help us save the environment, you can show your respect for nature, help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay." And so they're trying to push you to reuse your towels, but all they've really got to go on is the idea that it's really good for the environment, please do the right thing.

Dan: 11:43 Yeah. And this has always struck a strange chord with me because it's like, "Okay, you guys have got five swimming pools and lush gardens to maintain and you want me to reuse my towels, even though I'm paying you all this money to stay here?" So I see why this is a situation where this direct reciprocity doesn't really work because we've got established guard rails for this relationship. I'm paying you money, you're giving me a service, you can't come back now and try and discourage me from using the service that I'm paying you all this money for.

Mel: 12:07 Right. So some researchers wanted to see if they could apply the reciprocity bias, but in a slightly different way, to help increase the rate at which people would reuse the towels. And so they had three conditions, the first was this standard one, "Please help save the environment, show your respect, reuse your towels during your stay." Okay. The next situation they said, "Partner with us to help save the environment, in exchange for your participation in this program, we at the hotel will donate a percentage of the savings to a nonprofit environmental protection organisation." So they're saying if you reuse your towels, we'll do something good in return, by donating to this third party. And then in the third condition, they had a bit of a different message. The third group were told, "We're doing our part for the environment. We've actually already made a donation on behalf of the hotel and all of its guests. Thanks for playing along with us and reusing your towels during your stay."

Dan: 13:04 The old thank me for the thing I haven't done yet trick.

Mel: 13:08 And would you believe Dan, that when it came to actually looking at the rate at which guests were reusing their towels, they found that that third condition, that what they call reciprocity by proxy condition, they were 50% more likely to reuse their towels than people in the other groups.

Dan: 13:25 Wow. I mean, I love this. This is like when you walk into shops that have a sign that says, "Thank you for not touching the displays." Versus, "Please don't touch the displays." It's such a nicer way of putting it across and no doubt more effective. Because when it says, "Please don't touch the displays." That just tells me to touch the displays, it must be good otherwise, why would they put the sign there?

Mel: 13:45 Something worth touching.

Dan: 13:46 Seriously, I'm touching everything.

Mel: 13:48 And before you know it, you've knocked everything over.

Dan: 13:50 I know, I know.

Mel: 13:51 And then talk about feeling indebted, hey?

Dan: 13:53 They should have just thanked me first for not doing it.

Mel: 13:55 I think it's important that we also highlight that this doesn't always just work for positive actions, the same works in reverse. So we got to be careful with this because there's one thing to return a favour, but the flip side of this is the idea of an eye for an eye, that if you do something to hurt or if you do something negative, the instinct and the tendency is going to be to hurt somebody back to even the score.

Dan: 14:17 This is true. And I think that's a really good segue into getting onto what brands should do about this because I mean, the baseline stuff is pretty obvious. If you're a brand, do something good for people and they'll do something good back. And we see a lot of this, especially in times of crisis, brands going out of their way to do things for people who have suffered at the hands of natural disasters or in more recent times, seeing companies do free food or drinks or dry cleaning for NHS workers, which is fantastic. It seems obvious to just say, "Yeah, do nice things for customers and they will feel indebted to you." But I think there is more to it than that and if we analyse what it takes to make this thing really work, it seems like there are three conditions.

Dan: 14:58 So the first is the brand has to be the first to give. So you can't say, "Oh, if you do this, then we'll do that. If you reuse your towels, we'll make a donation." Because then it's not reciprocity, then it's just a commercial, rational arrangement that the person can decide if they want to participate in or not.

Mel: 15:12 But this is key, we talk about this in social relationships as well, that in order to develop trust, somebody has to be the first to put themselves out there. Somebody has to make themselves vulnerable and as the brand, better that be you.

Dan: 15:23 I guess, it's up to the brand to put it out there first and then tied in with that, is to make it unexpected, and with no stated expectation of return. So it's a thing that you're doing first, it is nice and unanticipated and you are making it very clear that for coming to this yoga class or for me fitting you with these shoes or for me putting on this presentation for your team, I really am not expecting anything back. I just do this purely out of the love of it. So first, it's got to be unexpected, I think the third thing that's really important is that it's got to be personalised. Where if it just feels like this is just a deal for everybody, the level of indebtedness and reciprocity that you feel is going to be far smaller than if it feels like this brand or this person has actually gone out of their way to do something specifically for me.

Mel: 16:10 Yeah. I think these are all really good examples and really key takeaways for how to ensure that you use the reciprocity bias effectively in positive situations. But there's also the idea that sometimes you're trying to balance out a negative emotion.

Dan: 16:23 Exactly. And so I think in the same way when the customer has gone first, and the customer has gone first because they've just been massively inconvenienced by your brand/product/service that has messed up, so they've ordered food to be delivered and the food hasn't turned up. The customer's gone first and this is why it is so infuriating when this happens to you and you call the service provider and they do not feel like they are responding in kind, where all they'll do is refund you for the food that didn't turn up. But what about all the time? What about the ruined occasion? What about all the stress? What about that half hour I've just spent on the phone with you, right? So I think it's really important for a brand perspective to return to a level that is perceived as at least the same indebtedness as the person has gone to for you, if not above and beyond.

Mel: 17:08 And this can be a really hard one to gauge because what you're trying to do is reestablish the emotional harmony, right? I'm going to keep saying that term until it sticks.

Dan: 17:16 E-harmony, for short.

Mel: 17:18 You're looking to reestablish that harmony and so you've got to, if the customer has already taken a hit, actually see where their emotions are at and you've got to gauge what it is that they need to overcome that emotion and to restore balance.

Dan: 17:32 For sure. So try not to get into that situation in the first place, but if you find yourself there, that's how to overcome it. So I reckon that's pretty much a wrap for the reciprocity bias. You got anything else you wanted to kick in Mel?

Mel: 17:42 I think, from the human side of things, that we talk about how you can fall victim to the reciprocity bias in a way and what to do in those situations. But I think it's important to realize that reciprocity is a thing that has continued to spur societies forward. So it's not the thing that we necessarily need to look to overcome so much, but if we recognize if we're feeling that sense of indebtedness, then we're in more of a position to go, "Do I actually want this product? Do I actually want to return the favour?" Or can I actually separate from and go, "You know what, I recognise that I have this instinct to want to buy that wine after having so much of it, but you know what, I don't need to."

Dan: 18:24 Don't be mean. Don't be mean, they've just spent an hour educating you. Anyway, you go your way, I'll go mine. I think the other interesting perverse take away from here, is if you really want to upset somebody, just do something nice for them and walk away.

Mel: 18:36 Create that emotional disharmony and then leave them to figure it out.

Dan: 18:39 You will never buy me a coffee.

Mel: 18:42 Okay.

Dan: 18:43 All right, reciprocity bias, let's put a ribbon on it. What is it?

Mel: 18:47 Reciprocity is the tendency for us to return somebody's positive or negative act with a similar act.

Dan: 18:54 Exactly. And if you're a brand, the ingredients for this, it's not just about being nice, it's about going first, making it unexpected and clear that you don't want anything in return and as personalised as you can. That's going to work wonders.

Mel: 19:08 You know what, Dan, actually remember the start of the episode when you asked me to do that favour for you?

Dan: 19:12 Yeah.

Mel: 19:13 I feel like it's really paid back. I feel like you've really paid back your part of the deal.

Dan: 19:16 Call it even then?

Mel: 19:18 We'll call it even.

Dan: 19:19 All right, see you next time.

Mel: 19:20 Consider the act reciprocated.

Dan: 19:21 Good. All right. Bye.

#28 Ostrich Effect: Why you really should just go to the doctor

If information can help us make good decisions, why would we sometimes actively avoid it? In this episode, Mel and Dan discuss the ostrich effect, and how brands can overcome the tendency we have to bury our heads in the sand.

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Mel: 00:20 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan: 00:22 The show that helps us to 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: 00:28 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:30 And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat. So Mel.

Mel: 00:45 Yes, Dan.

Dan: 00:46 Look, I know we usually start these shows with me having some ridiculous story, sounding like an idiot. And then you come in like the smart therapist that you are.

Mel: 00:54 I wasn't going to say that you sound like an idiot..

Dan: 00:56 And explain to me how I've been doing it all wrong, but I'm not doing that today. Because today, spoiler alert, we are talking about the ostrich effect. And in doing some work, some prep, some research for this show today-

Mel: 01:09 Which we do plenty of.

Dan: 01:10 Always. I have to let you know I'm furious. I'm outraged. Not since I learned that pigs don't sweat, despite the saying 'sweating like a pig' have I been so upset for one member of the animal kingdom.

Mel: 01:25 Dan, I hear you.

Dan: 01:28 Because ... I'm not finished. Let me tell you why I'm so mad. The ostrich effect. Obviously, people are going to go, "Oh, it's the ostrich effect. It's to do with people putting their heads in the sand." Right? Because that's what ostriches do. Right?

Mel: 01:41 That's what I understand.

Dan: 01:44 Wrong, they don't! Sorry. Wrong, Mel.

Mel: 01:47 Wow. Okay. This has taken a turn.

Dan: 01:49 Well, it's not like there's hundreds of things that the ostrich is known for. Tell me some of the things about the ostrich.

Mel: 01:55 I don't know much about the ostrich.

Dan: 01:57 You don't know much about the ostrich?

Mel: 01:57 No, I believe they bury their head in the sand.

Dan: 01:59 Yeah. The one thing that people know is completely fictitious.

Mel: 02:01 So they don't bury their heads in the sand?

Dan: 02:02 They don't bury their heads in the sand; they can stand up to nine feet tall; they can run 60 kilometers an hour. They can kill a lion with a single kick. And the only thing people know is that they put their head in the sand, which is wrong.

Mel: 02:13 I can hear your frustration. Your frustration seems valid.

Dan: 02:16 Yep. Shall we move on?

Mel: 02:19 Are we done? I don't mean to dismiss your emotions in any way.

Dan: 02:22 Yeah. I don't feel dismissed. I feel heard. Let's get on.

Mel: 02:24 Good good. I'm glad. I just hope that everybody listening also acknowledges that you have this anger.

Dan: 02:31 No, don't acknowledge that I have the anger. Acknowledge that this is an unfairness. It's a tragedy to members of the ostrich family. Let's get on with it. Let's talk about the ostrich effect.

Mel: 02:39 Look, I don't mean to blame anybody, but the term ostrich effect-

Dan: 02:44 Oh, here we go.

Mel: 02:45 Was actually given to us by Galai and Sade in 2005.

Dan: 02:50 Oh wait, let me just write them down. You guys are on my list.

Mel: 02:54 They were a couple of Israeli researchers who coined the term the ostrich effect. And they defined it as the tendency for people to avoid apparently risky financial situations by just pretending they do not exist. For lack of a better phrase, we bury our heads in the sand.

Dan: 03:12 Like birds do or don't do. Regardless, I understand the appeal of that.

Mel: 03:16 Now that we all understand a little bit more about ostriches Dan, and thank you for providing us with that really important information-

Dan: 03:20 You're welcome. Just doing what I can.

Mel: 03:20 May I provide some real science?

Dan: 03:26 Oh, don't trigger me, Mel.

Mel: 03:28 Let me give you some research.

Dan: 03:37 All right.

Mel: 03:37 So in 2016, Carlsson, Lowenstein and Sepi did some investigation into this idea of the ostrich effect and what they did was they compared behaviour of investors in both Sweden and the US. So what they're looking at really was how often do investors monitor their portfolios when the market's rising or falling, right?

Mel: 03:57 They wondered whether their behaviour will change in response to what the market's doing. And what they actually found was that when the stock market was down, investors would actively avoid looking at their portfolio.

Dan: 04:07 Yeah, of course.

Mel: 04:08 Of course?

Dan: 04:09 Yeah. It's not going down if I don't know it.

Mel: 04:12 That's exactly what the ostrich effect is all about. And this tendency to avoid is something that we see a lot. I mean, I see a lot, I guess, from a psychology perspective, it's common for us to avoid it. But I guess it's a problem when we think about what it does to our decisions, because traditionally, decision-making would tell us that in order to make the best decision for us, it would surely be helpful to us to have all of the information at hand, right?

Mel: 04:39 If we know everything, then we can the best place to make a decision about what's good for us and what's not. The problem is when it comes to the ostrich effect, is that in this instance we're actively avoiding information and that information could be helpful to us. So it doesn't quite make sense. Does it?

Dan: 04:53 I mean, we might make better informed decisions, but we might also be sad because there's a letter here from my bank, which I'm pretty sure is a credit card statement, but if I don't open it, I don't know about that. I've got other things to do.

Mel: 05:04 Yeah. And I mean, look, from a psychological perspective, there's a few things that come into this, that underpin why we might avoid information. For a start, it's probably worth considering the idea of selective attention, right? We can't just attend to every single piece of information that is available to us. It's too much, it's overwhelming to us. We don't have the capacity to deal with all of these things. And so we have to, to some extent, filter out information.

Dan: 05:30 Yeah, I hear you. But also, that feels like a poor excuse.

Mel: 05:33 Well, that's the thing.

Dan: 05:34 I don't really have time to be an adult.

Mel: 05:36 I've got too much to do. I can't attend to everything. Look, the concern with regard to the ostrich effect, as we've sort of said, is that we'd ordinarily filter out information that isn't relevant or helpful. The thing is that in this instance, we're actively avoiding information and filtering out information that could help us. We're just choosing to filter it out.

Mel: 05:56 When it comes to avoidance and this idea of avoiding particular information, there are a number of reasons why we might do it. So from a psychological perspective, avoiding things can have some benefits to us.

Dan: 06:08 Sure.

Mel: 06:08 Right? Sometimes, if we think about something that we know is going to make us uncomfortable, then we don't want to do it. So it would be much more helpful to us in some instances to just avoid thinking or feeling about things that are going to make us feel like crap.

Dan: 06:23 Yeah. So much happier. In fact, you know who probably has been a big contributor to this, knowingly or unknowingly?

Mel: 06:29 Who's that?

Dan: 06:30 Your mate, what's his name? Positive psychology guy, Martin Seligman. Is that his name?

Mel: 06:34 What about him? Not my mate, by the way.

Dan: 06:37 Your mate. The world of positive psychology is really just focused on the good stuff. Just ignore the bad things! Don't worry about addressing weaknesses, just focus on the strengths. Weaknesses: I have obesity, my credit card's due and I have a toothache that won't go away. I'm just not going to focus on those things because they are going to let me down. And instead, I'm just going to focus on everything that's good in life.

Mel: 07:01 So just in defence of all the positive psychologists out there who do some wonderful work that you probably misrepresented them a little bit.

Dan: 07:07 They do, they probably do. The thing is, if they're doing bad work, they don't want to know about it anyway.

Mel: 07:11 I'm going to leave that right there.

Dan: 07:12 Okay, yeah. Love your work everybody!

Mel: 07:15 But we're all very familiar with the idea of avoidance coping in, for example, the health industry. So I'm sure all of us have been in this situation where you might notice that there's something not quite right with you and you're feeling a little bit off, but you're like, "You know what? I don't need to go to the doctor for this."

Dan: 07:32 As a middle aged white male, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Mel: 07:35 You've never really thought, "Oh look, that's a strange thing on my skin."

Dan: 07:40 No.

Mel: 07:40 But no, I don't really want to know what it is. If I go to the doctor, they're going to tell me it's something bad. They're going to make me have some medicine. They're going to make me have some procedures that I don't want. So it's just easier to not know.

Dan: 07:50 Yeah. I think the last time I actually went to a doctor, the original series of Beverly Hills 90210 was still new.

Mel: 07:56 Great reference. And I appreciate that. And would like to talk about that further. However-

Dan: 08:01 But not for today's episode.

Mel: 08:08 There are all sorts of reasons why, as we've just discussed, why we might actually avoid certain bits of information or just not want to deal with them. If we don't deal with them, then they're not there, and then we don't get annoyed about them. We're not making any judgment call on avoidance per se, right? It's not the case necessarily that avoidance is always bad.

Dan: 08:24 Well, I would like to make a small judgment call, which is to say that I think part of adulting, becoming an adult is learning to stop avoiding stuff. There's nobody coming to pick up for you. And part of being an adult and a contributing member of society is meeting your obligations, like paying your taxes and paying your credit card bills. And generally, looking after yourself. So small judgment, if you are avoiding all of those things.

Mel: 08:47 Yeah. But all adulting responsibilities and commitments aside, I guess what I'm saying with regard to the idea of avoiding things is that it's not necessarily that avoiding is good or bad in itself. It's more that it's the outcome of it. So there are many instances in which avoiding something might actually be good for you, right?

Mel: 09:04 Like we said before, confronting something might actually introduce more distress than you're able to deal with. So in that sense, avoiding things or avoiding something in particular could be beneficial for you. We've talked about this with regard to the Choice Paradox, right? The idea that too much information can sometimes be overwhelming and can hold you back from actually making a decision.

Mel: 09:23 So in those cases, avoiding something or avoiding many things that could disrupt your decision making process is probably going to lead to you making a better decision and being more satisfied with it. But in a number of cases, intentionally avoiding information can lead us to a bad decision. And that's where we need to be careful.

Dan: 09:40 Yeah. And I think if we were to swing a marketing lens onto this now where I really think about this being a problem is if you are selling any sort of remedial product. So if you are selling a financial counselling service or weight loss or really any sort of health related products or service, people are ignoring their way out of becoming your customer. It's like if they knew how much trouble they were in or going to get in, they would gladly and willingly be your customer, but they've got their head in the sand like some unnamed bird, which may or may not do that.

Dan: 10:14 And they are not only blocking themselves from knowing about this, but they are blocking you from getting a customer. So working out how to circumvent this effect, the O effect, is ... I'm going to call it the ostrich effect, which is no endorsement of the term. But for the coherence of this episode, working on how to circumvent the ostrich effect is really important for a number of industries out there.

Mel: 10:35 I think of this with regard to the idea of ... Have you ever been in a car accident? Even just a little one.

Dan: 10:41 A little one.

Mel: 10:42 I have, I've been in a car accident. It wasn't my fault. Never is.

Dan: 10:45 Never is. That tree just jumped out of nowhere.

Mel: 10:48 I wasn't even driving, all right? But the intersection where it occurred, if I could, I'd rather just avoid it. That intersection triggers unpleasant memories for me, unpleasant thoughts. I don't like it.

Dan: 11:00 I think the official term is heebie-jeebies. It gives you the heebie-jeebies.

Mel: 11:04 I mean, I guess it's no surprise that I would use the term avoidance. However, in that instance, it's much more preferable for me to just avoid that intersection. And I'm sure many people can relate to this. The idea is this usually isn't an issue. The avoidance in that sense is helpful. It actually prevents you from actually feeling any of that distress.

Mel: 11:22 It usually only becomes a problem if, for example, you were to get a new job and the quickest and most efficient way to get to work is to drive directly through that intersection. Right? At that point, you've got a choice to make. Do you circumvent that discomfort by taking the scenic route to work, which might add an extra 30 to 40 minutes of travel time but you're going to avoid the distress of that intersection. Or do you just confront, make your way through that intersection, deal with the discomfort.

Dan: 11:53 This actually sounds like a good setup for Scooby Doo episode where there's a haunted intersection that everybody wants to avoid. And at some point, they realise it's just the owner of a shop that used to be there and missed having people around or something. Anyway, less intersections, more brands. So this is exactly what brands are dealing with that have to confront the ostrich effect.

Dan: 12:13 So the idea of people are avoiding becoming your customer because it's uncomfortable to think about the fact that they are more overweight than they'd like to be or in more financial hardship than they'd like to be. So I've actually got five things that I think brands can do to overcome this effect if they're confronted with it.

Dan: 12:29 So the first one is to make the discomfort from avoiding the issue greater than the discomfort of confronting it. So to do that, we need to dramatise, we need to extrapolate, we need to use emotion. We need to do everything we can to dial up how bad things are going to be if you don't actually deal with the thing you need to deal with, which is going to lend you to my product, business or service.

Mel: 12:47 Okay.

Dan: 12:48 So that's one. The second thing I think we could do is if we acknowledge that people are avoiding this because it's a negative and an icky thing to deal with, what we could do is reframe that negative into a positive, but the positive can't just be the bad thing's going to go away. The positive has to be awesome in its own right.

Dan: 13:06 So let's say if you're a financial counselling service, people just don't want to deal with that because I just don't want to think about how much debt I'm in and all those sorts of things. But if you actually targeted people by talking about how to start building a property portfolio or how to achieve true financial independence, all of a sudden, this is now an enjoyable, positive thing that I'm going to go explore and not an icky negative thing. But I'm pretty sure when you turn up to the first seminar about how to build a property portfolio, they're going to tell you to pay down your credit card bill. But you're there for a positive reason, not to alleviate a negative.

Mel: 13:37 So does that hark back to what you talked about before that if somebody is feeling bad, don't just say, "Oh, just be happy." That's not going to do the trick.

Dan: 13:43 No.

Mel: 13:44 Right, got you.

Dan: 13:44 Just be really, really happy.

Mel: 13:46 That'll fix you.

Dan: 13:48 All right. The third thing that I've thought about here is that people are uncomfortable dealing with something. And one of the ways that we can make people less uncomfortable with something is to make it more familiar.

Mel: 13:59 Definitely.

Dan: 13:59 And if you roll back to, I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about the Mere Exposure Effect.

Mel: 14:04 I remember.

Dan: 14:05 Do you remember the definition?

Mel: 14:05 Of course not.

Dan: 14:09 You call yourself a doctor! With a laptop in front of you as well. So, the Mere Exposure Effect was the idea that things become more likeable just because we become more familiar with them because we're exposed to them more and more times. So I think about all of the options there, especially through digital and social channels, with subtle targeting and remarketing, to get people slowly more and more familiar and more and more comfortable with whatever it is we're trying to get them to confront, so that it's not such a huge leap to go and tackle it.

Dan: 14:38 And probably bundled in with that is giving people a really easy on ramp. So it's like just a 30 second survey or a two minute call or a 15 minute appointment, just to make it easier for people to get started back on the right path.

Mel: 14:50 Increased familiarity, reduced discomfort. Got you.

Dan: 14:52 Exactly. That's pretty much what I said in a less articulate format. So number four is the idea of trying to automate as much as you can for people. So you're basically making the trade off for them to think about it once and have it solved lots and lots of times.

Dan: 15:04 So obviously, signing up to personal trainers is one place where we see this, where you're sort of motivated to correct your lifestyle or your health wants. And a trainer is going to turn up to your door at 6:00 AM every Wednesday until you say stop. But another place where we've seen this really come to life is in the subscription meal kits. So whether that's with the Light and Easy's or the Marley Spoon's of the world, what these guys do is they take the notion that at some point in time, you have decided to try and eat better and they have automated the service of eating better by sending calorie-controlled, portion-controlled, ready to go meals basically until you tell them to stop.

Mel: 15:41 Nice. I like it.

Dan: 15:43 Yeah. And I think number five is the idea that our imagination is a pretty amazing thing. And I think often when we're avoiding something, we think that the cost of dealing with it is far greater than it is. And the impact of not dealing with it is far less than it is. So it's like, "Oh, I've got something weird, it feels weird somewhere on me. It's going to be such a pain in the ass to go to the doctor. I'm going to have to take half a day off work. I'm always going to get stuck waiting in the waiting room. I'm probably going to get sick while I'm there. And it's probably nothing anyway."

Dan: 16:13 And if we can start shredding through that with some real data that it's actually only going to take you a 15 minute online consultation and you could die! And if you could die, then you should probably deal with it now, not later. The notion of giving real data to remove people's imaginations about how good and bad things could be, I think would also massively help.

Mel: 16:35 That's good.

Dan: 16:36 Quite comprehensive.

Mel: 16:36 That's five strong tips. There's a lot there. That last one. It sounds to me like you're talking about the idea of when there's an emotion attached to something that if you can actually present them with the rational objective data and that should take people out of it, yeah?

Dan: 16:48 Should.

Mel: 16:49 That's sort of what I think about when I think about how people just in general can avoid ostriching, if we can use the term that way.

Dan: 16:57 Yeah, of course we can.

Mel: 16:57 How to avoid ostriching.

Dan: 16:59 It's completely factitious anyway. You can conjugate it however you want.

Mel: 17:02 So the idea that I think about is that if you're avoiding something, it's because you've got an emotional attachment to it. So from a psychological perspective, what I want to do is to distance you from that. So the way that I would do that or one way to create some psychological distance would be to say, "If this weren't happening to you at all, if this was happening to a friend-"

Dan: 17:21 The old asking for a friend technique.

Mel: 17:22 What would you tell your friend? What advice would you give to a friend who was in this situation? So it's the same sort of idea. I'm trying to take away that emotional attachment to it which can help people to see things in a different light.

Dan: 17:33 I would tell my friend to pay the damn credit card bill before they ruin their financial track record.

Mel: 17:38 Probably some good advice.

Dan: 17:39 Yeah. I don't need to take that advice because I haven't opened a credit card statement in years. But I'm fine.

Mel: 17:45 The other thing that I would suggest to people who may be ostriching would be, if you can identify, and it's not hard to identify for yourself when you're avoiding a task, right? I think we all know it. The whole point is we're doing it consciously. We're consciously avoiding it. Sometimes we can ask ourselves, what are we actually avoiding? In the case of going to the doctor that you mentioned, what am I actually afraid of? What am I avoiding? What am I afraid of? Oh, I'm afraid that this is actually really something bad.

Mel: 18:09 In that case, surely the best course of action is actually to do something about it. Early intervention would have to be better than letting it just sort of sit there and grow.

Dan: 18:17 Damn you and your rational arguments. That makes so much sense.

Mel: 18:23 So I think that's pretty much a wrap on the ostrich effect.

Dan: 18:25 Yeah. All right. I think so too. Do you want to give us the definition one more time? The ostrich effect is-

Mel: 18:31 Is the tendency to actively avoid information just by pretending it doesn't exist.

Dan: 18:35 Yeah. Which may or may not be named after a bird that does or doesn't do that.

Mel: 18:39 At your discretion.

Dan: 18:40 Yeah, and we talked about how avoiding information in its own right is maybe not bad, but it can lead to bad outcomes.

Mel: 18:48 Definitely if it leads to bad decisions and that's why you're here, really.

Dan: 18:51 And if pain persists-

Mel: 18:53 Please see your doctor.

Dan: 18:54 All right. And then we talked about very briefly, rapid fire succession, five things that brands can do about this. So that was about dialing up the discomfort from avoiding the issue; reframing the negative into a positive; making people more comfortable by repeated subtle exposure to what you want them to do; automate as much as possible and replace imagination with real data. And then you talked about what peeps can do.

Mel: 19:17 Just what you can do. What would you do if it was a friend in that situation? And really just identifying and acknowledging I'm avoiding something: what am I avoiding? What am I so afraid of?

Dan: 19:26 Yeah. And just get on with it.

Mel: 19:28 Confront it.

Dan: 19:28 You're probably going to be fine. Confront your demons. All right. Psychological advice provided to you by me.

Mel: 19:36 Oh dear.

Dan: 19:38 And often corrected by you. Don't do that. I'm not a therapist.

Mel: 19:42 He's really not.

Dan: 19:42 No, but I am on the internet. You can find me @danmonheit all over the place.

Mel: 19:47 And I'm @drmelw.

Dan: 19:49 All right, we'll see you all next time. Pull your head out of the sand, people.

#27 Zero Risk Bias: Why there’s so much value in nothing

Turns out that one of the most ‘sure things’ in life, is people’s likelihood of picking a ‘sure thing’. In this episode, Mel and Dan look at how we make choices around risk, and why our desire to avoid uncertainty can sometimes end up costing much more.

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Mel: 00:20 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions ...

Dan: 00:22 The podcast that helps us understand why we choose what we choose ...

Mel: 00:25 Why we think what we think ...

Dan: 00:27 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel: 00:28 I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:31 And I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat.

Mel: 00:44 All right, Dan. We're going to start today and I'm going to pose you a little hypothetical scenario. It's only hypothetical.

Dan: 00:50 These never go well. Anyway. What have you got, Mel?

Mel: 00:54 Dan, look, I'm sorry to tell you that you've got an illness.

Dan: 00:56 Oh, good! An illness, yes..

Mel: 01:00 Look, there's two main symptoms that you're likely to suffer. One is that you'll have excessive body odour and the other is that there's a chance you'll get severe acne.

Dan: 01:15 So you're basically turning me back into my 13 year old self.

Mel: 01:18 Pretty much. But look, the good news is that I am a doctor.

Dan: 01:23 Good.

Mel: 01:23 I can treat these.

Dan: 01:25 I'm still actually doing my background research to confirm that, but let's just roll with it for this hypothetical situation anyway.

Mel: 01:30 It's hypothetical. Dan, the thing is I can sort of only treat one of these conditions.

Dan: 01:35 Okay. The odour or the acne?

Mel: 01:38 Excessive body odour or severe acne.

Dan: 01:40 Yes.

Mel: 01:42 So look, there's a 30% chance that, with this illness you've got, there's a 30% chance that you're going to get excessive body odour. There's a 5% chance you'll get severe acne. Okay? Now, look, if I treat the body odour, the treatment's actually pretty good. It's going to reduce your chances of getting that from 30% all the way down to 5%. There's still going to be a 5% chance that you'll get severe acne. So you'll have a 5% chance of getting excessive body odour and a 5% chance of getting severe acne, okay?

Dan: 02:08 And an 85% chance of being divorced. Yeah, let's go. What's option two?

Mel: 02:14 The other treatment is that I can reduce the risk of you getting severe acne by 5%, which means we'll completely eliminate it. So there'll still be a 30% chance of getting excessive body odour, but you won't have to worry at all about getting severe acne. Which treatment would you like?

Dan: 02:30 Let me just make sure I get this because I don't know why I always end up in these situations with you.

Mel: 02:33 The first option is you do nothing. There's a 30% chance you get body odour and 5% chance you get severe acne.

Dan: 02:39 Right. 30% chance of body odour, 5% chance of acne. Treatment one brings both of those things down to 5%. I've got a 5% chance of severe body odour, 5% chance of severe acne.

Mel: 02:48 That's right.

Dan: 02:49 The next option says the acne is not going to be anything at all, but I still have a 30% chance of severe, excessive body odour.

Mel: 02:57 That's right. Which treatment would you like me to proceed with?

Dan: 03:01 Well, it's always such a pleasure recording with you, Mel. I mean it seems to me that the logical, rational thing to do here, it would be to go 5% and 5%. I can probably live with that. So I would take-

Mel: 03:13 Is that what you want to do?

Dan: 03:14 Yeah, let's take the first treatment option, which will bring my chances of excessive body odour down to 5% and my chances of severe acne down to 5%.

Mel: 03:23 Okay, so then that's the rational decision. It may therefore surprise you to know that in a sort-of-similar but not quite like this study by Schneider et al. in 2017 when they posted a similar hypothetical situation, 47.1% of participants in their study, so almost half of participants actually chose the other option.

Dan: 03:45 So they chose-

Mel: 03:47 They chose to completely eliminate one of the risks even though there'd still be a significantly higher chance of the other one.

Dan: 03:53 Right. So instead of bringing them both down to 5%, they said, "I'll take one of them down to zero and leave the other one at 30."

Mel: 03:59 Yep.

Dan: 04:00 Well that seems appalling, but also understandable.

Mel: 04:03 Yeah, it's surprising sometimes to learn that people don't always make rational decisions.

Dan: 04:07 Wow. Who would have thunk it, right? So I mean surely in your realm as both an actual doctor and a hypothetical doctor, you have some sort of a name for this thing that we're talking about?

Mel: 04:17 So let's put the hypothetical stuff aside and let's go to sort of real stuff now. There is in fact a name for this tendency and it's called the Zero-risk bias, and essentially what it means is that we have an irrationally strong preference for situations that have absolute certainty.

Dan: 04:35 Well, I have an absolute certainty that we're going to get some Zero-risk bias music happening right here, right now [music plays]

Dan: 04:42 I guess what we're talking about here is Zero-risk bias. As humans, I guess it makes sense, right? We really like a sure thing. And we all have so many things to worry about that I kind of empathise and understand why even if it doesn't make rational sense, people would say, "You know what? I'll take the same chance of that other thing happening. Just get one thing off my list. Just give me one less thing to stress about in my day."

Mel: 05:08 Yeah. That's what this is all about. This is all about our preferences for certainty and particularly so when there are multiple conditions of uncertainties, when we've got a lot of uncertain things going on, even more so, we're going to be drawn to the option that completely has no risk attached, or completely reduces risk.

Dan: 05:23 Just take one away from me.

Mel: 05:25 There's another part to this as well, where not only do people prefer to reduce their risk, but they're actually also willing to pay more to reduce the risk down to zero, to completely eliminate a risk, which is weird. Do you mind if I share some research with you?

Dan: 05:40 Oh, I love some research. Let's do it.

Mel: 05:48 So it will probably come as no surprise to you that the Zero-risk bias was first alluded to in Kahneman and Tversky's famous prospect theory article. They cited a research piece done by somebody else called Sechauser. And basically, in this research piece, you were asked to imagine that you were compelled to play a game of Russian roulette.

Dan: 06:09 Right...

Mel: 06:12 Just imagine if you can, so I give some hypothetical scenarios and Kahneman and Tversky give you other ones.

Dan: 06:17 If while playing Russian roulette, do you have excessive body odour or severe acne? Or do you just play it as you are?

Mel: 06:25 That adds all another level to it. No, just stick with me, or stick with Kahneman and Tversky, who asked you to imagine that you were compelled to play a game of Russian roulette.

Dan: 06:33 All right, and just to make sure I understand what we're talking about here, Russian roulette is a game where we've got a gun, we've got some number of bullets in the cylinder, the bit where you hold the bullets, and you kind of spin it around and then you close it and then you put it to your head and you pull the trigger?

Mel: 06:49 Yeah, so calling it a game is probably a little bit misleading but-

Dan: 06:53 It depends which position you're playing really. I guess.

Mel: 06:57 Here's what's happened. So you're actually given the option to purchase the removal of one bullet from that loaded gun.

Dan: 07:03 Yes. This makes sense.

Mel: 07:04 The question is, would you pay as much to remove the number of bullets from four to three as you would to reduce the number of bullets from one to zero? And-

Dan: 07:12 Well, having just live through this hypothetical situation about body odour and acne, I know that surely people must have decided that it would be better or more valuable to get the last bullet out of there than to go from bullets five to four, right?

Mel: 07:29 That's right. So most people would be willing to pay much more for a reduction of the probability of death from one out of six to zero than for reduction from four out of six to three out of six. And the idea is that, essentially, you're still removing one bullet either way. But you're willing to pay more for that bullet if it takes your chances of living basically up to a hundred percent or if it reduces the risk of death down to zero.

Dan: 07:51 So I'll let you do the maths because you're allegedly and actually a doctor, so you must've done stats or something. But I guess rationally, objectively, each bullet should have the same value, right? It is like the removal of one chance of dying?

Mel: 08:04 Yeah, exactly. So essentially, a bullet is a bullet is a bullet.

Dan: 08:08 Yeah. Well, what I like about this is that when you say to me that people are willing to pay more, they will pay a premium to get a risk down to zero because I get the thing I'm buying and then I also get to cross something off my list. The inner marketer in me, which is pretty much all of me, says this is awesome because we have lots and lots of opportunities to use that in our favour. And it might sound really obvious because it's a tried and tested technique to talk about why free trials and money back guarantees work, especially for new brands where there is a really hard perceived risk of would I really stop buying the soap or the shampoo or whatever that I've been buying my whole life to switch to a new one? It's kind of risky. You see why, not just reduction but complete removal of that risk, has helped brands turn up and explode.

Mel: 08:58 Yeah. I mean from a psychological perspective, what you're basically paying for is the reduction of risk and also the elimination of uncertainty. And we've talked a lot about how all these heuristics are all about reducing uncertainty. So we will actually pay a lot more to do that.

Dan: 09:12 Yeah, I mean we've seen in the local market, sampling is a huge thing we see across food businesses in Australia. And if I think about the takeover of Chobani of the local yogurt market, how they've basically gone from zero to category kings in a lot of parts of the supermarket, and they have done that almost exclusively through sampling. So turning up in busy places, giving people free samples of the yogurt, which has effectively eliminated the risk of paying money at the supermarket, not picking your usual brand, instead of taking the risk of paying money to buy something that you don't even know if you're going to lick. So yeah, free samples, free exchanges, free returns, wonderful way to take risk completely down to zero for people.

Mel: 09:53 Yeah. And look, one of the reasons why, I mean fundamentally this is a thing, is because we like to reduce, or we have a desire to reduce, our cognitive capacity. So if something's not a problem, if we don't need to worry about it at all, then we've actually got more cognitive load to devote to other things that might be more worthy to us. So eliminating one risk entirely just totally releases our cognitive capacity and then we can focus our energy on the remaining risks that there are.

Dan: 10:20 Like how do I clean up this acne or body odour problem that I seem to have inherited?

Mel: 10:24 Sorry about that.

Dan: 10:25 I guess thinking about these more broadly, I completely get it from an individual decision making perspective. I think it's also interesting to think about the collective. So if we think about as a country how we want our politicians to spend money. And sometimes it seems like this obsession with getting something to zero, completely eliminating the risk of something, can distract us from solving other problems that would give us an overall reduced risk across the board. So if I think about the obsession with trying to get the threat of terrorism down to zero or the current global pandemic of coronavirus down to zero. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be trying to do that, but we have to acknowledge that if we try and do that, we are not trying to reduce road fatalities. We are not trying to reduce domestic violence. We're not trying to reduce all of these other problems that we won't probably get to zero, but still are massive contributors to our quality of life and as a society.

Mel: 11:26 There's definitely some merit in that. And the idea that this is something that happens at an individual level but has implications at a broader societal level. What we do find with this bias is that we tend to fall victim to it when it has more direct relevance to us, obviously. So when there's a risk to your personal health, for example, or your body odour or the chances of you getting acne, you're much more likely to fall victim to that Zero-risk bias than if it was something at a more distal or societal level to you.

Dan: 11:55 I guess if we talk about things that are relevant at a more personal level, it would be remiss of us not to at least touch on the idea of hoarding and specifically the idea of hoarding toilet paper. What we've seen in recent times is this Zero-risk bias come into play where people have decided that if they buy their normal six rolls of toilet paper, their chances of running out are pretty small. If they decide to buy 60 rolls of toilet paper, the chances of running out are now zero. And next thing you know we are buying a year's worth of toilet paper every week and brawls and hilarity ensue.

Dan: 12:26 So I guess this is one of those ones where we don't need to over cook it, we don't need to labor the point. As soon as you say it, it just seems really obvious.

Dan: 12:33 So that's a good transition really into thinking about, well what can brands and businesses do about this? And I've sort of got three very related threads on this. The first one is really straightforward. It's saying, well, if people are willing to pay more for the complete removal of risk of something, for something to be a hundred percent guaranteed, risk-free, it's a sure thing. The first thing you got to ask yourself is where can you do that in your product service or brand offering? Can you give people free trials, free samples, guaranteed buyback, guaranteed trade in prices, find it cheaper and we'll refund you the difference plus 10%.

Dan: 13:07 Any of those things we know are going to have a disproportionate impact on people's likeliness to purchase your product. And I think one of the best examples of that in the local market is from MECCA Cosmetics, where they have a hundred percent return and exchange on anything you buy, even if you've used it. So you go and buy perfume, you take it home, you use it for two weeks, you decide you don't like it, you can just take it back and swap it over. And I guess that they know that the disproportionate impact that's going to have on sales and appeal of shopping with them more than compensates for the reality of the people that are actually going to bother doing that.

Mel: 13:39 You can almost say that they found a solution to reducing excessive body odour.

Dan: 13:43 Oh my God, you know what? MECCA, if anyone from there is listening, give me a call.

Dan: 13:49 So number one is: look for those opportunities to completely remove risk.

Dan: 13:54 The second thread in what brands can do about this, is find the ways you're already reducing risk, surface them and celebrate them. So if you're running a decent business, you probably already have reasonable policies or processes that let people exchange stuff anyway, or come back to you and renegotiate down the track if something doesn't work out how they thought it was going to work out. And so my second guidance is find those things, surface them, celebrate them, make sure people understand that you are doing everything you can to reduce the risk for them. That makes sense, Mel? You with me?

Mel: 14:24 That sounds good to me.

Dan: 14:25 And really the third thing is for brands to realise that a lot of the time what people are buying is not just their product, it is the outcome of their product. So I think about this a lot in terms of food brands where if you are, let's say, a brand of chicken that people might buy or a brand of pasta sauce that people might buy. Of course, you can have your guaranteed preservative free. But the other thing you could do is talk to people about the bulletproof bolognese, or the home run parma. Basically saying here is a recipe to go with this product, which it is impossible to mess it up or it is impossible that your kids will not like this, effectively taking risk off the table.

Mel: 15:01 Sounds like it could make me a better cook.

Dan: 15:03 It could.

Mel: 15:04 Better get some of that bulletproof bolognese.

Dan: 15:06 Bulletproof bolognese. Yeah, I don't really do the naming convention stuff. I think it was the Russian roulette reference earlier. It fined me for thinking about that. So that's three thoughts for brands, what can the people of the world do about the Zero-risk bias, Dr. Mel?

Mel: 15:23 I think when we consider this as it applies to us individually, we obviously have this inherent desire to reduce risk and to want to try and impose some sense of certainty on a completely uncontrollable world most of the time. I think what we tend to do, knowing that we have this desire to reduce risks to absolute zero, what we tend to do is actually underestimate our ability to cope with stuff. So I guess my message is let's actually be okay with accepting a little bit of uncertainty in multiple areas of our lives, even though we want to really reduce as much as possible, let's not forget that we actually are really good at coping with a lot of uncertainty most of the time. And so we can probably handle a little bit more than we give ourselves credit for.

Dan: 16:04 So what you're saying is even if I had excessive body odour and extreme acne, we could still record podcasts together?

Mel: 16:11 Yeah. As long as we're not doing it in the same room.

Dan: 16:13 Yeah. My camera is turned off.

Mel: 16:15 Is that going to be a problem?

Dan: 16:15 Yeah, and my camera's off, right?

Mel: 16:17 Fine.

Dan: 16:19 Awesome. All right. I think that's quick and efficient, so let's put a ribbon on it. Today, Zero-risk bias. What's our definition, Dr. Mel?

Mel: 16:27 Zero-risk bias describes how we have an irrationally strong preference for situations with absolute certainty and that we're actually going to be willing to pay more for situations that completely reduce the risk.

Dan: 16:38 Awesome. So this is a super powerful one for all of us businesses and brands out there. Three things to think about if you're a brand owner. Number one is can you add risk-free elements to what you're already doing? Number two is can you surface and celebrate the risk-free things that already exist in your product or service? And number three is to say, how can you de-risk the outcome of whatever people are using your product or service to do.

Dan: 16:59 And for people?

Mel: 17:00 Don't fear uncertainty. Embrace it.

Dan: 17:02 Just settle in. We are in uncertain times.

Mel: 17:02 Powerful.

Dan: 17:07 Speaking of which, next time, I'm going to do the hypotheticals.

Mel: 17:11 Oh, be cool.

Dan: 17:13 Yes. All right. Hey, thanks for listening. If you got any feedback, you know where to find us. Dr. Mel, where are you on the internet?

Mel: 17:20 All over it.

Dan: 17:20 All over it? What do people Google to find you?

Mel: 17:23 The people can Google "Dr. Mel Weinberg." People can find me @DrMelW on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever else you want to, Instagram. Don't do much on there.

Dan: 17:34 And I'll be on all your favourite social channels as well. All right, we'll see you all next time.

Mel: 17:37 See you.

Dan: 17:38 Bye.

#26 Barnum Effect: Why smart people believe ridiculous things

Do you generally feel like you’ve got your life together, but sometimes wonder what the hell you’re doing? In this episode, Mel and Dan explore the Barnum effect and why 'clairvoyant' could still be a promising career choice.

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Mel:    00:18   Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan:    00:20   The show that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel:    00:22   Why we think, what we think.

Dan:    00:24   And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain. That's Dr. Mel Weinberg. She is a performance psychologist.

Mel:    00:29   And that's Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat, and this is Kops. [music]

Dan:    00:42   All right, Mel. Riddle me this.

Mel:    00:44   Yes.

Dan:    00:44   I am very, very lucky, fortunate, even "#blessed" some would say, to spend a pretty good portion of my day with pretty smart people.

Mel:    00:51   Lucky you.

Dan:    00:52   I know. It's pretty good.

Mel:    00:54   Wish it were like that for me! I'm kidding, I'm kidding all the people I work with. Love you all!

Dan:    00:57   Geez. And that's all we have time for today. Anyway, one of the things that I honestly just cannot wrap my little head around is how seemingly ... not even seemingly. Actually really intelligent people still in 2019, almost 2020, put any weight or validity in what things like horoscopes say about them. Or that do shit, and then say, "Oh yeah, but sorry. I'm a Virgo. What do you want from me?" No offence Virgos - I don't even know what it means.

Mel:    01:22   I'm a Virgo.

Dan:    01:22   You're a Virgo?

Mel:    01:22   That's awkward.

Dan:    01:25   That explains a lot. It explains nothing!

Mel:    01:28   So basically you're saying you can't believe that people can still be so stupid sometimes. Smart people can be so stupid sometimes. Is that what you're saying?

Dan:    01:36   They're not my words, but let's say that's an easy conclusion to draw from what I've just described.

Mel:    01:40   Dan, what if I told you that there was a heuristic that could explain it?

Dan:    01:43   Surely not.

Mel:    01:44   Come on, there is.

Dan:    01:45   Surely not all of our stupidity is explained by psychological heuristics.

Mel:    01:48   Given we're in front of the microphone, I feel like we should talk about it today.

Dan:    01:52   The timing could not have been better.

Mel:    01:54   In that case, let me introduce you and all of our listeners to the Forer Effect.

Dan:    01:59   The Forer Effect.

Dan:    02:07   Could you spell that for me?

Mel:    02:10   F-O-R-E-R, named after Bertram Forer.

Dan:    02:10   Bertie.

Mel:    02:12   Old Bertie. In 1949 and the Forer Effect described the tendency for people to accept vague, ambiguous, general statements as descriptors of their unique personalities. Would you believe?

Dan:    02:27   Awesome. That is totally a thing.

Mel:    02:30   Here's what Forer did in his classic experiment of 1949. I mean, if it's okay for me to indulgence in some research?

Dan:    02:36   Yeah, please.

Mel:    02:36   Can I have some research music? [music]

Dan:    02:44   Such a Virgo. Anyway..

Mel:    02:48   What Forer did in his classic psychological experiment, was he asked his students ... I think there were 39 of them. In 1949, that's a decent class size. He asked them to take a personality test. They all took what they believed to be a personality test that was designed by their instructor, Bertie Forer. Then he said a week later when you come back for the next class, you're all going to be given a paragraph or a list of statements that describes your personality. They all thought, "All right, this is cool. I'm getting my own set of results. Awesome." So next week they all come to class and professor Forer hands around the results to each individual. Here's what they receive: "You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside."

Dan:    03:52   Oh Bertie. You know me so well!

Mel:    03:53   Now look, these are just five of the 13 statements that were given. But as you might've guessed, each student was actually given the exact same report.

Dan:    04:01   No, surely not.

Mel:    04:02   Yep.

Dan:    04:02   Each student was given the exact same unique individual personalised result?

Mel:    04:06   But here's the cool bit. So they all read them and professor Forer, or Bertie, as you seem to like to call him.

Dan:    04:13   I only called him that once, you seem to like calling him that. Such a Virgo.

Mel:    04:16   He says to them all, "Hey guys, just before we finish up, like would you mind giving me a rating of how accurate you think this description is of you?"

Dan:    04:27   How accurate is this description that says I'm pretty much awesome. I would say very accurate.

Mel:    04:30   Of course, they all rated that this was a highly accurate description of themselves. Then he revealed the deception and said, "Ha ha, suckers. You've all got the same thing." And they never came to class again... But this is what Forer did. The Forer Effect, as it was known at the time, described how people will just take anything that is positive about themselves.

Dan:    04:54   Right.

Mel:    04:54   Then a few years later in 1956, a Paul Meehl, who's pretty cool and his writing is quite funny and a little bit satirical for somebody who writes about some serious psychological stuff. If you're interested, good read.

Dan:    05:06   Like an early Dr. Weinberg, yeah?

Mel:    05:06   Oh geez, wow. That's so positive and complimentary. Wow. That applies to me.

Dan:    05:16   I'm an Aries.

Mel:    05:16   Meehl wrote a follow-up paper on it. He thought that rather than giving Bertie Forer the credit for the effect, that it should actually be termed the Barnum effect.

Dan:    05:26   What?

Mel:    05:27   Yes, the idea was reminiscent to him of P.T. Barnum who people might know from the Greatest Showman.

Dan:    05:33   Circus dude?

Mel:    05:34   Yeah. So he was a circus owner and his whole formula for success was this idea that his circus has a little something for everybody. So sort of universally applicable to everybody.

Dan:    05:43   Oh my God. So basically he like took some liquid paper, for those of you listeners old enough to know what that is, and just whited out Forer and put it in Barnum. And that's it. Everybody knows about this as the Barnum Effect.

Mel:    05:54   He actually just said in he's 1956 paper, like, "I suggest that going forward we call this the Barnum effect."

Dan:    05:59   That is so outrageously disrespectful.

Mel:    06:02   Now it is referred to as the Barnum Effect.

Dan:    06:04   Oh my God.

Mel:    06:05   The sorts of statements that he used to illustrate the Barnum Effect are referred to as Barnum statements.

Dan:    06:10   I just loved that if this happened in Australia, he'd be the Johnny Barnum. It'd be the Johnny Barnum effect.

Mel:    06:21   I love it that this is in the context of us talking about how really smart people can say really dumb things.

Dan:    06:23   What do you mean? People love Johnny Farnham.

Mel:    06:27   Johnny Barnum?

Dan:    06:28   Also. It's like a more positive introspective version of John Farnham. Maybe I really am the voice?

Mel:    06:35   Anyway. We digress. These Barnum statements, things that are typically used in all sorts of ways to basically fool people.

Dan:    06:45   Right. It's basically that you tell somebody something that sounds like it's profound and personalised.

Mel:    06:49   Yeah.

Dan:    06:49   But actually it just applies to everyone.

Mel:    06:52   Yeah.

Dan:    06:53   I could totally do these. Do you want to try? This is like what crystal ball people and stuff do.

Mel:    06:58   Exactly.

Dan:    06:59   All right, we're going to do this. I'm going to have a crack at 2019, almost 2020, Barnum statements.

Mel:    07:05   Go on, this should be fun.

Dan:    07:07   I can't just do it, I need your palm, please. Whoa. Wow. That is interesting. The first thing that I can tell here: do you sometimes feel that your barista is judging you when you order coffee in the morning?

Mel:    07:25   Yeah.

Dan:    07:26   Do you feel that if you really look deep down inside, you know you should probably be plant based but can't quite commit to that at this stage of your life?

Mel:    07:34   A little bit.

Dan:    07:35   Do you sometimes feel like you might have something stuck in your teeth especially after eating meals containing quinoa?

Mel:    07:39   All the time.

Dan:    07:41   Do you ever find yourself looking at things on the internet when you know you actually should just be doing work?

Mel:    07:46   Guilty.

Dan:    07:47   Yeah. Do you ever feel that you wear too much black? No?

Mel:    07:51   Sometimes.

Dan:    07:51   Sometimes, but other times you don't.

Mel:    07:53   Sometimes you just feel like wearing black, right?

Dan:    07:56   I know it happens, but sometimes you wonder why you feel like that, right?

Mel:    07:58   Yeah.

Dan:    07:58   Yeah, I think I could do this. I think I can be a fortune teller. Your barista is definitely judging you, by the way.

Mel:    08:05   To make affective Barnum statements, you basically have to be as bored as possible. There are key ways to do this. Like writing, "at times" at the start of a statement.

Dan:    08:14   Yeah, that makes sense.

Mel:    08:15   Or couching something negative within a positive. So like while you mostly do this, you'll sometimes do this.

Dan:    08:21   The "at times" thing makes sense, right? Because really everyone is everything some time. In the right circumstances everybody feels self-conscious, everybody feels confident, everybody feels quiet, everybody feels gregarious.

Mel:    08:33   Yeah, in different contexts. We all have different versions of ourselves that come out.

Dan:    08:35   At times you feel unsure of whether you've actually taken the right steps in life. Like at times, yeah, but not usually!

Mel:    08:40   Who doesn't? Typically people will look at this and go, "Yeah, this is horoscopes." Which it is. Interestingly, there was a study in 1971 by Silverman on this idea-

Dan:    08:53   Is 1971 the golden age for horoscopes? I feel like people would have been very open minded to such things then.

Mel:    08:58   Yeah. Sounds right. Yeah, we'll go with that. So here's what he did in his experiment to test the Barnum Effect/the OG Forer Effect.

Dan:    09:03   Would you please just have some respect. Won't anybody think of Forer, please?!

Mel:    09:10   What Silverman did was he had 12 personality sketches. Which might be like what you would find in the back pages of the Herald sun. Do they still do that?

Dan:    09:17   I don't know. A personality sketch is not like a drawing.

Mel:    09:21   No, like a vignette. They gave people the option to read through them and say, "Look, which one of these sounds most like you?" They were just numbered one through 12. People would pick the one that was most relevant to them, that they felt best described them. But then there was another group of people who were given the same vignettes, if you will, but this time they were each labeled with one of the star signs. Of course, it just so happened that people tended to default to pick the one that was their aligned star sign.

Dan:    09:57   The description of me under the title of me seems to match me.

Mel:    10:00   Sounds more like you.

Dan:    10:01   Than the other possible descriptions of me that are assigned to people not like me.

Mel:    10:06   People are really gullible and that's what really the Barnum Effect does. It just plays on people's gullibility.

Dan:    10:12   You're gullible, yes. But I mean it seems like we're especially gullible or especially want to believe nice things about ourselves. Because your alternative to being gullible is to be realistic and say, "No, I'm actually not generous at all. I hate people."

Mel:    10:27   Yeah, and I'm an awful person.

Dan:    10:28   Yeah, I'm terrible. I don't even like me!

Mel:    10:31   And that's what this is all about. It's about your personal validation, right? Feeling personally validated and feeling like you are understood. That your thoughts and emotions are accepted by other people and that's something from an ego perspective that is really important to us and to our development and to our sense of who we are.

Dan:    10:46   We are all so fragile.

Mel:    10:47   Aren't we?

Dan:    10:47   Looking for validation on the back page of the Herald Sun. Hey if that's where you've got to go. That's fine. You do it.

Mel:    10:53   That's what it takes. So here's the thing, there are three factors that can influence whether or not the Barnum Effect is going to be in play and whether people are going to fall victim to it.

Dan:    11:04   If you're a shyster and you really want to be getting one over on people, these are three things you have to do really well to make sure it works.

Mel:    11:10   Here's how you really take advantage of people's gullibility by Dan and Mel.

Dan:    11:13   Oh God. Normally I don't feel awkward about this. You seem really into this. I feel kind of awkward.

Mel:    11:20   Yeah, okay.

Dan:    11:21   Ethically.

Mel:    11:22   Who's wearing the ethical hat now?

Dan:    11:22   Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it.

Mel:    11:27   If people are going to fall victim to this, if people are dumb enough, like we sort of said at the start-

Dan:    11:29   No, you said at the start.

Mel:    11:31   Then that's on them. That's on them!

Dan:    11:32   They're not dumb, they're just victims of the Barnum Effect. Did you know sometimes some really, really intelligent people ... in fact, often very intelligent people can feel victim to the Barnum Effect? Especially if they're also generous.

Mel:    11:41   Is that what you've learned?

Dan:    11:42   I've learned that today. All right, give me the magic three.

Mel:    11:46   The first thing is the more that you believe that the statement applies only to you, the more likely you're going to fall for it. There's magic words like "for you" which you'll see put out there, which just play on people's gullibility.

Dan:    12:02   Spotify do a wonderful job of this. "Your daily playlist". We made this just for you. Like somebody who's been up all night basically listening to the whole internet. They've picked the 30 best tracks, put them together, your name is on it. Go and enjoy.

Mel:    12:15   Wow.

Dan:    12:17   Netflix kind of do this as well with your personalised recommendations. Which usually, just because one of my kids watch something that I really have no interest in. But they're trying, I appreciate that they're trying.

Mel:    12:21   They're trying, that's all they can. The next factor that influences is how much you believe in the authority of the person conducting the evaluation. In Forer's study all of his students believe that he professor Forer like, he's hot shit. He's good at this and he knows. So what he says must be true.

Dan:    12:40   Right. This manifests everywhere. If I think about fortune tellers and those people who really kind of ham it up and try and look mystical and special because that adds some authority to them and makes you want to believe. I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but I find it weird that when you go to the chemist or the pharmacy that the person who is like dispensing drugs to you. Just for you, drugs just for you is like elevated on a platform. Must you be on a stage? There's no other retail environment that I go into where the person serving me is on a stage. I'm very unlikely to question them.

Mel:    13:18   Yeah, so you believe that they are a figure who is worthy of being able to dispense those drugs particularly for you. I'm sure there's nobody else in the world who takes these drugs.

Dan:    13:25   No, I mean those anti-histamines. Which has come down from the stage to me, I couldn't challenge it.

Mel:    13:30   It's like it come down from God himself!

Dan:    13:31   I know, from God through my pharmacists, to me. I also think it's really interesting- when you go into a Footlocker store, all the employees there wear polo shirts that make them look like basketball referees.

Mel:    13:47   Yep.

Dan:    13:47   The black and white stripes. Everyone's just used to it. But it's kind of weird. Like why would you just your staff like a referee? But it's kind of this idea that Footlocker is a multi brand store. There's Nike and Adidas, and everything else in there. You feel like the person serving you is a neutral and an authority.

Mel:    14:02   Supposed to be, yeah.

Dan:    14:04   They're neutral and they're an authority. They are basically going to give you the best decision that is right for you, what you need from your footwear in this instance. Well-played Footlocker. We had personalisation, just for you, we had authority.

Mel:    14:17   Yeah, and I mean I'm Dr Mel so obviously everything that I say.

Dan:    14:20   Yeah, absolutely.

Mel:    14:20   Because people believe in my authority. It's true and it's all relevant to every single one of you out there.

Dan:    14:25   It's true.

Mel:    14:26   The last one, is that it should be mainly positive. Because what we talked about before, our ego likes to be flattered, and that gets you a long way. So mainly positive traits that we talk about and sort of in a general ambiguous way. If we have some mostly positive traits, then we're able to tolerate some negative ones within that. It's like "You're mostly generous and amazing, but can be a little bit selfish." "Ah, yeah. Okay. I'll own up to that."

Dan:    14:48   That thing what you just did is actually called rainbow rusing, where it's like-

Mel:    14:51   Oh, excuse me?

Dan:    14:53   I know, I know. It's like a real straight scammer stuff. But it's like where you give people a personality attribute. What's the thing you just said?

Mel:    15:00   Well, I said you like you're really generous and awesome, but can be selfish at times.

Dan:    15:03   Yeah. So you give people an attribute like, you're really generous and awesome. But then you also give them the exact opposite of that. But sometimes you're this. "You're really, really outgoing, you like making new friends, but sometimes you just want to be by yourself." It's like everybody can subscribe to that.

Mel:    15:18   Everybody fits into that.

Dan:    15:19   But as long as it's overridingly positive that makes sense. I guess where we see this everywhere is in things like product descriptions. I always find it's weird that all moisturisers are for people with sensitive skin. Like is there anybody going, "No, my skin is just hard as fuck. I don't need your sensitive moisturiser. I can handle it."

Mel:    15:36   I just want to be treated gently though.

Dan:    15:37   I mean that's what everybody says. I think the athletic apparel categories are really interesting place for this, as well. If you look at, I don't know, like a long sleeve t-shirts for running in winter. Obviously you're wearing a long sleeve in winter. Its like "This is a garment for people who know that bad weather is no obstacle for a good training program." Or people who know that pain is just weakness leaving the body. It's like, "That is totally me. I am that runner. I know the bad weather is no excuse for a good training program. That top has clearly been made for me."

Mel:    16:08   Yeah. We see the Barnum Effect coming to play in all sorts of different circumstances. One of them, like with horoscopes like a part of it is just for entertainment value. Have you ever done those tests online? The which personality type are you? Or which Harry Potter character are you? Have you ever done those?

Dan:    16:26   Yeah. Not the Harry Potter one. Actually I haven't seen Harry Potter. So I figure unless I got Harry I would not even know who it was. Could I be Harry?

Mel:    16:32   But I imagine that most people listening would be familiar with the sort of tests that we're talking about.

Dan:    16:36   Yeah, I'm going to keep doing the test until I get the person that I want.

Mel:    16:39   Well you can because most of the time you'll score something different on these tests every time you do them. Which is testament to the point I'm about to make, about the validity or lack thereof.

Dan:    16:47   No, surely the which Harry Potter character are you is not invalid from a psychologist perspective.

Mel:    16:52   I'm not going to go into it.

Dan:    16:54   Don't wave that doctor card around like that.

Mel:    16:55   I'm not going to go into it.

Dan:    16:55   Those tests are highly researched!

Mel:    16:58   People will sometimes pay a lot of money for these sorts of tests. Like people might be familiar with the Myers Briggs inventory, which is promoted as a psychological assessment or a common personality assessment used often in hiring, recruiting, these sorts of things. But basically what it does, is it asks people some questions and then puts them into one of 16 categories and gives you a code for that. For example, you might be an INTJ or you might be an ESFP. This four letter code, that's yours. And you just happen to share it with a lot of other people. But there are 15 other different types. You feel special enough to feel that it's your category. But also different enough to everybody else. Because there are so many different options.

Mel:    17:40   It's commonly believed that the Myers Briggs test is helpful or useful in some regard. In reality, and without going into too much detail, it's not that much different to a horoscope. But people tend to believe it and people will identify very strongly with their result on the Myers Briggs.

Dan:    17:57   Wow. Gloves off!

Mel:    17:58   There's lots that you can read about if you're interested. But it does speak to just because there is a personality test out there and the Myers Briggs is known to not be ... just in defence of all psychologists out there, the Myers Briggs was not developed by psychologists. When we're talking about measuring personality, there are a lot of different tests that we use. Their aim is typically to discriminate between people and to recognise individual differences rather than chucking people into groups. Which I'm personally not a fan of. But that's my little rant over.

Dan:    18:26   So are we meant to discriminate more, or not discriminate more?

Mel:    18:28   Well, I'm just saying that it's the intention behind the test.

Dan:    18:31   Because I for one, am very anti discrimination. You should know.

Mel:    18:34   When I'm saying discriminate, I mean looking at understanding differences between people and that's what's key. Rather than looking at what's similar between people and chucking them into a group. Then giving them advice that they're all going to take as their own because they feel special.

Dan:    18:46   Right. Okay. So personality test are fine as long as they have been developed and issued by trained registered psychologists.

Mel:    18:51   Yeah. As an authority figure in the area-

Dan:    18:53   That is such a weird view for you to hold. So you, as a psychologist, think that personality tests developed by psychologists are superior to personality test developed by people who are not psychologists.

Mel:    19:03   Yes.

Dan:    19:04   It's so weird how even smart people are affected by it.

Mel:    19:06   Do you have anything else to say that would help us to finish off this episode?

Dan:    19:09   Yeah, yeah. You want to get out of here. Okay. Well I think the takeaways here from a marketing perspective are pretty straightforward. If you can wrap your product up in a way that is personalised and coming from a position of authority and is flattering for people - like this is a product for people who aspire for greatness, but you have to do it from a credible place - it's going to do well. And it's almost meaningless what thing you pick it as. Like I was imagining before if I was going to start a range of peanut butter. So get this, I could just say I have really good peanut butter, you should come and buy it. It's natural. But I could say, "Dan's peanut butter is made for choosy mums. Mums who know what's best for their kids. They want mealtime to be fun, great tasting and memorable."

Mel:    19:50   Well that's the sort of mum that I want to be. So I'm going to buy Dan's peanut butter.

Dan:    19:54   Yeah, but do you know what? I also have another product. Well, an alternative way that this could map out. Which is, "Dan's peanut butter made especially for choosy grandpa's. Grandpa's who know what's best for their grandkids. They want mealtime to be fun, great tasting and memorable."

Mel:    20:11   That's the kind of grandpa I want to be.

Dan:    20:11   Yeah, you see.

Mel:    20:12   Dan's peanut butter sounds amazing.

Dan:    20:13   It's crazy, it kind of doesn't matter, but as long as it's for someone. You just put it out there and let people connect themselves to it. If it's positive, people will. It's really going to stand out a lot more than something that doesn't offer such a thing.

Mel:    20:24   Yeah.

Dan:    20:24   The other thing I think about from a B2B sales perspective is one of the things I've learned over the years is that if we go in and meet a client and they sort of tell us all of their problems and what they're trying to achieve. If we can come back and articulate the problem or the opportunity in a really positive, flattering way better than anybody else, we are 90% there.

Mel:    20:46   Okay.

Dan:    20:46   If we can understand what the issue is ... "Really the problem here is that you have all of this greatness you just can't get out." But it has to feel real. It has to feel researched there actually has to be some greatness that you dig up from their past or their DNA. That is usually music to a prospective client ears. Because they can see the vision for that, they want to align with that and you're on your way.

Mel:    21:05   Yeah. I think from a personal perspective or from an individual perspective, this is about the need to feel validated. The need to feel validated by somebody who you think is important. But maybe if we can focus more on self validation or looking at who is important to us and looking at how we can get our validation needs met in other ways, then maybe we'll be less likely to be insecure. It's the insecurity that makes us more vulnerable to this Barnum Effect.

Dan:    21:30   Right. Well that's a nice feeling to end on. All right, so Barnum Effect ... actually Forer Effect. Yeah, I'm going to-

Mel:    21:37   I think it has been called the Barnum- Forer effect.

Dan:    21:40   Oh my God, that's just embarrassing.

Mel:    21:41   It's should be Forer- Barnum.

Dan:    21:43   Exactly. Anyway. All right. So the three core things, make it personalised, make it come from a position of authority, make it flattering. People will come along for the ride.

Mel:    21:52   You guys are awesome listeners. Every single one of you is actually really special to us and really fantastic.

Dan:    21:57   What I find actually is that it's only super intelligent people that enjoy the show. I'm just going to put that out there.

Mel:    22:03   Yeah.

Dan:    22:03   All right. Cool.

Mel:    22:04   The nicest people in the world.

Dan:    22:07   See you next time.

Mel:    22:07   Thanks guys.

Dan:    22:08   Peace out.