How to use behavioral science to create positive social impact

In this episode, we start our mini-series on behavioral science for social good. This time, we’re discussing how to encourage people to stop smoking. We explore three principles – social proof, the importance of starting small, as well as why fear-mongering can backfire. 

Transcript

MichaelAaron Flicker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Behavioral Science For
Brands, the podcast where we bridge academics and practical marketing. Every
week we sit down and go deep behind the science that powers some of today's
most successful marketing. I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And today we're beginning a new miniseries.
On social good from how behavioral science can help support the environment
to our health to improving our communities. We're going to take a tour through
a number of different areas, and today we're starting with one of the most
important things about our health, and that's avoiding smoking. Let's get into it.
So Richard, we chose smoking. Not to be a a light pole topic, but to really get
people to understand and think about how behavioral science [00:01:00] can be
used to help drive big behavior change across a long period of time. And when
we were thinking about that, smoking just seemed like a great case study that
would be a lot of interesting material and a lot of interesting fodder for
conversation.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, it's, it's an area that's well researched by academics.
There's an awful lot of experimentation in how to stop people smoking. So great
topic from that respect. And then also when it comes to your health, it's
probably one of the biggest things that people can do. You know, if you're a
smoker, you know, everything else is.
Playing around the fringes. You know, stopping is probably the, the biggest
thing you can do if your health. So it's a big meaty topic and there's lots and lots
of research out there.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I had that as part of my prep notes for today. Smoking
remains the mo, the leading cause of preventable death in America, killing
almost 500,000 Americans each year, and it imposes $600 billion in annual
[00:02:00] health and productivity costs in the country.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, so even though the government spend a lot of money
trying to stop people smoking, when you hear the scale of death, the scale of
economic impact, it doesn't make you wonder why governments aren't putting
more money behind behavioral science interventions. The.
MichaelAaron Flicker: As we said, it's a interesting topic, so let me bring us
back and just kind of put smoking as a health topic into context for everyone.
And then we'll talk about some of the behavioral science. If you look back
specifically in the United States, so in 1955, the mix is about 54% men. 24% of
women are cigarette smokers. 10 years later at the first NHIS assessment of
Nationwide smoking, they say 42% of all US adults were current smokers, and
that number was then 52% of [00:03:00] men, 34% of women.
It was marketed in the 1960s as glamorous. It was even being recommended by
physicians. And today those numbers seem staggering because public health
campaigns have successfully shifted cultural norms and dramatically reduced
smoking. And a major turning point in that history was in the mid 1960s,
surgeon General Luther Terry, released a first official report linking smoking to
lung cancer and bronchitis.
And then from that, there was a Federal Labeling Act, a Federal Advertising
Act, and 1969, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act. All of these in
together started limiting advertisements on TV and radio. Started adding
warning labels to cigarette packages, and started to give us the studies that came
in the seventies, eighties, [00:04:00] nineties, and two thousands that we're
gonna talk about today.
But really compared to those early numbers, cigarette smoking in the United
States has fallen dramatically. Today the number was from 1965 was 42% of
adults. Now the number's 11%, so only 28.8 million people still smoke
cigarettes, about 13% of men and 10% of women, but still, that's almost 30
million people still smoking every day.
And the story internationally is pretty similar. The latest WHO tobacco trend
study shows that globally the number of people smoking in 2024 is 1.2 billion.
It's a 27% reduction from 2000, but still. One in five adults smoke worldwide.
So interesting. It's gone down dramatically [00:05:00] over from 1965 to today,
but still lots of people smoke and it really creates this burden on all economies
to cover the cost of healthcare and as you say, lots of work by governments and
nonprofit institutions trying to help educate and reduce the amount of smoking
overall.

Richard Shotton: So, yeah, and I, I love your point about even though. It's a
very big public health success. This drop in smoking, there's still so much
further to go. 1.2 billion people continuing to do something that's highly likely
to cause cancer is a massive health challenge. So some of these experiments
should be useful.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, and it's, and. Like so often we talk about, on this
podcast, you and I have a lot of excitement. Behavioral science has a lot of
interest in looking at what people actually do rather than what they claim to do.
Yeah. And so this very well documented we're very, very well discussed. Health
hazard [00:06:00] with an addictive substance really leads to a lot of very.
What would you say? Fertile territory for us to study because people are
making a decision to smoke, presumably even knowing the health concerns,
even knowing the consequences of their health. So maybe let's dive into some of
the studies and what's a first bias that we can look into and learn more from?
Yeah.
Richard Shotton: So we often talk about this idea of, of social proof. So social
proof is the argument that humans are a social animal. We are deeply influenced
by what others do. So if we think lots of people buy a particular product or lots
of people smoke, we are more likely to do ourselves. We'll find it more
appealing, we'll change our behavior to, to mimic those others.
Now, now, often when we've talked about. Social proof. It's been on quite trivial
matters. Like there's a cini study from 2008. We often talk about that. If you tell
[00:07:00] people, most guests in a hotel reuse their towels, you increase the
likelihood of those towels being reused. We've talked about a fang study where
he looked at the choice of dishes on a Chinese restaurant menu, and if you said
most popular dish, that dish became even more popular.
Better than even saying things like the chef's recommendation, but people might
think, well, okay, social proof influences consumers and citizens on trivial
decisions, but surely a matter of life and death like smoking. Surely that is going
to be harder to to influence. But the evidence suggests social proof is very
powerful, even when it comes to attempts to quit smoking there.
There's an amazing datasets, an American dataset running for about 30 years,
1971 to 2003, where for. Certain area [00:08:00] called Framingham. People
gave an awful lot of their, their health data to researchers. So researchers can

this insight applies to brand marketing as well? I know [00:13:00] it's a little bit
of a tangent.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, I, I certainly think so, and it's probably worth. You
know, drawing an analogy again with smoking, which is, you know, smoking is
a addiction. Mm-hmm. It's a phenomenally hard behavior to change. So
something like concentrate and dominate. I think is really dialing up the power
of social proof to its absolute maximum.
So going back to the brand world, if you have a behavior that is particularly
hard to change, you know, maybe you for some reason need to win over, reject
people previously disliked your brand, dismissed it, then I think smoking could
be a really nice analogy. Then that might be the time to use this concentrate and
dominate approach.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Makes great sense. And just for everybody listening,
we made the first point about the idea of the closer the social bond is, the
[00:14:00] more, and, and if you can get a, a spouse to quit smoking, that's
gonna have the biggest effect. And now we're using this term concentrate and
dominate. Can you just break down for us, how are those similar and how are
those, how are those connected?
Richard Shotton: Yeah. So there, there, there's, there's two bits here. As you
say, there's firstly this argument that the closer the bonds, the more powerful
social proof that fit with an awful lot of experimentation. We are most
influenced by people like ourselves.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Mm-hmm.
Richard Shotton: So if I know a Brit has changed their behavior.
That's slightly influential. If I know a Londoner, which is where I live has
changed their behavior, it's more influential. If I know my neighbor has changed
behavior, it's even more influential. If I know my wife has changed behavior,
it's, it's even more so, so, so social proof isn't a one size fits all approach.
The closer we are to someone, the more their behavior influences us. So that,
that's kind of one point. The second point about concentrate and dominate is if
[00:15:00] we accept. That what we really wanna do, if we're gonna change a
very deep rooted behavior, is have them the, the, the, the smoker say, or the
person whose behavior wanna change.

Richard Shotton: And this experiment can definitely be used. On anti-smoking
campaigns, but it can also be used on any commercial campaigns.
Yes. What a marketer needs to do is think to themselves, what's my end goal?
And then what is the smallest thing that [00:23:00] I can ask my audience to do
that will change their identity? And then once they've done that, you then
remind people that they are a exerciser or a quitter or a, I don't know, a, a
subscriber.
And then once they've got. That action that the, the, the audience can look back
to in their past. You can then try and encourage 'em to make even bigger steps.
And because people wanna be consistent in their past behavior, it's a very
effective way of, of encouraging change.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I'd love to double click on that point, Richard, because
I think this is an insight that you and I talk quite a bit about wanting to be
consistent with your past self.
Maybe we could talk a little bit more about that because it's the underlying
reason why the foot in the Torah technique works. Maybe we could talk a little
bit more about that desire to be consistent with your past self.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, there's a lovely study from Steve Martin who's at
Columbia University where he explicitly [00:24:00] tested this idea of
consistency.
So he was trying to get people to turn up to appointments and the, the standard
practice before he he ran the experiment was people would come in for an
appointment, they'd be given a card with the time and date of the next one, and
they may or may not turn up what he, iNSTIGATED was a new system.
So now when people came out of their initial appointment, they were given a
blank card and the receptionist asked the person to fill out that blank card with a
time and date themselves. And what Martin noted was that there was an 18%
reduction in no shows. And his argument is very similar to what we've been
saying.
He was saying people hate this sense of being inconsistent and it's, it's looked
down upon by many, many cultures. So if you can get people to make a public
statement about what they [00:25:00] intend to do, they are much more likely to
follow through than if they just privately think to themselves. They may or may
not turn up.

So, so you go from. The very hard to change world of smoking all the way
down to a challenge, like, you know, getting people to turn up to a, a restaurant
appointment or a doctor's appointment. You can apply this same principle just
in slightly, slightly different ways.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I think it's so helpful because it gives us, as
commercial marketers that challenge of how can we break down a big idea into
a smaller thing that is achievable.
That's kind of part one of the challenge. Then part two is how can we use that
activity that we got people to do to build on it and go from there? That's a whole
second part of the effort. So if you break it down into this way, it starts to give
you achievable chunks to move people to the behavior change that you hope for.
Richard Shotton: Absolutely.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So Richard. Thinking back [00:26:00] to that Joe
Arden episode, she shared 350,000 additional quit attempts happened in that
month. The first time they ran, stopped October in 20 20 12, compared to what
would normally have been tried in a normal October in the uk. So you could just
see this concept of.
Making a public declaration and really doing something smaller and achievable,
like a 28th day challenge was super effective. So really a nice way to combine
both of the things we're talking about in this Stoptober example.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. And for American audiences. Where 350,000 quit
attempts might feel small.
You've gotta remember, Britain has a population of about 70 million, 10, 12%
smokes. What's that? 7 million people? You, you, you're looking at 350,000
extra attempts out of a universe of 7 million. It's a very, very significant,
significant number.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Great point, great point. Are there any other biases
[00:27:00] that we can learn from the Stoptober case study here?
Richard Shotton: I think there is. One other, and it's about the power of
positivity. So the whole kind of body language of stoptober is very, very
positive. And that's quite different from the history of public health messaging.
Cer certainly in Britain, they used to be in the seventies and eighties, maybe

And then our job as marketers is to use that to make better campaigns, to make
better outcomes. So I think that's, that's a beau beautifully said. What you said,
and this really applies to smoking and the smoking industry for. Anywhere in
the US you go. They have two types of [00:33:00] warning labels. One is just
text, but many states allow graphic, or I think mandate graphic, unpack warning
labels where they show shriveled lungs or they show you know, pictures of, of,
of death.
And it's really a shocking. Offputting experience, and this is just what you're
talking about almost to the, an extreme degree, how showing those might create
an ostrich effect where people just don't even want to, don't want to think about.
That that bad message because it's so it's so off-putting.
Is that, is that possible?
Richard Shotton: I, I, I, I think so. And, and, and there's an element that, you
know, they, I either, either might try and ignore that message as much as
possible, or in a situation where it's graphics on a pack and it's hard to ignore,
they might go to amazing mental gymnastics to explain why it [00:34:00]
doesn't.
Happen to themselves. So it could be a, a kind of literal ignoring or a kind of
psychological defense mechanism. You know, I think there's an argument for
trying to get people to engage in these quick programs by emphasizing the, the,
the positive upsides, rather than focusing on that, that fear mystery.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I think that's, that's really helpful to hear. And so often
we think about. What is the effect directly on the subject that we're marketing
to? So we're thinking about how will that be received by the smoker and what
does that cause them to do? There was a really interesting 2022 trial known as
the Casa, CASA, randomized clinical trials that put two different types of
cigarette packs into market.
Some were blank packs. [00:35:00] And some were packed with these graphic
warnings that we were talking about, and they tracked the behaviors of 357
smokers, and what they found was smokers with the graphic warning packs hid
the cigarette packs 38% more often. Then those with the blank packs that had
no pictures on them.
So. This, as soon as there was no warning labels, it was much more comfortable
for people to leave their cigarette packs out on the table, hold them in their hand
while they were smoking, and smoking became more visible. So something, it

something, especially in an matter of serious, as serious as smoking is worth,
worth, worth laboring.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I think that's, that's a, a lovely point. As we come to a
close on this episode, we had one more kind of idea that we wanted to bring to
everybody, and that's thinking [00:38:00] about how can the role of humor and
positivity possibly help change people's perception even better than a negative
message. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Richard Shotton: Yeah, and this, this very much relates to. The ostrich effect,
but maybe rather than just leaving a problem for marketers, there is an
opportunity here as well. And that is some of the tactics that we automatically
gravitate to in like the sin areas of marketing, you know, encouraging people to
have baked snacks or, or, or alcohol.
Well, you can use some of those tactics of humor and amusement and and wits
when you're trying to. Get people to behave in a more healthy way. Now that
might sounds ridiculous, but there are lots of examples of it used really
powerfully. And it might have been in the Gerard episode again, [00:39:00]
where we discussed the Australian campaign.
Dumb ways to die.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Mm. So
Richard Shotton: this was a campaign, I think it was either Sydney or
Melbourne. It was a metro, and they wanted to make sure that teenagers didn't
go on the tracks rather than showing people posters of the horrendous physical
damage that could do. Instead, they came up with a very witty song, which talks
about all the dumb ways to die, like sticking a fork in a.
Electric plug by, you know, rolling yourself in honey and going and playing
with a bear. You know, ridiculously bar Rockaways are dying. And then they
kind of said at the end of this song, the dumbest way to die is to to go on the
tracks. And that was a phenomenally successful campaign because it was
amusing.
It meant that a very hard to reach audience actually wanted to pay attention.
And the message went in almost in this kind of Trojan horse like manner.
MichaelAaron Flicker: 28 Cannes Lions five Grand Prix, [00:40:00] one of the
most awarded campaigns in history by using humor and lightheartedness,

humor and positivity rather than this more easy to gravitate towards scare
tactics.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, I think people have a rule of. Thumb in their mind,
which is essentially let's do more of the things that make us feel good. Less of
the things that make us feel bad. And on one hand that sounds ridiculously
simplistic, but if you think about many public health messages, they ignore that
they, so this situation in which people feel scared or ashamed, and you know,
just as you know, that rule of thumb suggests a lot of people then choose to
ignore the message.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I think it probably it probably also raises for me this
idea that serious topics require serious advertising is probably a fallacy. You
know, serious topics [00:41:00] require big ideas, but humor. And positivity can
be the right Trojan horse to deliver a bigger message. Yeah. And, and
sometimes you, you, you see that marketers mistake the seriousness of the.
Of the, of the goal with the way that they bring the creative to life.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. Ab absolutely. So when we were writing Hack in The
Human Mind, one of the most interesting chapters, 'cause we interviewed some
of the people at the, the company was Liquid Death. And that's exactly what
they said. They have, you know, health interests, water far fewer calories than
soft drinks.
They have environmental interests cans far better than, than plastics. But rather
than have a. Hair shirt, dry series of messaging about moral worth. What they
did was make their ads very, very witty, very funny, very gruesome, and by
making it such interesting engaging [00:42:00] communications, people wanted
to lean into it, and therefore they've got more sales and done more
environmental and social good than, you know, the, the, the basic literal
approach might have delivered.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Insert shameless plug if you Yeah, yeah. Your, your,
your copy of Hacking the Human Mind by all means pick it up. But yeah,
Richard well said. That really is that, that really was a delightful part of that
chapter, which is you wouldn't have necessarily known that was part of their
inspiration unless you talked to them and really heard that was that was part of
what they were trying to do.
Turn the industry. On its side and do something in a new way and they got a lot
more attention for it because of it.

So [00:45:00] as we come to a close, a wrap up question for you. Yeah. What's
one thing that has helped you quit a bad habit? We've talked about these very
serious things. Have you used one of these techniques or did you do something
else? To quit a habit you wish you could change.
Richard Shotton: So I, my, my probably worst habit is I have a real.
Predilection for crisps. So for chips as, as you'd say to the extent that I've just
had my 50th birthday and one of my best friends knows how much I love crisps,
and she bought me a giant box of 50 different crisps types from all around the
world. Weird flavors amazing variety. You know, she knew that would be my
very well appreciated.
So I have this big love of crisps. I'm always trying to cut back, and the thing I
have found that, that the best way of doing that is even though I live opposite a
shop in South London, if I don't have crisps in the house, the fact that it takes
about 30 seconds [00:46:00] of effort when I've got that pang and that hunger
and that desire, half the time, it'll stop me bothering to eat.
So. Adding in a little bit of, little bit of friction friction, that, that for me has
been one of the best ways to curve my crisp eating habit. What about you? Have
you had a any success in, in, in changing for good?
MichaelAaron Flicker: Well, I, I, as you were forming the question, I was
thinking to myself, I've had left success then I would like in life.
Richard Shotton: I'm not sure my crisp habit has been completely destroyed.
So yeah, I don't wanna have danger of over claim here, but
MichaelAaron Flicker: yeah. No, no, not at all. But, but. When I've had
success changing a really hard to beat habit, I've reframed it. As a different
thing in my mind. So I had this vision that I, that, that, for me, being really great
at work meant doing more hours than anyone else, than my clients, [00:47:00]
than my coworkers.
If I put more hours in than I was gonna be the best. And the human truth that
we, I think all. Have experiences, more hours does not lead to better work. It
only leads to more hours. Yeah. I had to reframe that the smartest people find
the way to do the best work in the least amount of time. How could I change the
challenge to be, how can I be more efficient with my time?

How can I be more smart with using other team members to partner with me?
How could I change the way I approached my work so that it was about doing?
Less better rather than doing more than everybody else. And once I saw it
differently, once I reframed it, it really changed the way I approached work.
And I've used that in my personal life and that's really been very helpful.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, I mean, reframing is a brilliant one. Maybe if we
continue the miniseries, we could do one on healthy eating. 'cause there's an
awful lot of work about reframing and how that can be used to encourage
maybe healthier eating choices. [00:48:00] I like that.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Let's make that a plan.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. Okay.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Until next time. If you found this podcast interesting,
engaging, please share it with others that you think would like to hear it and
leaving a comment, clicking follow, giving a like really helps us reach more
people.
So we'd ask that you do that as well. And until next time, I'm MichaelAaron
Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Thanks for listening.
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