Behavioral Insights Audit

Our behavioral insight audits take scientifically-backed research on how people process information, think about their social worlds, and make decisions, and apply these insights to traditional organizational and business problems. These insights can be thought of as gentle “nudges” that subtly shape attitudes and behavior. 

Most recently, behavioral insights teams have been gaining worldwide press with the “Nudge” Group (formerly) of the UK government and the Social-Behavioral Science Team (SBST) of the US government. In the marketplace and non-profits, behavioral economics (BE) has had many successful applications to date.

Examples 

• Actually reducing the number of choices — to prevent choice “overload” — has been shown to increase the sales of jams by approximately 300% (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000).
• Telling people about positive, pro-social things that others have done (as opposed to asking them to stop doing a certain negative thing) can produce a fourfold increase in the number of people being more pro-social — in this case, not stealing artifact wood from a historic, national park (Cialdini, 2004).
• Showing people smiling or frowning faces — a small emotional trigger — on their electricity bills results in about 25% more conservation of resources (Schultz et al., 2007).
• BE has also shown potential by leveraging people’s desire to feel “consistent” and not skip out of public commitments. For example, asking individuals to first do a small favor (display a small public safety sign in their windows) can increase the rate that they do a large favor (display a big, wooden public safety sign in their front yards) from 17% to 76% (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).
• Exchanging similarity-identifying information before a negotiation can boost the successful outcome rate from 50% to 90%, with an average 18% increase in perceived final value across parties.
• Asking people to make a concrete, solidified plan as to when and where they would plan to get a vaccine has been shown to increase the percent of people following up on plans to receive their vaccines from 3% to 28% (Leventhal, Singer, & Jones, 1968).  A similar technique of “planned motivation” was famously used by Barack Obama in the 2008 election to significantly increase voter turnout.

And the list goes on. Keep in mind that behavioral insights aren’t magic, and we can’t guarantee these kinds of results all the time. But we can guarantee that a comprehensive audit may turn up surprising and useful ways to tweak how your organization deals with clients and consumers for big results — all using methods that are scientifically backed, yet almost never used in classical organizational settings.