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- [00:00]
A
So the theory of the broken windows
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theory is very appealing. So it was introduced in the eighties in New York City. The mayor at the time cracked down on, like, visible signs of disorder.
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C
Here's the former mayor of New York defending this theory.
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D
Was this concept of the broken windows theory that it's not just, you know, the rapes, the muggings, the gun crimes, but the smallest infraction must. Must be dealt with because you send a message, correct, Mayor?
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E
It's a theory that was developed by a Harvard professor, James Q. Wilson. And it's a brilliant theory. And I saw it work for about 10 years in small cities. And when I became mayor, there was a big question even for me and for Professor Wilson, would it work in a big city?
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B
Crime dropped. The idea became that, like, okay, well, these, these visible signs of disorder invite more serious crimes by signaling that, like, no one's in charge or that people don't care about this space.
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C
The logic is simple. A broken window, if left unfixed, signals that a building is abandoned or unmonitored. This encourages vandals to break more windows. Over time, the building deteriorates, residents feel unsafe, they withdraw from public spaces, and serious crime moves in. Small disorders, if unchecked, cascade into larger ones. Or do they?
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B
But then researchers at the University of Chicago studied this in much more depth and talking to over 9,000 residents across 300 neighborhoods.
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And what they found was that, yes,
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dilapidated areas generally did have more crime,
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A
but crime was also lower in places that looked run down, but also had
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neighbors who collaborated to care for the shared spaces.
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C
Yes, places with broken windows did have more crime, but then again, places that fixed their broken windows still had just as much crime.
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B
What really mattered wasn't the clean streets and fixed windows. It was kind of the community's sense of shared ownership over a space, or what the researchers termed collective efficacy.
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And this is pretty useful because it
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can be reverse engineered, right? When people feel invested in a space, they're going to treat it better. And one way to feel this collective efficacy is to. To work together to make a space better.
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C
The broken windows theory is highly controversial, and many studies have shown that fixing broken windows alone is not enough to alter behavior. But that doesn't mean that the environment around you won't change your behavior. It can. Environment can change behavior. The places we inhabit do change how we act. And today on Nudge with Professor Lydie Kloltz will share how when someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI Suggest you. Well, most companies have no idea and by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot A E O helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot A E O is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for for growing businesses. Hello and welcome. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agne. And I'm delighted to be joined today by the award winning professor and acclaimed author Lydie Kloltz.
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B
My official job is as a professor in this department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. My last book was Subtract. It was about how we systematically overlook the option of taking things away when we're trying to make things better. Now my new book is called In a Good Place and the subtitle kind of describes it, which is how the spaces where we live, work and play
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A
can help us thrive.
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C
So let's get into it. Can our environment change our behavior? Can the way your office is set up change how good you are at your job? Well, Lidi thinks it can, and here's why.
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B
The best understanding or framework science has for understanding human motivation is self determination theory. And this is a theory that's been evolved over time. You know, tons of studies, across cultures, across different contexts. And the core psychological needs that we have are agency, competence and connection.
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A
And so agency is basically like feeling
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like you have control over the situation.
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The more agency and control we have, the happier we are.
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Now we can think about how do
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you get agency or control in a lot of different ways. I try to give my students agency in saying, hey, you can choose what assignment you're going to do within reason. But the original way that we had agency was having control over our environment.
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C
For thousands of years, humans have customized the environment they live in. The Mesopotamians irrigated deserts to grow crops. The Dutch built dikes to drain the wetlands. The Romans built aqueducts and roads. And on an individual level, we have always wanted to customize where we live.
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Agency is the difference between a dorm
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room and a jail cell in many ways, right? I mean, a dorm room is this place where you feel this freedom in general because it's more freedom than you've had in the past. And you can do what you want more than you've been able to do in the past.
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Whereas it's basically the same setup as
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a Jail cell in terms of the amount of space and of course the jail cell you're not allowed to leave. Right. And so the difference there is that you have control over your environment and your role in it.
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Like if there's something that makes us
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feel good mentally, there has to be a reason why, right? And if you think back to, okay, when we're roaming around as hunter gatherers or we don't have permanent shelter, right. The our ancestors that were drawn to try to control their environment, right. To try to change the situation around them to make, make it better, make it more likely that they were sheltered from the elements, make it more likely that they were sheltered from, from predators. That was a very helpful kind of psychological pull.
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C
Agency is the difference between a dorm room and a jail cell. I love this analogy, but I needed some evidence, so I asked Leidy for some studies that prove his points.
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When people study workplaces and they'll study self determination theory in the office environment, for example, and looking at agency competence and connection and one of the in, in big kind of meta analysis research looking at these relationships, they find that people who, people who don't have agency and people who can't, like personalize their workspace, for example, like that correlates with not being satisfied with the job, right. And being less productive in the job.
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C
In his book, Leidy cites this year 2000 study involving 338 employees at 20 different companies. The researcher Meredith Wells found that employees who personal their spaces report a higher job satisfaction and improved well being. These benefits are strongest amongst those who have meaningful control. So meaningful control over their environment, it's not just you can put up a few photos, but it's the permission you have to paint a wall behind you or to replace a carpet or to rearrange the furniture however you might like, or maybe even just buying the desk you want.
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And another kind of really striking example
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of this is a single study, but of residents of nursing homes. And the residents who were able to personalize and customize their living space were more likely to be alive 18 months later than those who weren't, insignificantly more likely.
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C
These studies run by Langer and Rodin back in the 1970s found that giving nursing home residents more agency over their living space helped those residents become more active, more more alert and happier and half as likely to be dead 18 months later. This same principle explains why psychologists treating depression may recommend yard work or closet organizing, not because tidiness matters, but because making chores about their environment can help people regain a measure of control. And begin to feel like themselves again. Now I should mention that there has been a few criticisms of the Langer studies in the nursing home, especially claims on reducing mortality. There were only 91 participants in this study and they were essentially just comparing the seven deaths in the agency group with the 13 deaths in the control group. That is a very small sample size to draw a lofty conclusion like agency halves the amount of deaths, for example. But put that to one side because it is still clear that agency is important. And also in that Langer study, the findings on being more active, being more alert and being happier, they've sort of held up over time. And I think there are numerous other studies that showcase how agency can make people happier. There are studies that show that agency can make people happier. People value lottery tickets more, make them more likely to pay tax, and they can even make customers more likely to visit a restaurant. This is one I've shared before. I love this study. It's one of my favorite examples about the importance of agency and it's cited in the brilliant book Pre Suasion by Robert cialdini. On page 206 of the book, he writes how a group of Americans were shown a description of the business plan for a new fast casual restaurant, Splash. Now, Splash hoped to stand out from its competitors through its healthy menu. After reading the description of the store, all participants were asked for feedback. However, the researchers tweaked the words they used in the ask. Some were asked for their expectations about the restaurant, others were asked for their opinions about the restaurant, and the final group was asked for advice for the restaurant. Now, finally, all participants indicated how likely they would be to visit a Splash restaurant. Those participants who provided advice reported wanting to eat at the restaurant significantly more than other participants who provided either of the other sorts of feedback. If you give advice, you feel more involved in the restaurant's setup. You feel like you have control over what the restaurant might be like and that control that agency, it makes you more likely to visit. Lidi wasn't done there. He went on to explain why places we love seem less wonderful over time, how to make a new home feel like home, and where you should go if you plan to conduct a negotiation. Oh, and he even explains why you're more likely to buy solar panels for your house if your neighbour does so too. All of that coming up. The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today after listening to today's episode of Nudge is Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clow, and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q and A sessions with successful business leaders in marketing, sales, and it covers everything from big businesses to startups and entrepreneurship. So go and listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. A HMRC investigation can happen to any business, even if your books are spotless. I found that out when I started researching the Federation of Small Businesses, which is one of the reasons why I joined their membership, because it includes tax investing, litigation, insurance of up to £100,000 per claim as standard. You also get a team of tax experts in your corner and unlimited tax advice for as long as your investigation runs, even if that's months or years. It's one of those things you hope you will never need, but you'll be glad it's there. Visit get.fsb.org uknudge or click the link in the show notes and use code nudge to get 10% off your membership. Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Now, I was fortunate enough to live in London for five years. It was over Covid. It was from 2019 to 2024 and I lived in Battersea, which was really close. It's really close to the centre of the city. So I could cycle to work. And on this cycle I'd pass Big Ben, the Shard, St. Paul's Cathedral. On my runs, I could head to Buckingham palace if I wanted. I could walk to the Royal Albert Hall. And when I first moved to London, I. I loved seeing these sights. I could not believe I was cycling under Big Ben. I really had to pinch myself every time I commuted to work. But after five years, that feeling started to wane. After time, I just wasn't as interested in my surroundings anymore. I still liked it, but the novelty had worn off. And Lydie knows why.
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B
Eric Kandahl, he won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating this at the cellular level in sea slugs. So repeated stimuli literally weaken the synaptic connection between neurons. So with the sea slug, he was kind of tapping the gill cover. And the more times you did that, the less it would kind of respond to the repeated taps because there was a threat and then nothing happened.
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And the same thing happens to us.
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B
You know, we're moving through our world. Once you realize that the. The stairs or the wall isn't kind of a threat or an opportunity, we tune it out so that we can focus on other things. Things. This has been studied in humans too. There's a classic study of asking people who work in offices where the closest fire extinguisher is, and nobody has any idea. And I'm sitting here in my office, I have no idea either. And I've told this story like five times and written about it, and it's
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just like, and this is literally some.
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A fire extinguisher.
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I mean, they're red, they're life saving,
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they're designed to be noticeable, they're really important, and yet we habituate and don't even think about them.
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C
That Kendall study is from the 1970s. The researchers involved found that when a sea slug is touched, its gill cover reflectively releases to protect the delicate gill beneath. But if you repeatedly touch the poor sea slug, that response gets weaker and weaker until the slug barely reacts at all. Repeat, Touching changes the structure of the connections between the slug's neurons and it reduces the response. In other words, it becomes habituated to the feeling and it doesn't bother acting. This affects humans as well. The more we see a place, the more we habituate to it, just like me in London. But this isn't always a bad thing. In fact, there's evidence that becoming familiar with a place, a person, a brand, will make us like that thing more. This is known as the mere exposure effect.
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I mean, mere exposure is familiarity breeds liking. The study I talk about in the
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book is the chicks that haven't hatched
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out of their eggs yet are listening to music or, you know, music's being played.
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And then after the chicks hatch, the
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ones that have heard the music when
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they were in the eggs, they're put
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in a pen and there's music playing from one side of it, the pen, the, the ones that have heard it kind of migrate towards the speaker. And the ones that haven't go the other direction.
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Hearing a piece of music, seeing a piece of art, eating a piece of food up to 10 or 20 times will make us like that thing more. Obviously, if you have it a hundred times, 500 times, you'll start to habituate. But if it's new, that mere exposure at the start could be really important. And Lydie has a tip for holiday goers based on this principle.
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If you want to like the place
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more, you can just increase the familiarity. Right. So I talk about when I go on vacation, I always go for a run at the beginning and that's like a really fast way to make me,
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you know, get endorphins going, but also
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just go out and see what this environment is like. And then I start to notice the things that I like about it. And I focus on them and I'm more comfortable for the rest of the time there.
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Brands use this effect all the time. Subway, the fast food sandwich joint, I shouldn't have to explain it, you'll all know what Subway is. But anyway, Subway, they always keep their ovens in the front of the store, so you can always smell that very familiar smell of fresh bread being baked in Subway. And the stores, they smell identical around the world. Whether you're in Bolton or Boston, you will smell the same scent and that scent increases liking. British pubs, they do the same most pubs. You go into a British pub, they will follow a conventional design. You will see dark wood patterns, panelling, low ceilings, soft amber lighting, snug corners and alcoves. You'll often see fireplaces, stained glass windows and beer mats. And this similarity, it makes us more comfortable and makes us like the pub more, makes us more likely to stay and drink more. On the other end of the scale, you've got upmarket coffee shops and they do the same with exposed brick, handwritten chalk, menus, the sound of grinding coffee beans. And my favourite is baristas with tattoos and beanies. You go into a coffee store with a barista with a tattoo and hat on, you'll like that store more. When designing a store, all brands use familiarity to increase liking.
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I think it's the reason why every hotel tries to be the same, right? Because like, if you check into a Marriott in Abu Dhabi, they want you to feel like you're at home.
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Being at home has other benefits too. In 2011, the researchers Brown and Bear invited participants to a study on home advantage.
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The researchers sitting around thinking up, this study is so brilliant because, like, the
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basic idea was, okay, we want to
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study home field advantage in negotiation and how can we, how can we do that in like a controlled experiment? And they were like, oh, well, we just have people. One group comes to this, the room that the thing is going to happen in, and they hang out there for 20 minutes while the other group is waiting somewhere else.
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And then that group comes in and
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they do the negotiation. And they were doing negotiations for, I think like a massive amount of coffee.
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Lydie writes how the researchers turned one group of participants into residents by taking them to a private office and giving them 20 minutes alone with multiple, multiple tasks to complete. So they had 20 minutes in the office to start to feel at home. They made the other group feel like visitors by taking them to a different side room before then escorting them to the resident's office, where they then negotiated the contract for five tons of coffee.
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And what they found was that the people who had sat in the room
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for 20 minutes achieved better outcomes in this negotiation. Right.
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And the only difference was, was that 20 minutes.
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And so they just felt more at
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home in the space, and it led
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them to be more assertive in advancing their own interests.
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This suggests that those who were made to feel at home based on just 20 minutes of familiarity advocated for their position more confidently, more assertively, and ultimately more effectively than those who are made to feel like visitors. We see the exact same thing in sports. Home teams will win far more of their games. And interestingly, according to a 2002 study that I've shared on the show before, referees in football matches are more likely to give preferential treatment to the home team. What I didn't know, however, was that during COVID they repeated this study and they found that that preferential treatment for the home team disappeared because the crowds weren't there. The home team didn't get preferential treatment when there weren't the home crowds, which show just how influential the crowd can be. Other people don't just influence sporting outcomes, they can change your buying decisions too.
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So the solar panel study is just
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like suburbs of Connecticut in the United States.
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And they found that people who could
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see solar panels from their house were more likely to have solar panels on their own house. And they controlled for everything else and
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found that like really the only thing
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that was making the difference was that people saw that their neighbors had this. Right? And so we know about social norms and their power. This is why you get a sticker when you vote, because this is an invisible action that people want to see
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evidence of without the sticker.
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Right. The solar panel is its own evidence of this behavior that somebody undertook, and then it is going to spread.
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The study found that people who could see panels on someone else's roof were more likely to install them on their own home. Even after the researchers accounted for factors like income and political views, visibility alone was enough to spread the behavior.
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Right.
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And if you're like, if you're installing solar panels to try to make the
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world a better place than try to make them visible too. Right? Because not only are you going to get the, the, the free electricity, you're going to convince your neighbors. You're more likely to convince your neighbors to do the same thing.
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C
The broken windows theory, it's really overblown. Repairing broken windows won't turn a crime ridden neighborhood into a safe haven. But that does not mean that our environment won't shape Our behavior studies show that giving people agency over their environment increases job satisfaction, increases happiness, and perhaps even longevity. The more familiar we are with a place, the more we like it, which is why Subway smells the same around the world. And the home advantage is measurable. Whether you're in negotiations, sports or consumer behavior, being in familiar territory changes how you behave. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Nudge, folks. And thank you so much to Lidi for joining me on the show. If you've liked today's episode, you will love his latest book, In a Good Place. It's well worth a read. Really, really interesting. Some fascinating studies in there, so do go and pick it up. I've left a link to it in the show notes and I want to say thank you again to the brilliant Federation of Small Businesses for supporting today's episode. As I mentioned in the ad in the middle of the show, I am a member of the Federation of Small Businesses. I signed up with my own money before they sponsored the show and I do so because I run a small business that really benefits from their support. As a member, I get stuff like members only discounts, which have saved me hundreds of pounds on the subscriptions that I use. I'm in a community of 500,000 other businesses, so I can ask for advice and get really interesting advice on how to run my own business. But more importantly, and this is why I think everybody listening to this who runs their own small business should sign up. I get stuff like legal advice, £100,000 worth of COVID for things like tax, investigation, protection, and help with recovering debt from some of my clients who haven't paid invoices. As I have no employees, I pay just £195 per year and I've already made that back in the discounts that they offer. But if I have any legal problems, this subscription will be worth ten, even a hundred times more than that. So thank you again to the FSB for sponsoring the show. As a reminder, they have kindly agreed to give out a 10% discount to Nigel listeners. They really don't do discounts, so this is a genuinely good deal to get it, click the link in the show notes. Please do click that link because that's the one that links back to the show and use the code nudge at checkout. If you use the code nudge at checkout, you'll get that 10% discount. I don't think you'll regret it. Thanks again for listening. I'll be back on Nudge for another episode next Monday. Cheers.