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- [00:10]
Phil Agnew
The Simpsons episode is called Itchy and Scratchy and Marge. It is a classic Simpsons episode from season two, filled with slapstick humor, dry jokes, and smart gags. And yet, behind all the humor, there really is an important lesson about leadership.
- [00:26]
Michael Hallsworth
My name is Michael Hallsworth. I'm the chief behavioural scientist at the Behavioral Insights Team.
- [00:30]
Phil Agnew
That's my guest on today's episode of Nudge. And together, Michael and I will share what Marge Simpson can genuinely teach you about leadership. I know it sounds cliche, I know this sounds a bit silly, but I guarantee you it's a good listen. All of that coming up now. Chances are you're listening to this ad while doing something else. Maybe a couple of other things, maybe three other things. Unfortunately, this is the bane of podcasters like me. We have to repeat points because many listeners don't pay full attention when they're listening. There's a bit of evidence that suggests people only pay attention to 70% of what you say, but that is just us podcasters. Now, imagine only listening to 20%. Now, that would be ridiculous. And yet most businesses do exactly this with their data. They miss 80%. The emails, the calls, the chats, all of these data points just float into the digital abyss. HubSpot has, however, pulls that data together so you can actually learn from it. It helps you see the data you miss, because the more you know, the more you grow. Get the full picture@HubSpot.com.
- [01:44]
Michael Hallsworth
So what this story is all about is inconsistency. So in the Simpsons, people who watches the show may remember this episode. It's the one where Marge gets worried about the amount of violence in the cartoon Itchy and Scratchy.
- [01:59]
Marge Simpson
Where would an innocent child get the idea to attack her father with a mallet?
- [02:06]
Michael Hallsworth
And she's kind of got a point.
- [02:12]
Marge Simpson
No Maggie. Bad baby.
- [02:15]
Michael Hallsworth
So television's responsible because, you know, a typical episode of that cartoon will be the mouse. Itchy often ends up kind of decapitating the cat Scratchy. So this is a. Like a metaphor for violence on TV as an issue.
- [02:35]
Phil Agnew
What are you doing?
- [02:35]
Marge Simpson
I'm cataloging the violence in these cartoons as homage forms.
- [02:40]
Michael Hallsworth
This kind of protest group.
- [02:41]
Marge Simpson
I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a letter which.
- [02:45]
Michael Hallsworth
Pickets the studios, forces the producers to cut the violence from the show.
- [02:49]
Marge Simpson
And what happens when a child grows up with insanely violent role models like these? The answer is all around you.
- [03:03]
Michael Hallsworth
But then an exhibition of Michelangelo's David statue comes to Springfield.
- [03:09]
Art Exhibition Announcer
This will be the art event of the century. The greatest masterpiece of Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo's David. And a cost to coast tour United States.
- [03:19]
Marge Simpson
Sir, which cities will be included in your itinerary?
- [03:22]
Art Exhibition Announcer
New York, Springfield, and if we have time, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles.
- [03:27]
Michael Hallsworth
And so this protest group that Marge has created want her to call for the exhibition to be banned because they think that, you know, it's got male nudity in it, and that's offensive.
- [03:37]
Marge Simpson
Get dressed, Marge. You've got to lead our protest against this abomination. But that's Michelangelo's David. It's a masterpiece. It's filth.
- [03:46]
Michael Hallsworth
So Marge thinks the statue is a masterpiece and refuses to ban it.
- [03:50]
Marge Simpson
But I like that statue. I told you she was soft on full frontal nudity.
- [03:55]
Michael Hallsworth
She goes on local TV and she is grilled on this. And she admits that, you know, her position is hypocritical.
- [04:01]
Protest Group Member
Why are you against this statue?
- [04:03]
Marge Simpson
I'm not. I think everyone in Springfield should see it. Hold it, hold it, hold it.
- [04:06]
Protest Group Member 2
How can you be for one form of freedom of expression, like our big naked friend over there, and be against another form like Itchy and Scratchy?
- [04:15]
Michael Hallsworth
So she wanted to ban one form of creative expression but celebrate another. So she was for Michael Andrew's David but against Itchy and Scratchy. The thing is, Marge actually isn't against violence in one creative setting, but for another. So Michelangelo's David is not very violent. Right. Her point was, like, Itchy and Scratchy is really violent, and that might be a bad thing. So it's not the case that she's supporting some kind of violent, classic work of art being shown? And there are some. Hieronymus Bosch has a famous painting which is full of violence. That would be much more inconsistent. She's against violence in one setting, but kind of condones the nudity in another.
- [05:01]
Protest Group Member 2
Well, what do you have to say to all those Maud Simpson wannabes out there who wish to suppress David's doodle?
- [05:07]
Marge Simpson
Hmm, I don't know. I guess one person can make a difference, but most of the time they probably shouldn't.
- [05:13]
Protest Group Member
Well, I guess that settles that. I'd like to alert our affiliates that we will be ending our show early tonight. Join us tomorrow when our topic will be religion, which is the one true faith.
- [05:24]
Phil Agnew
What this Simpsons episode shows is that inconsistency encourages people to call out hypocrisy. The more inconsistent you are, the angrier people will get. And for a leader, you should avoid inconsistency or you risk your subordinates to turning against you. A 2017 study looked at just this. I've shared the study before on the show, but I think it's worth re sharing because it so clearly shows why people hate inconsistent leaders.
- [05:49]
Michael Hallsworth
So in this study, they give the example of someone called Becky who downloads music illegally.
- [05:54]
Phil Agnew
Specifically, the researchers told participants about this situation. Becky is talking on the phone to her friend Amanda. They're discussing another friend who Amanda mentions often downloads music illegally. So Becky and Amanda are chatting. They reference another friend. Amanda says that friend downloads music illegally. Now, the participants are told to imagine the situation ends in one of the following three ways. Number one, shortly after the conversation, Becky goes online and downloads music illegally. Number two, Becky says that she thinks it is morally wrong to download music illegally from the Internet. And then, shortly after their conversation, Becky goes online and downloads music illegally. And then there's option three. Becky says that she thinks it's morally wrong to illegally download music, but that sometimes she does it anyway. Shortly after their conversation, Becky goes online and downloads music illegally. The researchers then asked all of the participants to judge Becky. Do you think she's a good person or a bad person? Depending on the action she took.
- [06:57]
Michael Hallsworth
They find that if Becky first condemns illegal downloading as morally wrong and then does it, people judge her really harshly. You know, that's classic kind of hypocrisy, giving a false signal. You're signaling that you're the kind of person who wouldn't do this, but actually you do it.
- [07:14]
Phil Agnew
Becky is downloading illegal music in every scenario. Her behaviour is bad in every version, but people judge her very differently, not based on her behaviour, but on her inconsistency. Participants only got angry with Becky for downloading music illegally if she'd previously said it was morally wrong.
- [07:33]
Michael Hallsworth
These are the kind of distinctions that really dial up or dial down perceptions of hypocrisy in our mind. And it's not a minor thing. There are often big arguments about the degree to which you're inconsistent. Like people said that Marge was inconsistent about creative expression. But equally you can argue back and say, well, actually I'm not inconsistent because I'm pro that kind of creative expression, but against this one. And that's basically a dynamic you see all the time in politics. People do this all the time. You might zoom out and say that a politician who argues against gambling was actually really arguing about the need for self control. And so when he's exposed as abusing prescription drugs, that's hypocrisy.
- [08:17]
Phil Agnew
A recent example of this in the UK would be the stamp duty scandal with the then Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner. Three years ago, Rayner said this about the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
- [08:29]
Michael Hallsworth
No, I don't want Boris Johnson to stay in post because, as you know, many of the public see politicians in general as untrustworthy.
- [08:37]
Phil Agnew
She referred to Johnson as untrustworthy, but then it came out that she was potentially untrustworthy herself, underpaying her tax on her second home.
- [08:45]
Michael Hallsworth
Angela Rayner has resigned as Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary.
- [08:51]
Phil Agnew
These two things aren't entirely linked. Rayner was calling Johnson untrustworthy for the Partygate scandal, not for avoiding tax. But that didn't stop people labelling Rayner as a hypocrite.
- [09:02]
Marge Simpson
I feel like Angela Rayner is a massive hypocrite.
- [09:04]
Phil Agnew
The public will always try to find inconsistencies with what a politician says and how they act. And leaders who have those inconsistencies will almost always face scandal.
- [09:16]
Michael Hallsworth
Or you could say, like, yes, I want more funding for schools but not for fire brigades. And that's not hypocritical because they're two different things. Whereas someone else who's criticizing you says you're a hypocrite on public spending, for example. That back and forth of arguing about the degree to which you're inconsistent and framing things differently is kind of a core dynamic in our everyday lives.
- [09:41]
Phil Agnew
But here's the interesting thing about these inconsistencies. We are far more likely to see inconsistencies in other people's behavior than in our own behaviour. And Michael's got an example to prove it.
- [09:53]
Michael Hallsworth
So phubbing is the idea of phone snubbing, the idea that you're snubbing someone in a social situation by looking at your phone instead. And it's a great example of everyday kind of double standards hypocrisy. Double standards hypocrisy involves a difference in our judgments of our own actions versus others. And social psychology has known this for a while as the actor observer bias. When we see someone else looking at their phone and they're ignoring us, we think it's rude and it can damage our relationship with them. But when we're the ones looking at our phones, we often justify it in our minds with kind of good intentions.
- [10:32]
Phil Agnew
People do this all the time. When we, for example, cut in the queue at the supermarket self checkout, that's because we're in a genuine rush. We say, well, we have to skip the queue because we're late picking up the kids from school. Totally understandable. But if someone else cuts in front of us, we don't even consider what Acceptable reasons there might be as to why they need to cut in line at the queue. No, we lament them immediately as rude, as selfish, as totally inconsiderate.
- [10:59]
Michael Hallsworth
So study found people tend to think their own phone use is for positive social reasons, like you're contributing to the conversation, you're looking up something that then you can use to provide to people or that there's a reason for it, that you just have to do something right now and it would be rude not to respond to somebody. We also think we're good at multitasking and being able to keep the connection with somebody else while still looking at our phones. But actually the study shows that we judge other people's phone use as just rude.
- [11:30]
Phil Agnew
The study actually found that Fubbing happens in 62% of conversations observed in a restaurant. An average of three times a conversation. That was a lot more than I would have expected. 62% of conversations at a restaurant involve people looking at the phone. Now when the other person used their phone, the person who was sitting with that person thought the conversation was far less intimate. However, people also thought that this wouldn't happen when they themselves used their phone. So we lament others for thubbing, but not ourselves. We think if we do it well, there's a good reason for it.
- [12:02]
Michael Hallsworth
The reasons for this are that we have access to all these reasons, all these internal justifications about what we're doing. We know our good intentions maybe and we want to tell ourselves about them. But for others we kind of just see the behaviour and then we attribute that to their kind of character. We're less forgiving generally about others intentions than our own.
- [12:23]
Phil Agnew
There's a name for this inconsistency.
- [12:26]
Michael Hallsworth
This is related to the idea of the bias blind spot, which is our tendency to think that other people are biased, but we're not. We have a hard time seeing our own double standards because we're so focused on our good intentions, like I just mentioned. And that means that it can be actually be hard to do something about them.
- [12:45]
Phil Agnew
1 20, 23 Study by Thomas and Reinman showcases this.
- [12:49]
Michael Hallsworth
So there's a pretty interesting study about recruitment that was done in Switzerland. You know, recruiters were told about common hiring biases like the halo effect. And that's where you let one positive trait of a candidate, like a good first impression, outshine all of their flaws. You fix on that and you interpret everything in that, in the positive light. So if you tell experienced recruiters about halo effect, they agree that their colleagues probably do that they're probably susceptible to the biases but themselves. No, we don't really do that. We're too good at recruiting to do that kind of thing. Of course, the study showed that they were just as biased as everyone else in their actual recruitment.
- [13:32]
Phil Agnew
This experiment was run on 234hr employees and it showed that the average HR employee had this bias blind spot.
- [13:40]
Michael Hallsworth
So you get to this weird position where not only do we have double standards in terms of how we act, we actually even have double standards for perceiving double standards.
- [13:51]
Phil Agnew
We hate inconsistency. When we see a leader perform actions that are inconsistent with their beliefs, we get mad. It doesn't matter whether it's Angela Rayner or Marge Simpson. Being inconsistent with your beliefs and actions will make others perceive you as a hypocrite. But individuals often don't see their own inconsistent behaviour. We see our own behavior as justified. We check our phones during a conversation, not because we're rude, but because we really need to. This bias blind spot makes us more inconsistent. However, good leaders, they avoid this inconsistency. They stay consistent and they become more popular because of it. And if you want someone else to stay consistent, if you want to persuade someone to be more consistent, there's a really interesting thought experiment used. You can run on them. And Michael will share exactly what that is after this quick break. The podcast My First Million is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. And it's the podcast I'd recommend today. My First Million explains how successful entrepreneurs made their first million and how you can apply their learnings to capitalize on today's business trends and opportunities. There are many fantastic episodes, but the one I really enjoyed was with Will Ghidara. Gidara's book is one of my favourite books. It explains how Will applied behavioural science to create a three star Michelin restaurant. It's a fantastic book and it really made for a fantastic episode. So if you want something to listen to after this, go and listen to My First Million wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So how do you stop someone acting hypocritically? It's a very hard question. I wondered whether it was even possible, but Michael assured me it is and he has a study to prove it.
- [15:40]
Michael Hallsworth
And one thing that can be done is this technique of induced hypocrisy. It's been around for a while now and it's kind of a technique to change behavior by pointing out hypocrisy. In a productive way. So it makes people aware of a conflict between their stated beliefs and their past actions. And that creates this kind of unpleasant feeling called cognitive dissonance, which we are motivated to get rid of. And what induced hypocrisy does, if it works well, is it helps us get rid of that tension by changing our behavior to bring our behavior in line with our stated beliefs.
- [16:22]
Phil Agnew
Michael had a 2010 study which showed that induced hypocrisy can help reduce cyberbullying.
- [16:28]
Michael Hallsworth
So this study on cyberbullying, the idea is that people were shown this online campaign against cyberbullying which explained its harmful consequences, and then they were asked to actively engage in that campaign by leaving kind words for the victims which would be used in the campaign video. So that first bit is all about trying to get people to publicly advocate for a cause. The second part was, which was crucial, was that half of participants were then shown a screen which made them mindful of their own past behavior. They were asked questions like whether they had tried to help people being bullied online or if they just stood by and let it happen.
- [17:08]
Phil Agnew
Participants were asked to leave kind messages for victims of cyberbullying. And then some of the participants were asked if they had ever intervened when they saw cyberbullying taking place. So did people call it out or did they just stand by?
- [17:22]
Michael Hallsworth
And for the people who sort of said that they'd stood by, this would have triggered some conflict between the principle they just supported and their own standing by their own inaction. And so the people who saw this hypocrisy generating screen were more likely to say they support the campaign and also more likely to donate money to it.
- [17:45]
Phil Agnew
So simply being reminded of their own hypocrisy, not calling out cyberbullying when they last saw it, well, simply being reminded of that changed their behaviour. It made participants donate more to cyberbullying charities.
- [17:58]
Michael Hallsworth
The follow up study they did showed that this change happens because confronting the hypocrisy made people feel guilty about this gap, which then motivated them to act.
- [18:09]
Phil Agnew
So if you want to change someone's hypocritical behaviour, you should remind them of the times where their actions had been inconsistent with their beliefs.
- [18:17]
Michael Hallsworth
And the key thing seems to be to point out the contradiction in a private and non judgmental space to get people to reflect on that and give them this space to change as well. And if you do that, it's much more likely to succeed. And it's been shown to work in a whole range of different behaviors. But the sad thing is that quite often in many debates in public life, it's the exact opposite of the conditions to help people change. In fact, you've got situation where it's public, there are costs to the exposure of that inconsistency feels like a gotcha. And so the obvious thing to do then is just defend, deny and don't change your behaviour.
- [19:01]
Phil Agnew
There is one simple leadership lesson to take away from this. Inconsistencies between what you say, you believe and how you act will make people very angry. This inconsistency is what leads to hypocrisy. And hypocrites rarely survive in leadership positions. From politicians to business leaders to Marge Simpson, those who appear inconsistent are almost always attacked. So if you lead a team, an activist group or an organisation, just make sure that you practice what you preach. That is all we have time for today, folks. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you enjoyed today's episode, I think you will really enjoy Michael's book the Hypocrisy Trap. We've only covered a very small section of that book, a very small example he gave about Marge Simpson in the book, but he goes into much more detail in the book about how actually labeling someone as a hypocrite can be a trap. How our natural tendency is to lower the status of other people by calling them hypocrites and that causes this wider damage to society. It's a really interesting read. It gets into much more detail than we had today. So I suggest you go and pick up a copy of that. If you enjoyed today's episode, you'll probably also like the first episode Michael appeared on. That episode we did on the Partygate scandal. So just search for Nudge and Partygate to find that episode. It also talks about hypocrisy, but in a slightly different way. So go back and listen to that and if you want more from Nudge, then please do go and check out my newsletter. Each week I spend 18 hours finding the best behavioral science studies I can get my hands on. And then I translate those sort of dense studies into easy to read newsletters. I've covered very simple tips to improve your pricing, advice to make any website sales page you're creating more effective, and then even more general tips to do things like sticking with your diet or staying consistent with exercise. The newsletter is and will always be completely free. And you can read all of my old newsletters newsletters on my website. So to sign up, just go to nudgepodcast.com and click newsletter in the menu that is nudgepodcast.com and click Newsletter in the menu and you'll also find the link in the show notes as well. That's all from me, folks. I've been your host, Phil Agnew, and I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge Cheers.