Ep. 161 - Mind Hacking With Richard Shotten

We were trying to encourage people to give blood.

And I just so happened to read at the same time as the brief came in, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Yeah, yeah.

Remember

that? That's great.

Yeah.

And massive book, you know, super popular.

People were talking about mavens and connectors everywhere in that era.

Yeah.

But what interests me was almost as a very tangent, a sub point.

He mentions right at the back of the book, an old psychology experiment.

There's a study by Latina and Dali in the 60s into an idea called the bystander effect.

So it's this super simple idea.

Essentially, if you ask lots of people to help, you tend to get a diffusion of responsibility.

Everyone leaves it up to someone else and nothing happens.

What you need to do is create a more personal sense of responsibility.

You want to individually target people and make a request rather than asking lots of people at the same time.

So I remember reading this back in 2004 and thinking, you know, this is exactly the problem we face on the blood cell list.

And we would go out with all these messages saying, blood stocks are low in England, please donate.

And just as the bystander effect suggests, virtually everyone was ignoring us.

So I read this book, read this study, and thought, well, why don't we apply this? Went and spoke with a creative agency.

Very, very crude suggestion.

And I just said to them, look, why don't we run a little test where rather than saying bloodstock's low in England, we try and create that sense of personal responsibility.

We have a little bit more direct target.

We could say bloodstock's low in Birmingham or Basildon or Brentwood.