Rory Sutherland on the awesome power of psychological placebos

[Applause] I'll start with a quote by JP Morgan who once said it was probably him it probably wasn't to be honest it never is is it but the person to whom a quote is attributed but he said everybody has two reasons for doing the things they do a good reason and the real reason and it's much much more true than we like to admit in fact because there is an official logical reason for doing things and quite often there's an entirely ulterior even unconscious motivation for doing things and to understand this one book I recommend actually Hugo Mercier and dance Berber wrote a book called the Enigma of Reason and it essentially says that nearly all were all living things apart from humans basically get by perfectly well without actually needing a sense of reason and it's a relatively late evolutionary addition and there can that essential assertion is that given that you know we effectively evolved as other animals did to act instinctively without needing to explain what we did what rationalize what we did and then very recently in our evolutionary history we had this capacity to use language to explain what we did and their contention is really that reason is very little involved in actual human decision-making we still make decisions largely instinctively and that reason evolved not to be a kind of Stephen Hawking or a scientist attached to our brain it evolved to be a kind of George Carlin or a defense barrister if you like and like a barrister our sense of Reason has a grossly exaggerated sense of its own importance because it thinks it's making decisions when mostly it's post rationalizing them in Johnson Heights words the conscious brain thinks it's the Oval Office when in reality it's mostly the press office it thinks it's making the decisions when in reality what it's doing is hastily constructing its plausible sounding explanations for decisions taken somewhere else and made for reasons that it doesn't fully understand I'll give you a perfect example of this in the healthcare field which is why do people clean their teeth and there's official good reason is to prevent cavities a maintained dental health and to prevent tooth decay however I would argue it isn't that at all and in fact anybody in the toothpaste industry will tell you it isn't that reason at all we really clean our teeth the real reason as opposed to the official reason is that we're frightened of having bad breath which will be unattractive to the opposite or indeed same-sex be unattractive to prospective partners and be socially embarrassing and that that's the main reason we do if you think about it how often would you clean your teeth before a date for example mostly right how often would you clean your teeth after a meal almost never okay now if you are primarily motivated by dental health you would actually do the latter and not the former and if you want further proof of what I say I often think by the way consumer capitalism is the kind of Galapagos Islands of understanding human behavior you know lots and lots of trivial distinctions and behaviors are actually surprisingly revealing Darwin himself actually could have saved himself a whole heap of travel if he'd simply gone down to his and indeed my local Sainsbury's in Oxford not far from down house and got himself some point-of-sale data he would have discovered that the single most frequently purchased item in all UK grocery shops is wait for it a banana so our evolutionary heritage is kind of revealed even in our shopping behavior now okay now the interesting thing if you think about it if the real reason we clean our teeth is to be honest a fear of bad breath the spin-off benefit is dental health that one very interesting I think support point for this is if this weren't so why on earth is 97% of all toothpaste flavored with mint okay if it weren't really about breath freshness and anxiety about breath freshness you'd have a whole range of flavors wouldn't you you know but the fact that it's nearly all mint I think is highly revealing and I think there's an important point to be made here which is actually doesn't really matter why people do it so long as they do I think there's a day particularly in government health activity which goes it's not enough for people to do the thing we want them to do they have to do it for the right reason you know to be honest I don't really mind if people buy an electric car because they think it's really cool if you look at Procter & Gamble for example and Unilever I'd say I probably would say this wouldn't I my grandfather's doctor funnily enough intraday ger which is the birthplace kind of of the NHS he said that before antibiotics that most of what you did was kind of a placebo it was psychological as much as anything else most of the games before antibiotics not all but probably the greater part there's many many things that Adam Gopnik mentioned in the earlier presentation that really increased human longevity were to do with hygiene and cleanliness rather than conventional medicine and that the real public health success up until penicillin was just getting people to care about you know how clean they were keeping themselves clean and making their homes hygienic and so on and to be honest you know this was achieved mostly not by advertising that said be clean and avoid a cholera outbreak it was mostly achieved by advertising by Procter & Gamble and Unilever which actually sold cleanliness on the basis of status and sexual attractiveness not on the basis of public health benefits it's actually slightly horrible advertising if you go back to it with a modern sensibility so that the phrase for example always the bridesmaid never the bride was made famous in a Listerine adverse montañas that they washed with pears and prevent a cholera outbreak they're all about being attractive or not being unattractive to other people and I think we've got to ask you a question here which is to what extent when we want people to behave the way we want them to behave do we really care whether it's for the right reason or not because there's a strange thing I suppose like you very simple example of this it's always viewed that anything that constructs a perception or a behavior which is achieved through sleight of hand or hacking people's perception rather than through objective reality is considered free cheating it's always considered smoke and mirrors it you know the only correct acceptable way particularly in government to solve a problem is by changing objective reality so it's very very acceptable putting more policemen on the beats it's much more dubious for example repainting shop shutters so that people are less violent we have an absolute horror of psychological solutions and in some ways I'd like to know why I'd like to know why the electronic cigarette aroused so much hostility no it's a kind of cheat I'm the first to admit it yes it doesn't entirely end nicotine addiction but the fact that people's instinctive reaction was to ban it kind of alarms me it also alarms by the way that perfectly logical and intelligent people when legislating for where you can use electronic cigarettes demand that they're treated in exactly the same way as conventional cigarettes without spotting what is to me a fairly obvious problem which is if you force all the vapors to go outside the office and stand right next to all the smokers they're exposed to an indecent amount of temptation it's like holding an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a pub okay now you wouldn't do that and so I'm always intrigued by the fact that there's a kind of I think what science has done is created a kind of misplaced purity to be honest which is the great achievement of science in all areas which are non psychological in engineering and bridge building and designing a Boeing 787 whatever it may be is that science has fantastic objective measures it overcomes the failings of human perception okay you know by the way were huge debates when it came to defining temperature because people said you can't just define temperatures how warm it is because depending on things like the breeze and the humidity it feels different and the scientists won and they said no no temperature has to be an objective measure what it feels like to us doesn't matter the temperature is objective okay and distances objective and weight is objective and everything else and those objective measures are fantastic.if you are solving a problem for a non human problem in other words a problem where human perception plays no part in the solution and in that case that objectivity is a brilliant priceless and fantastic thing but in other cases I think it's a bit dangerous but is it demands that there's a kind of rational link from persuasion through to action which may actually be remarkably ineffectual and so let me give you an example of what is an astonishing perceptual hack there nobody thinks we like that your television total Khan okay it does not produce a whole spectrum despite what the manufacturers will say it does not produce a spectrum of a hundred and seventy four thousand different colors do you know why because your brain does that the television produces three if you wanted to produce an objective TV it would have to have literally 50,000 different little blobs of color generation within each pixel and the pixels would be about ten yards across and a television will cost billions of pounds the reason your TV works is it completely hacks human perception it's not remotely interested in what and in creating objective reality it simply has to create what looks like reality to you and so the way it does this by the way is that essentially in the cones of the human eye now they're any vision specialists here because I am unconscious what the what I'm saying is slightly wrong but simplified so I don't want anybody to tell me shreds but broadly speaking you have three types of cone in your eye and they're sensitive to red green and blue and roughly in that area of the spectrum and color mixing is entirely a biological phenomenon it's not a physical phenomenon if you mix red photons and you mix green photons you don't get yellow photons okay you just get a mixture of red and green ones okay what's brilliant about the television design is it's optimized for human perception not for reality and if you want to solve a problem which involves human behavior you could actually say let's not worry too much about objective reality let's just worry about what people perceive the context in which they perceive it how they feel and how they behave as a result of those feelings what they actually think is to be honest a bit of a sideshow what they consciously think and your TV does this fantastically because essentially it doesn't need to produce yellow that would be really expensive by the way your TV's optimized for you and other a few other higher primates I think gorillas would find your telly quite good you know they go 4k brilliant okay your dog or your parents thinks your TV is a crock of total because it's so select you know it bears no relation to objective reality because for example pigeons I think can detect five colours including ultraviolet so they think your television was kind of totally rubbish okay but gorillas and humans I mean obviously because you know lower primates don't buy televisions you don't go into curries and it says special 4k optimized for higher primates that's left unsaid but essentially the mix of colors it produces basically works like that and it does even where the things by the way if your TV produces red and blue and blue but it doesn't produce any green so red and red and green if your brain is getting equal amounts of stimulus in that spectrum your brain basically hypothesizes yellow and produces it so it looks like a banana even though there are no yellow photons hitting your eyes okay and and weirder still if your TV produces red and blue now halfway between red and blue is kind of green but your eyes aren't detecting any green so what the brain does instead of going all furry and saying system error which you should do technically in an objective universe it produces a color that doesn't exist in reality which is magenta okay so magenta technically as a color is not green the colored magenta is created by the absence of green this is all totally biological and it's species dependent the ancient Greeks kind of understood this design for perception thing there isn't a single straight line on the path none it's not designed to be straight it's designed to look straight so the the actual columns curved outwards in the middle the floor actually bows upwards and the sides also because it was designed as I said not for objective purposes but for subjective purposes and I always think we give a really really hard time to people who essentially just use human perception as their as their goal rather than objective reality Paul nurofen in Australia okay they got a whole heap of pain because they celled nurofen migraine Europe intention headache nurofen for period pain at nurofen for whatever and some of them were actually chemically identical but what's completely unfair about this is that if it says neurofen for period pain on the packaging the way the brain works is it will be more effective at treating period pain than if it doesn't but the placebo effect is viewed as cheating and I think that's because physics if you think about it you have Newton's laws of conservation of energy you can't create anything out of nothing economics got in on the same game with there's no such thing as a free lunch okay and it's the same miserable miserable magic free philosophy that basically says in effort in is proportionate to result out but in human perception those boring linear rules don't apply you can actually create alchemy you can create magic okay wine tastes better if you pour it from a heavier bottle your car drives much better after you've had it cleaned if you noticed that so it's not just a cleaner car it's actually a better performing car right painkillers are more effective if they're red they're more effective if they're branded they're more effective if they make a specific promise than if they make a generic one okay and they're also more effective if if you tell people they're expensive I'm the only person in Britain who complains that you can't buy expensive aspirin right you've got this wonder drug and you're making it useless by selling it for 69p I haven't got a 69p headache for sake I've got a three pounds twenty-nine headache right and you're completely economists and rationalist are completely ruining the power of aspirin by putting it in grey containers and selling it for 69 P madness okay now my view is neurofen doesn't go nearly far enough first of all they should charge even more for the speciality variants and they should go much further they should have I've lost my car keys nurofen and nurofen for people whose neighbors like reggae okay they aren't thinking this through they should go much further and the placebo effects kind of magical now here's a guy called Nicholas Humphries a psychologist at Cambridge he has a theory which we don't know whether it's true or not but it's very very interesting which is very large parts of your body can't be controlled by direct acts of will you know there are things like your movements which at least feel as if they're motivated by acts will and you can at least have the illusion of free will over arm movements then there are things like blinking which are kind of a mixture of the two okay then there are things like your heartbeat or pupil dilation or whatever which you can only control obliquely if at all okay so you can't just sit there and go I'd like my heart rate to go up you know sexuality or sexual arousal will be another one you know you didn't go I like level four tumescence please right that'll be really weird okay so there lots of things which you can control in your body but you can only control it oblique it's a bit like an automatic gearbox didn't really hear Drive I love automatics person I know it's very lazy everybody who you don't have any sense of control what happens if you drive an automatic is after you've driven the same car in the ends of time you learn to kind of control the gear changes obliquely you know if you're nearing the top of the hill you just throttle off a bit to stop it changing down prematurely all that kind of stuff and we control most of our bodily functions kind of obliquely because we can't control them directly and Humphreys theory is that essentially the immune system is calibrated for much scarce of conditions than we actually find ourselves in in the modern world and the immune system had to be really careful not to over intervene he suggests that this may be why we get ill more in the winter than in the summer because in times of scarcity our body's inner accountant is going to be more cautious than it is in sunny weather and they're essentially the only way we can get our immune system to kick it up a notch is not by an act of will it's by heat hacking it oblique ly it's by effectively going who looked loads of people are bringing me soup I've got this fantastic expensive pill to take which tastes really horrible in his bright red and that essentially what we're actually doing you know just as okay you can increase or decrease your heart rate not by an active will but you can go jogging or practice yoga okay if you want to dilate your pupils you can go into a dark room or promptly look at pornography for some why that would be I don't know okay but for some reason that has that effect so in the same way if you want your immune system to kick it up again you can't do it by will the immune system is too conservative in its deployment because our evolutionary history was in a tougher environment where you might freeze to death in the night or run out of food and so what we need to do in the modern world is effectively deploy these hacks to make our immune system a bit more extreme he even goes further and says that actually very very large things large industries are essentially selfless ebbing so the fashion industry if you think about it is denied I've got two daughters of seventeen and I kept saying well you know I mean Jesus takes power to leave the house right yeah what's all this about because I mean you're only going some pub or whatever all McDonald's and they eventually said no no it's essentially L'Oreal it's because I'm worth it that being really well-dressed creates a sense of confidence in yourself that you can't auto-generate okay then it creates the sense of serenity and confidence and being attractive and important and you know and so forth which you can achieve through the oblique application of fashion okay but you can't generate yourself much easier if you're a bloke of course you just get the same effect with four pints of lager but but generally here I mean Humphreys goes even further and says there are placebos in the wild you know the reason that soldiers blow trumpets and fly flags is that and they talk to talk of themselves as brothers in arms and create a kind of fictive kin relationship is that's a way of hacking the unconscious into being a level of bravery which we couldn't achieve through an act of will and so a surprising amount of what we do may be driven by attempts essentially to change the way in which we feel by oblique means but the interesting question is I think we've got to actually give a little bit of thought to the placebo and not automatically despise it one of the things you can do with placebos is you can generate happiness by the way pretty much I'll give you a few examples simply by telling a story about something by presenting something in a different way without changing objective reality at all you can actually make something better or worse one thing one thing you can do by the way which I think the public sector does badly give customers totally trivial choices I don't mean you choose your own course of oncology right I'm not suggesting we take it that far but if you actually literally allow people to say would you prefer a ward on the second floor of the third floor totally immaterial choices people are much happier with an outcome that they've chosen than one that that's been imposed on them okay so there are lots and lots of little tricks you can impose and we had one car brand we work with we couldn't understand why the customer satisfaction levels seemed to be low even though the quality of the cars was going up and up and we discovered that it was one of Vauxhall and Ford disproportionately large number of Fleet cars when your company gives you a car you'll never like it as much as a car you've chosen yourself okay now the problem is as I said you don't want to worry about human perception when you're building a bridge that's all about objective measures that's the field of science science does that fantastically because you can define a good bridge in terms of will it take this weight traveling at this speed with this frequency over this period of time in the following climatic and seismic conditions that's human free definition of success therefore you don't need to worry about psychology the second you paint the lines on the bridge now that's a psychological problem this is an Icelandic zebra crossing which is designed as a kind of trompe l'oeil effect to freak out motorists and make them slam on the brakes but it certainly makes them slow down when you start painting lines on the road that's a psychological question this is probably the most successful burn in the in commercial terms by the way now what I mean by that is if you'd wanted to compete with coke you'd think wouldn't you that if you wanted a successful soft drink it would have to taste nicer than coke cost less than coke and come in a really big can so people got a great value for money now the most successful attempt to compete with coke basically cost a fortune comes in a tiny can and tastes kind of disgusting now it only makes sense as a consumer product if you think of it as a placebo that if you want to believe that something has psychoactive or psychotropic properties it's gotta taste weird it's got to be expensive and what the can says is that this stuff is really potent because we can't give you the full 330 milliliters because you'd probably go postal okay now I'll end very quickly cuz I must run that fundamentally there's no point in designing objectively because the human world the human brain doesn't perceive things objectively it perceives things relatively you think of that as a white thing connected to a gray thing cover the middle with your hand and you'll see that the bottom and the top objectively I've done it on the right fear if you're very lazy are exactly the same color okay but the brain helpfully goes that's probably in shadow so I'm just going to correct this anybody seen the McGurk effect right you're in for a very quick treat haven't got long we are being bombarded by sensory information our brains do a remarkable job of making sense of it all [Music] it seems easy enough to separate the sounds we hear from the sites we see but there is one illusion that reveals this isn't always the case have a look at this what do you hear but look what happens when we change the picture and yet the sound hasn't changed in every clip you are only ever hearing bar with a bee it's an illusion known as the McGurk effect take another look concentrate first on the right of the screen now to the left of the screen the illusion occurs because what you are seeing clashes with what you are hearing in the illusion what we see overrides what we hear so the mouth movements we see as we look at a face can actually influence what we believe we're hearing if we close our eyes we actually hear the sound as it is if we owe everything we perceive is essentially heavily processed so the connection with objective reality essentially human behavior is not like physics it basically goes stimulus perception correction for perception meaning emotion behavior and you can twiddle with any of those measures as television makers do to achieve the desired behavior or the desired perception not necessarily the objective reality which is often really expensive if you want something to seem cheap ok price is perceived relatively rolls-royce and Maserati stopped selling their cars at car shows because they look you know 300 thousand euro car looks really expensive they started selling them at plane shows New York shows if you've been looking at Lear Jets all afternoon a 300 thousand pound car is basically an impulse buy ok you know it's like the chocolate next to the til oh well I'll have a couple of those okay the espresso we've got an espresso machine if you had to buy in the jar like Nescafe it would cost about 40 quid and you'd look at it on the Shelf and go that is batshit crazy there's no way I'm paying that for coffee doesn't come in a jar most of us unless you work in procurement don't know what a single Nescafe costs right so when you put your 39 pea pod in your machine your frame of reference isn't Nescafe its Starbucks do you think what's 13 MP will cost me 2 pounds 20 at Starbucks this machine is practically making me money okay and so you know don't don't change it with a reality it's really expensive and it's tiring okay the bus to the airport we all hate it okay I've always gone god it's a bus the engines wind down you're still a mile from the airport Oh shite it's a bus you know and that's because of course the three worst words in the English language are bus replacement service you know three best words all day breakfast about Fillion okay now I'd always hated the bus and I just thought the bus is rubbish okay and then I land on an easyJet flight the pilot says I've got some bad news and I got some good news the bad news is we won't be able to get an air bridge because there's a plane blocking the gate the good news is the bus will take you all the way to passport control see when her far to walk with your bags I like you monkey man instant pollow thing that's always true isn't it I'm quite glad there's a bus I don't have to walk past 30 Toblerone displays just to get to my luggage now next time you're on a plane try this simple act of alchemy just say very loudly actually I'm glad there's a bus because it'll drive you all the way to possibly drill you just synthesized happiness out of nowhere in everybody within earshot okay now it's vital I'll skip this just for reasons of time um even getting people to choose things um you can make people do things okay I hate to say this but they don't actually have to choose them they have to feel they've chosen them so the way that restaurants get you to drink wine which has a much higher margin than anything else because you can't charge 20 quid for a glass of Johnnie Walker red because people know what it costs in the shops but you can buy a bottle of like 2012 shattered bollocks for four euros and and charge like 25 euros for every ozone marvellous hint of black currents right okay anybody else set anybody else have wine skeptic I think it's entirely emperor's new clothes yeah good exactly they're always a few of us basically gin or beer every time in my book anyway but what the restaurant does is it puts glass is there already for you in fact if you say we're not having anyone they take the glasses away at a bit of a huff don't they as if well we might be taking you very seriously for the rest of the evening and then they bring you it's not a called a drinks list it's called a wine list and the choice architecture of the wine list is five pages of bloody wine of insane variety followed by a really sad back page for the perverts and deviants who want to drink beer or spirits okay and then cleaver us still they only bring one wine list so the guy with the wine is there's only one drink well two drinks I suppose you can actually share with a whole table you could say tequila slammers all round but it's not the most sophisticated so what the guy with the wine list is forced to do as he turns to the table and goes red or white at which point it's game over for the gin drinkers okay so you can actually design choices in ways that achieve the desired behavior or change the perception Buber is largely a hack it just makes waiting less painful because what we hate about waiting is not the duration which is the objective measure it's the degree of uncertainty we did this with British gas people said oh god I hate waiting in for my you know my British gas engineer you know it means they're gonna take a whole day off work now we were suspicious of that points let's face it we love taking a day off work don't worry okay you know oh it's terrible I've got to take a day off work right okay now we should look actually don't worry the emotional problem is not caused by the duration of the appointment it's the uncertainty if you text people 40 minutes before you arrive the feeling is now okay I'm in control I can have a shower I can pop out to the shops rather than the feeling where there's no information which is like being under house arrest okay now important still you can do the same wine trick if you want to recruit if you want greater diversity change the choice hi people in groups you'll automatically get every kind of diversity social socioeconomic ethnic gender diversity if you hire people - the only reason I got my job at Ogilvy was because they had four jobs and when it came to position number four there a bit undecided and someone said let's take a punt on the weirdo okay now if there had been four people each hiring for one position I wouldn't have got any of those jobs and an awful lot of what we may think to be unconscious bias ethnic bias is actually just status quo bias it's I'm making a single decision that I want to make it look as unremarkable as possible for fear of blame should it not work out okay it's no one ever got fired for buying IBM essentially it's you go with the default because the consequences are lower and it's an instinctive thing it's not conscious okay if you hire people in group to think about it when everybody had one car everybody had a saloon car my childhood you had a Ford Cortina if you have a two-car household nobody has to saloon cars in fact they probably don't even have one they have an SUV and a small runabout okay so once you understand human perception the fact that it's linked to objective reality is tenuous at best what you realize is there's this whole new area for potential intervention which doesn't involve changing the changing the actual objective reality it simply involves changing the perception why aren't pain killers red why can't I buy expensive aspirin in many cases by the way there may be a massive mistake in that all scientists try and make medicine as easy as possible to take whereas the placebo effect might be actually magnified if you had to go through a bit of a ritual and you made it a bit difficult you know IKEA that's called that's called the IKEA effect which is you have to value this sofa because you think you know because you've been through something which is a bit like a tour of duty in Vietnam just to get the thing home so there's no way you're not valuing that sofa right and so it's really really important we stop trying to pretend that lots of things like engineering where it's all about objective metrics in many many cases the objective metrics may be surprisingly irrelevant and what matters is a tiny perceptual thing which does all the heavy lifting at tiny fraction of the cost the strangest thing about that is this isn't viewed as being highly efficient it's viewed as cheating but then if you made a television without cheating it would cost 16 billion pounds so that's me let's hear it for placebos thank you very much indeed [Applause]

Channel: WIRED UK

Views: 16,502

Rating: 4.9445982 out of 5

Keywords: wired video, wired magazine, wired uk, wired, pop culture, science, politics, conde nast, health, technology, new technology, wired health, wired conference, ogilvy uk, rory sutherland

Id: Icrt6JwnwJs

Length: 33min 19sec (1999 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019