Some Very Important Effects In Advertising - Richard Shotton - #091

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, people of Podcast Land. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Richard Shotton. He's a behavioral science expert and the founder of Astroten. Behavioral science is one of those really interesting... That's the end of my pomodoro. I'm gonna keep going. Thank you, be focus-prope. Behavioral science is one of those fascinating areas that I absolutely love to talk about. All of us are completely at the mercy of our own biases on a daily basis. So learning about them, even if you can't stop them from happening, is just a hilarious insight into the way that our minds work. So today, expect to learn. What is the reason that restaurants don't put pound signs in front of their prices? Why do marketing campaigns with huge flaws end up winning the market over? How does increasing wait times on comparison sites actually improve customer buying? And why do budget airlines reduce quality of experience to improve trust? Also, you're going to get to find out what the word nine-enders means in a marketing sense. That's a real term, nine-enders. This episode is fantastic. I absolutely loved it. Richard, you're a legend and a gentleman. Thank you so much for coming on. Rory Sutherland's Psychology in the World of Advertising, episode 49 is a perfect compliment to this. If you enjoy it, but for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Mr. Richard Shotton.
I am joined by Richard Shotton, founder of Astroten and author of The Choice Factory. Richard, welcome to the show.

**Richard Shotton** (1:50)
Hi, good to meet you, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (1:52)
Fantastic to have you on. Just before we started, you told me that Astroten, your company, is actually the wrong name for itself. Can you explain what's happened there?

**Richard Shotton** (2:02)
It is the wrong name. So I set it up last August, and I was on a holiday, and it was getting to the stage where I just needed a name. And I thought Richard Shotton consulting would just be a bit naff. So I was flicking through pretty much a textbook on psychology experiments, and I came across this experiment back in the 60s, which was all about the pernicious effects of authority. And in the experiment, what the psychologist did was ring up hospitals, said to nurses, quick, quick, you've got to go and find patient Jones and give them 100 milligrams of Astroten. And they shouldn't have accepted the order over the phone. And when they got to the medicine cabinet, there was the fake medicine, Astroten, and it said in big letters, don't give anyone more than 10 milligrams. Yet despite these two facts, 95% of the nurses tried to administer the fake drug.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
Did someone step in and go, what are you doing? No, no, no, no.

**Richard Shotton** (3:05)
Yeah, I'm guessing there was someone hiding in a cupboard or something. I don't know, yeah, that part.
So I thought, yeah, this is brilliant. Relevant name for the company. Part of a psychology experiment. And I also kind of liked the anti-authoritarian vibe. That it was one of the reasons for setting them up on my own. So I registered the name, got the website, registered at Companies House, did all that stuff. And then about a month or two later, I thought, well, if I'm going to call myself Astroten, I should probably read the original paper. And I went and found this paper. And I was halfway through, I suddenly realized to my horror that the textbook had had a typo. So the drug in the real experiment back in the 60s was not Astroten, it was Astroten. So by companies, it is a mistake.

**Chris Williamson** (3:55)
Your company is a typo.

**Richard Shotton** (3:57)
Yeah, my company is a typo. But I thought after that time, one, I couldn't be bothered to get another website. And I kind of like the fact that there's a very part of it.

**Chris Williamson** (4:07)
You've got a typo behind it, yeah, which is like, again, it's human behavior, right?

**Richard Shotton** (4:11)
Well, yes. I mean, my favorite, one of my favorite biases is this idea, if you had to go and call it the Pratt Fall Effect.

**Chris Williamson** (4:19)
Nope.

**Richard Shotton** (4:21)
So the Pratt Fall Effect is an experiment back in, done by Elliot Aaronson, who was this professor at Harvard in the 1960s. And in 1966, he runs his classic experiment where he gets a colleague of his to take part in a quiz. He's given his colleague all the answers. So the guy does amazingly well, gets 92 percent of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles, looks like a genius. But then as the quiz is finishing, the guy makes what American would call a pratfall, a small blunder. As he's standing up, he spills a cup of coffee down himself. So Aaronson's recorded this entire incident, great quiz performance, and then the blunder. He plays it to people, but he edits the clip. So there are two versions. One has everything, and the other version edits out the mistake. And when he asks listeners how appealing they find the contestant, the contestant is seen as significantly more appealing if people have heard the mistake as well as the amazing performance. And Aaronson calls this the pratfall effect, this idea that we prefer people, or, relevantly for advertisers, products who exhibit a flaw.