Behavioural sciences

I would love to have you on and tell your story right.

I've also connected with Kansas City Royals Director of Behavioral Science and Major League Mental Performance, Melissa Lambert, and I'll have her interview for you.

So I've got that and more coming up on Becoming Undone.

Becoming Undone is an iTribe creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks, proudly part of the Believe Network.

world.

Obviously, now you're a bit of a thought leader in the behavioral science space when it relates to marketing and advertising.

When did that stuff start coming into your

world? That came into my world as a result of following my curiosity.

And this is what I want to spend at least the next couple of years of my life doing.

And Early days of a creative agency, I also sort of realized every brief is a behavior change brief.

And it seems weird that more people aren't obsessed with human decision-making and behavior and that this whole world of behavioral science, which was very academic at the time, wasn't being applied to the sorts of challenges we were facing from clients.

So it just seemed like a very obvious marriage.

So there is a lot more opportunity for marketers to gain an edge by reaching outside of the marketing book.

And taking taking a course on neuroscience or looking at behavioral science and figuring out how behavioral economics could help them with pricing

yep no i completely agree i think when you see something even if it's something for me like if like christina but you're saying all this stuff i would say anything that i say that you're like that's interesting but i don't know if i should take think of it as an experiment Anytime you see someone on LinkedIn or you see a TikTok video or you see someone deconstruct something, you're like, that's really cool.

The thing is like the idea of like, you know, a good strategist because they'll say it depends because it does depend.

So why? Nicholas Epley has spent more than a decade's worth of research trying to uncover the reasons and why it matters so much for our well-being and the societies we live in.

He is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago.

His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and Wired, amongst others.

Professor Epley, welcome to the show.

Love that.

Now, talking about the products a little bit, as you mentioned it there, what have been some of the most powerful kind of behavioral science insights that have driven adoption? Because I think you've deployed some pretty clever uses of kind of psychology, haven't you?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, our co-founders, when they created Duolingo, it was based on one very strong mission at heart, which is still the mission that powers the business today to make the best education and make it universally available.

And that's really what's driven me to stay in the field for so long is I'm just fascinated with how people make decisions.

And and, you know, as the Advent of behavioral science came along that also spoke heavily to me because behavioral science kind of explains why people make decisions in a scientific way.

So, you know, studying that and combining that with marketing is kind of leads me to what I do now.

I run what I call a growth studio.

Yeah, so even though we're human beings and we all experience the same emotions, we have the same needs, desires, and I think a lot of that is universal.

How we express that sometimes does change based on our environment.

But, you know, just looking at the behavioral science out there, researchers have documented something like 188 different cognitive biases.

that we're all susceptible to.

They're still doing that to some level.

The other interesting thing, though, we found beginning in the mid 60s is a trend of what we call behavioral studies.

where the whole pattern shifts.

The military atomic weapons remains constant, but the rest of their activity, it becomes lower profile.

Many people think that persuasion is having the strongest argument.

Now, from a behavioral science perspective, is that actually true or is it something else happening beneath the surface?

So this is probably the biggest misunderstanding about persuasion, right? So part of the challenge, Marilyn, let me take a quick step back.

Part of the challenge is most individuals operate under this idea that the human brain is like a computer.

To beast or virus, that's an interesting way it just brings it out.

AI is making it so much easier than ever to generate persuasive content.

How do you think behavioral science and AI will work together, and what should communicators be careful not to lose?

That's a really good question, right? Let me start off by saying...