Invisible Influence (25 page)

Their company, Opower, now works with more than one hundred utility companies worldwide. Opower sends consumers carefully targeted energy reports. Rather than confusing terminology, the reports help consumers understand how much energy they are
using by putting their usage in context. Designed based on the San Marcos study findings, the energy reports show consumers their consumption relative to similar households nearby. Whether they are using more or less energy than their peers.

Social comparison information motivates consumers, but the reports don't stop there. They pair that information with specific customized steps different consumers can take to save energy: replacing certain electronics, turning off lights, and adjusting the settings on the television.

These programs lead people to reduce their energy consumption by around 2 percent.
¹⁵
For a given person, this decrease may not seem huge, but aggregated across the country the impact is staggering. Since their launch, Opower's programs have helped save more than 6 terawatt-hours of energy.
¹⁶
That's 6 trillion watt-hours, or the equivalent to taking all the homes in Alaska and Hawaii, more than 2.1 million people, off the power grid for an entire year.

Opower hasn't just saved energy though; it has also helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The cumulative impact of these reduced emissions is equal to saving more than twenty-four thousand football fields' worth of American forests or taking almost all the cars in Chicago off the road for a year.

Not bad for a little feedback about performance relative to others.

Interestingly, when asked in advance about whether this appeal would work, most San Marcos residents thought it would fail. Did they care about whether their friends and neighbors were conserving energy? A little, but they said that wasn't as important to them as helping the environment or saving money.

But they were wrong. As people often do, they underestimated how big an impact others have on behavior.

It's clear that others can motivate us to work harder or save energy, but does it matter how our performance stacks up to theirs?

You may not be into sports betting, but imagine for a moment that someone gave you $10,000 to bet on a basketball game. At halftime, you choose whichever team you think will win. If you win, you get to keep the money, and if you lose, well, you end up with nothing.

After pinching yourself at your good fortune (and your friend's generosity), you focus on picking which team to bet on. It's a fast-paced game and both teams show promise. The lead changes back and forth until one team goes on a run to lead by eight points. The other team charges back, closing the gap and resulting in another string of lead changes. At the end of the first half, one team (call them the Washington Winners) is ahead of the other team (call them the Louisville Losers) by a point.

Which team would you bet your $10,000 on to win? The team that is winning or the team that is losing?

If you're like most people, you probably picked the team that was winning. After all, whether fighting to win a tough game or trying to be the top salesperson in your office, intuition suggests that being ahead increases the chance of winning. Hockey teams leading after the first period win over two-thirds of their games, and baseball teams leading after three innings win over three fourths of the time. Basketball is no different. Teams that are winning tend to win and this tendency gets stronger as the lead gets larger. Teams ahead by four at halftime, for example,
win about 60 percent of games. Teams up by eight win over 80 percent of the time.

This tendency should come as no surprise. Teams that are winning tend to be better teams. That's partially why they're ahead.

Losing teams also have further to go to win. Mechanically, they have to score that many more points than their opponents if they hope to pull out a victory.

But could being behind sometimes be a good thing? Could losing sometimes actually make people more likely to win?

One of the most enjoyable, yet challenging things I've ever done was coach youth soccer. I was looking for a fun extracurricular activity in college, something that would take my mind off school, when a friend mentioned a Nike program that encouraged college kids to teach youth sports. My dad had coached when I was young, and I had always loved soccer, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

For the next few months, I spent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon with eighteen boys from the East Palo Alto division of the American Youth Soccer Organization. I was part teacher, part chaperone for a group of wonderful but crazy eleven- and twelve-year-old boys. We ran laps to improve conditioning, did passing drills to develop teamwork, and dribbled around cones to build confidence and competence. We also did a lot of goofing off and chasing each other around the field. I wasn't the best coach, but I tried to impart what little knowledge I had about the game and help them become better players.

In general, we were a strong team. We had a tall, smart-aleck forward with a deft touch and another shorter speedster who
scored a lot of goals. We had a couple of strong defenders and some crafty midfielders who never seemed to tire of running up and down the field.

But when it came to games, we were a mixed bag. Sometimes we played great. The first time the kids executed a “give-and-go,” I almost cried. It was amazing to see them internalize what we had learned in practice.

Other times we just fell apart. Something we had drilled dozens of times week after week just didn't seem to stick. No matter how many times we practiced, we could never make it work.

As a coach, there was little to do but pace the sidelines. It's one thing to have a plan about how to get better at something, but it's another to try to motivate others. I could substitute here and there, but the kids controlled the game.

The one chance I had to shake it up was at halftime. We'd form a halfhearted circle in the grass, the kids would guzzle water and eat orange slices, and we'd talk tactics. What we were doing well and what we needed to improve. Here and there I tried to throw in a bit of inspiration. A little bit of “You can do it!” or “Go out and get 'em!” The kids would then go play the second half, mostly indifferent to whatever I'd tried to highlight during the break.

But while the speech didn't seem to change how we played, whether we were winning or losing did. If we were winning or tied going into the break, we played okay. Sometimes we'd win and sometimes we'd lose. But if we were losing at halftime, something different happened. The kids seemed more motivated. We'd go into the half down 0–1 and come out winning 3–2. Or we'd be down two goals, 1–3, but finish the game winning 5–3. We seemed to play better when we were behind.

As a coach, this drove me nuts. If we could come from behind and win, why couldn't we play that well
all
the time? It was clear
we had the skills and the drive, so why did it only seem to come out when we were losing?

There are many reasons any one team might win or lose any one game: team chemistry, skill, home-field advantage, even the weather. But might my team's performance illustrate a larger pattern?

Behavioral economist Devin Pope and I decided to find out. Soccer is a low-scoring sport, and it would be tough to amass enough kids' games to form a meaningful dataset, so we examined professional basketball instead.

We analyzed more than fifteen years of play. Almost twenty thousand NBA games overall. Everything from David Robinson's games with the Spurs to Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett's games with the Celtics. We recorded the score at halftime, as well as which team ended up winning the game.

Consistent with the proverbial home-team advantage, teams were more likely to win when they played at home than on the road. Better teams, as indicated by a higher season winning percentage, were also more likely to win. And, not surprisingly, the further ahead teams were at halftime, the more likely they were to win. For every two points a team was doing better relative to its opponent (e.g., up by two versus tied or up by four instead of two), they were around 7 percent more likely to win the game.

This makes sense. Winning leads to winning.

Except at one place. Right around zero. Right where teams shifted from losing to winning.

Take teams losing by a point. Everything else would suggest these teams should be about 7 percent less likely to win than
teams ahead by a point. Controlling for how good each team was, whether they were playing at home or not, and all the other factors, out of one hundred games, teams losing by one point at halftime should have won seven fewer games than teams winning by a point.

But they didn't.

In fact, teams that were losing by a point were actually more likely to win. Not only did being behind increase a team's chance of winning (by around 8 percent), but, compared to their opponents, teams that were behind by one actually won
more
games. Even though they tended to be worse teams and had to score more points than their opponents to win.
¹⁷

If you had to bet money, betting on the team down by one at halftime would be a safer bet.
^II

Why does losing lead to winning? To find out, we had people play a simple game.

Imagine sitting in front of a computer keyboard. On the left side of the keyboard, right below the letter
Q
, is the
A
key. Toward the bottom of the keyboard, right between the letters
V
and
N
is the
B
key. Place one finger on the
A
key, and one finger on the
B
key, and imagine pressing them, in short succession, as quickly as possible.
A
,
B
,
A
,
B
,
A
,
B
, as fast as you can.

Every time you press those two keys in order, you get a
point. The faster you mash on those two keys, the more points you get. Not the most fun game in the world, but pretty easy to play.

Now imagine that you are competing against someone else who is playing the same game. There are two thirty-second halves (or periods of play) divided by a short break (or halftime). Whichever player has the most points at the end of the game wins a small sum of money.

We told different groups of players different things during halftime. While some players were told nothing, other players were given competitive feedback. Similar to Opower's energy reports, they were given information about how well they were doing relative to others.

To examine the effect of being behind, we rigged the competitive feedback. We told players that their opponent had scored one point more than they had so far, and thus they were one point behind. Then we measured how hard people worked in the second half of the game. Whether they increased or decreased the number of keys pressed.

Thinking they were behind increased motivation. It made people work harder. Compared to participants that received no feedback at all, those who thought they were behind increased their effort more than threefold.
^III

Competition influences motivation by shaping people's reference points, or the yardstick they use to measure how well they are doing. When running a 5K race, taking a test, or making sales calls at the office, we often set goals for ourselves. We want to run the race in under twenty minutes, get an A, or bring in ten new clients this month.

Our performance relative to those goals, in turn, affects how hard we continue to work. Consider the following:

Chip and George both love to work out and each usually follows a workout plan that involves twenty-five sit-ups a day. One day, Chip sets a goal of performing thirty-seven sit-ups and George sets a goal of performing thirty-three sit-ups. Both Chip and George are tired after performing thirty-five sit-ups and, at most, have the energy to perform one, maybe two more.

Who do you think will work harder to perform those final couple sit-ups? Chip or George?

People tend to think that Chip will work harder than George to do the last couple sit-ups because he's yet to reach his goal.
¹⁸
He has only done thirty-five and his goal was thirty-seven. Chip is almost there and with just a little more effort he can achieve what he set out to do. While George probably feels good because he's achieved his goal, Chip may feel unsatisfied because he hasn't gotten there yet. And that dissatisfaction will motivate him to work harder. Compared to being ahead, being behind is more motivating.
¹⁹

The motivating effect of being behind happens not only for the overall goal, it also happens for progress along the way. If our goal is to bring in ten new clients this month, and halfway through we've only brought in four, we'll feel less satisfied than
if we've already brought in eight. Being behind our ideal trajectory can motivate us to work harder.

Competition affects motivation for similar reasons. Just as we use certain predetermined goals (thirty-three sit-ups or ten new clients) to determine whether we are succeeding, we often use others as a standard of comparison. Winning a basketball game doesn't depend just on how many points your team scores; it depends on scoring more than the other team. Is 1,074 kilowatt-hours a lot of energy to use in a month? Hard to say, but if someone's neighbors are using less than that, people may be motivated to close the gap.

Sometimes there is a clear and compelling reward for doing better than others. Whoever makes the most sales calls gets a bonus. Whoever shoots the lowest wins the golf tournament.

Other times, the reward is just the feeling of achievement. Winning is more satisfying than losing. Using less energy than your neighbor feels better than using more.

Consequently, being behind others can motivate us to perform better. Teams losing by one at halftime came out of the locker room fired up. They played hard and erased most of the deficit in the first few minutes of the second half. Just like the people pressing the
A
and
B
keys in our experiment, being behind motivated the players to work harder. And as a result, their teams were more likely to win.