David Greenwood, Author at Product Gems

💎 On how the safety of success encourages Hollywood sequels (Fast and Furious 928)

Take Hollywood, for instance: Among the ten highest-grossing movies of 1981, only two were sequels. In 1991, it was three. In 2001, it was five. And in 2011, eight of the top ten highest-grossing films were sequels. In fact, 2011 set a record for the greatest percentage of sequels among major studio releases. Then 2012 immediately broke that record; the next year would break it again. In December 2012, journalist Nick Allen looked ahead with palpable fatigue to the year to come:

Audiences will be given a sixth helping of X-Men plus Fast and Furious 6, Die Hard 5, Scary Movie 5 and Paranormal Activity 5. There will also be Iron Man 3, The Hangover 3, and second outings for The Muppets, The Smurfs, GI Joe and Bad Santa.

Excerpt from: Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

💎 On how the company a brand keeps determines what consumers think of it (who are you compared to?)

When consumers who know a lot about cars were asked to evaluate a Honda ad, they rated it more favourably when it was surrounded by ads for prestigious brands like Armani and Rolex, than when it was in the context of less premium brands like Timex and Old Navy. When Simonson and Yoon compared how people evaluated the attractiveness of a series of products, including lawn mowers, food processors, and cars, they found that the strength of preference for a product was influenced by the context of choices presented at the time. For example, when a pen was selected from a set where it was significantly better than another, participants would pay more for it and think it wrote better than when the same pen was selected from a more balanced set of options. With the vast sums spent on advertising, a relatively small investment replicating Simonson and Yoon’s study for your own products and media options could lead to a dramatic difference in the way people feel about your brand.

Excerpt from: Consumerology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping by Philip Graves

💎 On how statistics lack emotional impact when compared to images (numbers versus coffins)

For eighteen years, the American media was prohibited from showing photographs of fallen soldiers’ coffins. In February 2009, defence secretary Robert Gates lifted this ban and images flooded on to the Internet. Officially, family members have to give their approval before anything is published, but such a rule is unenforceable. Why was this ban created in the first place? To conceal the true costs of war. We can easily find out the number of casualties, but statistics leave us cold. People, on the other hand, especially dead people, spark an emotional reaction.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On how research nearly killed the great Audi slogan (confident brand heritage)

This was the case with our early work for Audi, and even by 1983 we were still struggling to establish the Audi’s German heritage in a way that was motivating and memorable. We’d written a number of commercials that were due to air but still needed a hook to tie them together.

I remember, on one of my trips to the Audi factory in Ingolstadt, seeing the line ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ on a fading piece of publicity. When I asked about it our guide dismissed it, saying it was an old line they used in the early 70s.

But it stuck in my mind. When it came to binding our different commercials together I thought, why not use this line? And, importantly, let’s keep it in German. Mad as that sounds…

Excerpt from: Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic by John Hegarty

💎 On how priming lowers our threshold of attention (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon)

Have you ever learned a new word (or heard of an obscure sea mammal or an ethnic dance) and then encountered it several times in the space of a few days? You come across it in the news, you overhear it mentioned on the bus and on the radio, and the old issue of National Geographic you’re thumbing through falls open to an article on it. . .

This is priming (fortified with a few low-grade coincidences). When yon skim the newspaper, half-listen to TV, or drive on the motorway, you ignore most of what’s going on around you. Only a few things command attention. Paradoxically, it is unconscious processes that choose which stimuli to pass on to full consciousness. Prior exposure to something (priming) lowers the threshold of attention, so that that something is more likely to be noticed. The upshot is that you have probably encountered your ‘new’ word or car many times before. It’s just that now you’re noticing.

Excerpt from: Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

💎 On how passing up short term wins can bring long term gain (frame the context)

Mark Twain tells the story of a young boy he met in the mid-West. Every time a stranger came into town the other boys delighted in showing the stranger just how stupid this boy was.

They’d hold out two coins, a dime (10 cents) and a nickel (5 cents) and tell the boy he could keep one.

He’d always pick the nickel because it was bigger.

Every time he did it all the other boys laughed.

Mark Twain took him aside and said, “Son, I have to tell you that the small coin is worth more than the bigger one.”

The boy said, “I know that mister. But how many times do you think they’d let me choose if I picked the more valuable one?”

In the original context, the boy is stupid.

Change the context, and he’s smart.

Excerpt from: Creative Mischief by Dave Trott

💎 On how our expectations of a product shape our experience of it (our beliefs are hard to break)

Consider green goods. Rebecca Strong and I conducted an experiment to quantify the impact of labelling washing-machine tablets as ‘ecologically friendly’.

We sent a group of consumers the same type of washing-machine tablet. They washed a load of clothes and reported back on the tablets performance. The twist was that half were told that they were testing a standard supermarket tablet, the other half a green variant.

Once again, there was an element of subterfuge. We didn’t ask consumers directly what they thought of green goods. Generally, they make positive noises. Instead, we monitored behaviour in test and control conditions.

The results were clear. Those who used the green variant rated the tablet as worse on all metrics.

Respondents scored the eco tablet 9% lower for both effectiveness and likeability, while the number who would recommend the product was 11% lower and the number who would buy it themselves, 18% lower than for the standard version.

Despite eco-friendly products often having a higher price, consumers who tested the green tablet were only prepared to pay £4.41 on average compared to £4.82 for the standard version. Consumers believe that products involve a trade-off: improved eco-friendliness entails corresponding loss in cleaning efficacy. This is a concern for any brand interested in a green variant. If brands in this category are going to successfully sell green variants, they’ll need to counteract these negative associations, or spend heavily to bolster their cleaning credentials.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On how our behaviour can change the physical make up of our brain (e.g. London cab drivers)

It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains. Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry, sometimes in far-reaching ways. In the late 1990s, a group of British researchers scanned the brains of sixteen London cab drivers who had between two and forty-two years of experience behind the wheel. When they compared the scans with those of a control group, they found that the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing spatial representation won much larger than normal.

Excerpt from: The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember by Nicholas Carr

💎 On how much we’re prepared to pay for a product being partly determined by what we compare it to (beer versus wine)

I ran an experiment among my colleagues using King Cobra, a little known variant of Cobra lager. It’s a strong Indian beer, with an ABV of 7.5%, and it comes in a 750ml serving, the same size as a wine bottle.

A little subterfuge was required. I told my colleagues that we needed to run some tastings for a client. I organised two separate tastings of the beer alongside half a dozen other drinks. The participants rated the taste of the drinks on a scale from one to ten and said how much they’d be prepared to pay for each one in a supermarket.

The twist was that in each tasting Cobra was served alongside a different selection of drinks: in the first case bottled beers; in the second wines. The accompanying drinks had a significant effect on the amount people were prepared to pay for Cobra. When it was accompanied by bottled beers they offered £3.75, but when it was served with a selection of wines that rose, by 28%, to £4.80.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On how much we value a product partly depending on what we compare it to (choose your comparisons carefully)

Christopher Hsee, George Loewenstein, Sally Blount and Max H. Bazerman once ran an experiment in which they asked people browsing used textbooks how much they would pay for a music dictionary that had 10,000 words and was in perfect condition. Another group was asked how much they would pay for a music dictionary with 20,000 words but a torn front cover. Neither group knew about the other dictionary. On average, the students were willing to pay $24 for the 10,000-word dictionary and $20 for the cover-torn 20,000-word one. The cover – irrelevant to looking up words – made a big difference.

The researchers then cornered another group and presented them with both options simultaneously. Now the students could compare the two options side by side. That changed their perception of the products. In this easy-to-compare group, the students said they would pay $19 for the 10,000-word dictionary and $27 for the 20,000-word one with the torn cover. Suddenly, with the introduction of a more clearly comparable aspect – number of words – the larger dictionary became more valuable, despite the torn cover.

Excerpt from: Small Change: Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them by Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler

💎 On how survey answers can be swayed (by how question is asked)

For example, a questionnaire on the number of headaches people experience in one week was given to two different groups of subjects. One group had to indicate whether the number was 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, and so on, while the other was presented with the numbers broken down into 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, etc. The first group reported many more headaches than the second. Moreover, almost everyone is influenced by the two end points of a scale, tending to pick a number that is near the middle.

Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland

💎 On how contactless payments reduce price sensitivity (beware overspend)

What about new payment technologies?

Recently we have seen a flurry of new payment methods – the most widespread of which are contactless cards. Gabrielle Hobday and I investigated how contactless cards affected price sensitivity by posing three questions to people leaving coffee shops in Central London:

How much did you spend?

What means of payment did you use?

Please can we see your receipt?

The last question was crucial, as it let us compare recollection with reality.

The findings were striking. People paying with cash typically overestimated their spend by 9%, whereas those using contactless cards underestimated by 5%. A stretch of 14 percentage points. Credit card estimates were, in contrast, spot on.

The variation is important: on a typical supermarket shop of £25, the 14% difference between recollections of spend on a contactless card and cash amounts to £3.50. Contactless cards could be the difference between remembering a shopping trip as expensive or cheap. It is this memory that determines whether shoppers return. A positive recollection can either be achieved by steep discounting, which erodes profits, or by an innovative approach to payment.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On speculation about the future often being pointless (as it is little better than chance)

It’s fun to speculate about what those inventions might be, but history cautions against placing much faith in futurology. Fifty years ago, Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000: A Framework For Speculation. Their crystal-ball gazing got a lot right about information and communication technology. They predicted colour photocopying, multiple uses for lasers, ‘two-way pocket phones’ and automated real-time banking. That’s impressive. But Kahn and Wiener also predicted undersea colonies, silent helicopter-taxis and cities lit by artificial moons. Nothing looks more dated than yesterday’s technology shows and yesterday’s science fiction.

Excerpt from: Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy by Tim Harford

💎 On how modern tech can weaken our memory (smartphone cameras)

But a 2013 study conducted by Linda Henkel of Fairfield University pointed in that direction. Henkel noticed that visitors to art museums are obsessed with taking cell-phone shots of artworks and often are less interested in looking at the art itself. So she performed an experiment at Fairfield University’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. Undergraduates took a guided tour in which they were directed to view specific artworks. Some were instructed to photograph the art, and others were simply told to take note of it. The next day both groups were quizzed on their knowledge of the artworks. The visitors who snapped pictures were less able to identify works and to recall visual details.

Excerpt from: Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone

💎 On how deference to authority can distort memories (status and height)

In the experiment conducted by Wilson on 5 classes of Australian students a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, each class was asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half inch, so that as the “professor” he was seen as two and a half inches taller than as the “student.”

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On how developments in seemingly inconsequential areas trigger much more improved developments in another (the hummingbird effect)

I have called this phenomenon “the hummingbird effect”: the process by which an innovation in one field sets in motion transformations in seemingly unrelated fields. The taste for coffee helped create the modern institutions of journalism; a handful of elegantly decorated fabric shops helped trigger the industrial revolution. When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze, they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.

Excerpt from: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

💎 On the danger of grandiose marketing objectives (wishful bullshit)

Macho marketing language is common, but dangerous. And objective setting is where it’s perhaps most dangerous. Marketing plans are littered with words like ‘disrupting’ and ‘transforming’. Plans hardly ever use more modest, but more realistic, words like ‘nudging’, ‘reinforcing’ or ‘reassuring’ – they just don’t sound impressive enough. It probably doesn’t help that the box on the brief titled ‘objective’ has often been replaced nowadays by one called ‘ambition’ or ‘vision’. And when the brand plan writer won’t be there in two years’ time anyway, they may as well write wishful bullshit.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 On the dangers of a mindless deference to authority (rectal earache)

Errors in the medicine patients receive can occur for a variety of reasons. However, a book entitled Medication Errors: Causes and Prevention by two Temple University pharmacology professors, Michael Cohen and Neil Davis, attributes much of the problem to the mindless deference given the “boss” of the patient’s case: the attending physician. According to Professor Cohen, “in case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription.” Take, for example, the strange case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. But instead of writing out completely the location “right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear. Upon receiving the prescription. the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On the cumulative power of multiple small improvements (professional cycling)

Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.

But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. They determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.

As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated…

Excerpt from: Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear

💎 On how random clusters are mistaken for patterns (let the rice rain down)

To see why, stand on the carpet – but choose one with a pile that is not too deep (you might in any case want a vacuum cleaner to hand) – take a bag of rice, pull the top of the packet wide open … and chuck the contents straight into the air. Your aim is to eject the whole lot skyward in one jolt. Let the rice rain down.

What you have done is create a chance distribution of rice grains over the carpet. Observe the way the rice is scattered. One thing the grains have probably not done is fall evenly. There are thin patches here, thicker ones there and, every so often, a much larger and distinct pile of rice: it has clustered.

Wherever cases of cancer bunch, people demand an explanation. With rice, they would see exactly the same sort of pattern, but does it need an explanation? Imagine each grain of rice as a cancer case falling across the country. The example shows that clustering, as the result of chance alone, is to be expected. The truly weird result would be if the rice had spread itself in a smooth, regular layer. Similarly, the genuinely odd pattern of illness would be an even distribution of cases across the population.

Excerpt from: The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers by Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland

💎 On conformity having deep roots (nut cracking)

The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.

Humans are similar. There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.

Excerpt from: Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear

💎 On making communication entertaining and to the point (nobody wants to read your shit)

Nobody wants to read anything.

Let me repeat that. Nobody—not even your dog or your mother—has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchoupitoulas.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Excerpt from: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

💎 On strongest memory of taste tending to be the first bite (olfactory change blindness)

We are all in a constant state of ‘olfactory change blindness’. Intriguingly, this is something that the food companies have been trying to exploit to their, and hopefully our, advantage for a few years now. The basic idea is that you load all the tasty but unhealthy ingredients into the first and possibly last bite of a food, and reduce their concentration in the middle of the product, when the consumers are not paying so much attention to the tasting experience. Just think about a loaf of bread with the salt asymmetrically distributed towards the crust. The consumer will have a great-tasting first bite, and then their brain will ‘fill in’ the rest by assuming that it tastes exactly like the first mouthful did. This strategy will probably work just as long as the meal isn’t high tea and the taster eating cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off! Or imagine something like a bar of chocolate, which most people will presumably start and finish at the ends, not in the middle. In fact, Unilever has a number of patents in just this space.

Excerpt from: Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating by Charles Spence

💎 On power of brand versus physical assets (you take the factory, give me the trademark)

Or, as John Stuart, chairman of Quaker Oats, said, “If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks, and goodwill, and you could have all the bricks and mortar—and I would fare better than you” (in Dyson et al. 1996, 9).

Excerpt from: Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch. College Inc.. and Museumworld by James Twitchell

💎 On the power of the internet to remove our inhibitions (it doesn’t judge)

The researchers were able to conduct a field experiment into how the introduction of technology changed the content of customer orders. According to the data, online customers chose pizzas that were more complicated and expensive, containing 33 percent more toppings and 6 percent more calories. Instead of just ordering a pepperoni pizza, they chose pies that featured highly unusual toppings, such as “quadruple bacon” or ham, pineapple, and mushroom. (When orders were placed online, bacon sales increased by 20 percent.)

Excerpt from: The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior by Shlomo Benartzi and Jonah Lehrer

💎 On the problem with opinion polls (many opinions are invented on the spot)

One alternative would be an opinion poll. The drawback is that many “opinions” are invented on the spot to satisfy a pollster. Political scientist George Bishop once demonstrated this by asking people whether they favoured repeal of the “Public Affairs Act of 1975.” There was no such act. But thirty percent took the bait and offered an opinion. Bishop found that the less educated were more likely to claim an opinion.

Excerpt from: Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone

💎 On the creative benefits of thinking like a child

Einstein was a great fan of this technique. He said that: “To stimulate creativity, one muse develops the childlike inclination for play.” Researchers at the North Dakota State University agree. They conducted an experiment where they asked 76 undergraduates what they would do if college were cancelled for the day. The interesting bit was that half of them were encouraged to think as if they were seven years old. These students were found to give much more creative responses than the control group.

Excerpt from: Go Luck Yourself: 40 ways to stack the odds in your brand’s favour by Andy Nairn

💠 Optimism Bias

When looking to the future, we tend to overestimate the good stuff and underestimate the bad.

This is a draft chapter from my new book; Security Gems: Using Behavioural Economics to Improve Cybersecurity (working title).

Subscribe to read new chapters as I write them.

💠 In Sickness and In Health

Marriage. It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

In the Western world, the numbers don’t agree. Divorce rates are about 40 percent.

That means that out of five married couples, two will end up in divorce. But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent.

Good luck to them!

Optimism bias is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘overconfidence’, and refers to the phenomenon whereby individuals believe they are less likely than others to experience a negative event.

As humans we need some level of optimism, if we went in to marriage thinking it would end in divorce, marriage simply would not exists.

The optimism bias is an intriguing concept that comes with a host of benefits, such as shielding us from depression and ensuring we respond positively to failure.

Sadly, though, the optimism bias in cyber security leaves us overly-vulnerable to cyber attack.

💠 It’ll never happen to me

When I was growing up, there was a kid in my neighbourhood who loved climbing trees. I was always suspicious one of his parents was a monkey.

He’d shoot up them, without a second thought.

Once, thirty metres in the air, a branch broke beneath him. All of us standing below heard the crack. It sounded like lightning, followed by a heavy thud as it hit the ground

Luckily he managed to quickly reach out and grab a branch above, saving himself from a long fall.

Whilst the slip didn’t bring him back down to earth, it did bring him back to reality. It took him the rest of the day to climb back down. And weeks before we saw him up another tree.

The dangers of being overly optimistic or self-confident can often blind us to the very high likelihood of negative outcomes.

When there’s nothing to warn us of our impending doom we get even more reckless.

Drink and drug driving is a massive problem, and is in a large part a result of our unbounding optimism.

“I’ve only had a couple of beers”, offers no solace to the family whose love one has been killed as a result of impaired reaction times.

Nightclubs in Germany came up with a brilliant idea to reduce the problem of their patrons jumping into cars after a night on the tiles; piss screens.

Urinals allowed drivers to steer a car in a video games using their pee. Aim left to go left. Right to go right.

If you’re too slow or swerve too much, that is to pee on the blokes foot next to them, the car would crash. “Too pissed to drive”, the screen would read, along with the number of the local taxi firm.

Again, in life we need moments to peg us back to reality.

When people receive emails they don’t necessarily treat them with the suspicion they deserve.

Far too often, we’re optimistic about the outcome of clicking links, and end up clicking malicious links or opening malicious attachments.

Wether it’s drink driving, or clicking an email. Both can have catastrophic consequences.

Facebook do a great job of warning us about the result of our actions. Click an external link on your newsfeed and they’ll make you confirm the link shown is where you want to end up.

The aim here is to make the negative effects and losses of a certain action clear to the individual, and offer a clear, safer alternative.

Sadly Facebook don’t do this with uploading drunk photos yet.

💠 It’ll happen to them

Now, I’m not advocating we all become pessimists. World economies rely on optimism.

Entrepreneurs need optimism.

Do you ever find yourself in situations wondering “how hard could it be?”.

As an amateur home-chef, I have a particularly bad habit of asking this type of question when dining out. How hard could it be to create a menu? Cook the food? Leave the customers wanting more?

I make a great Pad Thai.

In my town one particular restaurant unit has changed hands five times in as many years. Italian. Indian. Thai. Greek. Italian, again.

It’s not unusual. In some cities, the chance of restaurant failure in the first year can be as high as 90%. That is, nine out of every ten restaurants opened will fail!

Nine in ten! Who would want to open a new restaurant?

Restaurateurs know the numbers, but despite the well-documented failure rates, they often don’t think they apply to them. They might argue their concept is different to the others, their restaurant is in a better part of town, or the cuisine is seeing new popularity.

But do they really have a better chance of success than others trying the same thing?

In the majority of cases, no.

The problem is we don’t know the reason behind the facts. We don’t know a lot about others, but know a lot about ourselves.

We’re optimistic about ourselves, we’re optimistic about our kids, we’re optimistic about our families, but we’re not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we’re pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country.

This plagues those responsible for creating public health messaging.

One in two UK people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. But despite the odds most people don’t think they’ll get cancer [1].

38 percent of cancer cases are preventable in the UK. 15 percent of that can be attributed to stopping smoking.

Yet millions of people still smoke, pouring their hard earned money into the pursuit of lowering their health outcomes.

People explain it away. They go to the gym everyday. Other smokers don’t. They don’t drink, like other smokers.

Comparative optimism, where we can’t make a direct comparison, convinces us others are more likely to suffer negative experiences than we are ourselves.

Studies around peoples perceived privacy risks, like unauthorised access to accounts and sharing of personal information, is much more likely to happen to other people [2].

Almost half of all UK businesses suffered some form of cyber security breach in 2020 [3].

Yet companies don’t think it will happen to them.

It’s why we can ignore network security risks while at the same time reading about other companies that have been breached. It’s why we think we can get by where others failed.

Optimism induced invincibility needs to be accounted for, and removed. You are no better than your peers, mostly.

💠 Prevention is better than cure

Skiing. Windsurfing. Rock climbing. These are the kinds of things I love to do on holiday.

Health insurance companies don’t like me doing them. I know this because they charge me a hefty premium for coverage.

Previously I was guilty of questioning if travel insurance was worth the money.

Whilst speaking to the Swiss Mountain Rescue team one Winter, they told me just how much it cost to be evacuated via helicopter. About $100 per minute. And that’s from takeoff to landing.

Perceptions of actual risk can be clouded by optimism. I don’t go on holiday to break a leg, but the chance is pretty high.

It’s not just that we don’t think bad things can happen to us or are more likely to happen to someone else. We–all things being equal–believe that good outcomes are more probable than bad outcomes.

In one study, participants were given a list of 18 positive and 24 negative events, like getting a good job after graduation, developing a drinking problem, and so on [4].

Overall, they considered themselves 15% more likely than others to experience positive events, and 20% less likely than others to experience negative events.

People are more likely to accept risks if they feel they have some control over them.

Here we see the feeling of security diverging from the reality of security.

Controlling for this feeling is important.

We all know someone that has “seen it all”.

Experience often trumps decision making. It offers a sense of security.

But never let it cloud the actual risks, which should be assessed with an eye of experience, but also an eye of fatalism.

💠 Security Gems

You are not invincible.

Set a “base rate”: Take an outside view, meaning we should look at base rates for our estimates as if we are looking at someone else’s chances.
Conduct a premortem: before making a decision predict how a project or strategy could fail and then work backward to prevent these issues.
Make impending negative events caused by over-optimism clear: Bringing negative events to our mind just before we’re likely to engage in an undesirable act can be a good behaviour change technique.
Use positive information motivate: Instead of telling people why they shouldn’t do something, convince them with the benefits of an alternative. Remember our optimism bias leads us to think we’re less likely to suffer negative outcomes compared to others.
Beware of feeling secure: Take a risk based approach to security. Best practises are good to follow, but make sure they address the critical issues.

[1] Cancer risk statistics
[2] Optimistic bias about online privacy risks
[3] Almost half of UK businesses suffered a cyber attack in past year
[4] Unrealistic Optimism about Future Life Events

Security Gems: Using Behavioural Economics to Improve Cybersecurity

This post is a draft chapter from my new book. Pardon the typos.

Subscribe to read new chapters as I write them.

💠 Confirmation Bias

We seek out or interpret information that confirms our preconceptions, avoiding things that challenge them.

This is a draft chapter from my new book; Security Gems: Using Behavioural Economics to Improve Cybersecurity (working title).

Subscribe to read new chapters as I write them.

💠 Paying for confirmation

According to the flat Earth model of the universe, the sun and the moon are the same size.

You’ll find credible looking mathematical models that argue the theory. Photographs taken from a plane showing a flat horizon. Queries about how the seas could ever exist if the earth was round.

You won’t find calculations from Eratosthenes who is credited for discovering the earth was round. Photographs taken from space of a round planet. Or mentions of gravity, which holds the water in the seas.

Or does it?

As humans we have a disposition to confirm our beliefs by exclusively searching for information that supports a hunch while excluding opposing data.

Confirmation bias isn’t limited to conspiracy theorists. It causes us to vote for politicians, investors to make poor decisions, businesses to focus on the wrong ideas, and almost certainly led you to buy this book.

During the 2008 US presidential election, Valdis Krebs analysed purchasing trends on Amazon. People who already supported Obama were the same people buying books which painted him in a positive light. People who already disliked Obama were the ones buying books painting him in a negative light. [1]

People weren’t buying books for the information. They were buying them for the confirmation.

I’m in no doubt the people buying this book have a predisposition for product psychology.

Sound like you?

💠 Biased Search for Information

I love the word “yes”.

Yes, have an extra slice of cake. Yes, you do look good today. Yes, you are the best.

Experiment after experiment has shown that people tend to ask questions that are designed to yield a “yes”.

This is also known as congruence heuristic [2].

Google search histories are a good demonstration of the affirmative questions we all love to ask.

“Are cats better than dogs?”

We prime Google that cats are indeed better than dogs. Google hears we have a preference for cats. Google plays ball, listing sites detailing reasons why cats are better than dogs.

“Are dogs better than cats?”

The same question phrased differently produces entirely different results. Now dogs are better.

“Which is better; cats or dogs?”

Or;

“What is the best pet for [my situation]?”.

Would have been better questions. Obviously the answer is always dogs.

Affirmative approaches to reasoning are common in security.

Analysts enter an investigation digging for an answer they really want. They are worried about their manager pulling them up because they’ve not found anything juicy. The CISO needs their shiny dashboard showing number of threats detected.

Teams lose sight of the bigger picture.

Such an approach creates blindspots because people are looking for what they know, instead of considering other possibilities, the negative test cases.

💠 Biased Interpretation

I hate the word “No”.

No, you can’t have an extra slice of cake. No, you don’t look good today. No, you are not the best.

It’s hard to accept something that conflicts with what we believe. So-much-so our brains have developed a coping mechanism of sorts.

Imagine you’ve spent years of research into a particular area of study.

Late nights in the lab trying to uncover evidence to support you hypothesis. Weekends spent fretting over calculations. Months lost scouring obscure libraries.

All to prove the world is flat.

So much knowledge makes it easy to explain away a “no”.

A picture of earth from space.

That’s Hollywood magic at work.

Tides.

Well, “Isaac Newton is said to have considered the tides to be the least satisfactory part of his theory of gravitation”. “Duh!”. [3]

People tend to not change their beliefs on complex issues even after being provided with research because of the way they interpret the evidence.

Capital punishment is another polarising issue, but one that also draws on our moral compass.

In one experiment, a mix of participants who were either in support of, or against capital punishment were shown the same two studies on the subject.

After reading the detailed descriptions of the studies, participants still held their initial beliefs and supported their reasoning by providing “confirming” evidence from the studies and rejecting any contradictory evidence, or considering it inferior to the “confirming” evidence. [4]

We can all be guilty of trying to explain aways why things that don’t conform to what we believe.

“Well, that could never happen. Our firewall will block that type of thing”.

💠 Backfire effective

And we’re a stubborn bunch.

I’ve had some silly arguments in my time. Backing down in the heat of an argument with a partner can be hard at the time, but laughable an hour later.

Politics is a similarly laughable pursuit.

Many people hold an allegiance to the same political party their whole life.

Democrats questioned why people still voted Republican when Trump was on the card, despite of all the evidence questioning the reality of his claims to “Make America Great Again”.

Evidence might hold a strong position in the court of law. In the court of public opinions it’s not so strong.

In fact, not only is it not so strong, it can work against our reasoning! People’s preexisting beliefs are not only explained away when challenged by contradictory evidence, they have been shown to actually get stronger! [5]

All is not lost though.

Whilst one piece of disconfirming evidence does not result in a change in people’s views, it has been shown a constant flow of credible refutations can correct misinformation and misconceptions.

Think about how you disseminate your research.

💠 Biased Memory

Before forensic science became an integral part of the criminal justice system, eyewitness accounts were the basis of a prosecutor’s case.

The problem is our memory just isn’t particularly good. We remember some things and forget others. It tries to link memories together for easier recall, often falling victim to confirmation bias, amongst others in the process.

“Was the car speeding or not speeding, ma’am?”.

“Yes, officer. I heard the engine revving loudly.”

Confirmation bias influences eyewitnesses to make non-factual assumptions.

A revving engine might be linked to speeding in one mind. A mechanic might recognise this as a badly tuned engine, completely unrelated to speed.

Hundreds of wrongful convictions have been overturned in recent years as a result of cases bought solely on eyewitness accounts for this very reason.

The future is strongly influenced by memories of experiences in our past. It’s a fundamental to becoming the best.

Which is great if you’re trying to perfect a free kick into the top corner, but often falls short in many other areas. Like reading the resumes of job applicants.

Oxford University; advance to interview. Likes cats; nope.

In one scenario, individuals were asked to read a woman’s profile detailing her extroverted and introverted skills. Half were asked to assess her for either a job of a librarian or salesperson.

Those assessing her as a salesperson better recalled extroverted traits while the other group recalled more examples of introversion [6]. Their memories told them the best sales were extroverted and vice-versa.

Before long your team talks the same, thinks the same, and dresses the same. They thrive of validating their same outlook on the world.

To quote Eminem; “Would the Real Slim Shady please stand up?”.

Management consultants love to hark on about the benefits of seeing things from a different perspective. And they’re right.

Sometimes a breath of fresh air can give you a new take on security strategy.

💠 Security Gems

Try to prove yourself wrong.

Be careful with your research: Read entire articles, rather than forming conclusions based on the headlines and pictures. Search for credible evidence presented in articles from a diverse range of sources.
Prove assumptions wrong: Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of our time, is well aware of confirmation bias and one of his first actions before making an investment decision is to seek opinions that contradict his own.
Plan for failure: When we understand that our first assumptions will not be correct and plan for failure, we allow teams to find the correct answer instead of going with the simple and easy hypothesis.
Data helps, but be careful: Qualitative measures are much better to use in arguments due to their inherent factual nature. However, you should make it clear how data points should be interpreted.
Surround yourself with a diverse group of people: Try to build a diverse team of individuals. Seek out people that challenge your opinions, perhaps someone in a different team, or assign someone on your team to play “devil’s advocate” for major decisions.

[1] New Political Patterns
[2] Heuristics and Biases in Diagnostic Reasoning (Baron, 2000)
[3] Earth Not a Globe
[4] Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979)
[5] The Backfire Effect
[6] Testing hypotheses about other people: The use of historical knowledge (Snyder, M., & Cantor, N.,1979)

Security Gems: Using Behavioural Economics to Improve Cybersecurity

This post is a draft chapter from my new book. Pardon the typos.

Subscribe to read new chapters as I write them.

💠 The Isolation Effect

We remember things that stand out in the crowd. But different doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important.

This is a draft chapter from my new book; Security Gems: Using Behavioural Economics to Improve Cybersecurity (working title).

Subscribe to read new chapters as I write them.

💠 Standing out is not such a bad thing

To “stand out like a sore thumb” implies that something is noticed because it is very different from the things around it.

I’m often guilty of being the sore thumb. Dressed in shorts mid-winter, whilst those around are being warmed by five layers of clothing.

One of the factors behinds EasyJet’s success, arguably the pioneer of the low-cost flight, was to stick out like a sore thumb. The companies early advertising consisted of little more than the airline’s telephone booking number painted in bright orange on the side of its aircraft.

“Have you heard of that orange airline?”, people would ask.

Have you ever highlighted information in a book? Then you too have used this effect to your advantage.

Psychologists have studied why our attention is usually captured by salient, novel, surprising, or distinctive stimuli. Probably using highlighter during their research.

Product designers understand our fascination with things that stand out and will spend hours perfecting the size, colour and shape of something to grab your attention, directing you on the path they want you to take.

Good products guide users to the important features and functions by making them stand out.

The big red flashing bell indicating a security alert should be distinctive, drawing attention and making it very clear that it needs to be looked at.

💠 Information overload can make standing out difficult

Being able to draw attention to something in the age of information overload is vital.

An email received from a friend or family member sticks out amid a sea of unfamiliar names.

A letter where the address is handwritten stands out, allowing me to easily filter boring correspondence from correspondence I will enjoy reading.

“YOU’VE WON A PRIZE”

“YOUR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN COMPROMISED”

These email subject lines have a similar effect.

Not only is someone shouting at you, they’re also warning you of a potentially serious event that arouses a sense of urgency.

It’s not your everyday (or hourly); “Sally has liked your photos taken in 2003 on Facebook” email. It’s serious.

In phishing school [2], you’ll find classes titled: How to grab a victims attention.

Successfully grabbing the attention of someone browsing their inbox is the first part of a successful campaign. You should expect the attackers to have aced that class.

💠 Not standing out can be disastrous

Digging deeper into the email inbox, or not as the case may be, it’s clear our brains weren’t designed to deal with mountains of spam.

So called alert fatigue highlights this weakness. People stop noticing alerts, emails, texts, and [INSERT LATEST COOL MESSAGING SERVICE HERE] because there are simply too many.

People become desensitised to similar things being shown to them every day.

I once sat with a client who somewhat proudly proclaimed the “Alerts” folder in his inbox stood at 10,000 unread emails. That was nothing he assured me, his colleagues folder clocked closer to six digits!

You don’t want to foster this culture.

When my fire alarm sounds, my heart rate accelerates as adrenaline is pumped into my blood stream. The noise that stands out. It’s important. It immediately draws all my attention. Yes, even from an oh so cute cat video.

Security alerting needs to have the same effect. To point you to real fires. To prioritise what is most important. Missing critical alerts, emails, texts, or warnings of actual fires does not typically end well.

💠 The art of deception

The ability to recognise and remember things that stand out has long proved advantageous to our species.

As hunter gatherers being able to determine something that stood out was vital in finding food and avoiding becoming food.

Evolution has long realised standing out is a disadvantage.

Chameleons.

The Artic Hare is another great example of the evolutionary importance of blending in.

In the winter their bright white coats hide them from predators amongst a backdrop of snow. In spring, the hare’s colours change to blue-gray in approximation of local rocks and vegetation.

Humans are no different.

Go to a club on a Saturday night and watch the herds of men and women dressed head to toe in clubbing uniforms.

During my college years flannel shirts were the “in-thing”. One night I bumped into 3 other guys, who all had a great taste in fashion I will add, all wearing the same shirt.

Militaries around the world understand the importance of camouflage. Soldiers don’t want to stand out. It’s a matter of life and death on the battlefield.

Neither do criminals.

Actors know downloading terabytes of data in a short period of time will stand out. Instead they slowly exfiltrate data over months patterns don’t stand out.

Malware is designed to act like a user, disguising itself as a normal process on an endpoint.

Yet so much of cyber security is focused on identifying the anomalies.

Sure, anomalies are important. It’s why so many vendors consistently demo that there product proudly detected “3 failed logons, from 3 different locations, in 3 seconds, for 1 account”.

However, the things that stick out, in a world where the bad guys are doing everything they can to stay anonymous, are only part of the story.

💠 Breaking camouflage

In the early days of map making it took a lot of time to produce a map.

Companies had to hire someone to go out and walk every street.

Needless to say, plagiarism plagued the pre-computerised map making industry.

In the 1930’s, General Drafting, a map making company, came up with an ingenious idea. In their map of New York State they included a copyright trap; a fictitious place, Agloe [3].

Fast forward a few years and the company spotted Agloe detailed on a map produced by one of their fiercest competitors, Rand McNally.

Such was the problem, Agloe continued to appear on a number of maps up until the 1990s. I can imagine the disappointed faces of day-trippers, and the ensuing arguments about wrong turns.

These traps have come to be affectionately known as Mountweazels [4]: a bogus entry deliberately inserted in a reference work. Prizes for anyone who spots the one in this book.

Like Mountweazels, honeypots are similar traps used in computer networks.

A honeypot mimics a system that may be attractive to an attacker, but would only ever be accessed by someone snooping around.

Like a motion activated light illuminates intruders attracted by the shiny objects in your house, honeypots illuminates attackers attracted by the shiny potential they offer.

💠 Security Gems

If you want people to remember something, make it stand out.

Make the right path clear: If you want a user to take action in a certain way, guide them by making the route stand out.
Beware of normal: it’s easy to remember things that stand out, but distinctiveness is not the only attribute you should be worried about.
Don’t focus on anomalies: entice those operating covertly into the open. Break their camouflage.
Don’t make yourself obvious: Remember, attackers are drawn to things that stand out.
Communicate effectively: Make important communications and events distinctive in a way that makes sense. Remove the bullshit.
Think about methods of communication: Sending important alert to mobile phone might make them stand out over email alone.

[1] Salience, Attention, and Attribution: Top of the Head Phenomena (Taylor & Fiske, 1978)
[2] Completely fictitious.
[3] Agloe, New York (Wikipedia)
[4] Fictitious entry (Wikipedia)

Security Gems: Using Behavioural Economics to Improve Cybersecurity

This post is a draft chapter from my new book. Pardon the typos.

Subscribe to read new chapters as I write them.