Andy is one of the Behavioural Insights Team’s excellent recent hires. He comes from Grimsby where he had a dedicated group of friends, all of whom smoked. Andy didn’t really think of himself as a smoker at the time, but when others lit up, he did too. He was your archetypal ‘social smoker’. When he moved up to Bristol to go to university, a similar pattern emerged. Many of his new student friends were smokers, and when they would light up on a night out, Andy would smoke too. The pattern continued for the next couple of years – Andy would rarely smoke when others around him weren’t also having a cigarette. Then, in his final year, the pattern began to change. He got involved in student politics and during the 2010 General Election campaign Andy spent much of his time in the headquarters of one of the local political parties. Almost everyone else on the campaign was a smoker and they regularly took cigarette breaks throughout the day to help de-stress from the hustle and bustle associated with it. When they did, Andy would join them. But now he’d occasionally initiate the breaks too. He started to realize that the social smoking he’d engaged in in Grimsby and then in his student days at Bristol, generally in the evenings, was turning into more regular daytime affairs. He had, in short, become a fully fledged nicotine addict. It felt as though he had slipped into it by stealth. ‘You wake up one morning, reach for a cigarette and suddenly you realize you’re not a social smoker any more,’ Andy later reflected. ‘Suddenly you’re an actual smoker.’
Then one day, everything changed. Andy met Nicola and they fell in love. The trouble was that Nicola wasn’t a smoker. In fact, she hated smoking. She hated the way it turned your teeth yellow and made your clothes stink, and she was pretty sure that she didn’t want to be settling down with anyone who was prepared to slowly kill themselves by continuing to smoke. So she made it abundantly clear to Andy that if he wanted to take her to be his lawfully wedded wife, he’d need to quit. This would have been a fairly daunting prospect for most people. Nicotine, after all, is a highly addictive substance. But Andy was armed with knowledge from behavioural science research that gave him good reason to be confident. So he took up Nicola’s stringent condition for marriage and agreed to quit smoking.
The reason for Andy’s confidence was his understanding of the social component of goal achievement. He recognized the influence of others upon him, both in causing him to smoke in the first place, and in potentially helping him to quit. So Andy accepted his bride-to-be’s quit-smoking condition not just because he was in love (though that of course played a big part), but because he knew that he could rely upon Nicola to help him achieve his goal. New research strongly backed up Andy’s hypothesis. When one spouse stops smoking, the other spouse is 67 per cent less likely to smoke.1 However, the story doesn’t end there. Another important factor at play here was the fact that he and Nicola planned to move out of Bristol, away from the social networks that he was embedded within and that would otherwise have had a big effect upon his ability to quit. Andy was also aware of new findings showing the strong influence of the social networks you are embedded within. So much so that if your friend’s friend’s friend smokes, you are more likely to smoke too.2 So Andy knew that extracting himself from his social networks in Bristol and Grimsby would make it far easier to quit, just as these very same networks had been partly responsible for him taking up tobacco in the first place. Two years on, and it looks like Andy was right to be confident. He hasn’t had a cigarette since moving out of Bristol. The following year, he and Nicola got married and they are very happy with their new, smokeless life together.
This chapter, then, is about how we can draw on the powerful influence of those around us to help us to achieve our goals. Sharing a goal is a great way of helping to keep motivated and on track, but in our personal lives it has become an under-used tactic because we tend to think of goals as individual betterment projects. Similarly, in our work lives, and certainly in government policy, we have historically ignored the social component of the projects or programmes we are putting in place, because we have adopted economic assumptions about the way that individuals maximize their own self-interest, without thinking about how important our social interactions are. As Richard Thaler – who as well as being a long-term advisor to the Behavioural Insights Team is also president of the American Economics Association – has put it: ‘The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron.’3 But before you continue reading, we want you to bear in mind one of the positive side effects of the power of social networks, which explains why we have decided to call this chapter ‘Share’. If you ask a friend, family member or colleague to help you to do something, it will trigger within you (and them) a strong urge to give something back. To reciprocate. This urge is so strong that Darwin considered it the foundation stone of morality.4 It’s the same urge you feel to give something back when someone gives you a present, pays you a compliment or invites you round to theirs for dinner. So we hope that, alongside you seeking out the support of others to help you achieve your goals, you also take the opportunity to help others with theirs.
We are social animals.5 We are influenced by what we think other people are doing, and what they think about us. Often unconsciously, and usually to a far greater extent than we realize. The three golden rules we encourage you to put in place to help use this social component to best effect are:
Ask for help. You are more likely to achieve your goal if you get someone to help you. You may be surprised at how willing others will be to support you.
Tap into your social networks. The networks we are embedded within have a profound effect on our behaviour. There are lots of ways you can draw on them to help you achieve your goals.
Use group power. Band together with a large group of people trying to achieve the same goal, and you’re likely to achieve more, faster, than you can by yourself.
Rule 1: Ask for help
Imagine you are in the following situation. You’re in New York and you need to make a phone call, but your mobile phone is out of battery. It’s pretty urgent, so you decide to approach strangers in the street to ask them if you can borrow their phone to make a call. What proportion of people do you think would say yes? Have a think before you consider a second situation. You’re a student and you need to get to the gym, which you happen to know is where all students go for their compulsory physical education courses. So you stop another student in the street and ask them where the gym is. They point you in the right direction, but instead of stopping at that, you ask: ‘Will you walk me there?’ What proportion of people do you think might agree to this request? Again, pause for a moment and think about what you think the answer might be.
These were the scenarios devised by two researchers who wanted to know whether people were any good at estimating the likelihood that total strangers would comply with requests for help.6 In the mobile phone study, participants predicted that 30 per cent of people would let them borrow their phone; and in the gym study, participants predicted that a paltry 14 per cent would agree to escort them to the gym. In both cases, however, close to half the people asked said yes (48 and 43 per cent of requests respectively).7 Most people are really surprised when they hear how many people say yes when asked to do something that apparently comes with no benefits to the person saying yes. But these aren’t just one-off findings. Vanessa Bohns, a psychologist from Cornell University, and colleagues have repeated these kinds of exercises with requests made of more than 14,000 strangers.8 And they have found a similar pattern each time. We are overly pessimistic about our fellow humans beings’ willingness to help us. In reality, people are often willing to help to a much greater extent than we imagine – around half the time they are asked.9 The result of this is that most of us miss out on a big opportunity to benefit from one of the best sources of support for our goals that there is: the help of other people. Once we realize that close to 50 per cent of New Yorkers are willing to help someone whose mobile phone has run out of battery, imagine how many of those much closer to us are likely to be willing to help?
So the first, very simple, lesson is to ask others to help you achieve your goal. That’s why at the Behavioural Insights Team, we often think about different ways of encouraging people to ask the question in the first place. One area in which we have taken this furthest has been in relation to education. Working with the Harvard academic Todd Rogers and Bristol University Professor Simon Burgess, the Behavioural Insights Team’s Raj Chande devised a set of deceptively simple interventions that encouraged parents to help their children more directly with their education. Most parents want to help, but they often don’t know where to start. They sometimes even feel a bit nervous that they won’t be able to help – kids these days are learning all kinds of things that weren’t part of their parents’ syllabus. In this context, Raj often asks people to imagine a typical conversation with a parent and their son or daughter who has just come back from school. ‘What homework do you have this weekend?’ the parent asks, while awaiting the all-too-familiar reply: ‘Not much, couple of things, the usual.’ So the research team wanted to give parents just a little bit more information, affording them the ability to get more involved in their kids’ education. Here’s how it works. Around once a week parents would receive a text message from the school with different kinds of prompts in them. Some of these were advance notice of upcoming tests and others were updates on what their child had learnt in their science, maths and English lessons – with little prompts to encourage specific conversations about these topics. There’s an example of one of these texts below. Take a look at it and imagine how it would change the conversation between a parent and their child.
By this message being more specific, time-related and focused on something that a parent can actually do (‘Please remind him to study’), most people guess that it would completely alter the parent–child dialogue. In this situation, for example, a parent might say: ‘So you have a maths test on Friday. When are you going to revise? Can I help?’ Though we may not know exactly what conversations do end up taking place, what we do know is the impact these kinds of interventions have on pupils’ educational outcomes. The trial showed that these simple text messages improve educational outcomes by the equivalent of a month of learning – pretty remarkable for something that costs next to nothing to put into practice.10 As well as being surprisingly effective, the texts are also popular. When asked if they would like to continue with the programme, the answer was invariably not just ‘Yes’, but ‘Can you do it more frequently?’ Even the pupils wanted more texts to be sent to their parents! And this has been borne out in follow-up studies in Further Education Colleges, in which the text messages are sent out on a weekly basis to help encourage pupils not to bunk off lessons and to achieve in their exams. In these settings we are finding even more powerful results. Weekly text messages sent to people whom the pupils nominate as their dedicated ‘study supporter’ are even helping to make sure that pupils show up at lessons – up to 11 per cent more often than those who don’t get the texts.
These are the kind of findings that really excite the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), an amazing organization that was set up with a £125 million founding grant from the Department for Education in 2011 to find out ‘what works’ in the classroom. Many of these studies, like the text message intervention, show the power of encouraging people to help each other. For example, one of the most effective changes that a head teacher can make is to get pupils to tutor each other.11 ‘Peer tutoring’, which usually involves using pupils as one-to-one teachers, adds five additional months of educational progress to a pupil’s education. Better still, it benefits both tutors and tutees, seeming to have the greatest impact on the lowest-attaining pupils.12 It’s very rare to find interventions like this – ones that don’t cost a lot of money, that dramatically improve performance and that seem disproportionately to benefit those who need most help. So when we do find them, we should take them very seriously. And in this case, it’s based on the very simple premise: people helping people to achieve their goals works.
We find similar results in all kinds of different areas. Smoking, alcohol-cessation and weight-loss programmes that provide peer support work better than those that do not.13 If you’re in any way sporty, you might have noticed that you are able to exercise faster or harder when you’re working out with another person. These are both the result of the same phenomenon. We find it easier to stoke our motivation alongside other people, who have the ability to push us harder than we might do if we were working in isolation, and studies are showing just how effective this kind of practice can be. One group of researchers sought to test the effect of working with other people by asking a group of gym-goers to exercise on an exercise bike at 65 per cent of their heart rate on six separate days. The women were split into different groups. Some of them were told to exercise alone. Others were given a partner to exercise alongside. The mischievous twist was that the partner wasn’t even real. It was in fact a virtual gym buddy, Skyping in for the session and, much as in the movie Speed, the gym buddy was actually on a filmed loop, so that they would always end up being able to outperform their real-life gym buddy. Those exercising with a buddy exercised for far longer than those exercising alone. It doubled the amount of time that participants exercised for.14 So it seems that we can be more effective when we get other people to help us, especially if it helps to engender a sense of competition amongst friendly rivals.
The first lesson, then, in sharing your goal is the simplest and the easiest to put into practice: find someone who can help you achieve your goal. When you do find that person (or people), think about how you make your ask. Just like a parent receiving a text message from a school, your goal supporter will benefit from knowing how they can help you to achieve your goal. So focus your request on the specific actions you want someone to help with, together with when you want the support.15
Rule 2: Tap into your social network
For many of us, our first (and last) foray into construction and house building started with sets of coloured bricks. Lego is a company with a long heritage in toy making. It was founded back in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter who designed a set of wooden toys that proved to be moderately successful in his native Denmark.16 In the 1940s Christiansen spent two years of profits on something that no other toy manufacture had: a plastic injection-moulding machine. Over the next fifty years Lego sets proved to be a phenomenal success, and the company started making serious money. In the fifteen years from 1978, the company doubled in size every five years and by 1993 was generating some $1.2 billion in revenues. But not much more than a decade later, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. In 2004 Lego posted its third annual loss in five years, and was reliant on loans from its controlling family members. How did such a successful business, with such a clear and popular product line, fall from grace? Many business school case studies of companies that have dramatically gone from world-beaters to basket cases focus on an inability to innovate in a changing world. Not so Lego. The generally accepted view is that, far from not innovating enough, the company had gone too far in the other direction: it had ‘lost control of its innovation efforts’. It diversified too greatly – buying an ‘intelligent toy’ maker in California, opening an internet business in New York and a design studio in Milan. Some of the games devised in these projects had almost no construction element in them at all.17
The remarkable thing about Lego is not its sudden fall. It was the way that, over the next ten years, it managed to turn things around. By 2013, it had become the biggest toy manufacturer in the world, bigger than its arch-rivals Mattel and Hasbro, with a total company value approaching $15 billion. A new set of business school case studies are now being written to explain the return to form in the decade or so since its new CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp has been running the company. These will focus on a variety of factors. There was a lot of financial work to be done – getting debt and cash flow under control, and selling parts of the Lego empire that were deemed not to be essential to the core business. But one of the principal reasons given for the dramatic turnaround has been Lego’s ability to harness the power of its legion of fans. The company managed to tap into the social networks that had built up around the brand, which had previously not been recognized as the huge potential asset that it was. And there was no better illustration of this than the launch of ‘Lego Ideas’, starting in Japan in 2008 and then taken global in 2011. The idea was both simple and ground-breaking. Rather than getting Lego employees to think up new product lines, why not get the customers who would ultimately want to buy them to make and suggest them? Better still, why not get these same people, self-selecting as ardent Lego fans, to help promote the products even before they go on sale? And that’s exactly what Lego did.
Anyone can submit a Lego idea. All you need to do is create a model, take some photos of it, make a project plan and then upload it onto the Lego website.18 The catch is that you then need to gather the support of 10,000 people over a two-year period. But this is at the heart of what remains a genius idea. Lego has managed to create a facility that helps it to determine whether or not an idea is likely to fly. In the past, they would have had to do a huge amount of product development, and then take a punt on a particular product without knowing for sure how popular it might be. But now they have a mechanism that tells them whether a product is likely to be successful before their employees even start getting involved. And sometimes this happens so quickly that Lego are able to spot instant bestsellers. When a Minecraft fan posted an idea for a set based on their favourite online game, they managed to get the 10,000 votes in two days. Six months later, Lego Minecraft Micro was in the shops and became an international bestseller.19 Other examples include birds (blue jays, robins and hummingbirds), a Doctor Who set and a maze made entirely out of Lego bricks. But one of the other things that makes Lego Ideas so appealing to its legion of followers is that the company intuitively seems to understand the reciprocal nature of the relationship. They don’t just take the ideas and then commercialize them. They allow the person who came up with the idea to have input into the final sets alongside professional designers. The individual is also featured in the final product, and even receives a royalty on the sales.
Lego is by no means the only company that is tapping into the power of social networks to drive innovation and customer service. From Apple support communities where customers help solve each other’s issues to Lay’s crisps 2013 ‘Do us a Flavour’ campaign, which received more than 14 million flavour ideas submitted by the public,20 companies around the world are using social networks to power innovation and efficiencies. And it’s not only companies and organizations that can use these networks. It is hard to exaggerate the power that the social networks we are embedded within have upon our daily lives. Behavioural research is starting to show this in new and stark ways. At the start of this chapter, we saw, in the example of Andy and his attempts to quit smoking, how profound the effect of social networks can be. But similar effects are now being unearthed in relation to many of the most pressing issues facing people in developed countries. Take obesity, for example. We might think about the process of becoming obese as being an intensely personal one. After all, it’s up to you how much you eat and how much you exercise. But at the same time, anyone who’s travelled to other countries knows that obesity rates differ widely. And one of the reasons for this is the widespread effect that the social networks we are embedded within have upon us. One of the most sophisticated analyses of this phenomenon has been conducted by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who looked at obesity in over 12,000 people who underwent repeated weight measurement between 1971 and 2003. These facts alone make the study pretty amazing – the breadth and depth of the data available enabled them to look at social networking effects on an unprecedented scale. Their findings were very similar to those that Andy encountered in relation to smoking. Far from being a purely personal phenomenon, obesity in fact travels through social networks. They found that the risk of obesity in people who were directly connected to someone who was obese was about 45 per cent higher than it would have been in a randomly selected network. In other words, if your friends or colleagues or family are obese, you are more likely to be obese too. Just as in smoking research, they discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend is obese, you are slightly more likely to be obese yourself. Even at three degrees of separation, you are still influenced by those within your social network.
When we recognize the power of social networks, it prompts us to rethink how and why we use them. So, when thinking about yourself and your goals, you should not only consider the ways in which you can tap into those social networks that are likely to enable you to achieve your goals, but also recognize those that are likely to undermine your efforts. There are lots of simple techniques that will give you an instant and vivid demonstration of how you can successfully tap into your own social network. One of the nicest examples we have tried ourselves was developed by sociologist Wayne Baker and his wife Cheryl, and popularized by behavioural scientist Adam Grant.21 It’s called the Reciprocity Ring, and is built around a simple premise. We are often, at work and play, embedded within very strong social networks with very wide reach. We just don’t realize or provide the structures through which the individuals within these networks can make full use of them. A Reciprocity Ring brings people physically together in a circle, and encourages anyone who wants to (but only if they want to) to say what they need support with. The idea is that the individuals then think of how people they know (or people who know people they know) might be able to help that person achieve their goal. This isn’t the direct help that we saw in the previous section. It’s about leveraging your social networks to gain access to support that wouldn’t have otherwise been available.
When Grant used a Reciprocity Ring with a group of his students, he found that they came up with lots of surprising offers of support, despite their initial scepticism. For example, one of his students was a theme park enthusiast who explained that his dream was one day to run an amusement park chain named Six Flags. It turned out that another classmate had a connection with the former CEO and managed to connect them to each other. When the Behavioural Insights Team got everyone to gather in a circle and encouraged people to make requests for support through their social networks, it resulted in tens of offers of help from colleagues in all kinds of different areas. One colleague announced – much to everyone’s surprise – that they wanted to learn how to fly. Did anyone have any connections? Well, it turned out that lots of people knew others who might be able to help: from a government official who originally trained with the Royal Air Force, to a commercial pilot who’d recently earned their stripes. Just like the study on obesity, you will be surprised by how far and wide your social network reaches, and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it to help you achieve your goal.
There are lots of other ways in which you can tap into your own and other people’s social networks. In fact, a growing range of the Behavioural Insights Team’s results focus on what we call ‘network nudges’, in which we don’t just focus on how we can encourage someone to change their behaviour, but encourage someone to encourage someone else to change their behaviour. This is exactly what the Behavioural Insights Team’s head of research, Michael Sanders, tested when he was devising new ways of encouraging investment bankers to donate a day of their (ample) salary to good causes. In the original studies, Michael had found that hard-nosed investment bankers were twice as likely to donate when they had been given a pot of sweets on the way into work by the fundraisers – the value of which was one thousand times lower than what they ultimately gave. That’s reciprocity in action. But over time, Michael found that the effect wore off. Giving sweets to the same investment banker who gave last year still results in higher donation rates, but not as high as the year before. So the following year, rather than asking those investment bankers to give again, he asked them instead to reach out to colleagues and encourage them to donate. It was one of the most effective interventions we had ever come across to get people to support charitable causes, resulting in a deluge of donations. Donation rates jumped fourfold when Michael got investment bankers, famed for their individual pursuit of self-interest, to tap into their social networks at work.
The emergence of online social networks in the twenty-first century – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. – has transformed our everyday ability to make use of those we’re connected with in ways that we wouldn’t have previously imagined possible. The challenge is no longer whether it’s possible to tap into our social networks. It’s how to structure these activities so that they can be channelled positively, to help us achieve our goals.
Rule 3: Use group power
In the weeks running up to February, you can feel the excitement start to build in the Behavioural Insights Team’s offices around the world. In the London office, our finance manager Oliver normally starts to prepare the chin-up bar in the storeroom, for what will be a month of activity during the cold British winter. The Behavioural Insights Team’s chief executive David Halpern – once famous for his ability to do one-arm chin-ups – starts warming up his arm. The already well-built Hugo, who leads some of our biggest health programmes, starts readying himself for an extra-hard month of exercise. Ariella, not renowned for her exercise regime, dusts off her running shoes. In Sydney, Guglielmo, Ed and Ravi start planning activities for the Australian sunshine – touch rugby, rounders and group workouts. In Singapore, preparations are being laid for some intense Zumba classes, drawing in as many participants as possible. And the newly established New York office is just beginning to realize that everyone else really means business. For during February, the Behavioural Insights Team’s offices of the world compete against each other for the increasingly prestigious title of FitFeb champions.
It started a few years back, just after Rory had moved to Sydney, when the team he helped set up inside the New South Wales government threw down the gauntlet by challenging the London office to a series of fitness-related feats. Now, every February, each of the teams competes against one another to accumulate ‘FitFeb’ points – which can only be obtained by undertaking a series of fitness and healthy-eating challenges. You get points for various healthy behaviours, such as a point for every twenty minutes of exercise, and for every day you go without consuming alcohol. You also get bonus points for undertaking weekly challenges, like reconstructing an archetypally unhealthy meal into something nutritious. For example, one intrepid member of the Singaporean team managed to create a healthy alternative to fried egg and chips, using yoghurt, tinned peaches and apples. I’m sure you’ll agree that the results look pretty appetizing.
It would be easy for a competition of this kind to backfire through being set up in the wrong way: by pitting individual against individual. In behavioural terms, the results would be fairly predictable: it would probably result in those who already do a lot of exercise really going for it, while the majority of their more leisurely colleagues put their feet up. But setting up the scoring system in a way that enables participants to gain points as individuals, but only to win as a team, encourages an entirely different set of behaviours. Suddenly, there is an incentive to encourage lagging colleagues to get involved, this being accentuated by each individual receiving more points for exercising with colleagues (double points for doing that) or organizing an office workout (just five minutes of this a day earns everyone in the office a point). It’s amazing to see how socially difficult it is not to join an office workout in which everyone else is taking part. Of course, the points system is not without its flaws. In 2016 the London office deliberately timed a team ski trip to coincide with FitFeb, resulting in hundreds of extra points for five-hour exercise sessions. But more often than not the effects are most pronounced for those who would not have otherwise done a lot of exercise, as they are actively encouraged by their colleagues to get involved.
It is, perhaps, not that surprising to learn that human beings often work better together towards a goal as a group than when they work individually. After all, if you spend a moment thinking about humanity’s greatest achievements, they almost invariably required large groups of people to collaborate. The famous story of John F. Kennedy asking a broom-carrying janitor at the NASA space centre in 1962 what he was doing illustrates the principle nicely. ‘Well, Mr President,’ he is reported to have said, ‘I’m helping put a man on the moon.’ We wouldn’t be able to achieve such great feats without working together as a team. But too often we think about goals as individual activities, pursued in isolation from other people, despite the fact that in most areas of our working life, working in groups is the norm. And the evidence backs up this basic intuition. Take smoking, for example. If you look at smoking rates across an overall population, the total numbers of individuals and groups of smokers has declined, whilst the size of the groups of smokers remains roughly the same.22 This at first appears to be paradoxical. If the overall population of smokers decreases, you’d expect the average size of the groups of smokers to decline too. Unless, of course, people quit together in groups. Then you would expect the group sizes to remain roughly constant, but for the number of groups to decline – and that’s exactly what is happening.23 People are giving up smoking not as individuals, but collectively in groups. Yet smokers rarely start by thinking about how to draw on the group dynamic from the outset to help them to achieve their goal.
This seems to be borne out in all kinds of other areas that will be relevant to various goals, especially when our natural instincts might be to try to achieve these alone. Take weight-loss programmes. Some of the most successful of these encourage participants to work together to lose weight, rather than simply attempting this by themselves. Probably the most famous example is the Weight Watchers programme. In one of the studies of the programme, which focused on 772 overweight individuals, people in the Weight Watchers group lost twice as much weight (5.06 kg) as those individuals who were not working together as part of a group (2.25 kg).24 We see similar effects in completely different areas. Take savings, an area that you might think would not be particularly susceptible to the group dynamic. One of our favourite studies sought to test the effect of encouraging people to form groups of fellow savers, in which they set savings goals and then agreed to have them publicly announced and monitored (in other words, the group dynamic was combined with commitments and feedback). Researchers then looked at whether people in these groups would save more money than those saving alone, some of whom were also given the added incentive of a much higher interest rate (5 per cent instead of a baseline of 0.3 per cent). The group savings scheme doubled the amount that people deposited, while the higher saving rate did almost nothing.25
When we think about working together as a group, we normally envisage everyone mucking in together in the same location. But in an increasingly online and interconnected world, we can often now draw on virtual networks and groups of people. This is particularly true in our professional lives and for work-related goals. Indeed, at the Behavioural Insights Team, we have also become interested in growing evidence showing how powerful the decisions formed by groups of people can be. If they are correctly organized, people acting together can be smarter than experts acting alone. The idea was brilliantly used by Francis Galton in 1906, who became fascinated by the outcome of a weight-judging competition at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. Some 800 people decided to pay the 6d entry fee to take a guess at the weight of a ‘slaughtered and “dressed” ’ ox. As Galton explained, those guessing included some experts – farmers and butchers – but also plenty of ordinary people who fancied their chances. Galton wasn’t interested in the competition, so much as in whether the collective guesses of the group would be close to the real weight of the ox. So he was surprised to find that, when it came to guessing the weight of farm animals, the group seemed to be incredibly good. ‘It appears then, in this particular instance, that the vox populi [voice of the people] is correct to within 1 per cent of the real value.’ At this particular moment in Britain’s history, when the right to vote for men still required them to own certain forms of property, Galton was interested in what the effect of opening up the vote would mean for decision making. He concluded that the result seemed ‘more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected’.26
Some have used Galton’s observations, and those of subsequent researchers, to conclude that the ‘crowd’ is always smarter than the individual. But it won’t surprise you to learn that the research throws up a more subtle interpretation of when a large group of people comes up with more accurate results than if one were to rely on the individual opinions of experts alone. First, you need a diversity of opinions – for example, if you are predicting whether inflation will go up, you don’t just want a group of economists, but also small business owners and financially stretched single parents. Research has shown that the collective predictions of these three types of people will be more accurate than when relying on the economist alone.27 Each of them is able to draw on different sets of knowledge and experience. Importantly, though, the predictions of these people need to be made independently of each other – the business people shouldn’t discuss their views with the economists or single parents first. Further, there obviously needs to be some way of aggregating views, to avoid the problem of simply having lots of disparate opinions about the question at hand.28 When these conditions hold, there are very few experts who will outperform the group.29
Interestingly, diversity seems also to improve the performance of small groups. The excellent British author and commentator Tim Harford has recently argued that while people tend to prefer to work with friends or people they know well, introducing a stranger can improve overall performance.30 So when putting teams together at work, you may want to consider deliberately combining people with different skills and backgrounds.
At the Behavioural Insights Team, we’re drawing on these very principles to help achieve our organizational goals – based on this same idea that working together as a group is a good idea, but that how you do so matters a lot. When we brainstorm ideas, for example, to avoid ‘groupthink’ we often use online tools to ask individuals to draw on their own knowledge and expertise to come up with new ideas in isolation from one another before they are aggregated together.31 When we finalize data analysis and reports, we ask people from outside the project team to undertake quality assurance and provide critical support and challenge. And when we started to devise our new recruitment practices, we developed an online platform which helps us draw on the power of the group to help us make our hiring decisions. The platform is called Applied, and starts by requiring the hiring manager to select a diverse range of people to conduct the initial sift. For example, we find that junior members of staff will spot different things (is this person going to be a good manager?) than their more senior colleagues identify (is this person going to deliver high-quality analysis?). These individuals then look at responses to questions independently of one another. The people doing the marking have no knowledge of whose scores they are marking and there is no conferring between individual sifters. The online platform then aggregates all of the sifters’ responses, and allows the hiring manager to decide how many people to take through to the next stage. We’ve conducted a huge amount of analysis using the Applied platform, and have found that it radically changes our hiring decisions. When we ran an experiment on our recent graduate recruitment round (in which candidates went through a traditional sift and through Applied at the same time, so that we could see which worked best at finding the candidates we were looking for), we found that 60 per cent of the people we eventually hired would never have made it through the traditional sift.
What these examples show is that, while we usually think of our goals as personal to us, we’re much more likely to achieve them if we work with other people. This might be as part of a team, working together towards a shared common goal. Or it might be drawing on the collective wisdom of the group in order to help us make better decisions.
It is often said that a ‘problem shared is a problem halved’ and the same can be said for achieving our goals. But too often, we keep them to ourselves, and consider them to be personal betterment projects rather than things that other people can help us with. In fact, the opposite is true. Other people play a vital role in helping us to achieve our goals and this chapter has shown three ways in which we can share our objectives with others to great effect. The simplest thing to do is to ask others for help. You’ll be surprised by how willing others are to support you, and how much they get out of it. But you can get even further by tapping into your social networks. Whether you like it or not, your friends, family and colleagues will already be having a major influence upon your life, but you might not have thought before about how you can use the reach of that to help you achieve your goals. Again, you should remember that this isn’t just about you – asking others to support your goal will also give you the opportunity to support others. Finally, we saw that you can have an even stronger impact if you work together with others as part of a group. This might be a group with a shared goal (losing weight, saving money, a team at work), or a group whose collective wisdom we harness to improve the decisions we take along the way. Whichever method you use, underlying the ‘share’ principle is the fact that human beings are social animals. And when we recognize this fully, we will come to realize that we are better off working together if we want to achieve our individual objectives.
