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- [00:00]
Toby Park
So, for instance, we've done some work promoting sustainable diets and found that simply changing the names of the dishes can have large effects. So calling a vegetarian breakfast field grown rather than meat free roughly doubled the number of people who said they would choose it from the menu.
- [00:14]
Phil Agnew
A field grown breakfast is picked twice as often as the same breakfast labelled as meat free. But why? Well, that's what today's guest on Nudge is here to explain.
- [00:26]
Toby Park
My name is Toby Park. I'm the Director of Climate, energy and Sustainability at the Behavioural Insights Team, AKA the original Nudge unit, created in the Prime Minister's office in the uk, but now we operate as a global social purpose consultancy.
- [00:39]
Phil Agnew
Toby spent over a decade at the Behavioral Insights team working on sustainability and today on Nudge, he'll share the dozens of ways psychology has been used to nudge citizens to be more sustainable, including one project that made Americans four times more likely to. All of that coming up, the world famous blogging site Tumblr had a problem. To succeed in marketing, they needed to move quickly. They needed to create content that was trending. But their marketing team was stuck waiting for engineers to build out every email campaign. That was until they switched to HubSpot's customer platform to send trending content to millions instantly. Rather than waiting for the engineers, they could use HubSpot to send all their email comms as efficiently and as effectively as possible. And the result? Well, they have tripled their engagement while doubling the output they produce. If you want to move faster like Tumblr, then head to HubSpot.com Toby park has spent his career helping organizations and public bodies create programs, tactics and strategies that encourage people to pick the sustainable option. But why? Why do we need to be more sustainable? I've sometimes thought that the changes I make aren't important. Isn't it down to big corporations and government bodies to tackle climate change? Well, no.
- [02:06]
Toby Park
62% of the emissions cuts we need to hit net zero depend directly on changes in the public's behaviour.
- [02:14]
Phil Agnew
That's data from the UK's Climate Change Committee.
- [02:17]
Toby Park
The lion's share of that, about 53%, comes from technology adoption behaviours. So we need households to adopt heat pumps and move away. Fossil fuel boilers, for instance. We need people to get out of petrol and diesel cars and start adopting electric cars, smarter home energy systems, smart meters and so on. Solar smart batteries, that kind of thing.
- [02:37]
Phil Agnew
To reach net zero, the public needs to be persuaded to make technological changes, moving away from unsustainable energy sources to sustainable ones. But that's not all.
- [02:47]
Toby Park
The other 9% is what we would think of as more sort of lifestyle changes or habit change. So that includes, for instance, eating a bit less meat and dairy, engaging more in sort circular economy practices, reusing, recycling and so on. A little bit less flying, a little bit less driving in general in favour of active and public travel.
- [03:06]
Phil Agnew
But what about the remaining 38%, the changes that are out of the public's.
- [03:11]
Toby Park
Control and actually the other 38% of decarbonisation, so called supply side stuff? It's still not free from this challenge of behavior and psychology because of course it still depends, you know, whether you're talking about increasing capacity from offshore wind and onshore wind, solar farms, nuclear and so on, changes to industry. It still depends on public acceptance and support, advocacy, getting the politics right, developing enough support for big public investment and so on. So really the whole picture is absolutely behavioral. It's very much enmeshed in the entire challenge.
- [03:43]
Phil Agnew
Toby sees net zero as not purely an engineering or economic challenge. He sees it as a behavioral challenge. To reach net zero we need to change the behavior of billions of people. And to do that effectively and cheaply, he uses human psychology.
- [04:00]
Toby Park
Here's why we have a whole series of sort of cognitive quirks, biases. We're very much habitual creatures, very much sort of influenced and constrained by our social environment. We find that small aspects of the choice environment, such as small points of friction or hassle, can often be disproportionately impactful.
- [04:18]
Phil Agnew
We're habitual, we're influenced by those around us, we are susceptible to multiple biases. So I asked Toby for a concrete example of how he's changed the public's behaviour using behavioural science.
- [04:32]
Toby Park
So we did some work in the city of Portland in the us who were aiming to promote a new cycleshare scheme. And working with our partners there, they developed an incentive leaflet basically that they were using for marketing material.
- [04:46]
Phil Agnew
The leaflet sent out was short. It said Biketown. That was the name of the cycle share scheme. Haven't met Biketown yet. Take a spin on us. And at the bottom of the leaflet there was a discount code which was available for all residents to use.
- [05:02]
Toby Park
We ran a fairly simple study where we tested the impact of that leaflet campaign on people who already lived in the area and compared them against people who just moved to the area. And what we found was that the new movers were roughly four times as likely to trial the scheme in response to the campaign as the existing residents. So, you know, 400% effect size more or less. That's obviously huge additional bang for Buck. The intervention is the same. All we're changing is just the time at which we're delivering it.
- [05:29]
Phil Agnew
Residents were four times more likely to trial the bike scheme if they received the message right after they'd moved to Portland. This is because behaviour is far easy to change before habits form. Richard Shotton and Laura Weston proved this in a 2018 study cited in the Choice Factory. Shotton and Weston surveyed 2,370 customers and they asked firstly, had they recently experienced a life event, a life event change, and then secondly, whether they had changed brands in 10 popular but specified categories. The results were conclusive. In every single category, consumers were more likely to switch brands when they had recently undergone a life event. On average, just 8% of consumers switched brands in those categories when they hadn't undergone a life event. That rose to 21% of consumers for those who had undergone a major life eventually.
- [06:27]
Toby Park
And this sort of timely moments concept is a concept that you can apply to all manner of interventions, really. There will be moments in people's lives when habits are disrupted where they will be more receptive to changing their behavior.
- [06:38]
Phil Agnew
Another life moment that can alter habits is a birthday, specifically a nine ending birthday. Researchers Adam Alter and Hal Hirschfeld found that when someone's age ends in nine, they're more likely to reappraise their lives. Adam and Hal analysed the data from 42,000 respondents to the World Values Survey and found that nine enders were more likely to question the meaningfulness of their lives. Shotten writes how this life event can be used to change behaviour. Data from the sports website athlinx.com showed that nine enders were 48% more likely to enter marathons for the first time than any other age group struggling running. Events that are looking for more participants should target nine enders. They'll be far more likely to sign up.
- [07:28]
Toby Park
That's a nice example of timely moments. It's obviously not just when people move home, when people move jobs, that's a really important one. Different behaviors might have different timely moments. So let's imagine you want to encourage people to shift towards more sustainable diets. Perhaps when somebody has a baby and they are under new constraints in the kitchen and they're looking for new recipes, perhaps when somebody goes to university and they're cooking and grocery shopping for themselves for the first time ever, perhaps. And that's a nice moment to instil good habits, etc. So, yeah, think about those moments when habits are disrupted. It can be a really powerful way of getting more bang for buck with your interventions or your communications.
- [08:06]
Phil Agnew
One 1994 study cited in Katie Milkman's book How to Change found that 36% of successful life changes, like career shifts or starting new diets or they occurred after moving home, compared to just 13% of successful changes for people who hadn't moved home. It really does seem like targeting life changes can be an incredibly effective way to create a new habit. But why do Portland residents need persuading? The vast majority of us know about the problems with climate change. We know we need to act more sustainably. Do we really need nudges to persuade us? Well, Toby thinks we do. Because there's a difference between understanding sustainability and, and behaving sustainably.
- [08:52]
Toby Park
People are actually mostly up for it. So in the UK, we see that over 8 in 10 do care deeply about the climate. They want to live more sustainable lives and support strong leadership on climate. And actually, UN data shows that's a fairly universal case around the world. The lowest levels of support we see are in the US and Russia, but it's still about 65, 66% who want their governments to take stronger action on climate. And across Europe, it's like in the 80s. Across many African and Pacific island nations, it's well into the 90s. But of course, there's a big difference between caring about climate and being willing specifically to adopt a range of behaviours that incur significant personal cost, hassle, inconvenience, perhaps some confusion and so on.
- [09:31]
Phil Agnew
And sometimes even when people have the motivation to change their behaviour, they don't pick the correct behaviour to change.
- [09:38]
Toby Park
Turning off lights is an action that's quite salient. It's sort of noticeable, you know, if your kids leave the lights on around the house and so on. It's something we're aware of turning. But with modern LED technology, it's, you know, I'm not saying it's not useful as a green choice in the home, but it's certainly not the biggest impact thing we can do. Whereas other actions, like, for instance, optimizing the flow temperature of your boiler will save far more energy, but it's a bit more techy, a bit more niche. People don't really know what that's about.
- [10:05]
Phil Agnew
This isn't hearsay. Toby ran a 2021 study which shows that we often overestimate how climate friendly some of our lifestyle changes are.
- [10:14]
Toby Park
And we actually found a negative correlation between perceived impact and real impact of those actions, which is to say that people's Knowledge was worse than random guessing. There are still some pretty persistent misperceptions out there. And as you say, the example with lighting is a good one. We also find that for instance, when it comes to sustainable diets, people's attention is mainly focused on plastic packaging and food miles. Again, important, but not as important as the main issue which people tend to under recognize. Which is, well, fundamentally, what are you choosing to eat? Is it beef? Is it lentils, is it chicken? Is it potatoes? Which all have radically different carbon footprints, often one or two orders of magnitude difference between substitutable ingredients.
- [10:56]
Phil Agnew
And yet to change behaviours around diet, for example, you don't need to make lengthy logical pleas about carbon emissions, sustainable sources and methane. No, sometimes you just need to tweak the language you use.
- [11:11]
Toby Park
Language, as you say, can do a lot. Language can evoke different values that may resonate more or less. For example, there's a famous case study of anti littering campaigns in Texas based on the slogan don't mess with Texas which has been credited as very successful in large part because it didn't rely on the sort of lefty green environmental messages, but on this image of state pride, toughness, civic respect and so on. Language can also infer a lot about the choice you're trying to encourage. So for instance, we've done some work promoting sustainable diets and found that simply changing the names of the dishes can have large effects. So calling a vegetarian breakfast field grown rather than meat free roughly doubled the number of people who said they would choose it from the menu.
- [11:54]
Phil Agnew
This 2018 study was conducted with 727 Brits who already ate meat. Reframing the meat free breakfast to field grown Breakfast made diners 200% more likely to pick the plant based option. Similarly, renaming meat free sausage and mash as field grown sausage and mash made it twice as popular as well. The paper went on to find that a veggie burger will be more popular if it's called a loaded burger. And gnocchi is 31% more popular if it's renamed as melt in the mouth gnocchi.
- [12:29]
Toby Park
I think what's particularly interesting about that, you know, not just the size of the effect, but the term meat free is kind of very lossy in its framing, right? We know people are loss averse. We're sensitive to things we will lose out on or miss more than than we are positively affected by things we gain. And to say something is meat free, you're just highlighting what is missing, not highlighting anything that's positive about the meal. So that's not a good term.
- [12:54]
Phil Agnew
And the same is true for healthy foods. A 2018 study which renamed carrots with sugar free citrus dressing to Twisted Citrus Glazed carrots found that the sales for the carrots increased dramatically when they made that claim. Removing the sugar free claim and instead saying Twisted Citrus Glazed. That made it more popular. The words were pick will drastically alter behavior, even making some people purchase more expensive but more sustainable appliances for their kitchens.
- [13:27]
Toby Park
This example comes from our work on energy efficiency. So what we did, we ran an online experiment with several thousand people where we simply asked them to make a choice between a couple of appliances, sort of option A and an option B at two different price. Fridge freezers, light bulbs, space heaters and induction hobs. The only difference was that we tweaked the label design. Some people saw the conventional A to G energy efficiency label.
- [13:51]
Phil Agnew
This is the color coded label. You'll be very familiar with this if you're in the uk. You'll see it on all appliances where products are ranked from A which is in bright green, right down to E which is in bright red for their energy rating.
- [14:05]
Toby Park
Some people saw that same label, but with a addition of a lifetime running costs in pounds. So rather than just making the judgment based on the kilowatt hour figure, which is what's on the normal label, the you're making that judgment based on a figure of running costs in pounds.
- [14:18]
Phil Agnew
The previous labels had the total price and the kilowatts per hour. The new label replaced kilowatts per hour with the total lifetime running cost, which of course made the more expensive yet more sustainable appliance appear to be cheaper overall.
- [14:34]
Toby Park
And we found that by introducing that additional pound information across all of the appliance types that we tested this on, the people who saw that label were significantly more likely to choose the more efficient good when presented with that choice. And I should say that more efficient good came at a price penalty, like it was more expensive upfront to choose the efficient one. But of course it saves money over time. And having that additional information on the label conveyed the fact that it saved money over time. That created sort of motivating factor there. For fridge freezers, we found about 48% of people selected the more efficient product with the standard label and that jumped up to 58%. With light bulbs it went from 63 to 77%, space eaters from 56 to 63% and induction halves from 59 to 65%. And that was all statistically significant.
- [15:20]
Phil Agnew
Calling a meat free sausage field grown doubles its popularity. Calling veggie gnocchi melt in the mouth increases sales, adding the lifetime cost to a fridge makes buyers more likely to pick the sustainable option, and contacting Americans after a house move made them four times as likely to take up cycling. Sustainable behaviours don't have to be the result of long, logical, rational arguments. Instead, smart labelling and targeting can be far more effective. And nothing tends to be more effective at changing behaviour than the principle. Toby shares after this quick break. Content Is Profit, hosted by Louise Anfonsi, is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the home of business shows that don't ramble on and give you insights as quickly as possible. Content Is Profit is one of those real practices, practical listens. You'll get tips on selling things that actually work. You'll hear frameworks, tactics, and you'll learn from guests who have done it all before. I would suggest if you want to get started, listen to the how to get your first 500 email subscribers. That's a great example of how wonderful this show is. A good mix of insights and ideas. So go and listen to Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. Timely moments and reframing appear to be two very, very effective ways to encourage sustainable behaviours, but Toby reckons there's a third principle that's even more it's social norms.
- [16:50]
Toby Park
We've done quite a lot with social norms. I think the use of social norms and social norm messaging is probably one of the most well evidenced sort of nudge communications techniques we have in the toolbox. And I guess it taps into the fact that, you know, we are deeply social creatures. We like to belong, we like to fit in, we like to be liked to be approved of, and so on. Just in case anyone's not aware in terms of what social norms are, social norms are simply the informal rules, expectations or accepted behaviors of a society or group, and they influence us in a number of different ways. So one of those ways is what we call social proof. So if the majority of people are making a particular choice, for example, choosing to buy an electric car rather than a petrol or diesel car, we will infer valuable information from that observation. So we're more likely to think, oh, okay, I guess electric cars must be getting good, or maybe they're less expensive than I remember them, or maybe I should be doing a bit more for the environment as well because everyone else is. So, you know, it's a bit like when you're buying something on Amazon. If you've got two kind of substitutable or seemingly identical options, let's say they're both rated 4.5 stars, but one of them has 11 reviews and the other's got 11,000 reviews, you're going to go for the latter. Right. There's a degree of safety and reassurance and information value within the fact that lots of other people have made this choice.
- [18:04]
Phil Agnew
There is a lot of evidence for this. In fact, one 2021 study found that simply listing the amount of sales next to a product on an E commerce website. So, for example, going on the site and seeing a little line which says something like, five people have already bought this brand of trainer. Well, adding a line like that made people in this study 58% more likely to buy.
- [18:26]
Toby Park
But of course, that all depends on us realising and noticing that lots of other people are making, in this case, the green choice. So the electric car example is an interesting one because actually the green number plates that we now have in the UK on electric cars, so that was one of our suggestions and proposals to Department of Transport several years ago. And obviously the idea there is that it just makes the existence of these electric cars a bit more noticeable and salient to other drivers to sort of increase the social norming effect there. It was also designed originally, by the way, to be a bit of an incentive, because the idea was that local authorities and so on could use it as a very easy way to manage things like free parking for electric cars and so on. But we haven't seen quite as much of that, perhaps, as we might have hoped.
- [19:03]
Phil Agnew
There's no study I could find which proved the green number plates definitely worked. However, it follows a rather famous marketing case study, which is Apple's white ipod headphones. Apple famously made their ipod headphones white, which was the total opposite from the industry norm. Most other MP3s, in fact, probably all other MP3s that were popular at the time had black headphones. By visually looking distinct, Apple made their ipod appear far more popular than it actually was. People would see dozens of others wearing black headphones and not really notice it because it wasn't distinct. However, as soon as they saw someone wearing white headphones which were visibly distinct from the norm, it would stick in their mind and it would make the ipod seem far more widespread and popular than it probably ever was.
- [19:51]
Toby Park
So, anyway, social norms have been used in a variety of contexts. We know that solar panels, for instance, are literally contagious, and that if you live on a street where More houses around, you have solar panels and they're visible, you're more likely to get them yourselves. Lots of organizations, including bit, have used social norms in letters and bills and things. If on your energy bill you show people how much energy they're using relative to their neighbours and you show that they're using more than their neighbours and people shift towards that norm that's been tested many times and seems to fairly reliably achieve sort of two and a half to three and a half percent reductions in energy consumption, which is not to be sniffed at, given that the intervention is essentially costless. And we can also deliver them in lots of different ways. So you can simply say something like 9 out of 10 people are paying their tax on time. And as we found, if you send that to late taxpayers, then you can bring forward hundreds of millions of pounds into the treasury. But even if that's not the case, so you can't say that you can leverage the sort of bandwagon effect or what we call dynamic norms, so you can say things like more and more people are doing X or Y.
- [20:57]
Phil Agnew
A 2017 study by Sparkman and Walton showcases this very nicely. 322 customers were waiting in line at a cafe in Stanford's campus and and they took part in this study. All were shown one of two messages. One message said, Recent research has shown that 30% of Americans make an effort to limit their meat consumption. The other message shown to the other half of the diners, said recent research has shown that over the last five years, 30% of Americans have started to make an effort to limit their meat consumption. The second message suggested the bandwagon effect. It suggested that more people than before had begun to eat meat free. Now, only 20% of those who saw that first message went on to actually order a meat free lunch, while 34%, so a 14 point difference. 34% of those who saw the dynamic social norm message went on to eat a meat free lunch. Even if the option you want to promote isn't popular, isn't the most popular choice, you can still persuade people with dynamic social norms, but you can also.
- [22:03]
Toby Park
Show it, you know, giving out badges that say I voted for example, or introducing, as our colleagues in Nesta are doing, show home networks for heat pumps so that people can go and look at one and it's more sort of apparent people in your neighbourhood are getting them. And in a sense that can be a sort of a double nudge, you know, if you can really show the behavior in the real world because the person who has done it benefits by getting the kudos, whereas those who haven't done it get the observation of others doing it and therefore start to perceive that it's more normal. So yeah, social norms really powerful and very versatile.
- [22:37]
Phil Agnew
I know I harp on about it on this podcast, but it's all too easy to assume that we can change behavior through logic and reason. We assume that persuasion is simply the case of making a better argument. If Toby's examples have taught us anything, it's that the illogical ideas work just as well. Rename your meat free bangers as field grown, tell households they use more energy than their neighbours, send cycling coupon codes to new movers, and make electric car number plates green. None of these implementations mention the perils of climate change, the carbon removed from the environment, or the contributions to net zero. No, they ignore that stuff entirely because often to persuade someone to make a change we don't need to be rational. And more often than not, the irrational ideas work just as well. Now, Toby and I didn't finish there. In fact, we went on to record a very special bonus episode for my Nudge newsletter subscribers. In the bonus episode you'll hear Toby share this interesting idea to encourage Brits to recycle glass bottles A lot of.
- [23:44]
Toby Park
Governments are thinking about deposit return schemes for things like plastic bottles and drinks cans and so on. The normal way of doing that would be you pay, say 10 pence deposit when you get a drink and then you get that 10 pence back when you dispose of the bottle back at a recycling centre. But I'd be interested to test a version where it's a lottery. So you pay your 10 pence when you get a plastic bottle with a drink. When you return that bottle, you don't get your 10 pence back. What you get is entered into a lottery where there's say, a one in a million chance of winning £100,000. So it's still costless. There's no net cost cost in that policy. But of course now that bottle is essentially a lottery ticket. And my argument would be that who would throw a lottery ticket in the bin?
- [24:23]
Phil Agnew
Listen to the bonus episode and you'll hear more about Toby's interesting bottle lottery. I really liked that idea. Plus we'll talk about why handwritten notes work so well, a smart challenge that really dramatically reduced the UK's carbon footprint, and why the 10p charge on plastic bags was so effective. To listen, all you need to do is click the link in the show notes, enter your email address and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode. So scroll find the link in the show notes, click on that, enter your email and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode. If you are already a Nudge newsletter subscriber, then thank you. You already have access to that episode. All you have to do is open the email I sent you this morning announcing this episode and you will find the link straight to the bonus episode in the email. Thank you to Toby for coming on. His work at the Behavioural Insights team is absolutely fascinating. If you've enjoyed today's show, you'll love the report he wrote on Net zero. It has fascinating ways you can apply behavioural science to tackle probably the biggest challenge we're facing as a society at the moment. I've left a link to that report in the show notes, so please do go and check it out. That is all for me today. I do hope you'll go and listen to that bonus episode, mainly because I talk about one of my favourite LinkedIn posts of the year in that bonus episode. Anyway, that is all from me. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Goodbye.