8 Fascinating Psychological Biases - Richard Shotton - #592

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Richard Shotton. He's a behavioral scientist, founder of Astroten, and an author. This might not be news to you, but the human brain isn't designed to be rational. There are cheat codes to get the brain to believe strange things, do strange things, and change in ways that you might not anticipate. Richard has one of the best insights into this world of mental models, psychology, consumer behavior, principles for advertising, and social change. Expect to learn the marketing secret about behavior change that everybody forgets about, how to make habit formation absolutely seamless, why IKEA is so successful even though they don't make your furniture, a hack that any advertising campaign can use to make it stick in people's minds, how to fix the problem of choice paralysis, and much more. The absolute OGs on Modern Wisdom will recognize Richard from, I think, in the hundreds, maybe episode 90-something and then 150-something as well. It's been a little while, but this guy is a complete beast. I absolutely adore his insights around human nature. He's just a wealth of interesting studies and stories. It's fascinating. You're going to absolutely love this episode, so sit back and enjoy. You're also now part of the OGs because in two years time, this will be one of the OG episodes. So you're slowly becoming part of that particular crew. Anyway, I'll stop waffling. Richard, he's great. Enjoy this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Richard Shotton.
Someone who has had their head under a rock for a long time and hasn't been exposed to much behavioral science. Maybe they're not an advertiser or a marketer, but they've probably got an interest in human nature. Why should anyone care about behavioral science?

**Richard Shotton** (2:09)
Okay, good question. So sometimes the terminology can be confusing. So if people haven't heard of behavioral science, it's essentially what we use to call social psychology. So it's the study of how people actually behave rather than how they claim to behave. And I would argue anyone who is an entrepreneur, anyone who works in marketing, anyone who is trying to influence other people should be interested in this topic. Because if you're any of those groups, you're in the business of behavior change. And all behavioral sciences is the study, going back 130 years, of what makes for effective behavior change. So it's a super relevant topic.
Above and beyond that, it is robust, which actually differentiates it from an awful lot of business theory. If you think about some very popular business theories, they're based on elegant arguments. And the problem with elegance is it's not often accurate. What's great about behavioral science is it's never based on logic alone. It always comes back to be improved by an experiment, so we can give these findings genuine credibility. And then the final big strength, so we've got our relevance and our robustness, the final big strength of this topic is its range. So there are literally tens of thousands of studies. So whatever category you work in, whatever discipline you work in, there are so many behavioral science studies that pretty much whatever challenge you have in front of you, there's going to be an experiment out there that can help you solve that challenge.

**Chris Williamson** (3:43)
What would be an example of an elegant business theory, which doesn't necessarily show up in practice?

**Richard Shotton** (3:50)
Well, I think one of the big theories that is prominent is this discussion of purpose being a successful way to drive business growth. Another one actually that got more interested in recently is every year, the PR agency, Adelman, produce data on trust. The story that they normally accompany this data with is, there has been a massive decline in trust. It's just not backed up by their own data. So it's quite commonplace that the headline findings that businesses and brands subscribe to aren't backed up by an analysis of the actual data.

**Chris Williamson** (4:37)
You use an example about why margarine isn't gray at the very start of the book. Why is that illustrative?

**Richard Shotton** (4:45)
So there's a lovely study, a really old study by a psychologist called Louis Cheskin, where he was working with margarine manufacturers. So these manufacturers back in the 1940s are trying to win over consumers, stop them buying butter, start buying margarine. If he went out and directly questioned those shoppers, they said, well, I don't buy margarine because it tastes bloody awful. I don't like the taste, that's why I don't buy it. But Cheskin was suspicious of this claimed data. So he set up a really simple experiment. He got a speaker and he invited local people to come in and listen to the speaker. And after they'd listened to the speaker, there was a buffet laid on. And part of that buffet was bread and spread on it. And sometimes people thought they were eating bread and butter. Sometimes they thought they were eating bread and margarine. Now, in reality, Cheskin had switched things around. So, he dyed the butter gray, so it looked like 1940s margarine. He dyed the margarine yellow, so it looked like 1940s butter. And when people ate margarine masquerading as butter, they said, oh, it tastes beautiful, it's wonderful. When they ate butter masquerading as margarine, they said it tasted bloody awful. So, what he showed by that was it wasn't the taste that mattered, it was the color.