SXSW Interactive 2015 - Daniel Pink Fear, Shame, Empathy & More Ways to Change Behavior

Yeah, there's no— there's no intro, and there's actually no presentation either. So thanks for coming. It's been great. Please rate it highly in your scorebook. So here we are. It's great to be at South by Southwest. I was thinking back, my first time here was in 1999. 1998, and there were about this many people who were at South by Southwest. Not this many people in this room, but this many people. So it's amazing to see how this thing has grown. So here's what I want to do today. Just, I want to give you a warning here at the outset though, because I know when you come, especially in the last few years, when you come to South by Southwest, you're supposed to be, you know, bold and visionary and talk about, you know, world-changing ideas and the big picture and all that. So that's right, you know, Visionary, bold, big picture. I'm not going to do that. I'm instead going to be very small picture, very specific, very tactical, very practical. So, if that's not your cup of tea, or I guess in Austin, your cup of chai, you can go somewhere else. We're going to be very, very specific, tactical, and practical here. So, the presentation, as you see, is called Fear, Shame, Empathy, and Other Ways to Change Behavior. And what I want to do is I want to try to give you some suggestions of how to change other people's behavior. And what I'm hoping here is I'll offer a bunch of suggestions and you might be able to use one. But again, truly, this is not visionary, big picture, world-changing. I just want to say one more thing here. I will not use the word disrupt. I will not use the word disruption. I will not use the word disruptive or disruptor, and as God is my witness, I will not use the word disruptophorian, of which there are many in the hallways, as you might have noticed. So here's what I want to do. I want to talk about behavior change. I want to talk— and it's rooted in 2 things. The last 2 big projects that I've done have been a book called To Sell Is Human, It's about moving others. It looks at the social science of influence and persuasion. Then last year I worked on a television show, 12 episodes of a cool television show called Crowd Control on the National Geographic Channel. This is a show about behavioral science. You can still— it aired last year. It's on iTunes, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube. I hope it's on BitTorrent. And what we did on this show is we went out and did real experiments out there in the wild. We took problems that are out there in the world, things like people driving too fast, people parking in disabled parking spaces, people jaywalking, kids peeing in swimming pools, people double dipping guacamole, a whole range of different things.

Truly.

And then we applied some principles of behavioral science along with some cool design and technology, and we put the solutions in place to see what happened, to see what worked to change people's behavior. And I want to give you a taste of some of those. So it's a mix of experiments that It's a mix of what I and our amazing Crowd Control team have done out there in the wild, and it's a mix of what some social scientists have found out about how to use fear, shame, empathy to change people's behavior. And again, the goal here is really, I'm going to give you, we're going to go straight down and dirty here. I'm going to give you 7 ideas here, 7 ideas. They're not even like principles, they're tactics really. All right? So I'm going to give you 7 ideas here about behavior change. And what I'm hoping is that out of these 7, you'll be able to use one during your time here at South by Southwest, truly, and you'll be able to use another one when you go back to your offices. Okay? So that's the goal here. So let's start with number 1. What a novel idea, Daniel. Start with number 1. So let me ask a question. How many of you, how many of you pay attention to Airline safety announcements. Airline safety announcements, how many of you? OK. All right. Looks to me like less than half of you are paying attention to those airline safety announcements. People don't pay attention to them, and that can be actually a pretty significant problem if something goes awry. And so what we tried to do on the show is we tried an experiment where we went to a flight sim— got inside a totally cool flight simulator, a $19 million flight simulator, In Orlando, Florida. This is at a place called JetBlue University. Seriously, that's the name of it. My SAT scores were too low, but I got to visit anyway. JetBlue University, where they train flight attendants. And we went to a $19 million flight simulator, and we tried some experiments about how do you get people to pay attention to in-flight safety announcements. And what we did is we tried— we did 3 different experiments. So the first, what we did is we gave people, we brought people in, they thought they were there for flight attendant training. So we put them on, boarded the plane. It's amazing. It's actually amazing inside. It looks and feels and smells just like an airplane. It's really, it's really an extraordinary piece of equipment. We brought them in again. They think they're there for flight attendant training. We go up, da da da da, flight attendant announcements, blah blah blah blah blah, stow your bags, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Plane takes off, and all of a sudden there's an emergency. They don't know it's coming. The plane starts rocking and they start issuing the emergency instructions. Smoke starts billowing into the cabin. When I did this myself, it was actually quite terrifying. I mean, it really, really was. Second time, it's not terrifying. First time, it's pretty freaking scary. And so what we did is we said, what kind of flight instruction announcements are going to get people not only to pay attention, because that's just the first step, but to get people to act properly When an emergency happens. So we tried the standard announcements, the ones that you guys don't pay— I don't pay attention to either. Didn't do very well. We had a—

it was—

we crashed the plane. We read the instructions, crashed the plane, and people were doing a terrible job. They were not getting out properly. And we talked to the flight attendants there, and several people would have died if this was a real emergency. Not good. So we tried a second strategy. We did this. We said— the flight attendant said at the beginning, here are the flight safety instructions, but before we go forward, we want to give you an incentive to pay attention. So what we're going to do is we're going to read the flight safety instructions, then at the end of this training, we're going to give you a quiz. And anybody who gets all the answers right is going to be eligible for something like $250. So we're going to incentivize people to pay attention. We got a lot of people paying attention. And we also got a lot of right answers on the test subsequently. But when we crashed the plane, they only did a little bit better than that first instance because they were really focused on getting the money, not on actually figuring out how to get out of an airplane. Then we came up with our third experiment. And our third experiment worked Really well, and it yields a lesson for all of you, particularly those of you in organizations. Let me see. Here we go. This is the clumsy part where I try to run a video off my computer here. So, okay, here we go. So here's what we did in the next instance. Take a look. Please work. We've got a new group of volunteers who think they're here for crew training. Let's see if our shock tactics help them remember the safety announcement.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. If staying alive is important to you today, we ask you to please take a moment to listen to your safety information. It could be the difference between life and death.

To increase the fear factor, we've rewritten the in-flight safety announcement to highlight some shocking home truths.

By opting to ignore this announcement, in the unlikely event of a crash, you will have increased your chance of dying by over 40%. So we suggest you listen. In the unlikely event of an emergency landing, sitting in a seat not in the vertical and upright position could fatally injure either yourself or the passenger behind you, or it could block passengers from trying to evacuate the aircraft.

We've also replaced the standard in-flight safety pamphlet with our own specially designed Shock Tactics version.

Failure to adopt the correct brace position could result in a broken neck, broken legs, or any other broken body parts on impact.

Okay, so you got the idea there. So did— and also, any of you Fight Club fans out there? Yeah, okay, so you— most of you have no idea what we're talking about, but this is a— that was a little something for Fight Club fans right there. So did this work? It seems kind of preposterous. Did it work? Absolutely. People got out of the cabin in an emergency faster than any other trial that they've ever done. Because for a couple of reasons here, and here's the key point. All right. So when you're trying to change people's behavior, here's the key point for all of you here is use fear the right way. All right. There are 2 different almost ideologies about fear as a motivator, fear as a mechanism of behavior change. One of them says people are only motivated by fear. You got to scare them. That's the only way. And then there are other sort of namby-pamby view of no, people are more enlightened. They don't really respond to both of those are completely wrong. Here's the way to think about fear, and this is the lesson of that particular experiment, which is this: Okay, it's when you deploy fear as a motivator, when you deploy, when you don't deploy fear as a motivator. Here's the easiest way to think about it: Fear go a little broader. Negative emotions. Narrow. Think about N and N. Negative, narrow. Negative, narrow. Negative emotions narrow our scope. That's very good sometimes. You block out extraneous things, you put your blinders on. That's very useful. Negative emotions like fear narrow our scope. So for emergency kinds of settings, fear works really, really, really well. If you are leaving a burning building, Are you focused or not focused? You're focused like a laser beam. You are locked in. You're not worried about how fast you're self-actualizing in that moment, right? You're trying to save your fricking life. And that's what negative emotions like fear do. They constrict us. So if you want people to have a narrow focus, use fear. If you want them to have a wider focus, don't use fear. You can't scare people into doing things that require an expansive focus, an expansive view. Things like creativity, things like conceptual work. So think about it in a business setting. Here's an example where fear can change people's behavior. If we don't do 3 more deals by the end of this month, we are going out of business. I think you'll get 3 more deals by the end of the month. But here's where it doesn't work so well. If we don't come up with a new product idea, we're sunk. You're not going to get a new product idea there. For new product ideas, you want an expansive view. To get pure execution, you want a narrower view. So one of the lessons here is to be a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more nuanced in using fear as a mechanism of behavior change. Use fear the right way. Fear, fear narrows. Negative emotions narrow, positive emotions expand. You want a narrow view, negative. You want an expansive view, positive. That's number one. Let's go to number 2. How many of you— I'm curious about this— how many of you were alive in 1980? Okay, good. So you might remember these guys.

Ronald Reagan.

Let me tell you, give you a little political history lesson that's going to yield a lesson in influence behavior change here. 1980 in America, the incumbent president is a guy named Jimmy Carter. The challenger is a guy named Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is, even though he's been around for a while, is a little bit of an unknown. He, people are a little bit nervous about him. But he's making an argument. He's trying to change the behavior of voters. He's trying to get them to kick out the incumbent and vote for him instead. So he has to make his case. How is he persuasive? What kind of tools does he use? Now, his argument, the core of his argument, Reagan's argument, was that Carter's economic stewardship was wanting. And so he, Reagan, could have gone out there and said to voters, your economic situation has deteriorated in the last 48 months. But that's not what he said. Anybody remember, anybody who was around then or a student of political history, remember what Reagan actually said? Exactly. Say it loud and say it proud. Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago? Exactly. He said, ask yourself, are you better off than you were 4 years ago? He used a question to change behavior. He used a question to persuade. There's some great new research out there that shows us when you should deploy questions to change people's behavior and when you should deploy statements. And what I like about this is that it's pretty algorithmic about how you do it. There's an algorithm for it. Here's the key point. Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. Let me emphasize that again. Questions, by their very nature, elicit an active response. I make a statement, it might wash over you. I may ask a question, even if you're not immediately going to respond, your wheels turn just a little bit. It's a little bit more engaging. Questions, by their very nature, elicit an active response. So here's what happened. When Reagan asked this question, this is some great research out of Ohio State University. Reagan did it as probably a matter of political instinct. But there's actually now science that explains why it's effective. Some great research out of Ohio State University. When Reagan asked that question, are you better off now than you were 4 years ago? Remember, questions by their very nature elicit an active response. So what did people do? Their wheels turned a little bit. They said, hmm, let's see. 4 years ago was 1976. 1976.

Okay.

All right.

Bicentennial.

Disco.

OK, this is pretty good. This is pretty good right here. 1980. Oh my God, I'm much worse off than I was 4 years ago. My situation is terrible. Things have gotten a lot worse. What happens? This is the axiomatic principle here. People come up with their own reasons for agreeing with you. People come up with their own reasons for doing something. When people have their own reasons for doing something, They believe those reasons more deeply, adhere to the behavior more strongly. Axiomatic. When people have their own reasons for doing something, they believe those reasons more deeply, adhere to the behavior more strongly. So in many cases, in many, many cases, questions beat answers. But they don't always beat answers. And so there's a cautionary side of all of this. And it's this. It's demonstrated by another Political tale. Take a look at these 2 wacky guys. These 2 wacky guys. It's amazing, isn't it? So, it's 2012. Barack Obama is the incumbent. Mitt Romney is the challenger. Mitt Romney is making an argument à la Reagan. Obama's economic stewardship has been wanting. Kick this guy out of the White House. Put in somebody who can bring the economy back. And in October of 2012, Romney wheeled out that same Reagan-esque line, are you better off than you were 4 years ago? And 3 days later, he wheeled it back into the barn, never to mention it again.

Why?

Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. You say this in 2012, here's what happens. 2012. Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago? Well, let's see how I'm doing right now. 2012. It sucks. It's terrible. There's a house foreclosed on my street. My spouse can't find a job. My 401 is in the tank. It's really bad. 2008. Holy smokes!

Holy smokes!

I mean, I guess I'm from Ohio, so we say things like that. Holy smokes! I think things were a little worse. What happens? Again, go back to the first principle. People come up with their own autonomous, intrinsically motivated reasons for disagreeing with you, which they believe more deeply and adhere to more strongly. And so here's the algorithm here on the science of persuasion, based on this great research from Ohio State University. When the facts are clearly on your side, persuading with questions is enormously effective. We don't do it enough. We want to make the case. We want to show how smart we are. We want to have the control. We want to get the assent. But when the facts are on your side, clearly on your side, persuading with questions is really, really, really effective. We don't do it enough. But here's the other thing. When the facts are not clearly on your side, don't do this. When the facts are not clearly on your side, get some new facts. Now, I want to give you an adjunct. This is 2A. I want to show you this one technique of persuasion and influence. It's a technique used in therapy called motivational interviewing. This is a really interesting maneuver pioneered by a guy named Mike Pantalon, who's a psychologist at Yale University. And here's what he does. He has— you can think of this as 2 irrational questions. You want to get somebody to do something. You can't pull this out all the time. This is like kind of a big gun to pull out. You want to use it appropriately, but it's incredibly effective. It's asking people 2 irrational questions, 2 irrational questions. So let me—

any of you have kids?

Well, a lot of you. Okay. So, so let's— so I'll give you a hypothetical. I have 3 kids, so I'll give you a hypothetical. Suppose that I have a 16-year-old daughter named Eliza. Just hypothetical. And suppose that Eliza's room is a pigsty and she can't find stuff and it sometimes makes her late to school. And I want Eliza to clean her room. I want to change her behavior.

How do I do that?

Well, you can't just tell her to clean her room. Here's what I could do. I could threaten her. Not going to work for very much. It might work for a tiny bit of time. I could bribe her. Not going to work all that well. I could harangue her and annoy her and pester her. Doesn't work. But maybe I can use some of this science to do a little bit better. Maybe I can recognize the power of questions. So here's a technique. It's called motivational interviewing. It's an aspect of motivational interviewing. Here's how it works. I ask Eliza to— I'm going to get killed at home here. I ask Eliza to— let's say it's a son, 16-year-old son named Elijah.

All right?

My 16-year-old son Elijah has a messy room. And I go to Elijah, who is definitely not Eliza, go to Elijah, and I ask him this question number 1. I ask him question number 1. Elijah, on a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to clean your room? Now, Elijah doesn't want to clean his room. It's obvious he's not very high on this scale. So Elijah might say to me, Dad, I'm a 2. Now, our instinct as persuaders, our instinct as parents, our instincts as human beings, upon hearing an answer like that, is to say, what the fuck? What do you mean you're a 2? Instead, the second question is more subtle and ultimately more effective. So the second question goes like this. OK, Elijah, you're a 2. Let me ask you another question, Elijah. Let me ask you another question, Elijah. Why didn't you pick a lower number? Now, this is not like a trick. This is actually rooted in science of behavior change. Why does this work? Why didn't you— okay, you're a 2. Why weren't you a 1, Elijah? Well, here's what Elijah might say. Well, you and Mom try to help me, but you can never find anything. You know, and I am 16 years old. I probably should get my act together a little bit. You know, if my room were cleaner, I'd get out the door faster. I'd get to school, you know, earlier, and I could hang out with my friends. What's happening here? It's the same principle. Elijah becomes— starts coming up With his own reasons for doing something. You get Elijah to talk about his own reasons for doing something, he's much more likely to do it. So even though it's counterintuitive, when you're dealing with someone who's very— somewhat recalcitrant like that, on a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to do this? Then say, why don't you pick a lower number? Then they have to justify— because most people are not 100% opposed to doing what they have to do. That's absolutely not the case. Most of them know in their hearts and their souls and their minds and their brains Some of the reasons they need to do it. Get them to articulate that, they become more likely to do it. Now, a footnote here, or you can— well, I'll talk about it now. There's a— the hashtag is #AskPink on Twitter for questions like that. Some of you might say, well, what if Elijah's a 0? Anybody been wondering that? What if he says, Dad, I'm a 0? It's a great question. Here's what you do. You say, Elijah, what do we have to— what can we do to make you a 1?

What can we do to make you a 1?

And what it often does is it surfaces some kind of barrier to his even moving forward. I have so much homework right now, I can't do it this week, but maybe I could do it next week. Okay, cool. Do it next week. What can we do to make it a 1? But most people don't say 0. What you get in this question with the people who are reluctant to do things, you get 2s, 3s, and 4s. Why don't you pick a lower number? That's your magic question. So that's number 2. I'm about to say, how ready are you to do that? But let's go to the next one. Would be number 3. Okay, this is a famous experiment, but it's really important and we overlook it all the time. Let's talk about hotel towels. It's a famous experiment from Robert Cialdini, the godfather, the guru, the pope of a lot of the research on the science of persuasion. Anybody here read— how many people here have read Influence by Bob Cialdini? Oh, that is not nearly enough. Okay, you need to— can you write this down please or type it in? Influence. That's the book. The author is Cialdini. C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I. Cialdini. Influence by Cialdini. You should read that book. You don't need to read any of my books. You should buy them, but you don't need to read them. So let's talk about hotel towels. Hotels want you to reuse your towels, right? I had a little notice in my hotel room when I came in late last night. They want you to reuse your towels. And so here's a great experiment. How do you get people to reuse their towels? Right? So here's the first thing that they tried. Again, think about those little tent cards, those little placards, those little notices, messaging to try to get you to do stuff. So first they said, the first kind of tent card that they tried for about a week said, help save the environment. You can show your respect for nature and save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay. We're appealing to the better angels of your nature. How many people reuse their towels? 35%. Not bad, but not great. So they try another technique. Here's where it gets interesting. Here's where there's a lesson for all of you, which is this. Try another technique. Different card. Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment. Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay. Did this have any effect, a better effect? Absolutely. Got it up to 44.

Hey.

Everybody else is doing this. It's cool. All the kids are doing it. Now here's where it gets even more interesting. They said, well, maybe we can turn the dial a little bit more. Maybe we can go from basically single digits, low double digits of compliance of people reusing their towels, get it even higher. So they did this. They tried this. Join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment. In a study conducted in fall 2003, 75% of the guests who stayed in this room, room 461, participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay. That nudged it up to 49%. This is what Bob Cialdini calls social proof. Social proof is one of the most powerful behavior changers. Basically, the lesson here is that you want to convey the idea. It's basically this. This is how we do things around here. This is how we do things around here. Anything you can do to broadcast that message in your behavior and even in your messaging, this is how we do things around here. People look to other people for cues about how to behave. If other people are behaving that way, If they think other people are behaving that way, that's your ticket. Now, we tried a version of this. We learned this in the show. We tried something. It was kind of funky. We went to Washington, D.C., my hometown, my adopted hometown, and we tried to address the hideous problem of people walking around with their face in their cell phone bumping into other people, also known as South by Southwest. And so how can we get people to actually pay attention to their surroundings, not bump into anybody. So we got, with the approval of the local DC government, still not a state, but we do awesome things, we established on a busy downtown street, we established cell phone lanes. So a lane for cell phone users and a lane for non-cell phone users. Now, how do— so we— but we screwed up something. So what we did is we put— we got 5 actors and we put them in reflective orange— we put them in orange reflective vests. Okay, orange reflective vests are so persuasive to me, you know? So, like, you show me anybody in an orange reflective vest and a clipboard, and I will do basically whatever that person tells me to do, right? But it turns out that I'm actually more compliant than most people. So we put a bunch of people in orange vests, and we had them directing traffic. Sir, you have a cell phone, go in this lane. Ma'am, you don't have a cell phone, go in this lane. And it worked a little bit. It worked a little bit. But we had people— I mean, this shows you partly the state of America. We had people basically ignoring, and then we had other people basically literally, literally tweeting, the government has gone too far. You know, it's sort of this whole kind of— I'm not joking about that. And so it didn't work all that well. So we're sort of puzzled because this was our whole awesome idea, and it was basically bombing in front of our very eyes. So here's what we did instead. We had our 5 actors take off their orange reflective vests, take out their cell phones, and start walking up and down the cell phone lane using their cell phones. Basically, 5 people following the rule, and instantly people started complying. So the key point here is this: if you want to change people's behavior, an individual's behavior, enlist the crowd. Enlist the crowd to change people's behavior. Send the message, this is how we do things around here. This is how we do things around here. Let's go to number 4. What is number 4? Oh, this is a good one. All right, so number 4. No, it is, it's really awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna go straight to the study. This seems a little cheesy, but it's really easy and it's effective.

What is it?

Here we go. Here's the study. It's a study out of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Here's what they did. It's a study done by some linguists. I happen to have been a linguistics major, linguistics major in college. So in my year of college, we had the record number of linguistics graduates in my graduating class. There were 4 of us. And so I love these kinds of studies. Study done by some linguists. Here's what they did. They took their sample of people and they gave them a series of proverbs, a series of aphorisms. Okay? Half of the aphorisms— so here we go, just to go to the chart here for a second. So half of the aphorisms, half the people got aphorisms, proverbs that rhymed. So you see up there, woes unite foes, and the other half got woes unite enemies. Same idea, one rhymes, one doesn't. Caution and measure will win you treasure versus caution and measure will win you riches.

That's right.

What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals. See South by Southwest. What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks. You get the idea. They're saying basically the exact same thing. And so the question they posed to these people is, look at these proverbs. Do they reflect the human condition? Are they accurate accounts of the human experience? Was there any difference in how people assessed the rhyming proverbs versus the non-rhyming proverbs?

Absolutely.

Absolutely. It was scary how much the people who got the rhyming proverbs were much more likely to say, oh, that makes so much sense. That is so accurate. Yeah, I get it. That makes— that's right. Now, they were so concerned about the volume of the results, they went back to the people in the rhyming category and said, Did the fact that it rhymed make any difference to you? Absolutely not. Here's what's going on here. This is the key point here. Rhymes increase what cognitive scientists, linguists call processing fluency. It goes down easier. Rhymes increase process fluency. It goes down better. When you increase processing fluency, people absorb the message. They get it. They think about it. It goes down good. It's linguistic comfort food in a way, right? It's not like, you know, sea urchin foam or anything like that. It's macaroni and cheese, right? Mmm, it's good, you know? I have no idea where that one came from. And, and that's what it does. There are other things that increase processing fluency as well. Repetition increases processing fluency. Repetition increases processing fluency. Thank you. Alliteration increases processing fluency. And there's a powerful effect of thinking, especially for those of you in business, thinking of ways— this is a great setting to do it in. You've got all these companies, all these ventures, all these apps, all these operations vying for attention. How do you cut through the crowd? Increase the processing fluency of your message. And rhymes are an woefully underused, underused technique. And if you look at, say, how kids learn languages, how kids learn to read, it's very rhyme-based, right? Because of the processing fluency. And you see this migrating into some interesting aspects of branding. It's always been true, but we now have an explanation for it. Some interesting aspects of branding and messaging in the corporate side. My favorite example is, is this company right here, Haribo, the makers of gummy bears. Great company. They operate in, I think, 35 different languages. German company. They operate in 35 different languages, and their message rhymes in every single language in which they operate. So in English, their message is so their proposition is like this is the candy that that mom likes and the kids like, that dad likes and the sons and daughters like. It's for everybody. Multigenerational candy. So in English, their message is their slogan is kids and grownups love it so. The happy world of Haribo. In French, okay, this is going to be painful here. Haribo, c'est beau la vie pour les grands et les petits. Spanish. Haribo, dulces sabores para pequeños y mayores. Bulgarian. No, I'm just kidding. And so, the idea here is that make time to rhyme. As cheesy as it sounds, don't dismiss this technique. Look for ways to increase processing fluency. Your message goes down a lot easier. Let's go to number 5, number 5 here, number 5. This is another really good one. I'm gonna go straight to the research here. Again, this is not something we did in the show. I'm gonna give you some cool stuff we did in the show. This is a great, great study.

Whew.

Okay, it was a study done at a university where they was having a food drive. It was a study of a food drive at a university. And what they did was the following. They asked the students, they said to the students, big group of students, please identify the peers among— who among your peers are least likely to donate to a food drive? These are people who don't care about anything, are partying all the time, don't— have no concern about their fellow man or woman. Now, then they also said, please identify the people who are most likely to donate to a food drive. The do-gooder, tree-hugger, petition-signer types. Not that there's anything wrong with that. So, and again, what's really important here is a little footnote here. Peer evaluations are really, really accurate in almost any kind of domain. Your peers have a much better— But your peers are much better gauges of your personality, much better gauges of your aptitude, much better gauges of your values than certainly an organization and bosses are. It's not even close. So we know who the least likely students are to donate and we know who the most likely students are. Now, it gets a little bit more complicated and I was basically tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to explain this and I had to resort to something. Just a quick show of hands, anybody here a management consultant? Or been a management consultant? Oh my, okay. So for you, it wasn't in your— I was figuring out a way to put it in your bags. So it's my version of swag for management consultants right here. It's my gift to you management consultants. It's a 2x2 matrix. Couldn't figure out another way to represent this. So, because what they also did was the following in this study. They sent out 2 different kinds of letters. Two different kinds of letters. One letter was what I'm calling the the general letter. The general letter said, "Dear student, I'm having we're having a food drive. It's a really good cause. It's on such and such a date. We hope you contribute." That's a general letter. They sent it half to least likely, half the most likely. Then they also sent out what I'm calling the specific letter. Tell me your first name. Gonzalo. Gonzalo. The the the the specific letter was addressed to the student, so it didn't say. To the particular student. It didn't say, dear student. It said, dear Gonzalo, we're having a food drive. It's on such and such a date. It's a really good cause. We're looking for these 7 varieties of food. We're going to have receptacles positioned around campus into which you can deposit these food items. And we're going to give— attached is a map showing you where those receptacles are. And we're going to give you a follow-up phone call. That's a specific letter. OK, so that gives us 4 conditions. So what happens— so use your predictive powers here. What happens when we send the— when they sent the general letter, the Dear Student letter, to the least likely students? Dear Student, general letter, people not inclined to do it. What percentage of them donated food to the food drive? Who said zero? Tell me your first name.

Carrie.

Carrie gets it on the first round. Zero. None of them contributed food. Oh, you're— she's a management consultant. Okay. Because you know the— first of all, okay, so if you're a management consultant, you know that the punchline is always on the southwest to northeast diagonal. So that's— so you know it's going to be like— so zero. So none of them contributed food, which is sort of awesome in a perverse way. Not a single one. Now what happens when you send a specific letter? To the most likely students, dear Gonzalo, and Gonzalo is inclined to do this. 44% of them contributed food. That's a very high take-up rate on college campuses. Oops. What happens when you step on your punchline? Let's just in the interest of transparency and also my thumb palsy, let's so when you had the general letter sent to the most likely students, 8% contributed, and then see if you can guess this one.

25%.

25%, that's right. So take a look at this. We got 3— they got 3 times— this is really interesting though. You got 3 times the take-up rate among people who were least likely to do something versus people who were most likely to do something because of the letter. There are 2 huge lessons here. One of them is one of the most important lessons in social psychology. The other is probably, I think, the most one, probably among the most important lessons in persuasion, influence, and behavior change, which is this. So the lesson here is this, the meta lesson. When we try to explain people's behavior or predict people's behavior, we always overweight, W-E-I-G-H-T. This is, and this is much more true of Americans than other nationalities. We overweight the importance of personality and underweight the importance of the context That people are in. Do you behave the same way at South by Southwest as you behave in your church or your synagogue or your mosque? Probably not. Do you behave the same way you behave on the highway? Do you behave the same way you behave in a client meeting? Of course not. Context affects our behavior more than ever, but our instinct, our immediate urge to explain people's behavior, predict what they're going to do— he did that because she's a jerk, she did that because she's kind— and so When you try to explain or predict people's behavior, don't go with your first instinct saying he or she is this. Stop. The context might explain it. The persuasion lesson, the influence lesson, the behavior change lesson is this. It's huge. Give people an off-ramp. Sometimes, many, many times, it's less important to change people's minds. It's hard to change people's minds a lot of times. It's less important to change people's minds than it is to give them an easy way to act. Make it easy for them to act. Give them that off-ramp. So go back here for a second. In this case, did we change anybody's mind about the importance of hunger? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, but we got a heck of a lot of people to act who wouldn't otherwise act because we built that off-ramp. So when you're trying to get somebody to do something, ask yourself, Have I built that off-ramp? Have I made it easy for this person to do what I want them to do? Simply doing that might mean that you don't even have to change their mind. Yeah, sure, what the heck? It's easy for me to do. A great lesson of this is, and this is, I don't want to empty the room here by talking about defined contribution pensions, but let me just say one point here. This is the great lesson of this is in retirement. A great lesson of this is in retirement savings. This country spent literally at least a billion dollars trying to persuade people to save for retirement. When you go to your company and your company offers a 401, make sure that you contribute to your 401 because compounding interest is magical and over time you're going to make a lot of money. And yet when people sat with their HR person, do you want to contribute to the 401? No, not really. What changed the 401 take-up more than by orders of magnitude more than anything else ever tried. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Who said that?

Yes.

Check the box for people. Automatic enrollment. Make the— change the default. Make the default that you're enrolled, and if you can, you can opt out. Built them an off-ramp. Building that off-ramp was orders of magnitude more effective than trying to change their minds. Make it easy for people to do something. If you want to change behavior, you want to persuade people, You want people to do something, ask yourself, have I built that off-ramp? Let's go to number 6. Here I want to talk about parking. And I love this example because it's right from right here in Austin. There's a problem with people parking in disabled parking spaces. It's unbelievable. I didn't think it was a problem until we— the folks on our show started working on this. I was actually skeptical of even doing this piece on this because I said, this is not a problem. No one parks in disabled parking spaces. So I actually came down to Austin, Texas, and there's a group of people here of advocates for the disabled, and I rode around with them and said, Dan, you're wrong. I want to show— just go for a ride. We'll see if we can find any violators. And literally, literally, literally, we get in this van, drive around. Literally the first parking lot we went to in Austin, there was somebody parked in a disabled parking space. It's unbelievable. What's even worse is that they had stickers like, World Wildlife Federation, you know, they were all— I mean, it was just unbelievable to me. And so how do you stop people from doing this? Well, we tried an experiment here in Austin that is really awesome, and I just want to just go straight to the punchline. We tried something that worked really, really well, and I want to show you the clip of it right here, if I can call it up here. Here we go. Let's get ready for this clip right here. We're setting it up. I'm never going to do Kimmel in my entire life because I cannot set up a clip. You're doing great. Here we go. Each of these signs has a photograph of a local person who needs to use one of these disabled spaces. The question we're asking is, will a direct appeal from them to drivers make any difference? I don't think that violators can just pretend that what they're doing isn't affecting anyone when they come face to face with Mack, Nancy, and other disabled drivers. It's no longer a victimless crime. All right, guys, I got something to show you. So what we did here is we put— we took photographs of people in Austin who are in wheelchairs. I'm going to show you the outcome here in a second. Took pictures of people who are in wheelchairs, real people from Austin, put them on these signs, put them adjoining the regular disabled parking signs. We used the principle of rhyming, think of me, keep it free, put those up on the signs. And so now here are our advocates for the disabled. Very nice.

I like it.

I like it.

That says it all right there. Do you think it will work? I think it'll make them think twice. I think it'll make them understand that there's somebody that has a disability in each one of these spaces. Let's see what happens. When you pull into a space and you see that That sign, it registers with you that you are parking in a space that really is designed for someone that really needs it. I thought people in a wheelchair needed it a lot more than I did, so I parked, you know, 5 cars down and walked. You park in the spot and you think, I think you're taking someone else's spot who really needs the access. We're lucky we can walk. You could park far away, and we probably need the exercise coming out of a restaurant. Empathy wins, and this time the face-off works. After a month of surveillance, we haven't recorded a single person parking illegally. I'm actually psyched about this because I think this is a— So we eliminated parking in disabled spots during the month we had those in place, And 2 days after we removed the signs, there was a violator. I mean, it's incredible, isn't it? And so the lesson here is this, is that if you want to, you know, like, for public problems, those kinds of things, put a face on it. Don't make it abstract, make it concrete. Put a face on it. And this idea is now being used. We basically made it up in a meeting, just to be fairly transparent. We made it up. Basically said, well, people are more likely to act on the plight of an individual rather than on the plight of a group, more likely to act when something is concrete rather than it is— rather than when it's abstract. Hey, I got an idea. We put up these signs. We had no idea what's going to happen. Now there are already 2 dozen communities around America that are using these signs, from Greenwich, Connecticut to Arvada, Colorado to several cities in California to many cities here in Texas. So this shows you again The way that you can cascade this kind of change. You do something cool to put a face on it, it can change. So don't make things abstract. And smart people, like the people who come here, love abstractions. Put a face on it. Put a face on it. One last thing. Let's go to number 7. I want to show you one more clip. This was probably my best idea, okay? And I want to show it to you because I'm proud of it. Okay, one last thing here, and then we'll take some questions. So I want to do I'll just cue this up here in a moment. Here's what we did. So there's a— we went to New Orleans. There's a problem in New Orleans. There's a problem in New Orleans with bike theft, and the police have so much to do they can't really deal with bike theft. And also the way that New Orleans is configured, there are all these kinds of small alleys and things that bikes go down. And anyway, it's a big problem, hard to solve. So we used a couple of things. One, there's an idea in India where India, certain cities in India have put up essentially cardboard cutouts of cops, almost like scarecrows basically. And so when people see them from afar, they don't realize it's not a real person, and it actually had an effect on the driving behavior in those places. And then I also, again, because I love abstraction too, I said, well, let's look at some other research. There's some fascinating research showing that you can predict a man's level of aggression by what's called the facial width to height ratio, which is if you measure the ratio of the width of his face to the height from about here to here. A high width to height ratio is a predictor for aggression. It's a marker for testosterone, a predictor for aggression. There's some amazing research on this. Somebody did this study where they went to the, the the yearbooks of all of the National Hockey League teams and measured the facial width-to-height ratio of the players. And a high facial width— the facial width-to-height ratio correlated almost perfectly with penalty minutes. So it's really freaky. All right. So I said, we're going to get a really wide-faced guy who's really aggressive looking, and we're going to put cardboard cutouts to stop bike theft. Yeah, it's totally cool. So take a look at what happened. I'm creating my own police force using life-size cardboard cutouts, and I've chosen an actor specifically for the shape of his face. Research shows that men with especially wide faces are considered more aggressive. Our theory is that the aggressive look and blue uniform might scare off They'll scare off thieves from afar and remind those up close of authority and the potential consequences of stealing. Awesome! Amazing!

Yeah.

Scary! We've got 10 of these. It's our own mini police force. Let's put them to work. My cardboard cops are all on patrol. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then we come back and we find out what happened. Time for an update on how our cardboard cops did. We used life-size photographs to increase the number of cops in an area notorious for bike theft. But did our virtual police presence stop any thieves? There's good news and bad news. The good news, thieves were definitely distracted from stealing the bikes. The bad news, that's because they ended up stealing the cutouts. Caught them red-handed. So yeah, so the last principle of behavior change is really just this, which is very appropriate for South by Southwest as well, which is this: try stuff. You don't know what's going to work. Try stuff. Be very— and my point here at the end, and we'll take some questions here in a moment, is that you can be very empirical about all of this. Okay? You can try stuff, you can test it. All of you are doing A/B tests on behavior change. We're in the era of A/B testing. Try stuff. Some stuff isn't gonna work, but other stuff is gonna be great, and you can learn a lot from doing your own little mini experiments like that. So these are just— these ideas are not meant to be exhaustive. They're not necessarily the best because I don't know your particular circumstances, but of these 7 ideas, I hope that you can use one here at South by Southwest and another one going forward. And now—

Thank you.

I think I'm ready to take some questions.

Thank you.

First applaud, yes, thank you. Oh yeah, by the way, yeah, okay, go ahead.

So thank you, Daniel, again, and a reminder to everybody to tweet your questions to #AskPink, and we will begin answering them just about now.

Yep.

As soon as we can get—

And there's a book signing in Ballroom, in the Ballroom D foyer right after this. In case you were wondering.

So—

We may be having issues.

We might be having issues.

So while we're doing that—

Who wants to— who has a question? Yes, sir, right in the front. Mark, okay. Yeah, here, go ahead. I'm curious why the follow-up question isn't what would make you a 3? Okay, that's a good question. That's a really good question. So Mark's question is, and the follow-up question— okay, Edwin has an interesting question too.

Answer Mark's question first.

Yeah, yeah, no, sorry. So the question is, why didn't you say, what can we do to make you a 3? Why isn't that the follow-up question? It's a really good question. That's a really, really good question. I think part of it, that's actually not a bad question to ask secondary. I think the real thing is basically to surface people's intention. All right? If people, in this particular case, especially something that's recalcitrant about and something that takes, something that you want to be a habit, something you want to go on long-term, you want to have people endorse it. You want people to be volitional about it. So if they have the reasons, then you can come in. You don't have to necessarily say, how can we make it a 3? And then in step 3, you could say, well, what if we bobbity bobbity bop? Or, do you have any ideas for how to do that? So it's a really good question, but really, in this particular case, for that kind of behavior that people are resistant to, it really begins with surfacing their intention.

Okay, so now from the Twitter feed, Edwin Lee wants to know, have you ever felt your self-confidence is gone?

How did you handle it? At this moment. This very moment. How did I handle it and get it back? Edwin, this is a great question because there's an incredible piece of research on this. There's an incredible piece of research on this that sort of goes to this question here. But let me— have I ever felt my self-confidence is gone? Personally, I don't have a huge self-confidence issue, largely because I have a Y chromosome. But here's a great— I want to give you a study that gives you another sort of form of self-motivation, restoring self-confidence. This is a really interesting one. Okay? So, all of us engage in what's called self-talk. That is, we talk to ourselves, often in advance of doing something important. Let's say you're pitching your company, you're going to an important sales call, you're asking somebody out on a date, whatever. You go to do it, and then before that, we often engage in self-talk. We talk silently to each other. ourselves. What should our self-talk sound like? Positive? Negative?

Positive.

Positive, right. What would it sound like? What might you say to yourself? You're going to go pitch a piece of business. Yeah, exactly. You can do this. You got this, right? You can do this. You got this. All right, here's what the research shows on this self-confidence point. Saying that self-talk, positive affirmative, You can do this. You got this. That is much better than going in neutral in terms of self-confidence, but also more important, performance. Definitely better than doing— going in neutral. But it's not the best thing you can do. The best thing that you can do, and I'm so glad that Edwin asked this question because it's such— it's so interesting, such interesting research, is something that social psychologists recently have come up with called Interrogative self-talk. Interrogative self-talk. Again, it goes back to our question point there. So instead of going in and saying, you can do this, you know, the Bella Coralli, you can do this, you got this, you know, you're awesome, you ask yourself a question. Can you do this? And if so, how? Can you do this? And if so, how? Now, the self-help gurus out there who don't know anything about evidence, who don't know anything about science, who think that every emotion should be positive all the time, who think questions are a sign of weakness, they hate this. But the evidence is very, very clear. There's a— one of the top researchers is a woman named Dolores Abad-Rahim. She's at— she was at Illinois. She's now at Penn. Here's what— here's the thing. It's a similar point that we were talking about before. Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. Your wheels turn a little bit. So let's walk this through. On self-confidence, on performance. I go in here, I'm about to pitch a new piece of business. I'm about to pitch a new book. I'm going to go to New York. I'm going to pitch ideas for a new book. High stakes. This is how I feed my family. This means a lot. I go in, positive affirmative self-talk. You can do it. You got this. I like hearing from myself that I'm awesome. I love telling myself I'm awesome. It's going to give me a lift, no question about that, but it's not the best thing that I can do. So what if I do this? Waiting outside in the plush offices of this New York publisher, ready to go in. This is how I'm going to feed my family for the next few years. The stakes are high. And I say to myself instead, Dan, can you do this? And if so, how? What do I have to do? I have to start answering the question. Yeah, I can do this. I've pitched ideas for books before. Yeah, I can do this. I've really, really researched this idea. I want to make sure I hit these 3 key points. Yeah, I can do this. You know Maria over there? She has hated every idea I've ever brought to her, but I've got this killer argument to even persuade Maria. Can you do this? Yeah, I can do this. Last time I talked too much and didn't listen very well enough. Now I'm gonna slow down and really be an active listener. What am I doing in that instance there? I'm preparing. I'm rehearsing. I'm getting better. I'm practicing. And so this thing, when we think of something like self-confidence, we think of self-confidence as something that is very loud, very muscular, very affirmative. And sometimes it is, but there's also this kind of quieter muscularity that's an aspect of self-confidence that often is more effective. And so you're preparing, you're rehearsing, and what's great about this And I think it's a rebuttal to some of the people who are skeptics, is that there's a line of research in sports psychology about this, where you have certain players, certain athletes, who will do, you know, they're about to do a dive from the 10-meter platform. You got this, you can do this. Then you have other ones who do this interrogative form of it. Can you do this? Yeah, I can do this. I know nothing about diving, unfortunately. I got myself into a trap here. I don't know, what do you have to do in diving? Like keep your knees together or something? It's baseball now. We're doing baseball, okay? So you got some— you got a baseball player. You got this. You're an animal. You're awesome. Let's go. You can do this. You got this. Better than doing nothing. Then you have other kinds of athletes and actually the really, really, really elite athletes who say this. Can you do this? Yeah, you can do this because this guy throws a changeup much more often than any other pitcher. Yeah, you can do this because last week you weren't keeping your elbow high enough, so get your elbow up. Interrogative. That quieter muscularity is a better form of self-confidence. Let's go to the next one.

Sure, we've got just under 3 minutes left, and Diatribe is asking, what are the most effective behavior change approaches for obesity and diabetes, the challenge being short-term sacrifice versus long-term gain?

That's a really great question. It's a really, really great question, and there are a lot of confounding variables, and when you talk about When you talk about obesity and diabetes and that sort of thing, the main confounding variable is that— is our brains and our bodies. That is, we evolved in a landscape of scarce calories. So we are, as human beings, we want calories, right? Because where we evolved, our brains evolved in a world where there weren't that many of them. So if there was some around, you want to get them or else you're going to die. All of a sudden, our Stone Age brains are in a world of ubiquitous abundant calories. So that's a big problem. That's a harder problem to solve than having your kid clean up the room or having your business pitch your business in a way that's effective. I think there are a couple of things. Number one is— a few things. The first is to go for small wins. Small wins. Have people set it up so people can make progress. Don't say, do all these things and then a year later or 6 months later, let's weigh you and see how you did. Do things that create small wins, small wins that cascade to small wins. The other thing that's super important here on this is actually to change the environment. So much of what we do are basically default behaviors. We do stuff, we just do it because that's what we always do. So if there's a vending machine that has crappy food in your office and you're hungry, yeah, you might go do that. If there's a Table full of vegetables and fruits, you might do that instead. So recognize the difficulty of the problem because we're dealing with physiology here. Go for small wins and change the environment, and you might have a, you might have a fighting chance. All right, great.

And this will be the last question. Joseph Byer asking, what's the relationship between quantified and qualified components of the Elijah question? Why both numerical and causal?

Huh, I'm not sure I totally I don't totally understand that question. Let's see. What's the relationship between quantified and qualified? So, I'm really not sure I get it, but let me see if I can come up with something. Joseph, are you here? Yeah, just rephrase it for me. I'm not sure I get it. What's causal? I mean, what do you mean? How ready are you? Because the question is, On a scale of one to ten, how ready are you to do this? Why didn't you pick a lower number? What's causal? Qualifying your answer. Well, I mean, I think basically what you're doing—I think I think I think I might get this—is that what you're doing is you're using the numbers as a way to start the conversation. You're using the numbers as a way to get into people's. inner motivations, their intrinsic motivations, their autonomous reasons for doing something like that. And then I guess when you're talking about the causality, I'm still not sure. Why don't you come up and talk to— seriously, I'm sorry about that. Why don't you come up and talk to me afterwards? This is probably the worst way to end. So because, because one of the things Let me leave you with, let me leave you with one tip. Let me leave you with one last tip. When people look back on experiences, all right, many of you are familiar with the peak-end rule. So if you have a long experience, you go on a vacation, you have a long period of doing something, okay, you're sitting around in a windowless room for an hour, you remember the peak. What you're more likely to, most likely to remember is the peak and the end. So endings are really, really important. Which is why you guys are gorgeous and brilliant and lovely, and I've so enjoyed spending an hour with you. Thank you very much.

And we're sourcing the ladies that will come to our academy in 2 avenues. First of all, through other companies that would like to take our program and have us train their ladies, or through the Ministry of Labor and the Human Resources Department. Development Fund. We'll be working with ladies that then don't have jobs. And what we would do is work with almost like preferred vendors and do on-the-job training where they've got 2 days in our academy and 3 days on the job.