From Elections to Loyalty: Leveraging Cognitive Biases to Influence Behavior
Heather Arbiter
Product Manager | Gamification and Game Designer | Engagement, Retention & Behavior Design Specialist | MSc, CSPO | Check out my #FeatureFriday Newsletter | DMs open!
It's election season in the US! With it being a presidential election year (we have these every four years for you non-USians), there are even more political signs than usual. Seeing these signs and thinking about how sharing and seeing them influences voters always brings me to think about cognitive biases, in particular the bandwagon effect.
In this article, I introduce several nifty cognitive biases and how you might take advantage of them in product and marketing (or avoid being tricked by them!). I explain a few that influence voting decisions including the bandwagon effect and share a tale about how emotional responses influence decision-making and brand loyalty.
What is a cognitive bias?
A cognitive bias is a deviation in rationality following a known pattern. Most cognitive biases are confirmed by reproducible research. Cognitive biases impact decision-making and behavior modifying the reasoning process in predictable ways.
Some Interesting Biases to Know
Anchoring Bias
This is when one piece of information influences the perception of another. For example, finding a product to be a better deal after being presented with a more expensive one versus viewing it on its own. This has many uses but one obvious place to keep it in mind is presenting pricing and promotions to users.
Confirmation Bias
A tendency to search for, interpret, or focus on information that confirms already existing beliefs. If you have a hypothesis and seem to find evidence of it in the data you're looking at, this can blind you to other causes. For example, if you suspect that a problem with your app's onboarding funnel is caused by how one of the steps is worded, you might see there's drop-off data at that step in your funnel analysis and decide that it confirms your hypothesis. You might then stop looking even though the underlying cause is a technical issue at that step which is also seen in the data.
Rhyme-as-Reason Effect
A tendency to believe information is more true and easier to remember when expressed as a rhyme. A well-known example is "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit" used by Johnnie Cochran during the OJ Simpson trial. This bias is commonly used in marketing (How many of you know what brand of paper towels is the "quilted quicker picker upper"?). You can lean into this when naming products or creating marketing materials.
Authority Bias
A tendency to attribute greater accuracy to statements made by people in positions of authority regardless of the content of the statement. A good product manager keeps this in mind and doesn't blindly implement features on the whims of executives. They rely on real user data and testing and use that to help executives make the final call.
Endowment Effect
For this one I'm going to borrow language and examples from a timely post from Sparky Witte over at Live Neuron Labs :
The endowment effect is a bias whereby "people value things more highly when they feel those things belong to them.... A 2022 megastudy on encouraging vaccinations tested dozens of different message types, and the one framed around the endowment effect—reminding people that the vaccine was 'waiting for you'—came out on top." Sparky offers the suggestion for a healthcare behavior change: "Instead of saying, 'You don’t have to pay extra for a preventative health visit,' we reframe it to emphasize ownership: 'This visit is already included in your plan. Don’t let this benefit go to waste.' By framing preventive services as something that is already yours vs. an extra benefit to take advantage of, we can motivate people to take action." Thanks, Sparky!
Reminding users of features that they already have access to can increase both the usage and overall loyalty in your products because they value what they own.
Name Letter Effect
This is a tendency for people to prefer the letters of their name over others. One interesting way you might use this is to dynamically name virtual assistants or characters a name with the same first letter as the name of your user.
As the US Southeast recovers from devastating back-to-back hurricanes, it seems especially timely to share this fascinating fact related to the name letter effect: After a major hurricane, individuals who shared the same first initial as the name of the hurricane were over-represented among donors. (Chandler, Jesse, Tiffany M. Griffin, and Nicholas Sorensen. “In the ‘I’ of the Storm: Shared Initials Increase Disaster Donations.” Judgment and Decision Making 3, no. 5 (June 2008): 404–10. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500000425.)
Political Biases
Bandwagon Effect
The Bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias whereby people will adapt their thinking based on what others are doing around them.
Consider an undecided voter. They drive around their neighborhood and see many signs showing support for a particular candidate. When the time comes to vote, they have to decide. Among their considerations is the perceived popularity of that candidate now. This candidate must be a good choice if so many people support them.
One reason that this happens is because biases are often mental shortcuts. The brain speeds up its decision-making processes by factoring in such information. "Hopping on the bandwagon" becomes a method of reducing the cognitive effort required in carefully researching and analyzing a candidate. Popularity is thus mistaken for quality or correctness. Fomo (an emotion named for an acronym, Fear Of Missing Out) also plays a part as people look for ways to conform to group behavior and participate in the collective experience.
Simply speaking, you may be able to influence the election by putting up a political sign of your preferred candidate. Especially for local candidates or candidates running for positions not always aligned with parties, such as school boards.
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You can use the bandwagon effect in your products by looking for opportunities to showcase how many other users have purchased, won, or tried something:
On the other hand, many voters already know who they're voting for simply because of party alignment.
Ingroup and Outgroup Biases
Ingroup bias is a tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others perceived to be in their same group. This bias can strengthen solidarity around shared values and policy goals, which is the core purpose of political parties. However, it can also lead to a situation where individuals support their party more out of group loyalty than a thoughtful assessment of its policies or candidates. As a result, voters may overlook flaws or inconsistencies within their own party, while viewing opposing parties through a lens of heightened scrutiny or even hostility.
Contrastingly, there is an outgroup homogeneity bias which is a tendency to see individuals as members of other groups as being less diverse than they are. In US political discourse, it is common for the major right-wing party, the Republicans to refer to the other major party, the Democrats, as being "the left" even though the Democratic party is politically centrist.
Adding team goals, challenges, and even user communities to your game or product will feel some positive effects from these kinds of biases. You can also use this in your marketing strategies, for example, Apple famously ran ads positioning Mac users as more creative and unique compared to PC users.
Affective Heuristic and Politics
Heather Darling is the name of a candidate for Surrogate in my local elections. "A surrogate is a judicial officer, elected by the people, having jurisdiction over the probate of wills, the administration of estates, and more." The surrogate is a very minor office and one that has little to no impact on me. So it's a great example of when one might combine that bandwagon effect with the in-group bias and just vote for the candidate that's of my political party.
Even though Heather Darling is not running under a party that I would normally vote for, I still find myself vaguely rooting for her because "Heather Darling" is a nickname my Grandmother gave me when I was young. (She'd say, "Hello Heather Darling" and I'd reply "Hello, Grandma Darling." This bias affected by my emotional state is an affective heuristic. My feelings about Heather Darling are being impacted by my emotions associated with the memory of my grandma. In this case, the affect (emotion) is positive.
Incidentally, this year, Heather Darling is running against John Holly over in a party I'm slightly more partial to, and thanks to the name letter effect, he's able to counter some of my bias towards Heather Darling'.
My name and my relationship with my grandma have no rational impact on who will make a good Surrogate in my county but they still impact my thought processes on the subject. This is prime cognitive biasing in effect influenced by my emotional connection to the name.
Affect and Loyalty
Affect is the experience of feeling or displaying emotion. It is also one of my "A's of Loyalty," a framework I devised to communicate about loyalty to clients. (Audience, Availability, Awareness, Action, Affect, and Aversion). The affect a consumer feels about a product or brand is one aspect of what drives loyalty. It's not enough for loyalty programs to give rewards, points, and perks. One has to drive a positive emotional response.
One of my favorite examples of how a brand uses this is DoubleTree Hotels. When guests check in, they are greeted with a warm chocolate chip cookie. The guest associates the DoubleTree experience with that cozy, warm, tasty treat making it more likely that guests will return in the future. The experience is linked to the brand and through affective heuristics it influences purchasing decisions when planning trips.
Affective loyalty influences purchasing and usage but it is often measured through Net Promoter Score as opposed to sales or engagement which better represent behavioral loyalty.
Conclusion
Cognitive biases affect the way humans make decisions and form attachments to things. By understanding them you can limit their impact on your own processes while taking advantage of them to nudge the behavior of your users.
If you're in the US, don't forget to vote on November 5th!
No contents of this article should be taken as an endorsement of any political candidates or parties.
Heather Arbiter is a Product Manager and Gamification/Game Designer with training and fascination with behavioral science. She studied loyalty to help advise clients such as Marriott and Verizon on their loyalty programs while working with Andrew Zimmermann presently of Behavior Design Collective who was a valuable sounding board in developing the loyalty framework.
FeatureFriday is a biweekly newsletter about the intersection of product, gamification, and behavior written with a personal touch. This is the 28th edition of the newsletter.