Alchemy

by Rory Sutherland

  I am willing to bet that there are ten times as many people on the planet who are currently being paid to debate why people prefer Coke or Pepsi than there are being paid to ask questions like ‘Why do people request a doctor’s appointment?’, ‘Why do people go to university?’ or ‘Why do people retire?’ The answers to these last three questions are believed to be rational and self-evident, but they are not.

  1.4: In Search of the ‘Real Why?’ Uncovering Our Unconscious Motivations

  As I have already said, if you want to annoy your more rational colleagues, begin a meeting by asking a childish question to which the answer seems self-evident – the fact that sensible people never ask questions of this kind is exactly why you need to ask them. Remember the example I gave about asking why people hate standing on trains? When I asked that question, it seemed likely that no adult on the planet had asked that question for the last ten years – it sounded like such a stupid thing to ask.

  Perhaps advertising agencies are largely valuable simply because they create a culture in which it is acceptable to ask daft questions and make foolish suggestions. My friend and mentor Jeremy Bullmore recalls a heated debate in the 1960s at the ad agency J. Walter Thompson about the reasons why people bought electric drills. ‘Well obviously you need to make a hole in something, to put up some shelves or something, and so you go out and buy a drill to perform the job,’ someone said, sensibly. Llewelyn Thomas, the copywriter son of the poet Dylan, was having none of this. ‘I don’t think it works like that at all. You see an electric drill in a shop and decide you want it. Then you take it home and wander around your house looking for excuses to drill holes in things.’ This discussion perfectly captures the divide between those who believe in rational explanation and those who believe in unconscious motivation; between logic and psycho-logic.*

  You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame. ‘Why do people hate waiting for an engineer’s appointment?’ ‘Why do people not like it when their flight is delayed?’ ‘Why do people hate standing on trains?’ All of these questions seem facile – and because of this, our rationalising brains find it dangerously easy to come up with a plausible answer. But just because there is a rational answer to something, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a more interesting, irrational answer to be found in the unconscious.

  ‘Why do people mostly buy ice cream in the summer?’ seems a pretty facile question. ‘Duh! To cool down on a hot day!’ It certainly sounds plausible, but human behaviour tells a different story. For one thing, sunshine is a far better predictor of ice cream sales than temperature. And to confuse things further, the three countries with the highest per-capita ice cream sales in Europe? Finland, Sweden and Norway. One possible way of looking at the question might be to ask whether people need the excuse of a special occasion to justify eating ice cream. Perhaps a sunny day is Sweden is rare enough to provide the necessary licence?

  Similarly, ‘Why do people go to the doctor?’ seems like an idiotic question, until you realise that it isn’t. Is it because they are ill and want to get better? Sometimes, but there are many more motivations that lie beneath this apparently rational behaviour. Perhaps they are worried and crave reassurance? Some people just need a bit of paper to prove to their employer they were ill. A lot of people may go in search of someone to make a fuss of them. Perhaps, what people are mostly seeking is not treatment, but reassurance. The distinction matters – after all, not many people make unnecessary visits to the dentist.

  If you want to solve the problem of unnecessary doctor’s visits or simply to set up a system to prioritise who gets seen by the doctor first, it is vital that you factor in unconscious motivations alongside post-rationalisations. Some problems might be solved over the phone, while other visits could be postponed until it was likely the person had recovered naturally. In the event of a flu outbreak, you might even leave an answerphone message detailing the symptoms and telling younger or less vulnerable people what to do if they were suffering. Once people know an illness is widespread they are less anxious about being ill, and correspondingly less eager to see a doctor for reassurance. ‘There’s a lot of it about’ is reassurance in itself. (What you don’t want your doctor to say is, ‘This is an extraordinary case – I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole professional career.’)

  The strange thing is that everyone is much happier pretending that the post-rationalised reason for visiting the doctor, to get better, is the only one that counts. If you want to change people’s behaviour, listening to their rational explanation for their behaviour may be misleading, because it isn’t ‘the real why’. This means that attempting to change behaviour through rational argument may be ineffective, and even counterproductive. There are many spheres of human action in which reason plays a very small part. Understanding the unconscious obstacle to a new behaviour and then removing it, or else creating a new context for a decision, will generally work much more effectively.

  Whether we use logic or psycho-logic depends on whether we want to solve the problem or to simply to be seen to be trying to solve the problem. Saving the world indirectly may not make you look like a hero; talking about the plight of polar bears makes one feel a good deal worthier than promoting the redesign of recycling bins, but the latter may be more effective. The self-regarding delusions of people in high-status professions lie behind much of this denial of unconscious motivation. Would you prefer to think of yourself as a medical scientist pushing the frontiers of human knowledge, or as a kind of modern-day fortune teller, doling out soothing remedies to worried patients? A modern doctor is both of these things, though is probably employed more for the latter than the former. Even if no one – patient or doctor – wants to believe this, it will be hard to understand and improve the provision of medical care unless we sometimes acknowledge it.

  1.5: The Real Reason We Clean Our Teeth

  There is one example of a human behaviour which has both an ‘official’ medical purpose and a deep psychological explanation, and which I think is helpful in showing how a logical, rational explanation for our behaviour may drown out the unconscious, evolutionary one. It starts with another childish question, ‘Why do people clean their teeth?’ Obviously it is to maintain dental health and to prevent cavities, fillings and extractions. What possible other answer could there be? Well, in fact, if we look at adult behaviour – when we choose, buy and use toothpaste – we see patterns of consumption that entirely contradict this logical explanation. If we were really interested in minimising the risk of tooth decay, we would brush our teeth after every meal, yet almost nobody does this. In fact, the times when people are most likely to clean their teeth occur before those moments when we are most frightened of the adverse social consequences of visible stains or bad breath.

  When are you more likely to clean your teeth? Be honest. After eating ice cream, or when you’re going on a date?* You might clean your teeth obsessively before giving a work presentation, or before meeting someone for a romantic dinner. After eating a chocolate bar at home in the evening is perhaps not quite so likely. If you don’t believe this, ask yourself one question: why is almost all toothpaste flavoured with mint? A recent trial proved that there were no dental-health benefits to the practice of flossing. I imagine that the manufacturers of dental floss were terrified by this finding, but they can relax – I confidently predict that this finding will have almost no effect on people’s propensity to floss their teeth; they weren’t really doing it for health reasons in the first place.*

  Even stranger than our teeth-brushing behaviour is our preference for stripy toothpaste. When it first appeared, in a product called Stripe, it aroused a great deal of debate over how it was made. Many people dissected the empty container; others froze a full tube and then cut it open in a cross section.* What was strange was that nobody ever asked ‘Why?’ After all, the moment toothpaste enters your mouth, all the
ingredients are mixed together, so what was the point of keeping them separate in the tube? There are two explanations: 1) simple childish novelty and 2) psycho-logic. Psychologically, the stripes serve as a signal: a claim that a toothpaste performed more than one function (fighting cavities, tackling infection and freshening breath) was thought to be more convincing if the toothpaste contained three visibly separate active ingredients. In general, people are impressed by any visible extra effort that goes into a product: if you simply say ‘this washing powder is better than our old powder’, it is a hollow claim. However, if you replace the powder with a gel, a tablet or some other form, the cost and effort which have gone into the change make it more plausible to the purchaser there may have been some real innovation in the new contents.

  The reason toothpaste is an especially interesting example is because, if an unconscious motivation happens to coincide with a rational explanation, we assume that it is the rational motive which drives the action.

  Imagine you came home to find a dog turd on the floor of your kitchen; you would find it repellent, and would remove it immediately. Having disposed of it, you would wipe the floor with water and detergent, and if I asked you why you were doing those things, you would answer ‘because it’s unhygienic, of course; it’s a source of germs’. But here’s the thing; an early Victorian would have experienced exactly the same emotions and performed exactly the same actions, but they didn’t know about germs. They were, technically speaking, irrational in their dislike of faeces, which was ‘purely emotional’. Nowadays, if someone started flinging faeces around, we would describe him as a public-health hazard, while in the eighteenth century they would have called the practice ‘ungodly’ and in the fifteenth they might have burned him at the stake. So the dislike of faeces was not originally based on sound reasoning – it was rather a sound instinct the reason for which had not yet been discovered.

  1.6: The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason

  For the half-million or so years before medical bacteriology arose as a study in the 1870s, evolution had provided us with an emotional solution to a rational problem. You would be more likely to survive and reproduce if you had a strong aversion to poo, and so almost all of us are descended from people who disliked it. What’s interesting is that we adopted the behaviour many thousands of years before we knew the reasons for it.

  There is a good reason why evolution worked this way. Instincts are heritable, whereas reasons have to be taught; what is important is how you behave, not knowing why you do. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks, ‘There is no such thing as a rational or irrational belief – there is only rational or irrational behaviour.’ And the best way for evolution to encourage or prevent a behaviour is to attach an emotion to it. Sometimes the emotion is not appropriate – for instance, there is no reason for Brits to be afraid of spiders, since there are no poisonous spiders in the UK – but it’s still there, just in case. And why take the risk? Other than in a few specialist jobs in zoos, there’s not much to be gained from not being afraid of spiders. So, as with tooth brushing, behaviours which have a rationally beneficial outcome do not have to be driven by a rational motivation. Cleaning our teeth is good for dental health even if we do it for reasons of vanity. As far as evolution is concerned, if a behaviour is beneficial, we can attach any reason to it that we like.

  You don’t need reasons to be rational.

  History books are full of examples of public health or social benefits that have been driven by spiritual rather than material reasons.* Strict dietary law, in both Islam and Judaism, is a good example – and has a further benefit in the shape of social cohesion, as it forces people to eat together.

  Additionally, while the rule against eating pigs may seem superstitious, as the anthropologist Richard Redding explains, keeping chickens rather than pigs has several key advantages. ‘First, they are a more efficient source of protein than pigs; chickens require 3,500 litres of water to produce one kilo of meat, pigs require 6,000. Secondly, chickens produce eggs, an important secondary product which pigs do not offer. Third, chickens are much smaller and can thus be consumed within 24 hours; this eliminates the problem of preserving large quantities of meat in a hot climate. Finally, chickens could be farmed by nomads. While neither chickens nor pigs can be herded in the same way as cattle, chickens are small enough to be transported.’ You can also add the risk of infection to this list; although in Judaism the prohibition against eating pork is described as chok, meaning a rule for which there is no rationale, pigs can spread diseases, and pig farming may pass them on to humans.

  Similarly, Islam requires that the dead are buried as soon as possible after death, in order to ‘reduce the suffering of the deceased in the afterlife and to return them to Allah’. As a result, throughout the Gallipoli campaign in 1915,* Muslims went to great lengths to bury their dead; by contrast, allied bodies often lay on the battlefield for days before they were collected. The outcome was further casualties from disease for the allies, and comparatively lower levels of disease among their opponents. Scientifically unverified beliefs about burial norms drove rational and life-saving behaviour.

  Similarly, if asked why it was a good idea to create a space outside a town for the burial of the dead, a modern commentator might point to the risk of infection or pollution of the water supply. However, as I said above, we have only known about germs for a little over a hundred years, so why did towns build cemeteries away from their settlements long before this? Again it was an instinctive behaviour enshrined in a spiritual belief. In the Middle Ages, Europeans moved cemeteries from inside their fortifications to outside because of a fear that the souls of the bodies of the dead might return to haunt the living. The incidental result of this fear of ‘revenants’ was improved hygiene and protection from disease.

  In trying to encourage rational behaviour, don’t confine yourself to rational arguments.

  Reason, and the naïve assumption that people understand the reasons for their own behaviour, would both provide very misleading explanations for the use of toothpaste. If you asked people why they cleaned their teeth, they would talk about dental health and avoiding trips to the dentist, probably without mentioning fresh breath and social confidence. A rational person would therefore suggest that people are motivated to practise health behaviours on the basis of their benefits; however, in reality, we probably mostly perform the healthy behaviour of cleaning our teeth for reasons altogether peripheral to the health benefit. My own view? Who cares why people clean their teeth, as long as they do it? Who cares why people recycle, as long as they do it? And who cares why people don’t drink-drive, as long as they don’t do it?

  If you confine yourself to using rational arguments to encourage rational behaviour, you will be using only a tiny proportion of the tools in your armoury. Logic demands a direct connection between reason and action, but psycho-logic doesn’t. This is important, because it means that, if we wish people to behave in an environmentally conscious way, there are other tools we can use other than an appeal to reason or duty. Similarly, if we wish to discourage people from drink-driving, we do not have to rely solely on rational arguments; if that approach does not work – and often it doesn’t – there is a whole other set of emotional levers we can pull to achieve the same effect. Just ask the 1920s ad industry.

  Believe it or not, the phrase ‘Often a bridesmaid, never a bride’ has its origins in an advert for Listerine – here was a hygiene product being sold not on medical benefits but on the fear of social and sexual rejection. ‘Edna’s case was a really pathetic one . . . But that’s the cruel thing about halitosis.’ Similarly, a 1930s advert for Lifebuoy soap was headlined ‘Why I cried after the party’ – another product promoted on its romantic rather than its physiological benefits. Colgate’s promise about ‘the ring of confidence’ was ingenious because it was ambiguous: it allowed the brand to talk about the confidence you would feel taking your children to the dentist, but also to imply the emotional confidence the pr
oduct conferred on the user in a meeting or social situation.

  Consumer behaviour, and advertisers’ attempts to manipulate it, can be viewed as an immense social experiment, with considerable power to reveal the truth about what people want and what drives them. What people do with their own money (their ‘revealed preferences’) is generally a better guide to what they really want than their own reported wants and needs.*

  Had Darwin waited a hundred and fifty years or so, he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble and seasickness in uncovering our primate ancestry by travelling from Down House to his (and my) local Sainsbury’s supermarket in Otford in Kent. There he could have learned from point-of-sale data that, over 30,000 items on the shelves, the single item most frequently purchased, as by all grocery shoppers in Britain, is . . . a banana.

  1.7: How You Ask the Question Affects the Answer

  A few years ago, I was called by someone who was responsible for a programme to install smoke detectors in at-risk American housing. They had a problem: people were happy to receive a free smoke detector, but balked at having more than one installed. For instance, they might accept one in the entrance hall but decline one in a child’s bedroom. I am sure that in the longer term there is a design solution to this problem – making smoke detection integral in light bulbs or lighting fixtures, for instance. However, my immediate suggestion was to borrow an approach from restaurant waiters and get people to accept three or four.