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In an information overloaded, stimulus saturated world increasingly we rely on shortcuts within
a communication to determine whether we should attend to a particular message or take action
on a particular proposal that is presented to us. The work of my colleague Robert Chaldini
an esteemed social psychologist suggests that there are six universal shortcuts that we
all use to guide us to good decisions. They are reciprocation, scarcity, authority, consistency,
consensus and liking. The message is that if we understand how each of these principles
operates, how they are activated and the context in which they work best any communicator can
significantly increase the effectiveness of their messaging, of their propositions, of
their proposals by incorporating one or more of these universal effects.
Let me give you an example of how a couple of these principles can be applied to increase
the effectiveness of a message. It's likely that on your travels you might have stayed
in hotels and you would have noticed the little card in bathrooms that encourages you to reuse
your towels and linens while you stay in that particular hotel. It turns out that we can
significantly increase the effectiveness of that message by honestly pointing out to guests
that previous guests who have stayed, interestingly enough, in the same room as them have also
reused their towels. Compared to the standard message that hotels used they typically increased
their recycling rate by between 26 and 30 percent. That's an astonishing increase if
you consider that the change made was both small, honest and entirely costless to implement.
So a good example of how a small change leads to a big effect.
Here's another example one of the things that the National Health Service here in the UK
suffers from considerably are those patients who book appointments to see a doctor, to
see a nurse and then whatever reason fail to show up and fail to cancel that appointment
in enough time that it can be offered to another individual. The estimates that we have her
in the United Kingdom are that the costs of no-shows can be anything up to 800 million
pounds a year. That's £800 million that is essentially wasted in the health service system.
In a series of studies we found that we can significantly reduce those wasted costs by
again employing a small change. This time from the principle of consistency. When we
asked patients after making an appointment to just verbally repeat back the time and
day of their appointment that typically reduced no-shows by around 3 percent. 3 percent doesn't
sound an awful lot, but 3 percent of 800 million pounds is still tens of milions of pounds
of potential savings.
In fact we didn't just stop there. One of the things that we know from persuasion research
is that the extent to which people have actively get involved in a commitment by writing things
down amplifies the effect. When patients were asked to write down the time and day of the
appointment on a little appointment card themselves that led to 18 percent drop in no-shows. So
now that small change doesn't potentially save tens of millions of pounds it saves hundreds
of millions. It's these types of small changes informed from persuasion science that can
have such a bit impact and a big effect when it comes to creating effective communications
and change programmes.