The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence (2 page)

L
ike tax collectors in a lot of countries, officials in Britain’s Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) had a problem: Too many citizens weren’t submitting their tax returns and paying what they owed on time.

For many years officials at HMRC had created a variety of letters and communications targeted at late-payers. The majority of these approaches focused on the various consequences that late-payers would face if they failed to respond and pay on time: interest charges, late fees, and legal action. For some folks these traditional approaches worked well, but for many others they did not. So in early 2009, in consultation with our company INFLUENCE AT WORK, HMRC decided to try an alternative approach informed by persuasion science. All it involved was one small change: a single sentence added to their standard letter.

This small change was remarkable not only for its simplicity, but also for the huge difference it made in response rates. The new letters led to the collection of £560 million of the £650 million debt that was the focus of the pilot studies, representing a clearance rate of 86 percent. To put this into perspective, the previous year HMRC had collected £290 million of a possible £510 million—a clearance rate of just 57 percent.

Overall, the new letters, combined with other best practices informed from the private collections industry, contributed to the collection of  £5.6 billion more overdue revenue than had been collected the previous year. Additionally HMRC reduced the amount of debt on its books by £3.5 billion. Considering how small and cost-effective the actual changes were, the overall impact is nothing short of astonishing.

So what exactly was this small change to the letter? We simply (and truthfully) informed the recipients of the large number of citizens who actually do pay their taxes on time.

But why would so many thousands of people feel compelled to mail in their checks on the basis of such a small change to a standard letter? The answer lies in a fundamental principle of human behavior that scientists call
social proof
—the evidence of the crowd. It means that people’s behavior is largely shaped by the behaviors of others around them, especially those with whom they strongly identify.

Researchers have been studying the phenomenon for decades, and it’s not only humans that are influenced by its immense power. Birds flock. Cattle herd. Fish school. Social insects swarm. So fundamental is the draw of what others are doing that even organisms without a brain cortex are subject to its force. The concept of social proof may not be new, but we are learning more about its impact and how best to employ it all the time.

That a context of consensus will frequently trump effortful cognition could be seen both as worrying as well as comforting to people. We worry about being seen as lemming-like, of submitting total control over our decisions to the crowd. Yet we can also take comfort because such conformity mostly leads us to the right decisions.

Following the crowd is not an action that is simply fueled by a need to keep up with the Joneses. It is more fundamental than that, striking at the heart of three simple, yet powerful, underlying human motivations: the motivation to make accurate decisions as efficiently as possible, the motivation to affiliate with and to gain the approval of others, and the motivation to see oneself in a positive light.

The seemingly small change made to the UK tax letters led to such huge differences because it was able to pull on each of these three motivations at the same time. In the context of a busy, overloaded life, “doing what most others are doing” can be a remarkably efficient shortcut to a good decision, regardless of whether that decision concerns which movie to watch, which restaurant to frequent, or, in the case of the UK’s HMRC, whether or when to pay your taxes.

Drawing attention to the fact that most people do pay taxes on time aligns to a desire to affiliate with others. After all, by following what most people are already doing, there’s a good chance that we’ll gain their approval and increase the odds of making social connections. Finally, in the particular case of the British citizens receiving the HMRC letter, the third motivation, a desire to see oneself in a positive light, was active too. Most people probably don’t take pride in being a deadbeat. It’s certainly easier to be a leech on society if one believes that everyone else is a leech, too. But in learning that so many British citizens do pay their taxes on time, those few who don’t will feel more like freeloaders. In the face of that information, following the majority by paying one’s taxes helped restore one’s self-image as an individual who does their fair share.

Given how powerful the concept of social proof can be, it is surprising how largely dismissive people are about its powerful effect on them. In one set of studies that two of us conducted with behavioral scientists Jessica Nolan, Wes Schulz, and Vladas Griskevicius, we asked several hundred homeowners in California to report on the extent to which they believed four different potential reasons for conserving energy actually influenced their decisions to try to reduce their overall home energy consumption. The four potential reasons were (1) conserving energy helps the environment; (2) conserving energy protects future generations; (3) conserving energy saves them money; (4) many of their neighbors are already conserving energy.

The homeowners resoundingly rated conserving energy because “many of their neighbors are already” doing so as having the least influence on their own behavior. Armed with this information, we then conducted an experiment in a southern California neighborhood, randomly assigning homes to display one of four signs on their front doors, each employing one of the four reasons listed above. Some residents were reminded of how much conserving saves the environment, others how conserving protects future generations, and yet others how much money they could save by conserving. Finally, a fourth group of residents was informed of findings from a recent survey indicating that the majority of their neighbors were actively trying to conserve energy.

When we measured their energy usage nearly a month later, we discovered that the social proof communication was the single
most
effective message when it came to actually changing their
behavio
r—even though a majority of respondents in the earlier study had rejected it as having any sway. Interestingly, the majority of people in the earlier study thought that the most influential reason to conserve energy was that it protects the environment. But, in fact, in the second study, that environmental message hardly affected energy usage at all.

The truth is, not only are people pretty poor at recognizing what will influence their future behavior, it turns out that they are also not that well attuned to what persuaded them after the event either. As part of a TV news magazine program one of us was asked to assist with a segment of the show that sought to identify the reasons why people might be persuaded to help others in a series of everyday (nonemergency) settings. At a busy New York City subway station we hired researchers to count the number of commuters who donated to a street musician as they walked past.

After a short time a small change was made to the situation that had an immediate and impressive impact. Just before an approaching (and unsuspecting) commuter reached the musician, another person (who was in on the act) would drop a few coins into the musician’s hat in view of the approaching commuter. The result? An eight-fold increase in the number of commuters who chose to make a donation.

In a series of post-study interviews with commuters who did donate, every one of them failed to attribute their action to the fact that they had just seen someone else give money first. Instead they provided alternative justifications: “I liked the song he was playing”; “I’m a generous person”; and “I felt sorry for the guy.”

That people are generally poor at recognizing the factors that influence their behaviors both before
and after
an event raises an immediate implication for any business or organization that invests time, effort, and often considerable dollars asking their customers and clients what actually drives their buying decisions and behaviors. Although we are confident that many customers will happily provide answers, we are less confident that the answers they provide will be an accurate reflection of what happens in reality, resulting in marketing strategies based on those answers having high failure rates.

So rather than basing your influence strategies on what people say will influence their decisions, one small change that you can make immediately is to simply and honestly depict what the majority of others who are similar to your target audience are already doing that you would like your audience to do, too. For example, a business development executive seeking to attract customers to a presentation about a new product could increase attendance by first inviting those who will be most likely to attend. Then the executive could honestly point out to his next group of targets that “many other people have already accepted our invitation to attend.” This small shift can be very effective even if those targets have previously stated that attendance by others will have no influence over their own decisions to attend.

Social proof appeals can be further enhanced by applying one other insight gleaned from the UK tax letter studies—adding extra specificity. Some letters highlighted not just the number of people nationally who paid their taxes on time but also the percentage of people who lived in the same zip code as the letter recipient. This approach yielded a response rate of 79 percent, compared to a typical response rate of 67 percent to the standard letters.

Of course it’s not just governments and tax officials who can benefit from the application of these insights. Most businesses and organizations, from global powerhouses to local housing associations, have a need to collect funds from customers and clients in a timely fashion. Where evidence exists that the majority of customers and clients do pay on time, our recommendation is to present such salient information on invoices and statements. Although it is unlikely that this small change alone will influence everyone to pay on time, it should certainly improve payment rates, freeing up organizational resources to target the minority who actively avoid paying on time or even evade making payments entirely.

Notice too the importance of focusing your audience’s attention on behaviors that are both frequently adopted
and
desirable. In a study that one of us led with physicians Suraj Bassi and Rupert Dunbar-Rees, we found that health centers that prominently published the number of people who failed to attend a health appointment the previous month typically saw an
increase
in no-shows the following month. As we mentioned in our introduction, the cost of no-shows can lead to huge losses and inefficiencies, not just in health centers, but in all types of business and public sector settings. So a small and costless change such as focusing on desirable behaviors can make an extraordinary difference.

Of course, a strategy of highlighting how many people are carrying out desirable behaviors such as paying taxes, keeping appointments, or doing homework assignments on time won’t be so successful if the behavior or change you are trying to effect isn’t already practiced by a majority of people. In such cases, as tempting as it might be to simply invent a majority, we would strongly urge against such an idea. Not only would this be unethical, but should it be discovered that your social proof appeal was manufactured, any future influence attempts you make will, at best, struggle for credibility and, at worst, simply become toxic.

However, there are alternatives; in fact, two specific approaches can be quite effective. The first is to highlight behaviors that are largely approved of in a given situation. Behavioral scientists label what most others approve/disapprove in a situation the
injunctive
norm. For example, highlighting survey results that have found that a majority of people support a particular cause can play an important role in helping to shape future change:  80  percent of California residents believe it is important that they play their part in energy-saving programs, and nine out of ten employees said they would be interested in learning more about how to lead a healthier lifestyle. In such instances the
SMALL
BIG would be for a communicator to make such injunctive norms part of their message strategy.

It can also be effective to publish absolute numbers that suggest the widespread adoption of an idea or behavior. Opower is an Arlington, Virginia–based company that provides energy reports that encourage homeowners to save energy. On its website Opower honestly publicizes that its programs have helped people save “over 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity” and “over $750 million on energy bills,” messages that can be pretty effective at spurring people to take part, even without specific evidence that the majority of people like them has already joined in. Messages that point to
growing
numbers of people can also be a useful strategy, particularly in the early stages of campaigns when you are seeking to gain momentum. For example, a blogger whose web traffic over the past few months has risen from a couple of hundred visits a week to close to a thousand might highlight the five-fold increase in such a short space of time. A Facebook user might promote the increasing number of “likes” they have gained.

Of course it would be naive for us to claim that social proof strategies such as the one we describe in the UK tax letter campaign provide an answer to every situation in which we want to change a set of behaviors. But given that some of the latest social-proof strategies are now generating
billions
rather than millions or thousands in extra revenues and efficiencies, it certainly seems to make sense to have an understanding of their uses.

Which leads us to a related question: Under what circumstances might people go out of their way to actually avoid following what others around them are doing?