You may know that I live in the city of Amsterdam. Just like many other cities, the government is trying to limit the usage of cars in the city centre. You maybe can imagine how much resistance a flat prohibition will create, how telling people they may not do something makes them dig in. So, I started thinking:
How can you change a city’s behaviour without banning anything? And where in our own lives could we get further by rearranging things rather than forbidding them?
And then I thought about a former Academy student who told me about Ghent, a city that changed how hundreds of thousands of people move without basically banning much at all. In April 2017, Ghent introduced a circulation plan for its centre. The mechanism was simple and quietly radical. The centre was divided into zones, and to drive from one zone to another by car you could no longer cut straight across the middle, you had to go out to the ring road and back, two or three times the distance. By bicycle or on foot, you could still go directly, exactly as before. Nothing was prohibited.
The car was not banned. Its route was simply made illogical.
The behaviour followed the new layout. Cycling in the centre rose substantially, from roughly 22 to 34 per cent of journeys, with a strong increase in and around the centre, while car traffic through the middle fell. The city did not persuade anyone onto a bike. It rearranged the situation, so the bike became the sensible choice and driving across the centre became the tedious one. The principle is the default, applied to a whole system, and the decisive feature is that Ghent did it without prohibition. And here’s a helpful lesson for us:
If nothing is banned, there is less to rebel against. A ban hands resistance a target, a freedom to defend, a principle to dig in on.
The solution is to remove that target entirely. This is Behavioural Design at work. Ghent did not change a single mind. It changed the layout, and the minds followed the road. So how do you change behaviour without provoking resistance? Here are three practical moves:
• Make the wanted behaviour the direct route. Whatever you want people to do, give it the shortest, smoothest path. The healthy option first on the menu, the shared drive as the default save location, the good process as the one-click one.
• Make the unwanted behaviour the long way round. Leave it fully allowed but add a detour. An extra confirmation, a request you must make, a setting you must change back. Friction, not a fence.
• Reach for redesign before prohibition. When you feel the urge to forbid something, ask first whether you could simply rearrange which option is easy. You keep people's freedom, and you avoid the backlash a ban reliably provokes.
Of course, it is fair to say this solution will not win everyone over. Some drivers will complain. But there is a big difference between talking and doing, and in the meantime they take the ring road anyway. I would just make that alternative a bit more attractive, that’s often a missing link in designing desired behaviour. Cheap drive-thru coffee stations along the route, maybe. Good coffee tends to put people in a better mood. It has to be good, though, or they will revolt over the bad coffee instead.
0,5 Minute on, Influence
The negativity bias: why one bad outweighs many good
I used to think it was a personal flaw that a single piece of critical feedback would drown out a dozen compliments. But it is not just me.
Negative events tend to carry far more psychological weight than positive ones of the same size, enough that one bad experience can outweigh a long run of good ones.
This is the negativity bias, one of the most robust findings in psychology. It makes evolutionary sense: The cost of missing a threat was higher than the cost of missing a reward. But it skews how we judge almost everything today.
Knowing this changes two things. First, in how you treat yourself: one critical comment is not the truth that outweighs all the praise. It just feels that way, because the wiring amplifies it. Second, in how you design experiences for others: a single bad moment can define the whole, so it is often worth more to remove the worst point than to add another good one. We do not average our experiences. We remember the worst bit, so attend to it first.
That being said: I think you are a great, smart, forward-thinking person for reading this newsletter. Take the f* compliment!
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
Sources:
City of Ghent, circulation plan (Circulatieplan, 2017). Short piece: Rozin, P., and Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296 to 320.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., and Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323