Here's three mind-blowing psychology studies we've come across in the course of working for our clients. We thought you'd like these!

And remember, we're here to help you...

👨‍🔬 Get into behavioural science
📈 Apply nudges at work
💸 Make more money

Tell us what you're trying to do and we'll show you how we can help.

Every so often we use our Monkey Business newsletter to share useful nuggets, opinions, and findings as food for thought. Sign up here.

🍔 The choice of a particular menu item - in this case a veggie burger - was increased using nudges in a thesis from Utrecth University.

Incorporating more descriptive language (calling the burger "artisinal") increased choice share to 24%, up from 15% in the control condition. Calling it the "chef's favoruite" increased choice share to 21%.

Making the item more salient, with a box around it, did not have a significant effect. Normally saliency works very well, but in this case the target item was already at the top of the menu.

You can use these kinds of techniques to increase the sale of higher-margin items - not just on restaurant menus, but wherever consumers need to choose between options.

🔊 The One-Voice-Fits-All Myth: In this paper in the Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, the more similar an AI's voice was to the user's, the more the user trusted and believed the content.

A personality-matched voice was more appealing (more so for extraverts than introverts).

Interestingly, people showed more resistance to 'misinformation' when it came via a matched voice - the authors argued this is because they processed the information with more scrutiny.

There are two lessons here for marketers:

1) personalise your voice to your target audience;

and 2) understand that consumers can recognise persuasion attempts and sometimes push back against them, if you're not careful.

👨‍⚖️ Nudges were used in New Zealand to increase court attendance by 3.6 percentage points.

According to the study in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, "If scaled throughout New Zealand, this would translate to around 1400 more defendants attending court each year due to the new notice."

The letter was made simpler and given a clearer call-to-action.

Remember, consumers are all 'cognitive misers' with limited brainpower: you need to make it as easy as possible for them.

As ever, if there's anything we can help with, do get in touch.

James, Patrick and Dan

capuchin.cc

We practically apply the science of the human mind for hard, commercial results 

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