Beyond Content: Tapping the Brilliance of Unconscious Decisions
Behavioral science reveals that content alone, regardless of its quality, rarely results in significant change. If you depend on messages to persuade your customers, consider expanding your repertoire by using the power of everyone’s “go-to” decision-making tool.
Choice architectures are decision environments that collaborate with how human brains operate. Encouraged by hundreds of studies from neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics, change agents are expanding emphasis from content to context. Your customers' decision-behaviors make more sense if you understand the contextual framework of choices.
Buyers aren’t persuaded by “reasons to believe” one product or brand is better than the next because buyers themselves don’t know the real reason they make a certain choice. The rational mind as a decision-making tool is overrated. Our decisions are made mostly unconsciously. Here’s one example of how changing the decision environment solved a problem that messaging couldn’t:
Ten people per day were dying at the Mumbai railway station by crossing the tracks in front of speeding trains. The transport authority conducted awareness campaigns and posted warning photos of dead bodies. Research showed people had seen the messages and were fully aware of the risks. When asked, people claimed they would never step before a speeding train. Yet, people continued to die. A behavioral science consultancy found an environmental solution that immediately reduced deaths by 70%. The scientists learned that the human brain is very poor at estimating the speed of large objects. People misjudged how much time they had to cross the tracks. The solution included painting simple yellow lines on the track so that people could see the yellow lines quickly disappearing and thus “feel” the speed of the train. In addition, it turns out that awareness of death is a poor motivator. They swapped death messages for posters showing facial expressions of extreme fear. Viewers unconsciously mirrored that fear and became more cautious.
The Brilliance of Unconscious Decision-making
We make decisions in a messy, unpredictable, world. No matter how we prepare, human thinking is subject to insufficient knowledge, feedback, and processing capability. To adapt, humans have evolved unconscious mental habits and heuristics.
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel prize-winning economist, Daniel Kahneman calls the use of unconscious decision strategies, System 1. System 1 thinking is automatic, intuitive, easy, and fast. It is our “go-to” thinking tool. System 1 is why you can arrive safely at home and scarcely remember the drive. System 1 isn’t the only tool in the decision-making box. We also have what Kahneman calls System 2, our slower, more effortful, rational brain. Occasionally, System 2 can override System 1. But it can be uncomfortable to realize the influence of System 1 over our decisions.
“I’m more logical and deliberate in my choices than others!” most people believe. If this is what you are thinking, you are experiencing a bias blind spot. According to author Jonah Lehrer, we prefer Plato’s analogy of the rational brain as a charioteer overseeing a team of emotional wild horses. However, scientists say the rational brain is more like a monkey bumping along on the back of an elephant.
System 1 choices are deeply affected by context. Almost anything in the environment can serve as a signal and influence judgment. Contextual elements register with System 1 without our awareness. We notice a traffic light turning red and react to it physically before the need to stop registers in our consciousness.
Decision-making Heuristics
Marketers have long been aware that psychology plays a big role in buyer choices. However, its only recently that our habits and heuristics have been scientifically studied and cataloged. Here are a few of the dozens of short-cuts and biases have been documented.
Ease Heuristic: “Laziness is built deep into our nature,” says Kahneman. We take the path of least resistance. Although common sense says that people should prefer more choices over fewer, when there are too many, we paralyze. In a grocery store, A grocery display with six flavors sells more jam than one with 12. Guidance: Reduce options and you’ll get more conversion. Also, pay attention to design that makes content easier to comprehend (e.g., font, white space, clean formatting)
Equality Heuristic: The loudest, most frequent messages get more credit than they deserve. Information sources range widely in quality, yet our brains tend to treat them with relative sameness. Our System 1 brain gathers opinions, tallies them, and favors the majority. To System 1, advice from someone’s sister-in-law carries similar weight as your company expert. Guidance: Narrow your target market to one where you can afford to be among the loudest, most frequent, voices. No matter how eloquent your spokespeople, if the message isn’t repeated frequently, it won’t get the attention it deserves.
Expectation Priming: What occurs immediately before a decision has a high impact. In one experiment, people were told that decaffeinated coffee was actually regular. After drinking the “regular” coffee, the heart rate of most people sped up. Recent information, especially if it is simple, emotional, and sensory, is significantly more influential than anything we heard a while ago – especially if the older message was rational or abstract. Guidance: You can’t control most of what a buyer hears or sees right before their decision. Manage what you can. Consider the order of your messages to “tee up” an action by priming.
Content is our digital voice. Navigating the context within which your content is received will intensify its impact.