The Choice Factory

25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy

Richard Shotton

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780857196101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Before you can influence decisions, you need to understand what drives them. In The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton sets out to help you learn.By observing a typical day of decision-making, from trivial food choices to significant work-place moves, he investigates how our behaviour is shaped by psychological shortcuts. With a clear focus on the marketing potential of knowing what makes us tick, Shotton has drawn on evidence from academia, real-life ad campaigns and his own original research. The Choice Factory is written in an entertaining and highly-accessible format, with 25 short chapters, each addressing a cognitive bias and outlining simple ways to apply it to your own marketing challenges. Supporting his discussion, Shotton adds insights from new interviews with some of the smartest thinkers in advertising, including Rory Sutherland, Lucy Jameson and Mark Earls.From priming to the pratfall effect, charm pricing to the curse of knowledge, the science of behavioural economics has never been easier to apply to marketing. The Choice Factory is the new advertising essential.

Bias 1: The Fundamental Attribution Error

Why brands need target contexts as much as target audiences

You slam your front door closed and trudge towards your car, which owing to a lack of off-street parking is a hundred yards away. In between you and the car is a beggar, slumped in a doorway.

A stream of busy commuters walks past him without stopping. You watch as a man, dressed in a pinstripe suit, picks up his pace, averts his gaze and strides past the vagrant. Good god – people are so selfish today, you think.

You root around in your pocket for some change to donate. There’s only a fiver so you pick up your pace and avert your gaze.

Your assumption about the selfishness of the businessman is an example of the fundamental attribution error. That’s the tendency to overestimate the importance of personality, and underestimate that of context, when explaining behaviour. You judged the businessman’s actions with reference to his personality rather than fleeting factors like his mood, busy-ness or mindset.

This mistake is widespread and has important implications for how we think about targeting our communications.

The classic experiment

In 1973 two Princeton University psychologists, John Darley and Daniel Batson, published a landmark paper on the topic entitled: From Jerusalem to Jericho. The paper proved how seemingly incidental contextual factors had a significant, but under-appreciated, influence on behaviour.

They asked 40 trainee Catholic priests to complete questionnaires regarding their motivation for entering the church. The surveys unpicked whether the students were motivated by helping others or to ensure their own salvation.

Once the surveys were completed the psychologists told the priests to record a five-minute talk on a given topic. Since the current room had insufficient space the students were sent, armed with a map, to see another colleague in a building a few minutes away.

Just before the participants left, they were notified how much time they had until the recording. A third of the students were told, “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving. The assistant should be waiting for you so you’d better hurry.” This was the high hurry condition.

Another third, those in the intermediate hurry condition, were warned, “The assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” And the final third, in the low hurry condition, were told, “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.”

The students were randomly, and separately, allocated to the different conditions.

As the participants marched, or strolled, towards their destination they passed a confederate of the psychologists. The stooge pretended to be in distress. He was slumped, head down with his eyes closed in a doorway and as a student approached he groaned and coughed.

This was the crux of the experiment. Which students would stop and help?

The power of the situation

Overall, 40% of the participants stopped. The primary determinant was how time-pressured they felt. In the high hurry condition, a mere 10% stopped, compared to 45% in the intermediate condition and a full 63% in the low hurry condition.

In contrast, the personality metric had minimal impact. It didn’t matter to any sizeable degree why someone had elected to join the priesthood. The situation, not the person, determined the behaviour.

Do the findings still apply nearly 50 years later?

A lot has changed since then. In 1973 a pint of beer cost 14p, Smash Martians were advertising instant mash and Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, was still at school.

But despite these differences our underlying motivations remain. As Bill Bernbach, the legendary creative, said:

It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.

Yet agencies continue to peddle the myth that consumers have radically changed.

Why?

It’s often due to their vested interests, rather than the underlying truth. According to Bob Hoffman, the outspoken author of Marketers are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey:

The more they can convince us that everything is changing, and we need them to interpret the changes -- the longer they stay employed. And so they have created an avalanche of exaggerated claims and dire warnings that gain them attention and a nice little profit from the increased viewership/listenership/readership.

But don’t just take Bob’s word for it. Through this book I’ll demonstrate the unchanging nature of people. To do that I’ll replicate, or build on, many classic experiments and prove that they still apply today.

We consistently underestimate context

The Darley experiment proved that in that particular situation context trumped personality. But that jars with most people’s prediction of what would happen.

Laura Maclean and I engaged 433 people in a thought experiment. Imagine, we said, a man slumped in a doorway, possibly in need of help, who do you think will stop? A caring man in a rush or a not so caring one with plenty of time?

It wasn’t even close. 81% thought those in a rush were more likely to stop. Only 19% predicted those with plenty of time. Pretty much the opposite of the results of Darley’s experiment.

Why do we underestimate context as a driver of behaviour? Perhaps, because it boosts our self-image: it appeals to our ego to believe that we are paragons of rationality. Who wants to admit to being at the whim of external forces?

If Darley’s was the only experiment that showed people underestimate the importance of context then it would be sensible to treat the findings with caution. However, this finding has been repeated in a broad range of circumstances, perhaps most famously by Lee Ross, Professor of Social Psychology at Stanford University.

Ross recruited 36 students to take part in a quiz; half were randomly allocated to the role of questioner and the remainder were the contestants. The questioners had 15 minutes to think of 10 tricky questions on a topic of their choice and then the contestants had to answer them as well as they could. As might be expected most contestants struggled to answer many of the mind-boggling questions. Finally, the participants had to rate each other’s general knowledge.

Contestants rated their questioners’ general knowledge as significantly higher than the questioners rated the contestants. Both parties mistakenly attributed the other person’s performance to their personality rather than the context of the situation.

How to apply this effect

1. Research little and often

Laura and I used Google Surveys to conduct our thought experiment. A single question among a nationally representative group costs about 7p per person and the data is normally available in one or two days.

The growth in these opportunities is a boon for brands. Research no longer needs to be limited to large projects co...

Table of contents

• Contentsx
• Praise for The Choice Factory
• Preface
• Introduction
• Bias 1: The Fundamental Attribution Error
• Bias 2: Social Proof
• Bias 3: Negative Social Proof
• Bias 4: Distinctiveness
• Bias 5: Habit
• Bias 6: The Pain of Payment
• Bias 7: The Danger of Claimed Data
• Bias 8: Mood
• Bias 9: Price Relativity
• Bias 10: Primacy Effect
• Bias 11: Expectancy Theory
• Bias 12: Confirmation Bias
• Bias 13: Overconfidence
• Bias 14: Wishful Seeing
• Bias 15: Media Context
• Bias 16: The Curse of Knowledge
• Bias 17: Goodhart’s Law
• Bias 18: The Pratfall Effect
• Bias 19: Winner’s Curse
• Bias 20: The Power of the Group
• Bias 21: Veblen Goods
• Bias 22: The Replicability Crisis
• Bias 23: Variability
• Bias 24: Cocktail Party Effect
• Bias 25: Scarcity
• Ethics
• Conclusion
• References
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index