Wadala Experiment at WSMConference, Dublin

Earlier this month, we presented the Wadala Experiment Case Study at the World Social Marketing Conference in Dublin, Ireland. The 2nd World conference brought together an audience of 600 behavioural change experts from 40 different countries.

 

The Wadala Experiment was the only case study presented at WSMConference that drew on learnings from Cognitive Neuroscience and Behavioural Economics to tackle social problems (trespassing in Mumbai). Behaviour change in larger societal problems, including healthcare, savings, and road safety can benefit greatly if we change our thinking and approach these issues in a more fundamental manner.

 

With the success of the Wadala Experiment Case Study, we have demonstrated how Behaviour Architecture™ can be used effectively to bridge the gap between AWARENESS and ACTION, a point which most social marketers, and even consumer marketers, are grappling with today.

The sweet ingredient to making better decisions

If you have a parole hearing, when should you schedule your slot so that you get a favourable decision? The graph below might shed some light on that question.

In this graph, Shai Denziger captures the results of 1112 parole hearings in Israeli prisons over a ten-month period.

 

The vertical axis is the proportion of cases where the judges granted parole. The horizontal axis shows the order in which the cases were heard during the day. And the dotted lines, they represent the points where the judges went away for a morning snack and their lunch break.

 

What the graph shows is extremely noteworthy. At the start of the day, the odds that a prisoner will be successfully paroled is 65%, before nosediving to 0% within a matter of few hours. The judges take their first break (as shown by the dotted lines), and the successful odds climb up to 65%, before plummeting again. Ditto for the proportion of successful paroles after lunch.

 

Danziger found that the three prisoners seen at the start of each “session” were more likely to be paroled than the three who are seen at the end. That’s true regardless of the length of their sentence, or whether they had been incarcerated before.

 

Whether prisoners are let off or not could merely be a function of when their cases were heard.

 

An easy explanation to this could be the aspect of “choice overload”. In repetitive decision-making tasks, once we’ve drained our mental resources, we suffer from choice overload and start opting for the default choice.

 

For the judges, the more decisions they’ve made, the more depleted they are, and hence they end up making the default choice – in this case, deny parole.

 

But if we look at things more fundamentally, a clearer picture emerges. Glucose helps you make better decisions.

 

Glucose is the only fuel used by the brain cells for mental activity. Since the neurons don’t store glucose, they depend on the bloodstream to supply a constant amount of this fuel.

 

As the judges make more decisions, their brains are getting drained, thereby creating a propensity to look at more immediate decisions (getting back concentration and focus on the current task) rather than understanding the prisoner’s situation and taking appropriate decisions.

 

The implications of glucose on decision making and its effect as seen in judges’ decision making are huge.

 

The brain is an energy optimizing machine. Making decisions takes a lot of effort, and too many of them make us feel tired.

 

In organizations that demand lot of mental task from their employees, productivity can be increased by creating an environment that leads to making fewer decisions. Google is a frontrunner in recognizing this aspect and creates an environment that reduces distractions (thereby keeping glucose levels higher), because of which it’s employees go on to create things that Google is so well known for.

 

As erstwhile CEO Eric Schmidt put it…

 

“Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.”

 

This is a fundamental way of looking at how organizational productivity can be increased. If more companies start thinking in this manner, it can only open up doors for a new era in innovation, creating a happier bunch of employees who can then do whatever they do in the best

Rs 50 cr to curb deaths on tracks - Times of India

Our neuroscience approach to minimize trespassing deaths has met with even more success. After the success of this experiment at Wadala, Rs. 50 Crore is being earmarked to be spent on these innovative measures across the Mumbai suburban network - erecting warning signboards, painting tracks to help people judge the speed of trains and calling for motormen to horn twice while approaching risky stretches. These interventions were designed on a strong foundation of new sciences - understanding the fundamental manner in which the human brain processes information and allows us to make decisions. Which in turn, always leads to consistent results.

Giving statistics, Divisional Railway Manager of Central Railway, M C Chauhan, said that from June to December 2009 there were 23 deaths at Wadala. However, in the six months from December 22, 2009 onwards, after the new safety methods were implemented, there were only nine deaths at Wadala.

The World Bank Funding is further vindication that these new sciences are more accountable and provide greater ROI to the client. This also makes Indian Railways the first organization in the world to undertake this approach and successfully minimize deaths due to trespassing.

Wadala Experiment features on The Boston Globe

(Screenshot from The Boston Globe) Our work to minimize deaths due to trespassing on Mumbai's railway tracks, called the Wadala Experiment, has been featured by Boston Globe in their Ideas section. The online version is out, and the paper version will be featured in this Sunday's (May 7) Ideas Section. The article details the Wadala Experiment and what we did. It also explains how we apply scientific principles into all our assignments thereby developing a fresher perspective on observing and explaining behaviour, and modifying it in a desired manner. Take a read; how does this new perspective alter the way you've been approaching behaviour change all along?

What's your CAPTCHA saying?

Especially your audio CAPTCHA. Listen to it carefully.

Just the other day, I was trying to set up my feedburner email. Inadvertently, I clicked on the handicapped sign out of curiosity to check out the audio CAPTCHA. Three beeps later, a drone of background voices filled the recording, until a distinct female voice came up and started reading out the real letters. You don't really pick it up the first time, until this voice says "Once again." That's when your brain is on full attention reconfirming what the voice said earlier. This audio CAPTCHA is brilliantly designed for human behaviour. It allows a human being to recognize the words, but ensures that machines cannot (or find it super tough to). How does this actually work? This is where knowledge in the human brain and its workings can help us decode this audio gibberish, and actually give us pointers to how our brain works. A computer or machine would find it very tough to recognize the words because they're designed to process information with all available data. Computers process everything as a whole. So, to effectively crack an audio CAPTCHA, you would need to have a library of sounds representing each character in the CAPTCHA's database. Depending on distortion in some CAPTCHAs, there might be several sounds for the same character. Hence, several machine learning techniques are required to perform automated speech recognition on segments of the CAPTCHA. The really hard task is teaching a computer how to process information in a way similar to how humans think. That sounds like a whole lot of work for cracking an audio file. So, how is the audio CAPTCHA behaviourally designed for a human to correctly understand it? The human brain is constantly taking in stimuli all the time. The brain will be overloaded if it tried to tackle every detail of every object at once. So we just don't bother. We're all equipped to selecting the key aspects of the scene one at a time, so this attention system allows us to concentrate on one thing while the rest of the world falls into the background. As humans, we are also not designed to do two simultaneous activities at once. Rightfully so, the 'cocktail party effect' is our impressive and under-appreciated ability to tune our attention to just one voice from a multitude.

Our ability to separate one conversation from another is beautifully demonstrated in a classic study carried out by Colin Cherry, then at Imperial College London (Cherry, 1953). Cherry used the simple method of playing back two different messages at the same time to people, under a variety of conditions. In doing so he discovered just how good we are at filtering what we hear.

The human brain's ability of separating sounds from background is based on several characteristics of the sounds, including gender of the speaker, direction from which the sound is coming, pitch, or the speaking speed. No wonder, once the real person starts talking in the audio CAPTCHA, our brains immediately latch on to this new distinct voice trying to decode what it's saying. Moreover, its not just this cocktail party effect. Notice the start of the recording with the distinguishable three tones. There has been quite some research done on music and how it increases alertness. One piece of research shows that peaks of neural activity occurred during silence in between two tones. This is because the brain is anticipating the next sound, and this creates alertness. That is precisely the objective for the start of the audio CAPTCHA - Get the listener to be more alert so that they can distinguish between the background voices and the real voice. As human beings, we're still far away from replicating the human brain. So maybe, until that happens, behavioural design of security will probably favour us humans more. Or at least until the artificial human brain comes to life. With regards to the robot apocalypse, well that's reserved for another post...