Just look at the amount of new information produced by your smart watch or fitness app. From the number of steps taken, the amount of calories burned and your heart rate to your oxygen saturation level, so much new data is generated. Today there is a huge amount of data available on various aspects of our lives not only in healthcare sector but also in areas like edtech and financial services. But has the availability of all this information generated any new behavior in us? For example, has the data on your smartwatch prompted you to take a few more steps every day?
The awareness-interest-desire-action (AIDA) model is one of the most commonly used strategic frameworks to generate new behaviors. The core belief of this model is that action, a new behavior, is a line extension of a higher level of awareness. Therefore, to solve any behavioral problem in society, whether it is violence against women or drunken driving, there is always only one solution: creating more awareness about the problem. But, does a man commit violence against women because of lack of awareness that it is a serious crime? It is the feeling of indulging in the most misogynistic practices people have in spite of a high level of awareness. So creating more awareness does not automatically lead to appropriate behavior.
Most of the information that comes our way has no action orientation. For example, knowing someone’s heart rate, no one is going to initiate a new behavior. But in a reading that says one has taken only 5,000 steps by 6 pm, there is an implicit call to take another 3,000 steps during the rest of the day to reach their daily target. Information that has an inherent action orientation is knowledge. Today, advanced technology has produced a lot of information, but not enough knowledge. TS Eliot, “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Very relevant today.
Even if information is generated with the underlying action orientation, it simply will not behave appropriately. It can create the best intention to act. But it is not a guarantee of intended action.
This information-behavior gap is one of the most important strategic challenges in business and policy making. How do we bridge this gap? The most common strategy used to motivate new behavior is to base the persuasion strategy on some recent trends in society. Many of these trends are not even a decade old. But some professionals prefer to build their persuasion strategies based on the cultural insights of society. These cultural insights are often a few thousand years old. There are also some persuasion strategies that can be built on human evolutionary traits that are hundreds of millennia old. These traits are working hard in the human brain. So what triggers those symptoms increases the chances of generating the appropriate behavior.
German physicist and polymath Hermann von Helmholtz was one of the first to realize the potential of these evolutionary constructions of the human brain. Back in 1867, he coined the term ‘unconscious guessing’ to describe this involuntary, pre-rational and reflex-like mechanism that is part of the brain’s formation of visual impressions. While optical illusions are the most obvious examples of unconscious inference, people’s perceptions of each other and their own behaviors are similarly influenced by many other unconscious mechanisms of the brain. Over the years, neuroscientists have discovered many other such unconscious mechanisms in the brain.
For example, working to address the problem of accidents caused by encroachment of rail tracks in Mumbai, my team found that trespassers do not need much awareness that being hit by a train can be fatal. And trespassing is a dangerous activity. From research, we realized why this information is not turning into proper safe behavior when crossing a railway track. This is due to the deficiency of the human brain. This organ is not very good at measuring the speed of large objects. But any awareness messages that trains are faster than they appear to be, such as warnings on automobile rear-view mirrors that the objects seen in them are closer than they appear, become pretty much useless. This is because these awareness messages have no effect on how our brain processes such visual stimuli, and therefore will not help produce the desired behavior.
Instead, following in Helmholtz’s footsteps, my team looked for unconscious brain mechanisms that might help a trespasser better judge the speed of an oncoming train. It was found that the human brain can judge motion only when it has a reference. With this knowledge of the evolutionary construction of the brain, the design team created a reference on the tracks for people to judge the speed of a train. At key trespass points identified in Mumbai, a group of track sleepers were painted yellow in the middle. The speed at which these yellow droplets disappeared under the oncoming train served as a reference point for those crossing the railway track. This intervention was a major breakthrough in reducing trespass accidents.
With advances in technology, our ability to monitor every aspect of human life and generate loads of data about every human activity will only increase. But unless this huge pool of information proves useful in generating appropriate behaviour, all this effort spent on collection and analysis of such information would be a colossal waste of time and resources. Clearly, much more effort should be made to bridge the information-behavior gap.
Biju Dominic is Chief Promoter, Fractal Analytics and President of FinalMile Consulting.
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