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In 2009, two former Harvard University rowers started a new company. Their goal was to create software that would support users pursuit for adventure and an active life. They described their company, known as Strava, as a virtual locker room where athletes could go to share their workouts with friends. In reality, it was little different from the thousands of fitness planners and trackers that came out before. From the notepad and pen to the Japanese step counter. The only thing different about Strava was the social element. Don't keep your run private, share it with your friends. In 2012 and 2014, two different companies, Peloton, an at home stationary bike with virtual instructor led spin workouts, and Zwift, an indoor cycling program that allowed cyclists to ride virtually with friends. Now, the stationary cycle machine had been available in gyms since around the 1870s. There's even a patent for an indoor bike from 1796. Zwift and Peloton didn't invent a new piece of hardware, but like Strava, they added a new crucial element, a social network. Before, your workouts were personal and private. Now they could be shared, joined, liked, ranked. And that social element propelled these companies into success. During COVID they were worth over $50 billion. Today, it's around $5 billion. But their fluctuating valuations hides one remarkable insight, that sharing your workout changes your workout. Our brains act differently when we're seen by others. And in using apps like Strava, Zwift and Peloton, athletes push further and harder. Today on Nudge, with the brilliant Owens service, we'll explain how when someone asks AI for a solution, a product or 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 AEO 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 growing businesses. Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew and I'm delighted to be joined again on today's show by Owen Service.
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I'm Owen Service. I'm the CEO of a company called Cogco. We work with organizations who want to understand their customers, their employees. In a previous life, I was one of the co founders and the managing director of the Behavioural Insights team. The so called nudge unit. I'm an honorary professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick University. Before that, I was a Deputy Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.
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Over Owen's impressive career, he would have heard about one of the first experiments in the history of social psychology. Interestingly, this study from 1898 reveals why Zwift and Peloton became such runaway successes. Norman Triplett, an American psychologist and avid cyclist, noticed that cyclists racing against each other are often faster than those racing against the clock alone. Puzzled by his observation, he decided to test whether everyone is more motivated with other people around. He set up an experiment asking kids to turn a fishing reel as fast as possible. Some children wound the fishing line when standing alone and others wound in the line when another child was watching, waiting for their turn. Turns out most children worked faster in the presence of another person. Years later, this phenomenon was named social facilitation. It refers to our tendency to work harder when others are watching. Athletes perform better in front of an audience. Mental performance also improves while others are watching. You'll be faster to learn as well as generate more arguments in favor of your position when you're in front of an audience. And, and keep in mind that animals too respond favorably in the presence of an audience of the same species. Rats, for example, run amaze faster when another rat is watching behind a window. Social facilitation explains these fitness apps. They reveal how we act differently when we are being watched by others, something Owen knows all too well.
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I think it remains, despite the time that's passed, it remains one of the most powerful get out to vote initiatives that's being conducted.
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This study took place in 2006 with 180,000 households. The researchers had one goal, encouraging participants to get out and vote. And they had some interesting ideas to test.
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And you wouldn't be able to do it in the UK or in many other countries, but you can do it in the US because of the way in which data is collected and made public around voting behavior. So it's not about who you voted for, but whether you voted. So it's a matter of public record in the US or at least in many states, as to whether particular people have voted in a particular election. The study, I think it took place in primary election in the mid-2000s and the way that it worked was that as is often the case, there'll be a lot of organizations who are just trying to get people to engage in the electoral process. It was run as a very large scale randomized control trial. I think there were a couple of hundred thousand individuals that were, that were sent these mailings. Some people were urged to participate in the usual way, so, you know, it's your civic duty to vote. Some people, they were given the voting record of individuals within their household and they were told that those voting records would be updated once the election had taken place. So you were kind of told, you know, we know effectively like that you did or did not vote in the previous election and this is going to be updated next time. The third group were showing the same information about their household, but they were also told whether their neighbors voted as well. And they were told that that information would be updated and it was implied that their neighbours would also be receiving this information as well.
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Group one was sent a letter which said, do your civic Duty, vote. Group 2 received letters listing whether each person in their own household had voted in previous elections, with a warning that the list would be updated and sent out again after this election. The final group went even further. Their letters showed not just their own household's voting records, but their neighbors households too, and their neighbours would receive the same letter showing their own voting record. The question was this, if your neighbours knew whether or not you voted, would it make you more likely to vote?
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You were creating this kind of very like, socially focused device to encourage people to go and participate in the electoral process. The key bit of this campaign was all around the fact that the information that you were being provided with, you were told was going to be updated after the election. And so it wasn't just about having a civic duty to vote. It was being able to show that you were fulfilling that civic duty to other people that you might either care about or know that you're likely to come into contact with in the near future.
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In Think Small, Owen writes how these results uncovered one of the most effective ways any ever devised to get people out and vote. The researchers themselves described the results as startling. Sending someone a letter urging them to go out and do their civic duty did have a small positive effect, but this was very small by comparison with the dramatic increase caused by reminding households of their own voting records. In that group, turnout increased by 16%. But the biggest gain of all came when someone's voting record was set alongside their neighbors and and became visible to their neighbours. For this group, there was a remarkable increase in over 27% in voting, an increase that is almost unprecedented for any kind of campaign that doesn't evolve going around face to face and pulling people to the voting booths. Peer pressure can turn a neighbourhood of moderate constituents into a group of passionate voters. In fact, I'd seen this behaviour myself. As Owen says, Brits can't know whether neighbours have voted, but but in some places you can know what they recycle. I recently moved cities in the UK before in London, in Wandsworth, where I was based, all of my recycling was put into an opaque plastic bag. It was impossible to see what I or my neighbours recycled. But now in Bristol, my recycling is placed into a few open boxes. You can very easily peer inside to see what's in there. Now, I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I am confident that this open bin encourages me and my neighbors to recycle more diligently. We take more care to wash out plastic tubs, separate cardboard from paper, remove soft plastics. And of course that is partly because we care about recycling, but I think it's also because we don't want our neighbors to think we're bad recyclers.
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Does it also change what you're likely to put in your recycling as a result? You know the number of bottles?
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I'd like to say no, but I'm aware that peer press pressure does change our behavior. It makes us more likely to vote, it makes us more likely to exercise, and many go to crazy lengths to appear perfect in the eyes of others. I researched Strava for this episode and I discovered something hilarious, something I never knew about. In 2024, runners for hire made headlines in Singapore. They are nicknamed these Runners for Hire. They're nicknamed Strava Jockeys and for a fee they will log into a client's account and run on their behalf. They charge around 50 pence per kilomet and they essentially just made your fitness feed look more impressive than it really was. We are so desperate to look good in the eyes of others and peer pressure alone can be enough to dramatically change our behavior. It is interesting stuff, but Owen and I were not done there. Owen had some advice on overcoming procrastination.
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It's easier to achieve a goal when you have very clear boundaries.
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And he had an experiment conducted on a huge number of Brits and I
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think at the time it was like one of the largest trials that had ever been conducted. There were 1.1 million people.
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Hear all of that after the break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today after you listen to Nudge is Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings and is brought to you, of course, by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Listen and you will hear Sarah ask the Hard questions and uncover these triumphs, failures and lessons from the top business leaders. Also, you can make your own billion dollar moves in venture, business and life. It's a wonderful podcast, so go and listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil agnew. Back in 2017, when Owen and Rory wrote their book think small, around 1 million Brits joined the NHS Organ Donor registrar. This might seem like a lot of people, but despite the hu number of registrants each day, three people were dying in the UK because there were not enough organs available. It was this knowledge that led the National Health Service, the nhs, to get in touch with the Behavioral Insights team to see if they could come up with any ideas that might encourage people to join the organ Donor registrar.
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This was like a genuinely really interesting piece of work. It was led by colleague my Hugo Harper, who's now at at Nesta, continued to do like great work in the health space. And it was a program that we ran with the bit of the NHS that encourages people to join the Organ Donor Register. Now in, in that I should probably say in the. In the past 10 years a lot of changes have been made to the organ donation scheme, opt outs vs opt ins, et cetera, et cetera. But back then the way they worked is that you wouldn't be on the organ diner register if you hadn't signed up to join it. There were a few mechanisms that the government and the NHS used to encourage people to join and one of them was the vehicle licensing scheme. So when you got a new car or you needed to renew your driving license, you go on the DVLA website, you'd fill in all of your information and at the end of the process you'd be asked if you wanted to join the organ Donor register. And so the question was like, did that message, was it important? How that message was was framed.
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The idea was simple test eight different messages that would be shown to Brits once they'd renewed their vehicle tax.
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And so we ran a, a trial and I think at the time it was like one of the largest trials that had ever been conducted in terms of numbers of participants. There were 1.1 million people and as a result of that we could try loads and loads of different messages. And I remember that for many years after we ran this study, we would use it as an example of why it's worth running randomized controlled trials in public policy. Because often people, if you ask them, which they thought would be most Effective got it wrong. The first message just said, please join the organ donor register. And we had a series of different alternatives that looked at encouraging people to join as a result of the thousands of other people who join the register every day. And one of those messages had an image of a group of people, lots of different people, smiling. And underneath the messages that every day thousands of people join the organ donor register. And there was another message that said, if you needed an organ transplant, would you have one? If so, please help others. So it was much more based on this idea of reciprocity, which I know you talked about a lot in your podcast.
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First message says, if you need an organ transplant, would you have one? If so, please help others. Second message says, every day, thousands of people who see this page decide to register. Plus, on the side there's a picture of smiling people looking at the camera. One of these messages helped add 96,000 people to the organ donor register each year. Which one do you think it was? Pause now and actually think. Which you think would work.
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So we were like testing this range of different messages and what we found was that the social message, thousands of other people, social norms message, thousands of other people every day join the organ donor register. That works. But when it was combined with an image of lots of other people, it backfired. And what was interesting about it is that that was the message that if you ask people, which one of these do you think is most effective? That was the one that they would go for. It's the one with the image. Subsequently, we found that it was likely that people didn't necessarily, like, relate to that image, which was important because it was the kind of image the loss of NHS campaigns would use. The idea being that, you know, we're trying to make this more inclusive of lots of different types of people, but the individuals themselves weren't necessarily thinking like, this is somebody like me the one that works best, and when rolled out, would add about 100,000 people to the organ donor register every. Every year was a reciprocity message. So if you need an organ transplant, would you have one? If so, please help others. That idea of, if somebody is going to help me in this way, then I should feel obliged to help them was really, really powerful. Yeah, it was a good example of both the use of behavioral science in a large scale, sort of public setting, but also the importance of trying to understand, like, what works and why different interventions might work more or less face than others, especially when you're doing things at scale.
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If you need an organ transplant, would you have one. If so, please help others. That message could beat the social norms message. In fact, it beats all eight other messages. It's a good reminder that often the very best message won't be obvious. We have to test different approaches to see what works best. Okay, one final tip before we end today. I asked Owen to share an example from his book which encouraged people to stick to their goals.
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One example is that we are advocates of a term that we borrowed that that's those bright lines thinking. So this is this idea that it's easier to achieve a goal when you have very clear boundaries attached to them. So, for example, if you want to reduce the amount that you drink or eat, it's easier to do that by saying, I'm not going to eat two days a week than it is to say I'm going to eat this specific number of calories through the week. It reduces the cognitive demands and it makes these very clear lines that you can adhere to. And in a lot of areas of public life, we find that that sort of similar philosophy reigns true. So, for example, a lot of religious communities will not say you can only work a certain number of hours through the week. They will say, do not work on the Sabbath. And that's a much easier set of principles to adhere to than then counting the number of hours through the week.
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Peer pressure changes behaviour. It makes us more likely to exercise and push harder. When we do exercise, it encourages us to vote, stops us from littering and makes us recycle. Yet at the same time, we've learnt that messages around social norms might not be the most effective way to ask for organ donations. So I guess the takeaway is that behavioural science principles, they're better than the norm. They are better than just going with whatever your gut instinct would tell you. But finding the ultimately best solution is very hard. The world's chaotic and the best solution will be different depending on your goals. For donors, it seems like reciprocity works. For online exercise apps, it's social facilitation. Behavioral science seems to tell us what works, but only through experimentation will we learn what works best. If you've enjoyed today's episode with Owen, you'll love his book Think Small. It contains dozens of actionable tips you can use to nudge your own life. I loved reading this book. I found it especially useful while training for the London Marathon and I recommend it to you. You might also be interested in learning more about Owen's work at his company cogco. Here's what they do.
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The thing that I think might be most interesting to listeners at the moment is that we're doing a lot of work around developing new tools using the latest developments in AI, including new ways of running segmentations of your audience that allow you to build interactive profiles of your customers or your employees based on large data sets of quantitative and qualitative data. And we think this is like a really powerful way of being able to test ideas, test messages, before you start that process of rolling out. So if you're interested in any of that kind of stuff, drop me a line.
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To find out more about that, go to Cogco Co or click the link in the show Notes. We've covered a few behavioral science principles today, but I know that many of you will want to apply this to your job. Well, if that's the case, you can check out my app, the Nudge Vaults. The Nudge vaults contains over 515 different behavioral insights that you can apply to your business. Everything is cited, tagged and easy to search for, making it easy to take Owen's study on NHS donations and apply it to whatever you're working on. Plus, there is an AI powered chatbot to help. For instance, I can ask Vault GPT for the best tips for sticking to my goals. It will give me a number of tips. It tells me to use fresh start dates, breaking down goals into smaller chunks, that's chunking and stacking new behaviors onto existing ones. All of these tips are cited as well. To learn more about the Nudge Vaults, go to nudgepodcast.com and click Vaults in the menu. You can sign up and see your first 50 insights for free today. So go and have a look there. That is all from me folks. I will be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Thank you for listening.