“How McDonald’s Make Men Binge” Rory Sutherland

now there's also a really interesting finding with the McDonald's screens uh which I hear anecdotally which is since the screens came in far more people order unusual meals in particular more men order meals which contain two burgers even though it's just their meeting that Rory sand he is the vice chairman of ogal V UK the author of the popular spectator column the wiki man and the bestselling book Alchemy he is arguably the world's best known Behavioral Science practice ier and he certainly has some of the most Forward Thinking suggestions on how to apply Behavioral Science

today we get into all of that there is a common belief that attitudes lead to behaviors that points of view dictate actions for example if someone likes F1 they'll be more likely to drive to work but behavioral scientists like Rory argue that the opposite might be true well very frequently okay uh it works in reverse that you change people's behavior and their attitudes then uh to avoid kind of cognitive distance their attitudes then come to aign with their behavior in other words we often post rationalize our attitudes in many ways okay and that would be

particularly applicable I think with things like environmental Behavior which is that I don't think many people buying a Tesla principally bought it because it was environmentally friendly I think they bought bought it because they were Geeks and they really liked the car okay having bought an electric car myself for largely selfish reasons I don't think I could go back to a petrol car in fact the uh the extent of the aversion to petrol once you've driven electric was manifested by the fact that I actually had seven days in Italy earlier this year and I actually

went to some lengths to rent an electric car which was an active slightly slightly bravado actually because I wasn't sure what the charging infrastructure was like in the event it was pretty good I think an awful lot of things work that way we had an advertising campaign which was that campaign but it was it was under the line of one bin is rubbish and we realize that if people have two bins they will tend to separate out recyclables from non-recyclables much more reliably than people who have one bin who you know with the best will

in the world you know it's late it's 11 o'clock at night ah you know okay you know Jeremy Clarkson with two bins will be better at recycling than a Greta thunberg with one been that actually in many cases our behavior is a product of our environment Not Our intention or our attitude and that is a known bias in the Behavioral Science which is kind of intentionality bias that it's apparently particularly acute in the west I didn't realize this but in eastern cultures they are more likely to explain people's behavior in terms of the context in

which they found themselves whereas in Western cultures could it be a legacy of Christianity perhaps or or just Western religions were more likely to say they did that because they're a bad person not because they found themselves in circumstances where you know you know they are weak willed they are evil they're selfish whatever it may be and so understanding the context and understanding essentially the context in which decisions are made and therefore in which behaviors originate strikes me as an essential part of the jigsaw to solve regardless of the role that attitude plays you have

to look at this because it's a nonsense just to assume that an attitudinal change uh leads directly to behavioral change it's simply not reliable Rory makes the point that most Tesla owners probably weren't strong environmentalists before buying but since buying because of that behavior they' formed stronger views on the environment a few years ago I'd happily drink instant coffee I didn't care about coffee quality but since joining a Philly remote company in 2020 I started to spend more time in cafes working from these cafes and drinking fancy coffee now my attitude has changed I don't

buy instant coffee in fact I'd never drink it I'd love to tell myself that's because of my mature tastes that I appreciate the delicate flavors of an O flat white but that's bull my attitude changed because my behavior changed I fell out of love with instant coffee because I was spending much of my working day drinking Barista poured coffee and chatting with coffee experts behaviors form attitudes and Rory has got a great example of this in practice before McDonald's introduced touchscreen ordering customers bought predictable items like Big Mac Meals and Egg McMuffins but once the

touch screens came in all that changed uh the McDonald's screens are ex I mean the speed with which they rolled them out I think is evidence of their efficacy if you want to sell as much as possible give people a choice of inter faces one thing I would one thing I will make a point of here is what McDonald's has not done is replaced human ordert takers with screens completely they have given the consumer a choice okay obviously the hourly cost of a screen is lower than the hourly cost of an employee but McDonald's has

not done what a lot of companies will do I think which is a terrible mistake which is to replace a human interface with an exclusively automated interface what they've done is actually they've gone effectively multi- channel in other in fact very very very multi Channel because you can as well as using a screen you can actually pre-order on your mobile phone you can order on a tablet Etc and general you know it's I wouldn't say it's an absolutely unfailing rule but most of the time the more ways you give people uh a mode of buying

something the more people buy okay now there's also really interesting finding with the screens uh which I hear anecdotally which is since the screens came in far more people order unusual meals in particular more men order meals which contain two burgers even though it's just them eating what's quite interesting about that is there was probably an element of social embarrassment or not wanting to look weird or not wanting to create a double take which caused people to order more conventionally face to face because they didn't want to go going but so you want two burgers

but only one fries you know I I don't get that you know don't you want a meal with both of them and then you'd have to go well it's just for me and they go God you lad us okay right so fundamentally changing the interface changes the behavior that's why Amazon okay is one of the most valuable companies in the world because you know they are a kind of default interface for people who want to buy who aren't in a shop currently and let's face it there's no point in attitudal change unless it leads the

behavioral change somewhere not necessarily in the person whose attitude changes necessarily but you know obviously the purpose of sub activity is to change the decisions how people act uh in some way what this does is it at the very least it stops people going the attitude is what needs to be changed in order to change the behavior and forces it to you to look at the question both holistically I what part is attitude playing in this behavior and what part is the wider environment it also face it also forces you to factor in time okay

because the general approach of advertising was we change people's attitude and then their behavior changes and we just do a big ad campaign but there are moments at which you can intervene which are probably 10 times more potent than other moments and so it also forces you to think about the customer Journey or in in the case of public sector work the decision maker journey and to look at the various points along that line not that it's ever that Linear by the way but you can look at the points of maximum leverage there and you

that means you Target by time not by audience in other words you have a Target moment not a target audience which is also enriching in terms of the possibility of finding breakthrough and Creative Solutions Rory says that there are moments you can intervene that are 10 times more potent than other moments this resonated I came across compelling evidence to back this up when reading chip and Dan Heath's book The Power of moments the author a study by Adam Grant of Warton University on initiation for local lifeguards see Adam Grant noted how lifeguards were a few

years in the jobble often share their best stories stories of Bravery of how lifeguards have rescued drowning swimmers these stories they drew lifeguards together it bonded them it gave them a sense of meaning Adam was sure that if new lifeguards heard these stories far earlier in their careers they'd be more committed so he tested it at a community recreation center in the midwest Grant divided 32 new lifeguards into two groups the control group heard the standard typical information it was about how other lifeguards had benefited down the road from skills they had acquired on the

job the typical thing they hear in onboarding the others heard stories of lifeguards rescuing drowning swimmers Adam Grant then monitored each of the group's commitment over the following months the group of lifeguards who heard the brave story about lifeguards saving swimmers well they voluntarily signed up to 43% more hours of work in the following weeks than the control group just one 30 minute session changed their behavior by sharing these stories early in the lifeguard's career they became more committed this showcases Rory's point that there are some moments that are more potent than others so that's

the power of moment but going back to the McDonald's story Rory had another point to make see it's not just moments that change Behavior Rory thinks interfaces are just as important here's why let's imagine you received a $30,000 or £3,000 windfall from a elderly Aunt who died now you're probably a bit younger you probably wouldn't do this I'm 58 okay the most logical thing to do would be to pay that into my pension but I probably wouldn't why not well two reasons it wouldn't occur to me okay I don't know why it wouldn't occur to

me but it wouldn't now you might you might argue that's partly an attitudinal thing but I think it's also very largely an interface question which is that if I want to put money into my deposit account with my bank which currently pays me some absolutely crck of rate of interest incidentally and doesn't have any tax advantages I can do that on the app okay if I want to pay money into my pension I'm not making this up I'd actually have to write a check I don't know where my checkbook is I'd have to post it

off to an address I don't know uh worse still I would send this check by the way and they wouldn't send a text to acknowledge it and say oh by the way we received your £30,000 with the tax rebate that means you get an extra £45,000 to your pension and whoopy Doo isn't that great we've received the money didn't you do well no nothing happens I'd have to remember that I'd paid that money in spend six months in a state of mild anxiety Then check my pension statement to check they'd actually received it and credited

me correctly at the end of the year okay now there are two problems with that one of which is it's a massive pain in the ass and by the way okay I spoke to a pensions company about that and one of the people who worked for the pensions company had exactly this problem which is they'd written a check in and then they'd been failed to be credited adequately or it had been credited to the wrong account and that involved like 24 hours of work on their part okay when I move money to my deposit account

it's instant gratification when I move money to my pension account it's really really deferred gratification combined with a huge heap of uncertain certainty and anxiety okay no surprise I put the money in my deposit account but there's another problem which is that if something's difficult to do it makes us nervous as well as making us frustrated it makes us nervous because we go If This Were a normal thing to do someone would have made it easy right we naturally feel I'm going off piec here by doing this because I'm writing a bloody check you know

you know I feel like a character in a sort of Dickens drama I'm writing this check with a bloody pen okay this is weird and ridiculous therefore maybe I shouldn't be doing this at all it's a natural kind of human inference or heuristic you know that you know if lots of people do something it's probably okay and I'm then doing a second order jistic which is well if lots of people do this wouldn't they have made it a bit easier they obviously haven't now this is a few years out of date now but about six

years ago I Al asked an audience to people who worked in financial services if I gave them £1,000 and told them you can keep that provided you paid it into your pension before the end before you get home this evening how many of you would know how to do that one person put up their hand they worth Goldman Sachs okay now that's okay that's just terrible before we start doing an advertising campaign going whoopdee doop aren't pensions amazing the second thing is the pension is a case where the government gives you money a lot of

money you get money from the government right now why governments can find their best best tax breaks to people late in life who are already probably relatively wealthy when I really needed these tax breaks when I had two kids and I was 35 years old I don't need them now I'm 58 the little buggers are about to become kind of self- sustaining I hope although one of them studying philosophy so my hopes of that are you know should we say realistic okay okay slightly dampens your hopes of her finding a job in the Goldman Sachs

um graduate pool but um uh but but nonetheless that's okay you you the government gives you money now if you give someone money okay when you give someone a present you wrap it in paper right you say it's a present okay you don't just go oh yeah by the way I've left a case of champagne on the back of your car unless you're engaged in some dodgy dealing yet the government gives you this money for your pension with absolutely no Fanfare or rasmas whatsoever there's not a text to say your pensions just been boosted in

fact you wouldn't even know you were getting this bloody tax break unless you're like ly retentive and check your pension balance every month are these people nuts I mean it's like the old joke is it's like pissing yourself in a dark suit you get a nice warm feeling but no one else notices okay why would you do that I have no screaming idea except that the people who work in government who decide these things are bloody tragic accountants who think that marketing is unimportant or indeed evil or distracting and that provided you create the economic

conditions for rational behavior that that people will consequently behave rationally in April 2020 Donald Trump insisted on signing his name on the federal government handout to support citizens this one-time Direct Cash payment of $1,200 per person plus $500 per child wasn't an invisible benefit like Rory's pension rebates it was a check received in the post with Trump's signature on it now this caused much backlash senior IRS officials lamented that taxes are supposed to be non-political but putting all that aside this did achieve something that all too many governments fail at it made the financial assistance

governments provide feel real and tangible rather than a two-point cut to National Insurance which most Brits struggle to actually conceptualize let alone calculate how much it'll save the government would achieve far more appreciation if it sent a direct bank transfer along with an email or push notification to every phone explaining the benefit on the subject of taxes Rory has some simple suggestions one which he thinks will make high earners far happier to pay I'll make two points about taxes what should the top rate of tax be in the UK okay uh the purpose of tax

is to maximize Revenue collection while minimizing um avoidance or reluctance to work as a consequence if you asked anybody who' worked in retail they tell you that the top rate of tax should be 39.9% okay right it shouldn't be 40% do not make the top rate of tax 40% you can knock 0.1% off that and get a huge basic feeling of uh oh that's better okay right for God's sake retail's known this for a 100 flaming years okay right okay are you idiots okay that's the first point the second point is for all kinds of

reasons paying a tax rebate doesn't create a new normal you actually it actually creates appreciation every year secondly it doesn't create outrage if you withhold it now had you had a tax rebate system you could have said during covid because of covid we won't be able to we'll only be able to pay 30% of the usual rebate so it gives you Flex that that's why companies pay staff in a bonus right it gives them a degree of flexibility to share the ups and the downs and the risk with their employees and likewise governments should do

the same thing with their citizens but also a single some there's quite a lot of evidence that Americans actually deliberately overpay their taxes because they like a chunky rebate if you're in the poorer half of the population by which I I would say probably a little below that but if you're significantly below median income okay life isn't really a wealth problem it's a cash flow problem and one of the ways you can significantly Liberate the poor is by giving them lump sums because there are lot lot of things let's face it okay there our capacity

if you're not very wealthy our capacity to save you know I mean the compounding effect is amazing but unless you're quite Rich to begin with it doesn't really get exciting for quite a long time okay but okay here's the thing if so saving is pretty unrealistic there are a lot of things you can't do if you don't have access to 500 quid okay you can't repair your car you can't sort you know sort sort out the leaking thing in the roof okay there are awful lot of things you can't do if you don't have access

to lump Suns there is actually bizarrely a right-wing movement in the United States uh which wants uh welfare to be paid in the shape of lump SS and of course you always get the argument oh they'll just spend it on drink you know D which is extremely patronizing okay I mean there will be cases who'll spend their money on drink but they're probably spending all their money on drink anyway okay I would I would say okay this is an interesting way of looking at it but I um now John Reed who is the uh cigarette

smoking minister of Health under the I think Brown Administration here in the UK he was a smoker still he grown up I think in a workingclass place in Glasgow and he kind of defended the right of the poor to smoke in a in a way by saying partly because I think he was a tabber himself but he partly said if you've got absolutely no money what you need is a 50p or one pound you know a 70p pleasure okay because the 5 pound Pleasures or the 20 pound Pleasures aren't really accessible to you and so

you know one of the reasons why poor people smoke is well everybody needs a bit of fun in their life and can you tell me something else that gives you that amount of pleasure for 70p you know you know it's all very well for rich people I don't understand why these people spending their money on smoking but if you you know if you're living absolutely close to the bread line okay well yeah I get it you should expect but equally you're not looking forward to your next skiing holiday are you right you know you in

other words your fundamental Pleasures are fundamentally constrained and so you know I would I would argue that people in the effective altruism movement seem to have come to this sort of similar conclusion that you just give people a shortterm dollop of money and as an opportunity to sort their [ __ ] out to some extent I think they make the argument that actually to some extent paying constant weekly benefits is a form of kind of Chinese water torture it's almost like you know keeping someone on an intravenous drip it doesn't really solve anything it just

keeps you dependent it also makes people incredibly nervous about looking for work because if one thing messes with their the frequency of their benefit payments it can be actually kind of cash flow catastrophe this idea to give welfare out in lump sums is interesting it got me thinking about the principle in Behavioral Science known as variable rewards now this is the idea that variable reward rewards are more motivating than consistent rewards evidence for this comes from a 2014 study led by luie Shen a psychologist at the University of Chicago she recruited 87 participants and set

them a challenge some participants were incentivized with a $2 reward this was the certain reward condition while the others were offered a 50/50 chance of either winning $1 or $2 this is the variable reward condition she found that when the reward was unpredictable 70% of the participants ended up completing the task compared to just a mere 43% in the certain reward scenario now this is interesting because the reward for the certain scenario is greater but that variability that was the thing that encouraged action to Rory's Point perhaps variable lump sums would be far more motivating

than consistent yet small welfare payments look it's pretty clear that Rory's got a few gripes about economists and seeing that he was on a role I decided to ask him what the worst thing about modern economics is well that's difficult it's a very very crowded field for the worst thing to come out of neoliberal Economics but one of the worst things is the single representative agent right because okay let's take it okay yes on average increasing the tax on cigarettes reduces smoking okay great okay what about the people who can't quit who are poor it

could be destroying their household okay and you're you're looking at a very very narrow interpretation of that data now just in case you like me needed a refresher on what the single representative agent is then don't worry I've Googled it it is a term used by economists to refer to the typical decision maker economists make decisions to benefit the single representative agent in other words to benefit the average person but like Rory mentions the issue with this is that it leaves out people who are not average taxes on smoking reduces smoking on average they reduce

smoking for the single representative agent but they'll make the lives of cash poor addicts utterly miserable uh second point with a single representative agent is increasing interest rates well okay maybe that like reduces inflation a bit although given that the reason for recent inflation was actually exogenous supply chain shocks right it wasn't really runaway inflation inside the system the reason to increase interest rates doesn't seem to be entirely clear okay because uh what what the government should have done is said sort out supply chain problems and and get the Russians out of Ukraine or get

the oil flowing again or whatever it might be okay we get the bread flowing again not let's put the interest rates up because an interest rate rise is unbelievably uneven in terms of winners and losers it's unbelievably polarizing okay in the same way that that smoking putting tax on cigarettes is brilliant for the people who quit it's double win isn't it they save a fortune and they don't get cancer okay but no one's asking the corresponding question yeah but what about the people who you know there are some people myself included okay I don't drink

very much um uh I'm an incredibly moderate Drinker I think because I'm a bit fat I think my doctors always think I'm lying but I don't drink very much I very rarely drink at home I never drink alone um I basically because I'm lazy and I like driving I rarely have more than like two units in an evening because you know I leave it for a few hours so I've metabolized it by the time I get home you know but there are some people myself included who find quitting nicotine almost impossible I would take if

I were in prison I'd take up smoking again in a shot right or you know I mean if you can't get Vapes I'd smoke again in a shot not not not a moment's hesitation okay so you know you know what what's the effect on those people so you have this fundamental Problem by the way which is we're not sufficiently granular we the single representative agent causes us to solve for the average not to solve for the individual now an interesting one there I'll give you two interesting examples here now I got to be really careful

about the second one because I'm not even sure that I want to reveal it okay but it is in the public domain I just don't know where I want to the first one is salt okay telling people not to eat salt on average increases life expectancy but it doesn't increase life expectancy for everybody it's that there are six or s% of people or whatever whose blood pressure is does not effectively cope well with salt okay now if you could identify who those people were you could then say to those people you need to really really

cut back and salt and stop bothering the rest of us and we can concentrate on the people who should give up salt rather than trying to solve for the average okay the single representative agent just says what's good for the average person is good for the is good for everybody not true now it doesn't matter that much if I if I don't eat that much salt because um even if I'm one of those people who's not particular particularly susceptible to that salt isn't particularly bad for me okay what happens if you do that six times

and you do the same thing with you mustn't eat this you mustn't eat that you mustn't drink coffee you mustn't drink wine you mustn't do that okay well suddenly you've gone to the entire population instead of saying you over there you shouldn't drink alcohol you over there you shouldn't eat salt you over there you shouldn't do this instead you've gone to everybody and said the only way to be healthy is to lead a life of almost you know tragic desperation boredom okay right okay now here's another one which is a real toughy now is your

audience mostly fairly responsible or do you have a okay I'll I'll share it anyway I think I will because I think the time has come okay Sir Richard do did the work on the link between um smoking and lung cancer and it was an absolute statistical slam dunk uh the argument was absolutely conclusive by the way this wasn't like an increase in likelihood of you know 3% or 5% or whatever it was like in the hundreds of percent the smoking made you uh more likely to get lung cancer slam D the other thing he found

was that if you quit before you're 35 it looks as though your life expectancy isn't much affected so there is a question here which I ask which is at what point should we do a smoking campaign that says that writes to people on their 35th birthday or better still their 34th birthday and says okay you've got a year to quit after now a lot of people don't quit because they think the damage has already been done there are a lot of people in their 30s or 40s or whatever who go there's no point in quitting

now because basically you know I've done the damage already and those people really need to quit because they're over 35 they're over 55 they really to quit there's a very very strong reason why the first finding of doll is very famous smoking causes lung cancer which is they wanted everybody to know okay there's also a very good reason why the other finding of doll which is quit before the age of 35 and it doesn't seem to do much long-term harm is completely unknown because they didn't want kids to start smoking okay and they didn't want

kids to go well Dad you can't smoke but I've got another 10 years left right okay and they didn't want kids to think well I might as well try this because I've got you know I've only got I've got 25 years of not quite that young I've got 10 years of risk-free smoking to enjoy before I had to quit you might however argue that if people can switch to vaping and get off cigarettes that youth smoking is less of a problem and smoking in the elderly should be really what certainly in the middle age should

be really focused on heavily and that you might want to do a communication inflection point around people at the age people when people are 35 and say okay from now on every cigarette counts you dodged a bullet but from now on everyone counts and then and then give people a reason to quit because one of the things we need in order to change our behavior is a narrative that we can then Supply to explain to others or to ourselves why our Behavior changed today Rory has looked at how a basic understanding of human psychology can

change the way we answer life's tough questions he shared irrational ways to double a blokes McDonald's order a simple method to make high earners more willing to pay tax and a better time to tell people to quit smoking it's always a pleasure to hear Rory Rift on these topics but we weren't done Rory and I went on to discuss creativity he told me what bees can teach us about Innovation why doormen shouldn't have been retired and how brexit could have been avoided all of that is coming up in a future episode of nudge so to

make sure you don't miss it please do sign up to my newsletter not only will you be the first to hear about that future episode with Rory but you'll also get my weekly Behavioral Science tip and access to bonus episodes to sign up just head to nudg podcast.com and click newsletter in the menu or or just click the link in today's show notes