A key contention of behavioural science is that we must focus on the specific behaviours that need to change. We cannot rely on awareness, attitudes and beliefs alone to shift the changes we want to see in the world. The majority of people know that smoking cigarettes is bad, and yet plenty of people (including some very smart people) continue to smoke. Counterintuitively, women who know someone currently receiving breast cancer treatment are less likely to go for mammogram screenings than women who don’t[1]. Our behaviour can contradict our awareness, attitudes and beliefs, and so we must squarely focus on our vision for what behaviours we want to see, and target our interventions at influencing behaviour.
It is the behaviour of individuals that determines how a company impacts people. Responsible business advocates are therefore focused on trying to get others to start doing something or stop. This operates on two levels:
First, in how practitioners respond to specific challenges and impacts. You want to see people start doing something (for example, community liaison officers not just speaking with men, instead treating all other members of the community with importance) or stop doing something (for example, factory managers denying promotions and training opportunities to trade unionists); and
Second, in how practitioners embed policies, processes and management systems to institutionalise better business behaviours. Here, you also want to see people start doing something (for example, managers raising bad news on human rights risks of market entry) or stop doing something (for example, procurement officers indicating that social and labour standards aren’t as important as cost and delivery times).
What are the risks of focusing on awareness alone?
There are three key challenges: first, people don’t always necessarily do what they say they are going to do; second, people aren’t great at predicting how they will behave in a given situation; and third, sometimes interventions aimed at increasing awareness or changing mindsets can backfire.
“we can’t necessarily trust what people say about how their attitudes and beliefs will shape their behaviour”
First, we can’t necessarily trust what people say about how their attitudes and beliefs will shape their behaviour. Moral judgments of what is the right action and what action people really take can be different. One study utilised the ‘trolley problem’ - a philosophical thought-exercise which asks under what circumstances is it permissible to harm one person to save many people - see clip below from the Good Place which comically explains it. The experiment used real-world consequences of the trolley problem conducted found gaps between what people say is morally right and how they actually behave in those situations – finding that moral judgments do not necessarily lead to moral behaviour[2].
“People are notoriously bad at predicting how they will behave in certain situations”
Second, people are notoriously bad at predicting how they will behave in certain situations. And people can behave in surprising and unexpected ways - as demonstrated in some of the most high-profile psychology experiments. For example, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (where student-guards rapidly descended into abusive behaviour against student-prisoners) and Milgram’s obedience studies (where people show deference to authority to the extent where they will administer dangerous levels of electric shocks to unresponsive people)[3]. But when it comes to predicting behaviour, real-life experiments have found disparities between how people predict they will behave and how they actually behave. One study found differences in how women anticipated responding, and how they actually responded, to sexual harassment in job interviews. The women anticipated feeling angry and imagined confronting the harasser. When put in the harassment situation however, the women felt afraid and in actuality rarely confronted the harasser[4]. This insight– that we are bad at predicting how we will behave – matters because it means that we cannot rely on how people say they will react or behave. Workers may say hypothetically that they will report code of conduct violations but in reality there may be several barriers (individual, organisational or systemic) to doing so. Business development teams might say that they will consider human rights in their risk assessment process, but when the moment comes there may be competing priorities or time restrictions that means they don’t.
Third, raising awareness and trying to change attitudes can sometimes be counterproductive and lead to backfire effects. Diversity and anti-bias training in particular has been a victim of this effect. Studies have shown that raising awareness of gender and racial inequalities can actually entrench biases by making differences more salient[5], or by sending the signal that stereotyping is widespread normal behaviour, or by creating the illusion that the organisation has now fixed the problem[6].
This means that we need to squarely focus on the behaviours that we wish to change. "Common intuition presumes that people’s deeply held moral beliefs and principles guide their behavior, whereas behavioral science indicates that ethical behavior also stems from momentary thoughts, flexible interpretations, and the surrounding social context. Common intuition treats the challenge of influencing ethical behavior as a problem of altering beliefs, whereas behavioral science indicates that it should also be treated as a design problem”[7].
How can we shape better business behaviour?
Future blogs will explore numerous ways that we can encourage better business behaviour - including through concepts like social proof and social norms, cognitive biases, framing, priming and anchoring, hyperbolic discounting, and by understanding motivations. For now, I will provide two initial examples and their implications for responsible business. First, simply asking people what behaviour they intend to undertake makes people more likely to behave that way. Asking people on election day if they are going to vote increases the probability by as much as 25% and asking people if they intend on buying a car can increase purchase rates[8].
Second, in ‘Nudge’, one of the seminal behavioural economics texts, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe a great example of how we can build on awareness, attitudes and beliefs to support people to take action[9]. They describe a 1965 study by Leventhal, Singer and Jones where one group of students received a lecture raising awareness on the risks of tetanus and the importance of going to the health centre for inoculation. Most students said they planned to go get the inoculation but only 3% went to take the shot. Another group of students received the same lecture but were also given a copy of the campus map with the health centre circled. They were asked to look at their schedule and plan when to go, and look at the map and decide which route to take. In this group, 28% went to take the shot - nine times as many students as the group who had the awareness lecture alone.
In the responsible business context this has (at least) four implications:
First, let’s encourage greater specificity of action and intended behaviour. Who do we want to do what; when, where and how? This is of course nothing revolutionary, it is simply good strategy that plenty of people employ, but it is a helpful reminder to be specific and targeted. Some companies already do this in their capacity-building programmes for managers which use real-world, situational examples of what people may encounter and guidance on how to respond, making the desired action more readily acted upon;
Second, let’s support people to take the first step. Companies’ in-house training programmes are not just geared at telling employees what their rights are but geared towards “if X happens then use Y mechanism to tell us and Z will follow” to encourage the desired action;
Third, let’s not rely on what people say they will do or what they think they will do. Let’s focus on what people actually do, focus on their behaviour and what we can do to shape it; and
Fourth, the first example suggests that disclosure initiatives that ask companies what they intend to do in the future to manage risks and impacts could effect their behaviour. There is an existing body of research on disclosure effects but more is needed to understand the applicability to the responsible business field.
This is not to say that people aren’t already utilising these strategies in the field but serves as a reminder of the importance and robustness of these approaches. The next blog in this series focuses on how the responsible business field can utilise user-centred design principles, methodologies and approaches to shape behaviours.
[1] Hidden Brain (2018), ‘You 2.0: the Ostrich Effect’, NPR
[2] N. Gold, B. D. Pulford and A. M. Colman (2015), ‘Do as I Say, Don’t Do as I Do: Differences in moral judgment do not translate into differences in decisions in real-world problems’, Journal of Economic Psychology 47 p.50-61
[3] See documentaries on Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Milgram’s obedience study
[4] J. A. Woodzicka and M. LaFrance (2001), ‘Real Versus Imagined Gender Harassment’, Journal of Social Issues, Volume 57, No.1, p.15-30
[5] Iris Bonhet (2016), 'What Works: Gender Equality by Design', Harvard University Press
[6] Tiina Likki (2018), ‘What We Learned By Failing to Make Work Better for Female Staff’, Behavioural Scientist
[7] Epley, N., & Tannenbaum, D. (2017), 'Treating ethics as a design problem', Behavioral Science & Policy, 3(2), p.74
[8] Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008), ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness’, Yale University Press, p.71
[9] Ibid.