Category: Excerpts

💎 On how scarcity of goods and exclusivity of information significantly increases sales (a double whammy)

After we talked in my office one day about scarcity and exclusivity of information, he decided to do a study using his sales staff. The company’s customers—buyers for supermarkets or other retail food outlets—were phoned as usual by a salesperson and asked for a purchase in one of three ways. One set of customers heard a standard sales presentation before being asked for their orders. Another set of customers heard the standard sales presentation plus information that the supply of imported beef was likely to be scarce in the upcoming months. A third group received the standard sales presentation and the information about a scarce supply of beef, too; however, they also learned that the scarce-supply news was not generally available information—it had come, they were told, from certain exclusive contacts that the company had. Thus the customers who received this last sales presentation learned that not only was the availability of the product limited, so also was the news concerning it—the scarcity double whammy.

The results of the experiment quickly become apparent when the company salespeople began to urge the owner to buy more beef because there wasn’t enough in the inventory to keep up with all the orders they were receiving. Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On prioritising tried and trusted findings (over the new and surprising)

But the problem is not just with journalists. The physician John Ioannidis scandalized his colleagues and anticipated the replicability crisis with his 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” A big problem is that many of the phenomena that bio. medical researchers hunt for are interesting and a priori unlikely to be true, requiring highly sensitive methods to avoid false positives, while many true findings, including successful replication attempts and null results, are considered too boring to publish.

This does not, of course, mean that scientific research is a waste of time. Superstition and folk belief have an even worse track record than less-than-perfect science, and in the long run an understanding emerges from the rough-and-tumble of scientific disputation. As the physicist John Ziman noted in 1978, “The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.” It’s a reminder that Bayesian reasoning recommends against the common practice of using “textbook” as an insult and “scientific revolution” as a compliment.

A healthy respect for the boring would also improve the quality of political commentary.

Excerpt from: Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

💎 On why collective behaviour is so hard to predict

Pitts put it. ‘A one-man riot is a tantrum.’ So how does a riot grow from a single person? In 1978, Mark Granovetter published a now classic study looking at how trouble might take off. He suggested that people might have different thresholds for rioting: a radical person might riot regardless of what others were doing, whereas a conservative individual might only riot if many others were. As an example, Granovetter suggested we imagine 100 people hanging around in a square. One person has a threshold of 0, meaning they’ll riot (or tantrum) even if nobody else does; the next person has a threshold of 1, so they will only riot if at least one other person does; the next person has a threshold of 2, and so on, increasing by one each time. Granovetter pointed out that this situation would lead to an inevitable domino effect: the person with a 0 threshold would start rioting, triggering the person with a threshold of 1, which would trigger the person with a threshold of 2. This would continue until the entire crowd was rioting.

But what if the situation were slightly different? Say the person with a threshold of I had a threshold of 2. This time, the first person would start rioting, but there would be nobody else with a low enough threshold to be triggered. Although the crowds in each situation are near identical, the behaviour of one person could be the difference between a riot and a tantrum. Granovetter suggested personal thresholds could apply to other forms of collective behaviour too, from going on Strike leaving a social event.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 On quality over quantity (in copywriting)

After all, isn’t brevity important? Nobody sits down and reads a great big press ad or an eight-page sales letter. do they? Do they?

Er, turns out they do. And more orders come from the long letter than the short version. More enquiries from the long ad than the short one.

Perhaps the most famous example in press advertising is an ad for Merrill Lynch written by a partner, Louis Engel. Engel was the managing editor at Business Week until he was hired by Charles Merrill, the firm’s founder.

The ad occupied a full page in the New York Times. Seven columns. Tiny type. NO PICTURES. In total, 6,540 words.

It drew 10,000 requests for a booklet mentioned towards the end of the ad (which, incidentally, had no coupon or any other recognizable “response device”).

Excerpt from: Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide to Great Copywriting by Andy Maslen

💎 On the danger of poorly set targets

Metrics have even shaped literature. When Alexandre Dumas first wrote The Three Musketeers in serialised form, his publisher paid him by the line. Dumas therefore added the servant character Grimaud, who spoke in short sentences, to stretch out the text (then killed him off when the publisher said that short lines didn’t count).

Relying on measurements like clicks or likes can give a misleading impression of how people are truly behaving. During 2007–8, over 1.1 million people joined the “Save Darfur’ cause on Facebook, which aimed to raise money and attention in response to the conflict in Sudan. A few of the new members donated and recruited others, but most did nothing. Of the people who joined, only 28 per cent recruited someone else, and a mere 0.2 per cent donated.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models

The second kind of response is at the other extreme. Rather than ignore results, people may have too much faith in them. Opaque and difficult is seen as a good thing. I’ve often heard people suggest that a piece of maths is brilliant because nobody can understand it. In their view, complicated means clever. According to statistician George Box, it’s not just observers who can be seduced by mathematical analysis. “Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models,’ he supposedly once said.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 How Smirnoff created the appearance of popularity at launch

PYOTR SMIRNOV came into this world on the eve of the birth of Russian capitalism and, in 1864, employed that capitalist spirit to make what would eventually be the world’s number one selling vodka brand, now known as Smirnoff. Pyotr was the first to use the charcoal filtering process that removes impurities from the grain-neutral spirit. He was also the first to “advertise.”

While organized publicity was still a vague concept, Smirnov shrewdly gathered a group of beggars, offered them a warm meal and plenty to drink at his home, then paid them to pop into Moscow’s major bars demanding Smirnoff. The man was a PR genius far ahead of his time. No wonder he became the official vodka supplier to the tsar in 1886.

Excerpt from: The 12 Bottle Bar: Make Hundreds of Cocktails with Just Twelve Bottles by David Solmonson and Lesley Jacobs Solmonson

💎 On progress being made when you’re prepared to accept a decline in a metric others aren’t

The shift towards 3-point shots had broad consequences for overall basketball tactics. But without the original and founding insight – that the game had been too cautious in accepting the increased risk of missing the shot altogether – there would have been no great leap forward. Whenever someone innovates in business or in life,’ argues the poker player Caspar Berry, ‘they almost inevitably do so by accepting a negative metric that other people are unwilling to accept.’ (My emphasis.)

Excerpt from: Making Decisions: Putting the human back in the machine by Ed Smith

💎 On safety measures causing people to take more risks

Economists call this excessive risk-taking when you know you’ll be bailed out ‘moral hazard’. To reduce moral hazard on the road, the economist Gordon Tullock once argued that instead of mandating seat belts, the government should require large spikes to be installed in the centre of steering wheels – known as Tullock spikes. These spikes would make drivers more aware of the danger of driving too fast. The Bank of England doesn’t quite do that.

Excerpt from: Can’t We Just Print More Money?: Economics in Ten Simple Questions by Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning

💎 On the importance of avoiding black and white thinking

The physicist Richard Feynman put it like this: ‘Statements of science are not of what is true and what is untrue, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty … Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute truth and absolute falsity.’

Excerpt from: Making Decisions: Putting the human back in the machine by Ed Smith

💎 On the benefit of willing yourself into a state of relative indifference when it comes to negotiations

This is connected with the art of negotiation. The game theorist John Nash demonstrated that protagonists bargain more effectively when they are less needy. The less you fear not getting what you want, the more likely you are to get what you want. The logical conclusion follows: in any negotiation, your best strategy is an internal as well as external question. Can you ‘will’ yourself into a state of relative indifference, and thereby negate anxiety-induced neediness?

Excerpt from: Making Decisions: Putting the human back in the machine by Ed Smith

💎 On the problem with teaser headline (we don’t care)

Which headlines work best?

When a big US advertising agency tested headlines for print ads, they ran the same ad with three different headlines. One delivering news, one promising a benefit and one arousing curiosity, Which do you think out-pulled the others? (The answer’s in the following text box.)

The benefits headline performed best.

When I ask delegates on a writing workshop to vote, they usually go for the teaser headline—the one arousing curiosity. I guess the thinking is, people are naturally curious so if you set them a puzzle, they’ll want to find out the answer. Here’s why that reasoning doesn’t stack up in the real world.

If you write a headline like this one:

Why are freelance copywriters like dried apricots?

Most people’s reaction is, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

You have to remember that for print advertising, your ad will be nestling among editorial, ie all that stuff your reader paid for and wants to mad. Why should they stop doing what they want to do—reading about cars or hi-fi, for example–just so they can solve your little puzzle? If people want puzzles, they do Sudoku.

If, on the other hand, you write a headline like this one:

How this freelance copywriter can help you double your sales

I think they’ll want to know more.

Excerpt from: Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide to Great Copywriting by Andy Maslen

💎 On how adding a little bit of effort into learning increases probability of remembering

In one study published in 2014, researchers from Princeton and UCLA examined the relationship between learning and disfluency by looking at the difference between students who took notes by hand while watching a lecture and those who used laptops. Recording a speaker’s comments via longhand is both harder and less efficient than typing on a keyboard. Fingers cramp. Writing is slower than typing, and so you can’t record as many words. Students who use laptops, in contrast, spend less time actively working during a lecture, and yet they still collect about twice as many notes as their handwriting peers. Put differently, writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases. tale When the researchers looked at the test scores of those two groups, however, they found that the hand writers scored twice as well as the typists in remembering what a lecturer said.

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On how, once we decide upon a way of thinking, we struggle to see the other side

One important study of the power of such decision-frames was published in 1984, after a researcher from Northwestern asked a group of participants to list reasons why they should buy a VCR based on their own experiences. Volunteers generated dozens of justifications for such a purchase. Some said they felt a VCR would provide entertainment. Others saw it as an investment in their education or a way for their families to spend time together. Then those same volunteers were asked to generate reasons not to buy a VCR. They struggled to come up with arguments against the expenditure. The vast majority said they were likely to buy one sometime soon.

Next, the researcher asked a new group of volunteers to come up with a list of reasons against purchasing a VCR. No problem, they replied. Some said watching television distracted them from their families. Others said that movies were mindless, and they didn’t need the temptation. When those same people were then asked to list reasons for buying a VCR, they had trouble coming up with convincing reasons to make the purchase and said they were unlikely to ever buy one.

What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. The two groups were demographically similar. They should have been equally interested in buying a VCR. At to very least, they should have generated equal numbers of reasons to buy or spurn the machines. But once a participant grabbed on to a decision-making frame—This is an investment in my education verses this is a distraction from my family

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On the illusion of progress being a motivating factor to continue (a diet)

One place to start is to highlight ways people already agree or are already moving on in the desired direction. One diet and exercise book cleverly leverages this idea. Rather than starting off by trying to convince people to be healthier, the author points out that this is something they already want: “Congratulations! Whether you realize it or not, simply by picking up this book you have taken the first of what I hope will be many steps, both large and small, simple and challenging, toward the most rewarding journey of all—the road to reclaiming your physical health, well-being, and happiness.” By pointing out ways people are already on board, the author encourages readers to see their position on the field as closer to the end goal. Which makes them likely to stick around for the next phase of the journey (Greene, 2002, p. 9).

Excerpt from: Catalyst by Jonah Berger

💎 On people we think of as exceptionally creative (essentially being intellectual middleman)

Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common-Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psycho-therapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.

“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”

Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers.

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On the downside of working from home (the spread of new ideas from weak ties)

In the 1970s, sociologist Mark Granovetter suggested that information could spread further through acquaintances than through close friends. This was because friends would often have multiple links in common, making most transmission redundant. ‘If one tells a rumor to all his close friends, and they do likewise, many will hear the rumor a second and third time, since those linked by strong ties tend to share friends.’ He referred to the importance of acquaintances as the ‘strength of weak ties’: if you want access to new information, you may be more likely to get it through a casual contact than a close friend.’

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 On analysing successful brands and looking for a recipe for success (is often misleading)

A quick hypothesis: say one million monkeys speculate on the stock market. They buy and sell stocks like crazy, and, of course, completely at random. What happens? After one week, about half of the monkeys will have made a profit and the other half a loss. The ones that made a profit can stay; the ones that made a loss you send home. In the second week, one half of the monkeys will still be riding high, while the other half will have made a loss and are sent home. And so on. After ten weeks, about 1,000 monkeys will be left — those who have always invested their money well. After twenty weeks, just one monkey will remain — this one always, without fail, chose the right stocks and is now a billionaire. Lets call him the success monkey.

How does the media react? They will pounce on this animal to understand its “success principles”. And they will find some: perhaps the monkey eats more bananas than the others. Perhaps he sits in another corner of the cage. Or, maybe he swings headlong through the branches, or he takes long, reflective pause while grooming. He must have some recipe for success, right? How else could he perform so brilliantly? Spot-on for twenty weeks — and that from a simple money? Impossible!

Also known as: Outcome Bias.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On the power of loss aversion in healthcare (increased awareness)

For this reason, if you want to convince someone about something, don’t focus on the advantages; instead highlight how it helps them dodge the disadvantages. Here is an example from a campaign promotion breast self-examination (BSE): two different leaflets were handed out to women. Pamphlet A urged: “Research shows that women who do BSE have an increased change of finding a tumour in the early, non treatable stage of the disease”. Pamphlet B said: “Research shows that women who do not do BSE have a decreased chance of finding a tumour in the early, more treatable stage of the disease.: The study revealed that pamphlet B (written in a “loss-frame”) generated significantly more awareness and BSE behaviour than pamphlet A (written in “gain-frame”).

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On giving the story a face (statistics don’t stir us, people do)

In another experiment, psychologist Paul Slovic asked people for donations. One group was shown a photo of Rokia from Malawi, an emaciated child with pleading eyes. Afterward, people donated an average of $2.83 to the charity (out of $5 they were given to fill out a short survey). The second group was shown statistics about the famine in Malawi, including the fact that more than three million malnourished children were affected, The average donation dropped by 50%. This is illogical: you would think that people’s generosity would grow if they know the extent of the disaster. But we do not function like that. Statistics don’t stir us; people do.

The media have long known that factual reports and bar charts do not entice readers. Hence the guideline: give the story a face.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On why we often, mistakenly, think the past was a golden age (we just forgot about all the shitty shit)

This argument — for example, “Why isn’t music as good as it used to be?” — reflects a historical selection bias, one colorfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. “Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”

Excerpt from, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt

💎 On the danger of interpreting data at face value (Alex Ferguson’s mistake selling Jaap Stam)

Another example, this time involving Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, didn’t have such a happy ending. Opta data showed that his star defender, Jaap Stam, was making fewer tackles each season. Ferguson promptly offloaded him in August 2001 to Lazio — keen to earn a high transfer fee before the decline became apparent to rival clubs.

However, Stam’s career blossomed in Italy and Ferguson realised his error — the lower number of tackles was a sign of Stam’s improvement, not decline. He was losing the ball less and intercepting more passes that he needed to make fewer tackles. Ferguson says selling Stam was the biggest mistake of his managerial career. From then on he refused to be seduced by simplistic data.

These criticisms don’t mean you should disregard tracking data. Expecting any methodology to be perfect is to burden it with unreasonable expectations. Instead, you need to be aware that it merely provides evidence to which you need to apply your discretion and judgement.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On changing the subjective experience rather than the objective reality (Houston airport baggage waiting times)

In the early 2000s, the management at Houston airport was dismayed by the number of passenger complaints it was receiving.

The main issue was delays at the baggage carousel: by this point passengers were often at the end of their tether and even trivial delays tested their patience.

In response, the airport approved a hefty budget for more baggage handlers. At first, the cash looked well spent as waiting times dropped to eight minutes, about average for an airport. But complaints remained stubbornly high.

The authorities considered hiring more baggage handlers but that was prohibitively expensive. Instead, the managers took a psychological approach: they focused on improving the subjective experience rather than the objective reality.

One fact they had discovered earlier became key: people spent about a minute walking to the carousel and eight minutes waiting. The authorities re-routed passengers after passport control so they had to walk further. This meant they spent about eight minutes walking to the carousel and just a minute waiting.

Even though the time they picked up their bags was the same, complaints plummeted. In the words of Alex Stone, who reported on the Houston redesign for the New York Times, “the experience of waiting is defined only partly by the objective length of the wait”. What matters more is perception and an unoccupied wait feels far longer than an occupied one.

Excerpt from: ‘Customer experience is as much about perception as reality’ in Marketing Week

💎 On anchoring in practice (at Apple)

The same approach can be used to communicate initial product value. Steve Jobs used anchoring during the launch of the Apple iPad to such effect. At one of his fames launch presentations, he introduced the “rumoured cost” that was speculated to be $999. This information anchored the press to the notion this would be the high-priced product. However, when Jobs later in the event revealed the iPad to be priced at $499, this “anchoring and reveal” tactic created a notion of value for money.

Excerpt from: Northstar

💎 On the more we see a statement, the more likely we are to believe it’s true (illusion-of-truth effect)

Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in precious weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as trie, even if they swore they has never heard it before.

Excerpt from; Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

💎 On the myth that talent alone is enough (the Beatles were not an overnight success)

To the USA, the Beatles were an overnight success, but in fact Lennon and McCartney had been playing together since 1957. In the clubs of Hamburg they performed/endured live non-stop shows for eight hours a day, seven days a week until two o’clock in the morning, and had to work incredibly hard to attract audiences from the many clubs in Hamburg competing for attention. Their abilities and confidence increased. By 1964 they had played roughly 1,200 times, totalling thousands of hours’ playing time, more than most rock bands play there entire careers. Those hours performing set the Beatles apart. They were addicted to practice, yet their rehearsing was not repetitive but adventurous. They didn’t play the classic rock songs of the time over and over until they sounded exactly like the originals, as other bands did; they experimented and improvised, constantly embellishing the standards until they made them their own. They understood there was nothing to be gained from mechanical reputation.

Excerpt from; The Art of Creative Thinking: 89 Ways to See Things Differently by Rod Judkins

💎 On the power of accountability (to reduce littering)

A writer at out agency, Rob DeCleyn, found another great example of choice architecture in his local paper.

A village in Kent had a problem with litter.

Sweet wrappers, crisp packers, soft drink cans and bottles were strewn all over the streets.

But the local shopkeeper didn’t complain or nag the children.

He just wrote their name on the crisp and sweet packets when they bought them.

That’s all, just the child’s name.

And the litter problem cleared up almost immediately.

That’s choice architecture.

The children could still choose to throw their wrappers in the street.

They didn’t have to put them in the litter bin.

The only difference was that now everyone would know whose litter it was.

Excerpt from: One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking by Dave Trott

💎 On the power of expectations to shape our experience of products (you taste what you expect to taste)

Pour a bottle of Gallo into an empty 50-year-old bottle of French Burgundy. Then carefully decant a glass in front of a friend and ask for an opinion.

You taste what you expect to taste.

Blind taste testings of champagne have often ranked inexpensive California brands above French ones. With the labels on, this is unlikely to happen.

You taste what you expect to taste.

Were it not so, there would be no role for advertising at all. Were the average consumer rational instead of emotional, there would be no advertising. At least not as we know it today.

Excerpt from: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries

💎 On reducing anti-social behaviour (by making the alternatives more fun)

[…] in 2004, Preston council in Lancashire started to use boards with a peelable plastic film that could be cleaned every day and announced that the board helped reduce gum litter in the town by nearly 80 per cent. In the first year of their use Luton, Bedfordshire, the boards collected in excess of 75,000 pieces of used gum would otherwise have probably ended up on the pavement.

Excerpt from: One Step Ahead: Notes from the Problem Solving Unit by Stevyn Colgan