Choice Hacking: How To Use Psychology And Behavioral Science To Create An Experience That Sings

Choice Hacking

How to use psychology and behavioral science to create an experience that sings

Jennifer L. Clinehens

For my incredible fiance Rob, who inspires me everyday to be the best I can be xxx

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While you’re reading, don’t forget to check out the FREE Choice Hacking Companion Course.

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How to Design an Irrational Experience

Companies have much to gain from recognizing the role and nature of the unconscious mind in consumer behavior. 

— Philip Graves, author of Consumerology

Primed by a pandemic

Like everyone on Earth, you've heard the word coronavirus. Not only have you heard it, but experts have debated it, scientists have analyzed it, and some people have panicked over it. Coronavirus is a deadly disease that transformed the world overnight, so, understandably, the word has been at the tip of everyone's tongues. Because of the similar-sounding names, the media naturally became curious if it would impact Corona beer sales. So they asked. And customers responded that yes, they intended to stop buying Corona beer. In fact, 38% of Americans ¹ said they would not buy Corona beer under any circumstances. But in reality, people were saying one thing but doing the opposite. While customers were saying they'd never buy Corona again, sales quietly grew 28.8% by April 2020 ².

On the surface, Corona beer and coronavirus have nothing in common other than their first three syllables. But the mere mention of coronavirus triggered unconscious associations with a cold, frosty beer. How is it possible that a deadly pandemic could drive beer sales? And why were customers saying one thing while doing the exact opposite? It's down to the irrational ways the environment influences human behavior - the field of behavioral science.

Behavioral science: what it is and how to use it

Behavioral science explores why people behave the way they do. Itself a subset of psychology, behavioral science includes two broad sub-categories: 

Information sciences: This is the study of how humans take in information and how it affects their decision-making and behavior. Research comes from disciplines like cognitive science, neuroscience, and neuromarketing. Areas of practice that could apply this research include information architecture, store merchandising, personalization algorithm design, experience design, store design, and marketing.

Relational sciences: The study of how human decisions and behavior are affected by social interaction. Research originates from sciences like sociology and social psychology. Within experience design, affected disciplines might include the design of social media platforms, gamification, store design, loyalty program design, and more. 

For the purposes of Choice Hacking, I consider principles fair game so long as they've been stress-tested and peer-reviewed in a research environment. To be considered, the principle must deal with how people behave, make choices, and consider information.

What you need to know about how people think

The last 50 years have seen leaps forward in our understanding of how the brain operates. The work of researchers like Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard H. Thaler have transformed the fields of economics, consumer behavior, and psychology. 

Before Kahneman and Tversky, scientists and economists thought of people as Homo Economicus - a species that behaved rationally, methodically considered choices, and were reasonable decision-makers. But as we'll find out in Choice Hacking, the Homo Economicus doesn't exist in the real world.  Richard H. Thaler, behavioral economics pioneer and the author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, put it this way: 

The purely economic man [the so-called Homo Economicus] is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

Decades of scientific research was based on this non-existent, rational person. But pioneering work by Kahneman and Tversky started a paradigm shift regarding human decision-making. This new school of thought is based on the following principles:

Everyone is irrational 

People don't know what actually motivates them 

Everyone uses mental short cuts to make decisions

1. Everyone is irrational

As we'll explore, one of the defining characteristics of humans is that we behave irrationally. There is no situation in which people objectively weigh all the variables of a decision before acting. Bias, assumptions, and mental shortcuts all play a part in how we evaluate choices. In his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions ³, researcher Dan Ariely described irrationality this way: 

Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless - they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over because of the basic wiring of our brains.

As Ariely says, even though people behave irrationally, it's still possible to predict how they will react to a given situation. In Choice Hacking, we'll explore common irrational behaviors and how we can apply their predictability to create experiences customers will love. 

2. People don't actually know what motivates them

At the core of behavioral science is the idea that people aren't aware of what's driving them. We're all more influenced by our choice environment than we realize. 

For example, The Anchoring Effect states that people use the first piece of information they see to judge later information. This principle was explored in a study by research duo Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. 

Participants watched a roulette wheel that was rigged to stop only on the numbers 10 or 65. They were then asked to answer a seemingly unrelated question, guessing the percentage of the United Nations members that were from Africa. If subjects saw the roulette wheel stop on 10, they guessed a number that was 25% lower than people whose wheel stopped at 65. 

What the participants didn't realize was that the random number on the roulette wheel had influenced their answer to an unrelated question. As this study showed, people greatly underestimate context in their decision-making. Also known as the fundamental attribution error ⁴, it's a key principle of behavioral science and one of many we’ll discuss in Choice Hacking.

3. Everyone relies on mental shortcuts and biases to make decisions

In the past, scientists not only assumed that people act rationally but they also assumed what we think rationally as well. What we now know is the brain works in a so-called dual process manner. In the dual process model, the brain uses two kinds of thinking - fast and slow: 

Slow thinking is the type you’d use when writing an essay or composing a symphony. It's deep work, contemplative and methodical. Above all, it's hard work. The type of work our brains want to avoid because it consumes a lot of time and physical energy. In short, our brains are lazy, and slow thinking is hard. 

Fast thinking, on the other hand, is off the cuff. It relies on biases and mental rules of thumb, called heuristics, to make 95% of our decisions. Our brains prefer this type of thinking because it’s easy and doesn’t take much time.

I'll reference this quote several times in Choice Hacking, but I love it because of how well it illustrates the brain’s bias toward laziness: 

Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it but they'd prefer not to.

- Daniel Kahneman

How can we apply behavioral science to the customer experience?

If you work in experience design, you've likely run across psychology or behavioral science terms. In fact, there’s become a bit of a buzz around them over the last decade. They've been talked about a great deal though their application to the experience has been pretty sporadic. In Choice Hacking, we'll learn to apply science to the customer experience in a systematic manner. You'll discover that by leveraging these principles, your work will be more robust and your recommendations more effective. 

Defining the customer experience

The customer’s experience is such a big concept that we’d be well served to define it before we begin. For the purposes of this book, we consider the mechanical, social, transactional, and emotional experiences of a brand. Digital and physical touchpoints are both covered, such as websites, store designs, and mobile experiences. Choice Hacking also touches on out-of-home, digital, and video advertising although they aren't the focus of this book.

Because the purpose of many experiences is to drive sales, we will also explore how to tie the advertising environment to the customer experience, ensuring consistency between all touchpoints.  Choice Hacking may challenge you to look beyond your realm of expertise, but I’d encourage you to stretch your thinking. 

With that in mind, there are a few ways we can apply behavioral science to the customer experience, as we've just defined it. 

Create effective touchpoints (including advertising) 

Design a choice environment that gets people to buy

Manage emotional responses to and memories of the experience

The beautiful and sometimes challenging thing about applying behavioral science is that it can work well in literally millions of moments, and on many different levels. It's not as cut and dried as it may first appear, and our improvements come in the form of increasing the probability that customers will take action.

1. Create effective touchpoints

On every level of the customer experience, we can use behavioral science to inform the purpose and design of our touchpoints. For example, at a high level, we can use research to inform the purpose, context, and content of touchpoints throughout the customer journey. We’ll answer questions like:  

How can we use the information on earlier touchpoints to influence decisions at later touchpoints?

How critical is a specific moment in the journey to a customer's memory of the experience?

How do we know if customers are noticing what we’re telling them?

An understanding of what types of messages are best suited to which part of the customer journey.

We can also use behavioral science and psychology to go a layer deeper and inform the details of a specific touchpoint, answering questions like: 

How many steps should we have in our checkout process?

In what order do we show products in a suggestive sell process?

What color buttons do we use on our webpage?

2. Design a choice environment that gets people to buy

A choice environment, sometimes called a choice architecture, is the way we present a choice and how this presentation influences behavior. When you apply behavioral science to the design of a choice environment, you increase the probability that customers will do what you want them to. 

You no longer have to rely on gut feel or questionable qualitative research to make design decisions. Instead, you can base your approach on proven, peer-reviewed research and rigorous experimentation. For example, you can use behavioral science to inform:  

How many product options to show to drive sales.

How to price each product so that customers view them in context, and choose the right product.

How to frame promotions so that they drive sales. 

3. Manage emotional responses to and memories of the experience

Before you think Choice Hacking is all about the mechanics of selling, know that behavioral science can drive brand love as well. Our judgments, memories, and behaviors are profoundly affected by our emotional states. That's why a compelling customer experience must manage actions and emotions. 

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt used the metaphor of a man riding an elephant to describe the relationship between