241. Behavioral Science in the Wild with Dilip Soman

Welcome to episode 241 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Dilip Soman, Co author of Behavioral Science in the Wild.

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You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Dilip Soman, co author of Behavioral Science in the Wild. Dilip is a Canada Research Chair in Behavioral Science and Economics and serves as the Director of the Behavioral Economics in Action Research center at Rotman, also known as Bayer. His research is in the area of behavioral science and its applications to consumer well being, marketing and policy. You know, I love that he has written multiple books including the Last Mile, the Behaviorally Informed Organization and Behavioral Science in the Wild, all of which we will discuss on today's episode. And he also teaches a massive open online course called BE101X Behavioral Economics in Action on edX. That's actually how he and I first got introduced, introduced years ago when someone who was taking BE101X had tagged him and I both on Twitter, suggesting my podcast as a resource for students taking his class. We had connected a bit then, but didn't end up making it the last mile to getting a meeting in the books.

See what I did there?

So when this new book, Behavioral Science in the Wild, came out, I knew it was the perfect time for us to have this first long overdue chat. And it was so much fun. I am confident it will not be the last. I'm not going to make you wait too much longer before we get into that conversation, but I do just want to make sure you know there are links in the show notes for everything, including Dilip's books and contact information and related past episodes, all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com241 now let's jump right in. Dr. Dilip Soman, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you. And not too many people call me Dr. Soman. So thank you for that.

I always do. I feel, you know, there's a lot of work that went into earning that and it's deserved to be recognized. And so many of my guests say, oh, weird, no one calls me that.

In psychology, one of the things that I sort of did some research on is the notion of depreciation of memories. So I think I'm at that stage where the whole effort piece is depreciated enough that I still get surprised when people call me doctor. It was a long, long time ago.

Yeah, well, I'm very interested. Not that this is where we expected to go, and we'll have you introduce yourself in more detail here in a bit too. But what can you tell? I'm fascinated in memory stuff, as many of us are. What can you tell us about the depreciation of memories and just memory stuff in general?

Well, so actually a lot of my early research was on the notion of how pain or memory for pain depreciates. And I, I did that in the context of the pain of payment. But I've also sort of written a little bit about the depreciation of memories in other contexts. So I'll give you a quick example. I remember many, many years ago when my son was all of a year or so, he was at a stage where he had to be in the stroller, but he had just learned to walk and he felt like he could push the stroller, you know, that age. So we took him to a vacation in Italy in July. And I remember it was dreadful because it was really, really hot. You can imagine Italy in July. Cobblestones. And so pushing a stroller was no fun. And I vividly remember cursing myself for deciding to go to Italy with a stroller and a one year old in the middle of July. Yet 25 years later, when I think about that experience, I still have memories of saying that I hated myself for doing it. But actually I remember the Fontana and I remember the Coliseum and I remember all of the beautiful sights, but that pain of, of the heat and the fear of pickpockets and having to carry a one year old and a stroller around that seems to have depreciated. So I think it's interesting how memories for factual things remain. Memories for experiences tend to depreciate. And maybe that's not the universal case. I guess it depends on what kind of factual stuff and what kind of memories. But all in all, it makes for some really interesting memory effects.

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm gonna bring up something that feels super random, but it is just like boggling my brain right now. And I've been asking a bunch of people about this because I'm fascinated. So yesterday I had to have. I haven't had a cavity in a really long time. And I had to have a tiny filling yesterday. And this is important language on here. And so when I was there at the dentist and we were having to wait for a while, and so I was talking to the hygienist and she had said, oh, you know, if the numbing starts to wear off or something, like, you know, kind of this, like, don't be a hero, like, raise your hand, let us know. You don't. You don't need to suffer. To which I laughed and said, don't worry about that. Right. Like, there's like, I promise to tell you if I feel anything. Right. That's a bad thing. She said, oh, well, you know, you'd be surprised. Quite a few people, especially when it's a tiny thing like this, will opt to not have any numbing for their dental work because they don't like the feeling of being numb after. To which I can't believe that that's a thing because I'm so ingrained in it. And so I followed up and asked, like, when you say some people, like, what are we talking about here? If you were to give me an estimate? And she said she thinks about 40% of people will say, no, no, I don't want the Novocaine, because I don't like feeling numb after the appointment.

I'm guessing these people severely underestimated the sound of the drill and the terror that it strikes into.

No, no. And so I went and I've. So I've started putting this kind of survey out into the world. So I posted on my LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. So Twitter is where I went first. And of the first seven people that responded, two said, no, they don't do Novocaine. And I am amazed at this. And I think as so much of confirmation bias and feeling like people are like us, like, what does this say?

Who.

What type of person is? And not a note, but like, what is it about that person that would make that choice? Because there's no version. I was talking about my husband with this. If I was going to be numb for a full day, like 24 hours after, and it was a tiny feeling, I still would take it.

Right. I'm with you. I take it. So another interesting dentist story, which actually resulted in a research paper. So the story actually starts not with the dentist, but with my neighbor who had, after seven really bad southern Ontario winters, decided that it was time to get a snowblower instead of breaking his back and shoveling. So he bought one from Sears. And I forget what it was. It was 400 and something dollars. But it came in parts, and so it had to be assembled. So a box showed up on his driveway, and, you know, neighbor is a lawyer, so handy question mark. But he tried. He tried his very best. And after about eight hours of trying to fix that snowblower, he gave up. And so he called Sears and they said, well, we can send someone over to do it for 200 and something bucks. And of course, there's all of that mental arithmetic of spending 250 to fix something that cost 400. But, you know, he went through it, called the guy. The guy shows up, and in about 20 minutes he's done assembling the snowblower. And my neighbor, I mean, he's clearly chagrined at the whole thing, but the thing that bugs him the Most is the 20 minutes. Right. And so it just so happened that I was, you know, at my dentist. Getting your teeth cleaned, and I was talking to the dentist, and they had introduced this several years back when they first started doing the laser drilling, whereby sort of having the. The drill that actually, you know, the one that sent shivers down your. Down your spine. This one just basically you, you know, they hold your jaw in place and the laser cuts through and it's all nice. It cost a bit more because it wasn't yet covered by insurance at that point in time. Time. And it got done quickly and painlessly. And the dentist was telling me, just like some of the people on your Twitter, that some of the customers weren't happy with this because they were paying more to get something done sooner.

Yeah.

And so we actually worked on a research project on this. We call it the duration heuristic. The idea is that people sort of learn in some domains that the longer a service is, the better. So getting access to spa for two hours is better than getting access to a spa for one hour. And people are willing to pay more, and then they misapply it to other things. My other favorite example is if you ever lock yourself out and the locksmith shows up, they open it in like 30 seconds and then they charge you 40 bucks for it. And people, like, take longer because you don't deserve 40 bucks for just the 30 seconds of opening the. So I find that a really interesting phenomenon. I mean, I think in general, you're pushing me to think about dentist offices being good places to collect research ideas. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting phenomena there.

Really, I am just flabbergasted by it. And this laser drill thing was not something that was offered to me in this case. So I don't know if maybe that's, maybe Canada has it and we don't have that here yet in the States. But even though it was like seven years ago for you, like you said. But this last week, my class was one of my classes we were talking about, I had a student asking about. It was on the peak end rule, surprise and delight. And then someone was asking about duration neglect. And in this, like, I don't understand, like, why is that a thing? And how are people applying that in marketing and you know, how does that even work? And I remember from working in banking that people will believe they're in line for less time if you have a TV screen or something. Even if they're there longer, it feels like less because we're able to be distracted. And like you were talking about on your trip. But what's funny is like you said, you, when people ask about the trip, you may meant the things that come to mind is like, oh man, my, my son, I had to be hauling him around. I actually currently have a 14 month old, so I totally. That whole thing. And I lived in Italy in the summer, so I know exactly what that is too. I can fully sympathize with that. But. So you would say those things. But then it's like, so the trip was bad. You're like, oh no, the trip was amazing. Right? But what a weird, weird brain phenomenon, you know, so it is.

And I think, I think the whole general notion of experiences is an interesting one because you're absolutely right. Like you would think that your overall evaluation of an experience, experience depends on the sum of all of your individual experiences. But it depends on when you sort of make that judgment. Right? And so one of my favorite papers that I ever worked on is a paper on something that I call virtual progress. And the idea is that sometimes experiences seem better if you feel like you're making progress as opposed to actual progress. And sometimes when we design things, we just optimize for the wrong things, right? So I often hear administrators saying, oh, we've got to reduce wait time. And maybe that's not the case. Maybe you've got to maximize the feeling of progress. And so again, that project idea came to me when I used to, you know, I used to live in Boston briefly during the Big Dig in the late 1990s. And so I had a little desk at Harvard Business School and I used to live near Mass General Hospital. So for any of your listeners who are from Boston, you know exactly where all of this is. It was a 10, 15 minute drive on storrow drive. But what would happen is that there'd be traffic. And so by the time I left Harvard Business school at about 4:30 or 5pm I'd just be kind of standing in traffic. And it was extremely tempting to take one of the side streets. So one day I did. And so I went north, went past the commons, made a grand turn around the commons, came down south, ended up home. And then I looked at my clock. I had actually reached later than I would have reached had I stood in traffic, but I was happier. Right. And so that notion was, was virtual progress. Like during the 25 minutes of driving, I was driving all the time and it felt good as opposed to 15 minutes standing in traffic. And so you would actually think about applying that to many situations. Right. So I give, you know, in one experiment, I gave people a proofreading task and it was either printed the standard 25 lines per page or in some cases 10 lines a page or five lines a page. And when people were doing five lines a page, they were flipping pages like super quick. They felt motivated, they got a lot more done. That's virtual progress again. And I think those are the kinds of things that designers of services in particular have not tended to think about in the past. So hospital comes in and says, gosh, you know, people are waiting for their blood draws. It's 45 minutes, we've got to reduce it. And then they bring in these work study people, the operations folks with their clipboards and stopwatches, and at the end of this whole exercise, they'll say, you know what, you're going to move the lab somewhere else and put better signage and, you know, maybe, maybe 45 minutes improves to, I don't know, 41 minutes right. At the end of it, it doesn't matter because these people are going to be there. Just make the experience better, help them learn, help them, you know, get a sense that they've made some progress, talk to each other, got some information, something. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Experiences are interesting.

Yeah, it's, it's so. And obvious. The obvious example that comes up for people in these is when you think about waiting in line at Disneyland.

Oh yes.

And that it's a really long time in a lot of cases. Or, you know, I'm a big Harry Potter fan, so we would say Universal as well. Got to give some, you know, shout out to Harry Potter there. But the line. And there are people I know that I don't know personally, I know that people have stood in line at Harry Potter World for a ride that they have no intention to go on and will go through the entire line to be a part of that experience. Experience and then leave because you get to walk through where it looks like the castle and all the experiences of it. And so like you said, that reframe of taking it from, you know, reducing the wait time, which for something we don't want to do, like waiting at the grocery store, being at the bank, waiting to get our blood drawn or our teeth drilled, reducing the time from 45 minutes to 41 minutes waste.

It's not a. It's not a big win. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of people think about waiting time as a cost. I see it as an opportunity. So it's an opportunity to educate people. It's an opportunity to amuse people, to engage people, to learn something from people. And in fact, some of the best work we have done at the center that I run was in the domain of organ donation. This was actually a project that Nina Magyar, my colleague, had led. And essentially what we did was we used the waiting time when people came in to a service Ontario location to renew a driver's license or their health card or whatever else to educate them to deliver interventions that would get them to donate organs. And it was a light touch intervention, but we essentially, if people hadn't been waiting in line, we wouldn't have had those precious few minutes to get them to think about this. Right. We did little things like we handed out the forms for organ donation as they entered the line to wait as opposed to when they were upfront front. Simple stuff. And you look back at it like, you know, why didn't people think about this before? But, you know, that's. That's what I mean by thinking about waiting times as opportunities. And once you think about it that way, the whole world looks different. It's amazing.

Yes. I love it. Love it. This is. We're so on the same page for all these. And the little changes that make such a big difference is something I talk about all the time. So we're now, you know, 15 minutes into our conversation, much further than we usually get before I say, hey, hey. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, you've talked a little bit about your.

Now, they know me, don't they?

No. Everybody is now super excited. I am.

They know my neighbors, they know my neighbors, my dentist.

We've talked about dental work and trips to Italy and all these. So can you share a little bit about you and your background? The Work you do?

Absolutely. So maybe, maybe I'll do the Sound of Music thing and start at the very beginning.

It's a very good place to start.

It's always a good place to start. Yeah. So I'm actually my first degree was in engineering, and I'm a mechanical engineer by training. I used to work on the shop floor of a company that made heavy earth moving machines. And then at some point in time, I saw this posting for a job in sales and service. And for some reason still unknown to me, I applied for that job. And for reasons even more unknown to me, they gave it to me. And so here I was doing sales and service for heavy machines out in the field at coal mines and cement companies, and immediately was struck by the fact that the thing that we as engineers tried to optimize on the shop floor in the manufacturing facility was not the thing that our customers cared about. So we'd always, like, work hard to improve the torque of the engine and the speed and let's optimize the horsepower and all of that stuff. And people were like, well, what's the color of the machine and what are the warranty terms? And we talk about big machines. These are machines worth thousands and thousands of dollars, right? And so that got me interested in this whole sort of notion of what makes people tick and why are we wasting so much time producing stuff that people don't care about. Then I learned it wasn't that they didn't care about it, but they expected the good stuff, right? So they like, you know, for a reputable company, they expected the product was good and so the other things mattered. But anyway, so, so that got me interested. I ended up doing an mba where I found marketing, the whole concept of selling and advertising, fascinating. So I did that. I worked for an ad agency briefly, and then I ended up getting a PhD at the University of Chicago. In a discipline back then, it was called decision making. Judgment and decision making. Now I guess we call it behaviorly gone. And I've been in academia since. But I guess my entire motivation to come to academia was to A, understand why people tick, and B, what can we do about it? How can we help people lead happier lives? How can we help them come out of poverty? I mean, I grew up in India, and while I have to say I was never below the poverty line myself, I knew a lot of people who were. And so I'd actually seen the difference that a little bit of science could make. And so I was kind of really interested in that. And so I guess since 1996, which is when I got my PhD. I've tried sort of in many different ways to take our science from the lab to the field. And I think that's. That's my passion. My passion is really, I think the science is great, and we can talk a lot about, you know, dental visits and perception of time and all of that, but does it actually help people do things differently? Does it help organizations deliver more value? Does it help governments take care of their citizens better? So that's kind of my thing. And so in 2012, I and Nina, who I just spoke about, briefly set up a center at the University of Toronto. We call it Bear. It's a very Canadian animal. Behavioral Economics in Action at the Rotman School. And the inaction part is key. As part of that center, we also launched an initiative few years ago called Behaviorally Informed Organizations. And again, the idea there is to develop what we call a science of using behavioral science. So kind of a meta approach to that. And that's what's kept me busy for the past few years, among other things, like dental checkups. So that's a little bit about me.

Well, I love that. And in reading. So Behavior Behavioral Science in the Wild is your new book. You also have the Behaviorally Informed Organization as a book, and I see some others behind you. I'm not sure if you wrote each of those or if those are just.

I did. I did, actually. So, yeah. So the Behavioral Science in the Wild is latest in the series from the Behaviorally Informed Organization Partnership. Let me sort of briefly go back in time and tell you a little bit about what motivated the partnership. So I think the way we think about behavioral science is, you know, 2008 was sort of a turning point, for obvious reasons. Nudge had just been written. Danny Kahneman had received a Nobel Prize a few years before. So it was the rage of the town. Everybody was talking about behavioral science, and we kept getting queries from our government partners and our business partners saying, you know, not just great, it's fantastic, but how do I start doing it? Who do I hire? How do I set up a unit? Should I set up a unit? Right. And so that sort of got us thinking about this whole notion of how to best embed behavioral science in organizations. I think about the medical sciences. The medical sciences actually have a science for how to implement stuff. It's called implementation science. We don't have that. And part of it was because pre 2008, I mean, our science wasn't considered something that their organizations would. So I think the timing was right. So we set up this partnership. It's basically about 25 academic researchers and about 25 organizations who are all committed to dedicating resources to sort of trying to understand how to best embed behavioral science into how organizations do things. So the first book in the series, which is called the Behaviorally Informed Organization, actually talks about the philosophy behind it. Right. What should an organization do to actually embed behavioral science? Should they embed behavioral science in the first place? What do we mean by doing experiments? What do we mean by building partnerships? What are the success factors? So it's more about the science of the organization as opposed to the behavioral science. We identified a couple of other challenges for the field. So kind of moving on from phase one of the field, which is, well, I call it the cheerleading phase. Right. Like after nudge, we said, isn't this brilliant? We can solve all of the problems of the world. And my sense is we've probably been guilty as a field of perhaps being more enthusiastic than we should have because, you know, we know that behavioral science does not solve the problem of the world. It helps along with other approaches. But I don't think we should sort of make the point that behavioral science is a better approach than anything else. So I think, yeah, so we had a lot of that cheerleading. Now we are getting to a new instance. And what I mean by that is oftentimes organizations have learned that an intervention that worked well yesterday for some reason stops working today. Or an intervention that worked amazingly well for the UK Behavioral Insights team doesn't work in Canada or in Mexico. Right. And so the question is, why is that? And what can we do to improve the portability, if you will, of our research? So Behavioral Science in the Wild was actually written to tackle that challenge. The fact that our results are not as portable as we would like them to be. Right.

A thing I talk about more than anything else is context always matters. And nothing is generalizable, which is why we have to understand the context of it. And I recently had Michael Hallsworth on, and he was talking about, you know, in the do nudges work? Debate and the article he wrote, and a very similar, you know, opinion and area of focus of saying it's, yes, they work. Maybe not as much as it in the cheerleading phase was looking. Right. But we needed that phase of excitement to get people to see that this matters. And it does work, and it's important, and we have to have an awareness of what we're trying to do and then look at how these things can be applied. And. And so it seems that you're in the same vein there.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And he was talking about, too, the same of, you know, if we're looking at applying. Trying to put a linear approach toward a complex system is not going to work. And so when you're talking about the. Making it a more applied science and being able to understand how things could be more generalizable, can you share a little bit about what you found so far and maybe some of the approach of what you're doing there?

Yeah. So I think back to the point that Michael was making, I think one of the ideas that is a central idea in a book that Richard Taylor wrote, it's a book called misbehaving in 2015, is he invented a new term, a SIF. S I F. So what's a SIF? It's a supposedly irrelevant factor. Things that we. Things that we think shouldn't influence decisions but do. And actually, if you go back and look at all of our journals in psychology or consumer behavior more generally, it's a catalog of stiffs, right? Like most papers will say, look, you know, we didn't think the temperature of the room mattered, but people behave differently, or we didn't think that having ambient music mattered, but it does, and so on and so on. So one of the things that I think we need to do as a field better is to catalog a lot of these SIFs. And of course, we have to keep in mind that the fundamental property of a SIF is it is supposedly relevant. Right? So we can catalog what others have demonstrated, but there will still be new SIFs that are coming up. So what does all of this mean for the way we do our research? Right. Step one, can we catalog everything and create, like, almost a dossier of things that will and will not have an effect? In theory, possibly in practice, I'm not sure how that's going to work. Right. Just because of the fact that there will always be new sifts, there will always be new combinations of conditions under which an effect as robust as even framing might sometimes break down. So I don't know that that's worthwhile procedure. Now in the book, of course, that's what we try and do. So every chapter in the book will pick a phenomena, it will pick a situation. It'll say, look, here's a fresh start effect. Right? It works. Not always. Or here is a social peer comparison effect. So you think about social comparison effect, things like 90% of people do. X. Shouldn't you do it? There's two ways I can read it, I can say, 90% do it, so maybe I should do it. I could also say, well, you know what? 10% don't do it, so it's okay. And there's a beautiful chapter in the book by Ulai Gormansky and Indra Neel Goswami where they talk about the fact that every intervention could have these multiple interpretations, could have multiple causal pathways, and we need to understand and map out all of those pathways ways, right? So just because in Molina's study, for example, the 90% worked, doesn't mean that my target audience is also going to interpret it the same way. We have to think about what else could have happened. I'll give you another example. We've done research, and this is also in the book In Mexico, this was with ids42, a couple of my colleagues, and Consar, which is the pension authority in Mexico. And the goal there was to try and get more people to make voluntary contributions to their pension account. We did the standard stuff, right? Like, you know, framing interventions, reminders, all of that. It works. But there was something interesting about the Mexican pension system where by law, the quarterly statements that you got had to list every single fund that was available and its performance, right? And so what ended up happening was we tried these interventions. On average, they seem to have no effect. And we could have dismissed them by saying nothing happens, but it turns out there was. For half the people, it had a whopping positive effect. For the other half, it had a whopping negative effect. Why was that happening? Well, that was happening because we managed to motivate people to think about retirement. But for half the people, they would look at the table and they would say, yeah, you know what? My fund is doing well, so I'm going to put more money in it. The other half would say, this thing is important. My fund is crap. I should look at other ways of investing, right? And so these are the kinds of things that we often don't do as social scientists. And what I mean by that is we often look at a control condition where we do nothing and we look at a treatment condition where we look at the average. And on average, there's no effect. But look, there is a huge positive and a huge negative, right? And so maybe for the negative folks, there was a different intervention that could have worked, right? And so one of the conclusions that we reach in the book, and in particular one of the chapters, is that successfully scaling an intervention doesn't mean that that intervention has to. That it has to be homogeneous. You don't have to do the same thing for everyone. You could actually customize. And so I think that's the other big prescription that comes out of our work is to try and understand what the customization patterns look like and then. And then act on that.

Yeah, definitely. And I also. There was an example in the book that was talking about, you know, different students, the ones at ASU versus those in New York. And I forget if it was NYU or a different school, but that then you had, you know, sending information to parents for ASU and having a more friendly language versus the stuff for the New York students, which typically didn't have, you know, parents that were involved in the process and something that was too friendly felt like it shouldn't be coming from a school. And, you know, those sorts of things that you learn both through testing and good questioning, as well as something. Some things you can be aware of going in and say, hmm, do we use the same thing? Yeah, some of it you learn along the way.

So this is it. So I think there are two sources of differences in situations that might cause the effect of our interventions to change. So one source has to do with who your audience is. So the example of the two schools is a great one, right? Engaged parents versus relatively disengaged parents. Parents that want simpler communication versus parents that want more complex communication. So people are different. We know that. We've known that for a long time. We've known that forever. But we haven't really embraced that in design of our interventions. That's one source. You can think about other things that make people different. Language, culture, nationality. All of that stuff falls into one bucket. The other bucket is, I think, equally important. And that's the situation difference bucket. So think about things like reminders. We always, when we read papers that look at the effect of reminders, they'll basically say, we sent a reminder, people reacted. Hang on, does it matter when the reminder is sent? Turns out it does. Right? So if you send a reminder first thing in the morning, it's probably going to get buried in all of your workday stuff and nobody's going to react to it. You send it at about 4:30pm especially if it involves stopping on the way to a bank to do something, people will do it. Right? So timing, related stuff or social context, like, did you send it when the person was alone versus when they were with other people? The method of delivery, was it sent electronically? Was it sent in person via phone call? All these things matter. And so I think we need to start doing a better job in Our research, in our reporting of research to document all of these things, exactly how was the reminder sent and exactly to whom was it sent and what did these people care about? And if you don't do that, then it is going to be easy for people to kind of oversimplify the stuff and say reminders always work because, gosh, they don't always work. Right. And I think we need to start documenting when they do and when they don't. And again, like I said, the book makes a start in doing that. But, you know, I'm sure there are more nuances than anyone has ever actually documented. So I think really thinking through, you know, what do we mean by context? I think this is my other peeve. It's not in the book as much as it is in a project that I'm working on right now is oftentimes we explain failures by just saying, oh, it's a different context. But I think it'd be helpful for us to develop a taxonomy of what goes into a context. And I think we're working on that right now just so that people will, you know, will have at least a vocabulary to think about what that context actually means.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It doesn't get to just be the catch. All of.

Well, yeah, it didn't work, so it must be context. Right.

And perhaps it is. And what can we identify about it that we can know for future testing generations. Right. As we go through to the next thing? So I would love, as we are not quite wrapping up, but getting sort of close to wrapping up for everyone who's listening, knowing this is the brainy business podcast, I'm sure in the you were talking about for behaviorally informed organization and knowing, you know, should I even be looking at behavioral science? How do I make that decision? Where do I start? What are some of the insights, you know, kind of top level things that you can share about that for everyone who's listening and asking those same questions.

So, absolutely. I think I'm going to be glib in responding to this and I'm going to be glib by actually borrowing a line from one of my earlier books, the Last Mile, where it basically struck me after 20, 25 years of being in the business business, that every business is in the business of changing somebody's behavior. Right. I mean, it could be anything like, you know, your dentist wants you to do things differently, they want you to floss, good luck with that. And then your dietitian wants you to change behavior, your wealth advisor, I mean, everybody wants to change behavior. And so I think it is critically important to embed behavioral science into any business, no matter what. The trick is where you do it and how do you do it? And at the end of the day, I often make a distinction between the behavioral science part and the behavioral engineer part. And so what I mean by that is like, you don't need to run experiments every single time. You should have some ways of trying and testing the validity of conclusions. I love Ronald Reagan who always used to say, trust but verify. So trust the literature, but it's always good to verify, to make sure, as we said, the context is the same as it is before. So there's low hanging fruit which is relying on the literature, thinking through what are the behavioral frictions. I mean, these are things that all of us could do every single day. I mean, how many of us have stopped to ask the question, why aren't my customers buying the product, right. And trying to understand if it's just a feature of the product or is there something else going on in their lives that is preventing them from doing that? And I think the moment you change that lens to try and understand the friction, you start seeing things, right? So that's, that's one piece of advice I would give. The other piece of advice is think small. And what I mean by that is oftentimes the success of big products and big ideas gets tripped up by small things, right? So one last example has to do with how do I get people to get their annual health checkups? All right, so it turns out I worked with an insurance company many years back. People that are bought an insurance product and were entitled to an annual checkup, only 16% actually got their checkup. And as a traditional marketing unit, you know, they did the usual stuff. They hired a market research firm. The market research firm tried to find out. They called the people and said, why didn't you get your checkup? And everybody said we were too busy. Now I was deeply suspicious of that. Right? Like, I mean, who is so busy that they can't contribute two, three, maybe four hours of their life in a year to make sure they're healthy? And so what I did in the following year was we did an experiment. Not a well controlled experiment, therefore not published anywhere. But we just took a bunch of people and randomly assigned them appointments. We'd say, like, John, thank you for buying the product. I've booked you in to see Dr. XYZ on June 16th at 10:30. Should you not be able to make it, give us a call. Our dentist does the same thing to us. They'll book you for the next one. And gosh, it worked like a charm. Right. The friction wasn't the fact that people were busy, they just didn't want to make a phone call.

Right.

That was the problem.

Yeah.

Right. And so it's a little, little stuff. Right. And so sometimes it's the little stuff that trips people up. And so having the discipline of mapping out a customer journey, not just what people do, but what you would like them to do to accomplish a certain outcome and then comparing the two will give you these little things. I made people send me a letter. They don't have a stamp or they don't have that. Like I designed a welfare program for low income people for which they need to go to a bank, but the bank shuts at 6pm and most of these people work till 7pm Those are the kinds of things we don't really recognize. And I think having the discipline to map it out I think makes a big difference.

Yeah, definitely. Well, and so you had mentioned earlier the fresh start effect and then you were talking about the kind of pre commitment slash like this is set aside for you as we go from the omission commission question. And I know that Katie Milkman and team at Behavior Change for Good did some work with vaccines that has taken, you know, in a similar vein perhaps inspired by some of what you had done there of like looking at, you know, if we set aside and say your vaccine is waiting for you, will more people get it? That that's right.

And again like so I was part of the team that actually worked on, on that entire mega experiment.

Of course you were. See, I knew it even in that experiment.

Yeah, we can tell a lot of good stories about the save for your idea but it's the act of reminding people that has the biggest effect. Everything else has small effects compared to that. And so I guess sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones. We don't need to get too fancy about what we tell them, just tell them. And I think that's it. Right. So I think that's the other third message that I leave people with is like oftentimes when you think small, some of the simplest things and small, simple things might make a difference. Remind people, frame it to them in such a way that it resonates with their, with their wishes, give them feedback, help them experience progress, make things easy for people and they'll do it.

Wonderful.

Well, thank you so, so much. I could of course keep chatting to you for days of all the things, but we'll go ahead and use that as a good stopping point and for everyone that is now so exc to go get one of your many amazing books and learn more about your work and connect with you. You know what are their best options to do that?

I guess the best thing to do is to go to your local favorite search engine, be Google or whatever else and type University of Toronto Bear B E A R. It'll take you to both our Bear web page as well as the behaviorally informed organization's webpage. You can also find me@twitter dilipsoman and hopefully I will hear from many of you and look forward to comments and questions.

Wonderful. And we'll of course be linking to everything in the show notes to make it nice and easy. And yes please do. I always like to say, you know, I don't know of anyone who creates content and does work and shares it with the world that then if someone thinks what wow that was really insightful or I applied this thing then doesn't want to hear about it no matter how small. Right. So do the little shout out Twitter or elsewhere.

And not just that, even if stuff doesn't work, I'd love to hear about it because that's learning right there, of course as to why it didn't work.

Right. Yeah. And maybe it's in the form of a question of I don't know why this didn't work. Right. And be able to learn a little bit. We're all about learning and good questions and keeping that conversation going. So. So thank you so so much for joining me again. It was a lot of fun to.

Chat with you today.

Thank you. And hopefully we'll have a relatively painless dental visit next time, the both of us.

Yes, here's hoping.

Thank you again to Dr. Dilip Sohman for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, it probably isn't too surprising to know that I really love all the ways they're showing showing how behavioral science can be applied in business and where it doesn't always act exactly as you think it might in the wild and what that means as the field moves forward. In the conversation I referenced my previous chat with Dr. Michael Hallsworth called Do Nudges Work, which is my top recommended next episode for you to listen to and is linked for you in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation with Dilip, I know you are going to want to keep digging in and thinking about how this all applies with that conversation with Michael. We are at a really interesting time in the field where we get to shape what comes next. There's so much opportunity. I absolutely love being able to be a part of behavioral economics and behavioral science right now and think about what's next and see how the conversations we're having today could help shape some of that, whether it's from research at the dentist or any number of other fascinating conversations and following up on that dentist stuff. Like I said, I had just started asking the question on LinkedIn and it really did hold true that about 15, 20% across social media channels, that large amount of people that said that they don't use Novocaine or when they go to the dentist. So I'm curious, definitely even you know, whenever you're listening to this, let me know if you're someone who never uses novocaine or that does. I am sure I'm gonna continue to think about this over time. Come find me on any of the socials as the Brainy Biz and also as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And of course, be sure to listen to Tuesday's episode on the Pain of Paying to get a little more insight into the type of research Dilip did for his dissertation. That episode, as well as my interview with Michael Hallsworth and so many others, along with Dilip's books and ways to get in touch with him, are all waiting for you in the show. Notes for the episode, which are in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com241 and thank you again to Dr. Dilip Sohman for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.