Do we sound like a broken record?  People are different and yet we treat them all the same.

I’m desperate to understand why this is as it’s been this way a long time and maybe that’s both the issue and the reason.   A long time means a lot of well-worn habits and resistance to change is fierce.  And a “long-time” means a lot of money has been raised and at least some charities have gone from startup to big.  Success is of course, relative.

But, I’m convinced the introduction of behavioral science and all the 47 different labels (e.g., behavioral economics, decision science) thereof have made matters worse, not better.  How so?  Most of the academics and damn near every practitioner reduce behavioral science to ‘nudges’ and crank out guides and workshops and blog posts and powerpoint slides and copy-cat books that repeat the original sin, over and over:  that these biases are universal, applying equally to everyone.

• Want people to pick a certain gift amount, sprinkle some social proof messaging on there and be sure to cite the hotel towel example as your reason to believe.
• Want people to do “X”, make it the default option requiring opt-out, not opt-in and rattle off the organ donation study as your reason to believe.
• Want people to give a higher amount?  Suggest anchoring and then talk about the Gandhi age at his death experiment.

The problem with all this?  These biases work differently in different contexts and differently with different people.  People are messy and complicated.  Reducing it down to the idea of a few universal ‘biases’ and presenting them as if they cause versus merely describe behavior may work well to fill a conference session but it’s doing a huge disservice to people and science.

Take the Holy Grail of biases, prospect theory.  This argues people are more motivated to prevent loss than have an equal gain even if the expected outcome is identical.  There are many, well-worn examples trotted out as illustration, many premised on the idea that we should frame the donation as preventing death (avoid loss) versus saving lives (create gain) when the outcome is identical.  We weigh the prospect of loss more heavily than its  equal gain.

Voila, let’s frame everything as a loss and raise a boatload more money.  If only…

Here are test results showing that framing as a loss works but only for some people.  Other people are more motivated by framing as a gain.

I’ve cheated a little bit here in that Personality A and B are an amalgam of Big Five traits with people higher in Neuroticism and lower in Extroversion being more motivated by loss aversion while folks with certain Agreeable and Conscientious traits prefer gain framing.

Bottom line, different people respond differently.  It’s worth noting that if you didn’t break out results by Personality you’d think that neither gain nor loss did better than the other.

People only give if it makes them feel good about themselves.  The best way to do this is match the messaging to who they are on the inside.  It feels like you know them.

It’s not magic, it’s not rocket science.  It’s social science and it does require working differently, not more and not harder and not more expensively, just differently.

Kevin

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