đ§Ș Round 2? Yeah. In Round 1 it didnât feel like the right match of message, medium, and me. Round 2 is another attempt.
We bought a Nespresso machine. When my kids unpacked it the reservoir crashed on the floor.
Could it have landed on the top end? The end with the cap? The itâs-cracked-but-thatâs-okay-we-just-wonât-fill-it-all-the-way end? Yes. It could have.
It did not.
It landed on the end where the water enters the machine. We taped it up. It only leaks a little. We ordered a replacement.
One of the big assumptions I got wrong was that adults donât make mistakes, adults have things figured out, adults know. In my experience as an adult thatâs all wrong. What really seems to work, especially with kids, is adaptability. Fixing is adapting. Trying is adapting. Learning is adapting.
So we adapted for coffee. We adapted for newsletters.
đ€ Iâve been digging back into the current trends, research, and application of behavioral science and stumbled onto some of the replication issues.
If youâre unaware, Behavioral Science has found some really interesting stuff, headline grabbing stuff, but it doesnât always replicate. Thatâs hard for a âscienceâ.
But itâs still worth doing because behavioral science is like index investing. For both thereâs a cost and an outcome. Outcomes are impossible to know, but costs arenât. Behavioral science and index investing both something lead to nothing-burgers.
Thatâs not great, but at least the cost is low. And sometimes low cost actions lead to big-wins (defaults for instance).
Itâs not that behavioral science answers are always correct, but that they are often inexpensive possibilities.
đ Related to the low-cost, high(potential)-reward is Rory Sutherlandâs joke about trains. Rather than faster, give people a place to sit, to charge their phone, to rest their coffee.
đ The little Jab Book is a summary of behavioral science research of vaccinations around the world. One theme here is the importance of framing. If you change what someone pays attention to it changes how they view decisions. In general:
If you donât get vaccinated this is what youâll miss out on.
This vaccine was developed for your community, claim it.
Hereâs how, where, and when to get it. Be there.
Though a nice collection of articles, itâs not all academic. Each study (and the report) notes that itâs important to talk with the people involved to understand what the important frames are.
Thanks for reading.