2015 SXSWi — Daniel Pink on Driving Behavioral Change
Fear, Shame, Empathy & More Ways to Change Behavior by Daniel Pink
This is a quick recap of a great talk Daniel Pink gave at the 2015 SXSW Interactive Festival. His talk was based around using fear, shame, empathy (and more) to change user behavior. This is just a recap, so the ideas expressed below were taken from his talk.
Here are the 7 methods he described:
1. Use Fear the Right Way
Fear… a tried and true tactic for driving change in both the office and our personal lives, right? While fear is a powerful motivator for tasks that require a narrow focus, such as meeting a sales quota, it’s counter-productive when it comes to tasks that require expansive thinking, such as creative work. Negative emotions (like fear), narrow focus. A person trapped in a burning building will have a singular focus on escape. Positive emotions, on the other hand, have an expansive effect on focus.
In short, fear can motivate when it comes to right-brain tasks, but will hinder left-brain activities. To create more expansive behavior, use positive emotions (such as those created by incentives and rewards) to drive change.
2. Using Questions to Persuade
Most people use active statements when they are trying to convince people to change; But a passive question can sometimes have a much more powerful effect on behavior. Take 1:36 and watch the following video from Daniel Pink on using questions to force people to convince themselves to change:
If you’d like some more information on using questions to drive change, take 4:16 and watch:
3. Enlist the Crowd
Another powerful tactic to drive change is to take advantage of the herd mentality. Give people a sense of “this is how we do thing around here” or, better yet, “this is how everyone does things around here”. Most people will conform to the social pressure they put on themselves when they feel they are acting outside of the norm.
Pink cited the “Towel Study”(Dan and Chip Heath also referenced this study to support herd mentality in their book Switch) where a study measured the impacts of various messages in getting hotel visitors to reuse their bath towels. The control was the common placard you’ve seen in most hotel rooms asking you to reuse your towels to help the environment. What this study found was that changing this message to simply read, “The majority of guests at the hotel reuse their towels at least once during their stay.” increased towel reuse by 26 percent. What’s more, adding the room number to this (“The majority of guests in room xyz…”) increased towel reuse even more. The greater the affinity for the herd, the greater the force this internal social pressure exerts for change.
4. Take the Time to Rhyme
The harder your brain has to work to process a message, the less impactful the message. Techniques such as rhyming and alliteration increase your brain’s “processing fluency” of a message and make it easier to digest.
Pink breaks down the power of rhyming in this 1:32 video:
5. Give People an Off-Ramp
Yes, the talk was on changing behavior, but it’s less important to change people’s minds than it is to give people an easy way to act.
The US government spent a billion dollars on attempting to get people to save for retirement with little success yet, but driving that level of behavioral change is very difficult. The greatest impact to retirement savings in the US has come from a simple automatically opted-in checkbox that requires employees to opt-out of their 401k plans at work. Make it as easy as possible for the person to take the action you want.
6. Put a Face on It
Literally. Put a face to your problem to make people see who they are changing for. Do NOT be abstract. Make it personal if you want to affect people’s behavior.
Pink breaks it down in this 1:57 video:
7. Try Stuff
We live in the age of A/B Testing. Try things. Not everything will work out, but that’s ok. Just make sure you make small, quick tests and iterate on your results.
There you have it, a recap of 7 powerful methods to drive behavioral change using fear, shame, empathy and more as expressed by Daniel Pink.
