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- [00:01]
A
There is an experiment that I think every marketer and every business person needs to know.
- [00:07]
B
The scientists wanted to see, you know, how our knowledge of what goes into food shapes our perceptions of it.
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A
To test this, the scientists did something a little unusual.
- [00:18]
B
They just took some normal beer. I can't remember what it was. It was like Budweiser or something, you know, very standard. And put a few drops of vinegar in each pint.
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A
Now that sounds horrible. Vinegary beer. It sounds genuinely disgusting.
- [00:32]
B
For most people, the idea of beer mixed with vinegar probably isn't that appetizing.
- [00:37]
A
And yet the scientists managed to make 60% of their participants prefer the vinegar laced beer to normal beer. And the methods they use to persuade people is something that I think everybody listening needs to learn. Hear all of that in today's episode of Nudge. Here's something that's happened to me a lot in using AI over the past couple of years. I've spent, you know, 20 minutes writing the perfect prompt. The output looks pretty good. It sounds, you know, authoritative, but it completely misses the point. That is what you get when AI doesn't have a clue about your business. HubSpot's AI works off your actual customer data. It looks at every interaction, every signal your team has built up over time. So rather than just prompt and cross your fingers and then start again with HubSpot, you can ask just once and get a great result. So check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. I am delighted to be joined again by the award winning author who in 2023 with his book the Expectation Effect won the British Psychological Society Book Award.
- [01:47]
B
I'm David Rovson. I'm a science writer and journalist. I've written for outlets like the BBC, New Scientist, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal. The New. I specialise in the mind, body, connection and human behaviour. And I've written three books, the Intelligence Trap, the Expectation Effect and the Laws of Connection.
- [02:07]
A
In his book, David suggests that expectations can help shape your happiness and productivity. He explains how our expectations really shape who we are. To many of you, this probably sounds a little fluffy. In fact, when David first started reading about the effect, he thought the same.
- [02:24]
B
I mean, so I would say, you know, when I first kind of came across the phenomenon of the expectation effect, you know, I was quite sceptical. So I really did use all of my scientific background, my experience as a science journalist to really interrogate the studies and they are very robust and Actually, you know, it sounds fluffy, but it's actually something that we've all experienced and we can all, I think, relate to very well. So, I mean, a simple expectation effect that we've all experienced would be, you know, you think of your favorite meal and your mouth starts watering. Well, that's actually releasing digestive enzymes in your saliva that will help you to break down that food. You know, a negative expectation effect would be when you've been out for a meal and someone around the table suddenly falls sick, and then you start feeling nauseous yourself and you know that you're not just imagining those symptoms. Like, it feels really real, even if you haven't necessarily contracted the same bug as that person.
- [03:19]
A
My mouth salivates when I imagine a cheesy pizza. I feel a little nauseous when I picture vomit.
- [03:27]
B
So those are kind of everyday examples. What I'm really showing in the expectation effect is just that this is very widespread and it's affecting our lives in loads of ways that you don't even realise.
- [03:37]
A
Loyal listeners of Nudge will know that I'm quite keen to hear evidence to back up these points. So I asked David for a study that clearly showcases how our expectations change our reality.
- [03:48]
B
We've got a huge mountain of evidence of this from studies of the placebo effect in medicine, which you can see in almost every clinical trial of any drug that has been tested. But also, the recent researcher then started looking at how that might relate to things like exercise or diet.
- [04:07]
A
David starts the book by referencing this 2007 study by Harvard researchers Crum and Langer. I asked him to walk us through this study.
- [04:15]
B
And the study that you mentioned from Harvard University was looking at whether our appraisal of physical activity could actually change the benefits of that activity for our bodies through something akin to the placebo effect in medicine. And what they did was the scientists realized that if you're cleaning hotel rooms, you're actually doing a huge amount of physical activity, right? You're lifting beds, you're lifting furniture, you're cleaning windows, you're pushing the vacuum cleaner around the room. All of that actually, over the week adds up to the recommended level of physical activity that doctors are telling us that we should be getting, which is about 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise. But, you know, few of the hotel cleaners that I studied actually realized that fact. So the scientists, they just educated them on this. They gave a presentation, they left leaflets around the hotels to help people, to change their interpretation of the work that they were doing.
- [05:12]
A
The study Titled mindset matters involved 84 female hotel room attendants across seven hotels cells. 44 were in the so called informed group. They were given specific calorie breakdowns on their activities. They were told that changing linens for 15 minutes burnt 40 calories, but vacuuming for 15 minutes burnt 50 calories. And cleaning bathrooms, well, that burnt 60 calories. This information was posted in their break room and explained to them verbally. The control group of 40 other members of staff received none of this information.
- [05:47]
B
And one month later they found that without any actual changes to their physical activity, to their lifestyle, the people who had been educated in this way to reinterpret the benefits of the work they were doing tended to have healthier bodies. So they had lower blood pressure, for example. They moved down from being on the threshold of hypertension to well below it. And that just seemed pretty remarkable to me. So that was one of the first studies I came across that really got me thinking that, you know, way beyond the well known placebo effect, that actually our expectations are shaping our lives, you know, from morning until dusk, even during sleep. And if we're always being shaped by our expectations, then the obvious question is, well, how can we make the most of that effect? How can we change our negative expectations to have better outcomes in life?
- [06:35]
A
The cleaners in the informed group lost an average of 2 pounds. They lowered their blood pressure by 10 points and showed significant improvements in body fat percentage, BMI and waist to hip ratio. Meanwhile, those in the control group showed no significant changes in any of these physiological measures. It sounds kind of unbelievable and I should point out that this is just a small study with only 84 people. I don't think it's conclusive, but there is plenty of other evidence behind the expectation effect which backs it up. In fact, David has experienced the effect firsthand a few years back.
- [07:11]
B
Yes, I was going through a pretty, pretty horrible time in my life when I had this kind of, kind of mounting depression. I would say like it was like waves of kind of sadness and, you know, low moods that were getting just kind of increasing in intensity. So yeah, I went to my doctor, I was prescribed antidepressants and the doctor, you know, as she was obliged to do, she told me that they could have some side effects which included migraines or really bad headaches. Now, you know, soon after taking the antidepressants, I felt like I was probably, you know, experiencing some benefit to my mood, but I was also experiencing these daily migraines. You know, it's like a kind of ice pick going through my skull. Like, you know, it was very hard for me to concentrate at work. You know, I was taking painkillers all day to try to relieve it. But it was just a pure coincidence that I was working at the BBC at the time and I was writing a piece about expectations in medicine, and in particular, this phenomenon known as the nocebo effect. So whereas the placebo effect is when our positive expectations bring relief from an illness, the nocebo effect is when you're told about a side effect, when you have a negative expectation that can make you feel ill. Comes from the Latin for I cause harm rather than I cause pleasure. What was really striking to me, you know, I read about these studies which had included studies of antidepressants. You know, I looked at the statistics, and what you saw in the clinical trials was that even people, when they were comparing people taking the real antidepressant to the dummy pill, which you have to do in a clinical trial, they found that even people taking the dummy pills often reported these bad headaches. So, you know, it seemed a clear example of a nocebo effect. And just knowing about that phenomenon helped me to reappraise the pain I was feeling. And whereas previously I might have interpreted it as a kind of sign that, you know, the pills were kind of playing with my neurochemistry in a way that was causing the pain, I recognised that maybe it was just the fact that I was expecting to feel the pain that had caused it. And that realization helped the pain to almost completely evaporate within about 24 hours. So it's quite remarkable. And I think a few things were striking to me about this experience. One was that, you know, we might think, you know, if you say an illness is all in someone's head, we might think, well, they're not really suffering, you know, they're kind of making it up. And we see people at all levels of medicine, politics, when they're talking about what we call psychogenic illnesses, they have that assumption that it's kind of faked, but that pain for me, was very real. It was very inhibiting. I did not want to feel that pain, but I was. I couldn't distinguish that from any other headache I'd had in my life. And I looked into the science of this and actually, when you look at people suffering from nocebo headaches, you can actually see physical changes in the brain. So there's the release of chemicals that cause the blood vessels to constrict, which might be causing this kind of buildup of pressure in the brain, whether or not it's caused by a real physical trigger or whether it's caused by expectations. So you can see from those studies that our expectations are changing the brain's physiology in some way. The fact that I had experienced that very real pain, but then simply reinterpreting the pain had helped it to disappear. That showed me how powerful expectations were, which was then what led me to build a huge Google Doc of any study I could find that demonstrated an expectation effect. The Harvard study was one of the first, like I mentioned, that caught my attention because it showed that you can have these effects outside of medicine in, you know, health and exercise. But, you know, the more I kind of researched, the more profound it seems. So I found studies showing that it can affect diet, sleep, and the effects of sleep loss and insomnia, willpower, even aging. And it got to a point, I guess, in 2019, when I realised that I just wanted to share that body of research with the broader public, because it really wasn't known at that point. There was a lot of maybe pseudoscience around things like manifesting, but very little popular writing about the expectation effect and how we could actually use that for our own benefit, based on the science.
- [11:28]
A
In our previous episode of Nudge Titled Were the 2018 Gatwick Drones Real? It's a great episode. David and I covered a lot more about the Nocebo effect. So do go and listen to that. That after this, if you want to check that out. But on today's show, I really wanted to focus on how marketing can alter our perception. And to do that, we need to go back to the study shared at the start of the show, conducted at MIT in two of the university's iconic pubs, Muddy Charles and the Thirsty Ear.
- [11:55]
B
The scientists wanted to see, you know, how our knowledge of what goes into food shapes our perceptions of it. They just took some normal beer, I can't remember what it was, it was like Budweiser or something very standard, and put a few drops of vinegar in each pint. Now, you know, for most people, the idea of beer mixed with vinegar probably isn't that appetizing, but they kind of labeled it as this specially concocted MIT brew made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And they gave it to people in the pubs around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and just asked them to say how much they liked it, how it compared to other beers. Now, the perceptions, when they labeled it as MIT brew was overwhelmingly positive. People loved it. It kind of had these subtle flavours that they just hadn't experienced before. In other kinds of beers, if they told people up front what it was, that it was beer with vinegar, they really didn't like the taste at all. So there was a very big disparity between the two. Based purely on their expectations, 388 participants
- [13:02]
A
took part and 59% of people preferred the MIT brew in the blind condition. But for those who were told up front that the beer contained balsamic vinegar, only 30% preferred it.
- [13:13]
B
Now, what I think was interesting was that once people had tasted it, they liked it. You know, they'd had the experience of pleasure. It didn't really matter if, you know, post hoc you told them what they'd just drunk because the expectation that it would be delicious was already planted in their brain. So it's only if you knew beforehand that it really made a difference.
- [13:32]
A
David's right. Being told after that the MIT brew was laced with vinegar and only reduced preference by 7 percentage points. Knowing that there was vinegar in the drink before tasting it changed how it actually tasted.
- [13:46]
B
But, you know, I've tried it myself, like, I actually do think it tastes quite nice. Like use a nice balsamic vinegar in your beer and it is quite tasty. But yeah, it's just, it's one of my best examples really to when I was talking with friends to explain what the expectation effect was, because it's very tangible how much that can affect your perception.
- [14:05]
A
This isn't a new finding. In his book, David shares how in the 1960s, two American scientists looked into people's perceptions of astronauts meals such as chocolate flavoured health shake drinks filled with protein, carbs and vitamins. Without knowing the origins of the drink, people tended to find the taste really unappetizing. A real poor comparison to normal chocolate milk that we're all familiar with. But when the drink was explicitly labelled as space food, when they told people this is used by astronauts, the public's appreciation for that exact same drink dramatically increased the exotic name. Associating it with cutting edge science raised expectations and as a result acted as a powerful flavour enhancer. The effects of our preconceptions are evident in scans of the brain's responses to Foods. In 2008, researchers at the University of Oxford gave participants the basic UNAMI flavouring msg. Every participant tasted the same ingredient, but some were told different things. For instance, some were told a single sentence about MSG saying it has a rich and delicious taste. Now, when MSG is labelled as rich and delicious, the participant's brain showed a greater activity in the regions processing pleasure gluttonary pleasure. However, when a different group was told that the same MSG flavour was monosodium glutamate or boiled vegetable water, the pleasure part of the brain didn't show any greater activity at all.
- [15:36]
B
And it fits with a whole load of other studies that have shown that things like the price of wine can influence how much pleasure people get from it. So telling someone that they're drinking an expensive bottle will change the descriptions that they use. It will change the kind of notes that they perceive within that glass of wine. If you blindfold people and give them red or white wine, but tell them that it's the other, that will also change their perception. Because you know when you're told you're receiving a certain kind of wine, you know you already have these simulations of what the taste is going to be and that changes your perception.
- [16:08]
A
In his 2016 book Surfing Uncertainty, the author Clark shares how scientists coloured white wine red. And participants when served this red coloured white wine noted how it tasted of prunes and chocolate and tobacco. Of course these flavours are typically associated with real red wine, but the actual drink they were drinking was white wine. David writes that the power of expectations is so strong that even wine experts fall for this illusion. This proves how important marketing really is. The way you describe, present, deliver your products and service has a direct impact on how those goods are evaluated. And if you're not convinced, well, David has more evidence. In his book he shares how a team of Israeli and American researchers asked participants to wear a pair of shades and then to read 84 words under the glare of a bright light. Every participant had the same quality shades, they had the exact same sunglasses on. But some participants were told they were wearing Ray Ban sunglasses and when they were told that they made around half as many mistakes half as many mistakes as those who were told their shades came from a mid market brand. I believe that mid market brand was Mango. The participants who believed they were wearing designer sunglasses or also completed the task more quickly in around 60% of the time. In a follow up study, they gave participants tea from a prestigious or less prestigious brand. Those who thought they drank tea from a prestigious brand made six times fewer errors on a cognitively taxing puzzle. The same tea, the same task, but the brand name alone produced meaningfully better concentration and precision. And I should mention this was chamomile tea which was promoted to the people in the study as being good for easing your cognitive load.
- [17:55]
B
So it's very important in marketing and I think very important even just in day to day life like when you're cooking for your friends or family, right, Tell people what they're having. Explain to them the kind of care that you've put into it. Tell them if you've used a new ingredient that you want them to notice because that information is like a garnish for your food. Like is actually helping to calibrate their expectations. Change their simulations so they'll appreciate more what you're providing them.
- [18:23]
A
But expectations don't just change how we view marketing.
- [18:26]
B
The placebo effect can be quite powerful in Parkinson's in particular.
- [18:30]
A
Hear about that after this quick break. Science of Scaling, hosted by Mark Roberge, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. In each episode, Mark, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets, strategies and tactics to scaling your company's growth. It's a fantastic show, so go and listen to the Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts. Health and safety compliance isn't glamorous, but it matters for small business owners and it's easy to fall behind. It's the kind of thing the Federation of Small Businesses quietly takes care of. On top of all the other great benefits included. Starting from just 195 pounds a year when I signed up, I got immediate access to a regularly updated document library, plus four free CPD certified training modules. Whether you work from home like me, or on a construction site, or in hospitality, there's guidance written for your sector. Visit get.fsb.org uknudge or click the link in the show notes to sign up and use code nudge to get 10% off your membership. Hello, welcome back. You're listening to Nigel with me, Phil Agnew. We've heard how a vinegary beer can be preferred if it's labelled MIT brew. We know that higher priced wine is enjoyed more. Sunglasses seem better quality if we think they're Ray Bans. Tea helps us concentrate more if we think it's tailors of Harrogate over Tesco Own brand. But the expectation effect goes beyond consumer preferences. It can change our health too.
- [20:07]
B
Yeah, so there's like quite a lot of research showing that the placebo effect can be quite powerful in Parkinson's in particular. So Parkinson's is caused when the brain cells that produce neurotransmitter dopamine, they start dying off in the brain. Dopamine's hugely important for neural transmission in general, for pleasure, for reward, but also for helping to coordinate our movements, which is why people with Parkinson's develop tremors. Now, there have been whole host of research showing that actually often when you switch someone's Parkinson's drugs to a placebo, so to a dummy pill, they often continue to experience the same benefits for a while, even though they're not receiving a pill that will help ease the release of dopamine. And the strange thing is, when you scan their brains, you can see that even when they're taking that dummy pill, their brains are actually still releasing more dopamine than they would without the dummy pill.
- [21:02]
A
I've cited two papers in the show notes that cover this one from 2010 and another from 2018. Both show that a placebo treatment can improve the symptoms of Parkinson's patients by around 20 to 30%.
- [21:14]
B
You know, it's really remarkable. And another sign that, you know, something more mysterious is going on with the placebo effect than just people kind of imagining that they're feeling better. You know, it's actually changing something in their brain's chemistry.
- [21:26]
A
David describes this nicely in his book. He calls it our inner pharmacy. He writes, it seems that the brain has its own inner pharmacy, allowing it to create its own medications like opioid painkillers on demand. This inner pharmacy can do many things, including making a painkiller more effective.
- [21:44]
B
But what the researchers had found is that if you change people's expectations of the effectiveness of the pills that they are taking, that can also change the benefits that they're receiving. So if you tell them that they're taking a cheaper drug, a generic drug, rather than one that's been patented and comes from a recognised company, you know, all of those things can shape the physiological benefit of the pill they're taking. And we've also seen this in painkillers, for example. So telling someone that they're taking Nurofen, which has very powerful marketing, I think bright colors, very evocative messaging, telling you how powerful that pill is, if you take that, you will experience greater pain relief than if you take a generic kind of Tesco owned brand painkiller. Again, because of the associations you have with the different types of branding.
- [22:35]
A
This 2016 study involved 87 undergraduate students with frequent headaches. They were given painkillers labeled as either Nurofen, which is a very premium brand here in the uk, or just generic ibuprofen. So a no brand label. Not only did the branded label drugs deliver more pain relief, they also caused fewer side effects. So a high profile brand can make a drug more effective. But be aware, because small changes to a Drug can, can make it seem far less effective.
- [23:05]
B
Again, this was this case where like the drug, I think they'd changed where it was being manufactured and none of the active ingredients had been altered. But I think there was something about the kind of vector that they were using, you know, the kind of binding for the tablet that had slightly changed in shade.
- [23:23]
A
This was in 2007. GSK had decided to move the tablet's production to a new factory, which meant they had to change the tablet's formulation, resulting in a slightly altered colour from yellow to white. The active ingredient was still the same. The pharmaceutical company had altered the binding ingredients that bulk up the pills and extensive testing revealed that the drug was absorbed and metabolised in the exact same way. Patients should have been able to carry on with their treatment without even noticing
- [23:52]
B
the difference, but it shouldn't have had any effect on the biological action of the drug, which I think was to treat some kind of thyroid issue. But whereas the previous iteration of the drug had been, the previous form of the drug had been very well tolerated by patients with very few side effects. Suddenly patients started calling in with these terrible experiences of side effects which had increased by a factor of about a thousand, I believe, straight before and straight after you could measure how many complaints were coming into the pharmaceutical company. And yeah, it was a huge increase in magnitude by an order of three. And you know, there was no good biological biochemical explanation for this, but it just seemed like the change in appearance of the pill had undermined people's faith in what they were receiving. It felt like they were being given a new drug that wasn't familiar, that didn't feel safe and so that was causing these nocebo effects that I described earlier. So it was planting the anxiety and expectation of illness which was then causing them to develop these symptoms.
- [24:59]
A
David writes that reports of totally new side effects, including headaches, rashes, itchy eyes, blurred vision and nausea began to roll in once they changed the color of the pills. Concerns soon reached local media which jumped on the story. Within 18 months they had 1,400 new reports of side effects, a roughly 2,000 fold increase on the previous rate at one report every couple of years.
- [25:24]
B
Now it was kind of self limiting because after so many months, you know, I think people started to feel more familiar with the pillar gain. The reports went down. But I think that, you know, really shows how even small, very small changes to a product's marketing can have a really big impact on the consumer experience.
- [25:44]
A
The takeaway today is simple and yet vitally important. The way you describe a product changes the actual experience of that product. Ray Bans made participants work 40% faster. Tea from a prestigious brand decreased errors in a cognitive task by six times. Space food is preferred to freeze dried food. MSG labeled as delicious is loved but hated if it's called boiled vegetable water. And when people knew that MIT Brew contained balsamic vinegar before tasting it, 70% rejected it. It when told after most liked it just as much. Balsamic beer will not make beer better, but the way you describe your beer certainly will. All right, that's all for today folks. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Nudge, but David and I were not done there. He went on to explain how expectations affect hunger, how they influence product decisions, and he shared one of my absolute favourite studies from his book.
- [26:45]
B
You know, the way you describe it as either Parmesan or vomit will completely change what they're perceiving.
- [26:52]
A
That is in today's bonus episode of Nudge. To listen to the bonus episode for free, all you have to do is click the first link in the show notes of today's episode. You enter your email address and you will be taken straight to that bonus episode. You can listen to it right now. It is produced just like a normal episode. It's fully cited and I think it's pretty good. So please do go and listen to the bonus episode. Just click the link in the show notes and you can listen to it after this. If you are already a Nudge newsletter subscriber, then I have already sent you the link to the bonus episode in today's email. Now I can't praise David enough. His book is fantastic. You should definitely read it. You will find a link to the book in the show notes, but if you don't fancy reading his book, there are other ways to connect with him.
- [27:30]
B
Follow me on Instagram davidarobson or go to my website davidrobson Me where you can find my portfolio updates on my books under my substack, which is 60 seconds psychology, which is kind of on hiatus but I'm hoping to start it again soon. So yeah, you know I love hearing from listeners from readers. So please do get in touch.
- [27:52]
A
You'll find a link to David's book in the show notes and you will also find a link to today's bonus episode. So please do go and click on that if you want to hear more from David. That is all from me. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.