Dear reader,
You haven't heard from us in a while. Behavioural Design Fest was to blame. We had an amazing event on September 20th. There are moments in your life where everything you have been working for seems to be falling in place. Fest was such a moment. Thrilling keynotes, 170 excited people in the audience. Behavioural Design is alive and kicking. I'll be talking a lot about the things we've learned in the upcoming weeks, as we've learned some radical new ideas.
This week I want to talk about priming, how you can spot cunning attempts to prime your thoughts and feelings, and how you can use priming to become healthier, happier and more successful.
Priming is about first impressions
Imagine you walk into a restaurant, and the staff ignores you for more than 5 minutes. Woud this affect your perception of this restaurant? Of course, it does. Your first impression lays the blueprint for the rest of your experience. This psychological phenomenon is called priming. Thinking about priming is a lot of fun because we’re being primed all the time without realizing it. Here are some fascinating examples:
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Priming health
People who think they are living a healthy lifestyle, actually become fitter. Room staff in a hotel were told that their job is very similar to fitness. The priming of this is insight resulted in a decrease in overweight and lower blood pressure. Even more bizarre: People who think they are less fit than their friends, die sooner, regardless of whether they actually are less fit.
Priming happiness
Lot’s of “positive thinking”-apps use priming as their key feature. A famous example is the “5-minute journal”. Every morning after waking up, the journal forces you to come up with answers to three questions: 1) What are three things you’re grateful for today? 2) What would make today great? 3) Daily Affirmation: I am someone who [fill in positive thought about yourself]. The goal of this simple act is genius: It forces you to direct your attention to positive thoughts. People who do this every day, turn out to be substantially happier than people who don’t. The 5-minute journal is all about building a small daily habit to direct your attention to the positive things.
Priming success
The social context in which we find ourselves always primes us into thinking and believing certain things. Corporate offices prime us to accept the rules of hierarchy. Posters on a sales floor, prime us on competitiveness - think: posters of runners crossing a finish line, throwing their hands in the air. Open offices prime us to collaborate and share ideas. Expensive suits prime us to respect the higher rank in the social hierarchy. And I must admit I’m fascinated with how the big consultancy firms prime their customers through the use of complicated Powerpoint-slides with abstract schemes, to the extent that they make them believe that the 30-year old kid who’s running the project knows what he’s talking about. Impressive priming.
Priming lust for life
A little while ago, one of our SUE-people came up with an idea. I thought it was brilliant. The idea is a happiness-clock. the clock wakes you up every morning with a short story of something horrible that happened somewhere in the world. A story about a person just like you, who suffered from hunger, corruption, injustice, torture, poisoning,..
Every shitty news-update ends with the question: Do you realize how fucking lucky you are to be alive today? Get up and be grateful. I don’t know about you, but I would embrace every day like it’s the last one.
Priming is all about designing attention and first impressions. Once primed, our automatic brain tries to look for confirmation.
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Book a 60 minutes with SUE
Do you consider hiring SUE? Book 60 minutes with SUE. Get to know the people behind SUE / Behavioural Design Academy and get a Behavioural Design perspective on your challenge. Who knows where it could lead to...
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Still have some training budget to spend?
The 2020-editions of the Behavioural Design Academy
foundation course are now online.
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That's all for this week, we hope to catch you next week!
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