Riani Kenyon is a caffeinated Zillennial who is hopelessly addicted to The Sims 4 and binge-watches her latest anime obsession when she’s not busy bopping to early 2000’s K-pop. Beyond being a nerd, she has worked on initiatives for the UN Academic Impact and the UK Model WHO, and also explored politics while interning at the House of Commons.


People are drawn to honesty and integrity in the post-truth era

Radical Transparency 

People want insider status that's community-driven

Inside Track

Institutional distrust from the public is growing. In 2024, 61% of people across the globe believe business leaders are purposely trying to mislead people by knowingly making false or gross exaggerations. 

Edelman

 These sentiments have led to increased brand backlash, like the public outrage over 

 that fluctuates based on demand and the less than positive responses over 

, which summarised users' spending habits. Geopolitical tensions are heightening people's awareness of brand insensitivity, as seen in 

 facing backlash over an ad campaign which resembled scenes from the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

However, people still believe businesses should be spearheading change, especially when individuals feel like their actions are futile in the face of large corporations. In fact, people across the globe believe CEOs should take a public stand on the treatment of employees (89%), climate change (82%), discrimination (80%), the wealth gap (77%), and immigration (72%). 

 So, if business leaders take a stand and use human insights to influence people for a better society, people are all for it. Yet, despite this sentiment from the public, brands rarely harness behavioural heuristics in their strategies. Indeed, 45% of people globally agree that scientists do not know how to communicate with people like them. 

 Canvas8 brought in Richard Shotton to answer business leaders' questions on how to use behavioural science effectively and ethically.

In the summer of 2005, Richard Shotton had just attended a less-than-ideal meeting with the NHS on a Give Blood brief he’d been working on at the time. But, he was struggling to achieve the brief’s goal of getting people in the UK to donate blood. To distract himself after the difficult meeting, he picked up 

. He started reading about a series of studies done in the late 1960s by two American psychologists who came up with a theory called the ‘

The theory argues that if you ask lots of people to help you, there's a diffusion of responsibility, and every individual is slightly less likely to come to your aid. As he read this in 

, he thought, "Bloody hell! This is exactly the problem we're facing!" So, Richard Shotton adjusted the donation messaging to evoke a more personal sense of responsibility. Instead of saying, 'Blood stock is low in England. Please donate!' the call to action became localised – for example, "Blood is slow in Birmingham. Please donate!" Even this tiny tweak led to a 10% to 15% improvement in the cost per donation. This revelation got Richard Shotton hooked on behavioural science and psychology.

, which put behavioural science at the core of all initiatives, whether it was to encourage people to switch their drink of choice, exercise more, or click ‘buy’ rather than just browse a website. Having written two books – 

 (2023), Shotton is perfectly placed to help businesses understand how behavioural heuristics can inform and transform creative and commercial strategy for businesses. At Canvas8’s first Breakfast Briefing of 2024, founder Nick Morris sat down with Shotton to explore the theme of ‘Knowing not Doing’, analysing why brands rarely use behavioural heuristics – and where the most exciting opportunities for heuristics are.

Is behavioural economics an academic or commercial exercise?

Most experiments in the public domain are done by academics, but behavioural science isn't an invention. It's not like pharmacology or aeronautics, where academics are creating this insight about human nature. All they're doing is describing what already exists and proving in controlled conditions that it's a genuine insight. However, there are many other ways to gain insights about human nature. And often, practitioners get there first. So, one of the studies I talked about in 

In 1966, Elliot Aronson was at Harvard and he got a colleague to take part in a quiz. He has given this guy all the answers. So the guy gets 92% of the questions right and looks like a complete genius. But then, as that quiz comes to a close, he spills a cup of coffee on himself. Aronson has recorded all of this – he takes the audio recording and plays it to a new group of listeners. In some cases, he plays the entire incident; in others, he edits out the spillage. He then questions everyone as to how appealing the contestant is. The core finding was that if people heard the spillage as well as the great test performance, they wrote the contestant was 50% better in terms of appeal than those who just heard the amazing test score. He calls this the pratfall effect, and he argues that if a person exhibits a flaw, they become more appealing.

Looking back seven years before, in 1959, advertising creative director Bill Bernbach said, "A small admission gains a large acceptance." So, before the academic work, this brilliant creative director had, through observing people, realised that one way to win trust and appeal was to draw attention to a problem or a flaw in your product rather than trying to hide it away. Following this, the first VW ad used the tactic, 'Ugly is only skin deep'. So yes, sometimes behavioural science is considered an academic concept. But there's just as much generation of these ideas from practitioners.

 talks about 16 ½ heuristics. Are there some heuristics that are more relevant for marketers than others?

Some are not really relevant at all; they might be about addiction or child development, which aren’t directly commerce. But some have an obvious link to business, and what I've tried to do in the book is pick those experiments that have a very practical application.

There are thousands of studies where academics are acting in good faith, but the benchmark for a valid result in an academic paper is a 95% statistical significance. What that means is there’s a less than 20% chance that it was a fluke. So if you have 10,000 experiments, there’s a large portion of those that are going to be random noise. What you need to do is then take the potential universe of relevant biases, and then whittle them down into the ones that are genuine findings rather than just statistical works. Ask yourself, has this study been replicated? Is it a one-off study, so should be treated as an unproven hypothesis? Or has it been run in multiple different circumstances, multiple different times and places, and you’re finding a similar result? Those are where we should be putting our efforts or at least having the greatest faith in their relevance.

What sorts of problems are people coming to you with and able to solve using this logic?

I think there are two ways of looking at it – from the problem or from the bias. There's a massive, unwieldy number of experiments, so if a brief comes in, such as 'We are getting too many people dropping out on the purchase while on our website, what could we do to improve that?', the first thing that I recommend doing is using a simple framework. Many psychologists have tried to categorise biases into groups. There are many different frameworks, like 

, which has these four key themes: make it 

imely. If you have a challenge, think about those four questions, and then find experiments related to them that will come up with the correct studies to tackle the challenge.

The other way is to address the same questions that come up again and again. How do we build trust? How do we break or recreate habits? How do we make the brand at the same price appear more palatable? There are academic tools or groups of academics trying to address that question. So, if it was a habit, that's a massive area that psychologists are interested in. They've identified moments when habits are more weakened and destabilised. Ideas like 

' are a good place to start because they've identified tactics for rebuilding those habits. There's work by Dr. Phillippa Lally at UCL, who showed how long it takes to embed a habit.

So I think there are two approaches from that angle – use a framework to go through the main principles and the related biases, or is there a close analogy, a body of work that solves something very similar? That's how to turn that mass of studies into something more practical. However, the other way of looking at it is when behavioural science can be used. If you're trying to influence people, then there's a role of behavioural science, studying what genuinely influences people. So you could take a principle like 

, which is the idea that we're deeply influenced by what others do. If you were designing a product, you could apply that principle in one way, like Monzo did. They harness social proof in their product designs by making a bright, eye-watering card that leads people to their service. It makes them distinctive and noticeable and allows people to gauge the product's popularity. People don't pour over a market report; they think about an example of someone else using it.

 units internally. Have you seen these gaining traction and having success?

I think there are two ways of applying behavioural science. You can either set up a specific team or see this as a route for all planners or creatives to apply behavioural science. The best uses and the most significant impact tend to come from that secondary group, and the agencies that have isolated behavioural science units have had some success, but not as much as they would have hoped.

But if you go back to having the best use of behavioural science and talk about the pratfall effect, that didn't come from a behavioural science unit within an agency; it came from people who wanted to understand human nature.

A few years ago, Canvas8 ran tests for Wagamama to improve its menu layout. Our approach used the ‘

Studies by Sakhalin and Lichtenstein at the University of Colorado show that most of the time, people buy based on the presence of a higher-priced item and how the other options are framed around it. They did a study with a fancy craft beer bar in America, and over eight weeks, they randomised the menus. Sometimes, people got a menu of 13 beers, with the cheapest beer at the top and the most expensive at the bottom. Other times, people got the most expensive beer at the top and the cheapest at the bottom. They found that people spent 4% more on average with that second approach. So their argument is it's the first thing that sets your expectation about what's fair to pay. If you see a $4 beer at the top, and it goes up to $7, that $3 difference is looking pricey. Whereas if you see $10 first of all, by the time we're getting down to a $8 beer, you're saving $2.

Have you ever encountered a situation in which you've proposed an approach that may engage behavioural heuristics and it's been met with a degree of caution, and they’re not comfortable engineering behaviour?

Behavioural science is just a description of what influences people, so it’s essentially ethically neutral. To me, the question about ethics isn’t whether you should use behavioural science; rather, it’s whether you are trying to change behaviour in a beneficial way.

How can we make the different teams in different countries with different business models that all belong to the same company buy into behavioural science features?

There's often this myth that behavioural biases are relevant to the general public, but they don't affect professionals. However, there are other studies done on professionals, such as a 2017 study done by the Australian Government, where they wanted to get doctors to prescribe fewer antibiotics. They sent out letters to over 6,000 doctors telling them there’s a 3.2% reduction in prescription rates and that they’re giving out 85% more antibiotics than their peers, which caused them to cut back on their prescription rates by 12.3%. This is the social proof effect in action among professionals. So, if, for instance, your employees aren’t doing their timesheets, you can reach out to the bottom 49% and tell them they’re doing their timesheets less in comparison to the rest of the team.

How can we think about different audiences and apply behavioural biases to those who pride themselves on not ‘following the crowd’?

There's a brilliant study from the UK Behavioural Insights Team and HMRC from 2011. They sent out 140,000 letters trying to get people to pay their taxes on time. What they found when they sent out a message saying 'Pay your tax on time, or we'll fine you', 68% of people pay their tax on time. When the message said, 'Pay your tax on time, nine out of ten people in Britain do so', there was a 5% point increase in repayment rates of up to 73%. But the interesting result was when the message said, 'Pay your tax on time, nine out of ten people in Lambeth do so', there was a 50-point increase.

For people who don't 'follow the crowd', they're still most influenced by people like themselves. So, if you don't want to talk about a band being popular at the risk of alienating those folks, you can show which bands have been popular among the people they admire or like, establishing that social proof.

If there's one piece of advice on how to integrate behavioural insights, what would it be?

Don't think of these studies as fixed in stone, just bogged down by academics. If you ever come across a study that was maybe done 50 years ago in public health among Americans, don't reject it. Think about how you can take that methodology and run it among a much larger sample of drinkers or whatever category you're working on. Then, if the bias works on those control circumstances, then you've got some weighty evidence to persuade all the stakeholders that you need.

 of people globally agree that scientists do not know how to communicate with people like them

 of people across the globe believe business leaders are purposely trying to mislead people by knowingly making false or gross exaggerations

Globally, people believe CEOs should take a public stand on the treatment of employees (

While behavioural science is rooted in academic research, study findings can effectively address challenges like trust-building, habit formation, and brand appeal

Behavioural science frameworks and well-replicated studies can provide valuable human insights to apply to commercial strategies

The ethics of behavioural science is neutral, but the moral application of these techniques depends on whether practitioners are changing behaviour for the better

Richard Shotton is an author, consultant, conference speaker, and trainer who specialises in behavioural science and marketing. He began his career 21 years ago before setting up his own company, Astroten, which works with clients including Google, Facebook, the AA, BrewDog, and Fever-Tree. Richard is the author of 

, which explains how behavioural science can solve business challenges. 

 was a #1 Amazon bestseller and is available in 12 languages. In 2021 Richard became an honorary lifetime fellow of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and an associate of the Moller Institute, Churchill College, Cambridge University.

Global

Behavioural Sciences

Psychology Today

, offers insight into the commercial application of behavioural science for Canvas8’s Breakfast Briefing series. He speaks directly to clients on how they can incorporate heuristics and biases into their company strategies.