A cutesy Scottish ditty and humour to help carry and spread a serious message - Test Your Poo. Feel’s like it’s inspired by the Metro campaign Dumb Ways to Die
Posts tagged behaviour change
Rituals bring comfort, even for non believers
Nice summary of this article which suggests rituals create comfort by delivering a sense of control, even if you don’t actually believe in the ritual.
“Mourning is left behind, thanks to the mourning itself’; the rituals of mourning in which our participants engaged hastened the decline of the feeling of mourning that accompanies loss.”
Mourning for love, or as tested in the experiment, lost winnings!
image via flickr
Some interesting blog posts over on the British Psychological Society Blog:
- Saying good stuff about a brand lingers longer than saying bad stuff – a pair of studies have shown that we remain impressed after reading early positive reviews on review sites, even if negative reviews come later. Firstly undergrads (the psychologists favourite participant…) were told positive facts about one fictional coffee brand and all negative facts about another, along the lines of: “the company has put green policies in place” and “the company has tried to cover up exploitation of its workers”. They were then told that fact sheets were wrongly labelled and that it actually applied to the other coffee brand…..the key finding here was that the impact of the early positive facts lingered, leading to enhanced ratings for the brand that was originally misdescribed in glowing terms. In contrast, the stain of negative facts wore off. Secondly undergrads read five Trip Advisor reviews for the hotel, either ordered so that they went from positive to negative, or from negative to positive. The participants showed more favour for the hotel when they read the more positive reviews first, again showing how the impact of early positive reviews appears to linger. Fancy psych word for all of this: asymmetrical affective perseverance
- How to kill an earworm - after listening to music, try to avoid mental tasks that are either too easy or too difficult. Any kind of activity that increases your mind-wandering will also provide fertile ground for an earworm to develop. So…if you want people to get your jingle stuck in their head, play it to them when they are half listening…?!
- Not particularly ground breaking but useful if you want to make the argument…Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation - as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising
(image via flickr)
Changing bad habits into good ones
Quick summary of this post
- Awareness: notice your habitual acts. Reduce variability to start getting control
- Triggers: find them, and then replace with new habits
- Context: change your context to make desired behaviour easier and undesired behaviour harder
- Don’t give up: changing habits can take an average of 66 days
‘Myths of decision making’
Anchoring is an important cognitive bias in decision making
Some useful reminders about decision making from @northresearch over on his blog:
- “Prices are determined by supply and demand” - however, willingness of what price to pay is heavily influenced by anchoring and can be fairly arbitrary
- “People are mainly influenced by brand or product before they take action” - which is key to the A.I.D.A model. However, decisions are highly influenced by emotions, social norms and ‘herding’ and purchases are often post rationalised. Purchase is rarely linear but a set of positive and negative influences that bring us closer or further away from choosing a particular product. [But, as a build on Neil’s point in his blog, it’s important to note that ‘brand’ can obviously appeal to these emotional and ‘herding’ drives]
- “People have clear preferences and know what they want” - but as Dan Ariely points out in Predictably Irrational, everything is relative. So asking about future purchase intentions can be tricky
- “Consumers like to act independently of each other and express individual preferences” - however, humans are super social and our behaviour is often unconsciously influenced by others, particularly in situations we are unsure about. [as a build, would suggest that there may be individual differences between groups of people and their willingness to be individual - although the Exactitudes project shows that even fasion individuality is a norm)
(image via flickr)
ColaLife: changing behaviour through design (and piggy backing on Coca Cola distribution network)
Love this behaviour change approach.
Getting diarrhoea medicine distributed through to remote parts of Zambia is difficult when the distribution networks just don’t exist. But ColaLife founder Simon Berry noticed that Coca Cola was one product that was available in most places. So they designed a clever packaging product which meant they could piggy back their medicine distribution on to Coca Cola crates.
The packaging itself is also carefully designed with the task in mind - smaller serving sizes and the pot itself serves as a measuring and drinking cup.
find out more here
via moo.com
Dumb ways to die
‘Cute’ train safety campaign from Metro Rail. I have to say, from my own experience a couple of weeks ago of rescuing my cat from the railway tracks (damn kitty) 90’s train safety ads very much came to mind! And despite the massive temptation to run across the tracks and rescue the wailing kitty I was surprised how strongly I remembered the ads. Anyone remember this? Also made me terrified of sticking my head out of train windows - Roald and Quentin certainly have a way with imagery!
via @Awalshy
Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going. Jim Ryun
