TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	May 03, 2018
Event	TEDxCambridge
Duration (min:sec)	12:09
Video Type	TEDx Talk
Words per minute	186.46 fast
Readability (FK)	55.61 medium
Speaker	Erez Yoeli


1	00:13	How can we get people to do more good,
2	00:16	to go to the polls, give to charity, conserve resources,
3	00:20	or even to do something as simple as washing their mugs at work
4	00:24	so that the sink isn't always full of dirty dishes?
5	00:26	(Laughter)
6	00:28	(Applause)
7	00:33	When I first started working on this problem,
8	00:35	I collaborated with a power company
9	00:37	to recruit customers for a program that prevents blackouts
10	00:40	by reducing energy demand during peaks.
11	00:43	The program is based on a tried-and-true technology.
12	00:46	It's one the Obama administration even called
13	00:48	"the cornerstone to modernizing America's electrical grid."
14	00:52	But, like so many great technological solutions,
15	00:56	it has a key weakness:
16	00:59	people.
17	01:01	People need to sign up.
18	01:04	To try to get people to sign up, the power company sent them a nice letter,
19	01:07	told them about all the program's benefits,
20	01:09	and it asked them to call into a hotline if they were interested.
21	01:12	Those letters went out,
22	01:14	but the phones, they were silent.
23	01:18	So when we got involved, we suggested one small change.
24	01:21	Instead of that hotline,
25	01:23	we suggested that they use sign-up sheets that they'd post near the mailboxes
26	01:27	in people's buildings.
27	01:30	This tripled participation.
28	01:35	Why?
29	01:37	Well, we all know people care deeply about what others think of them,
30	01:41	that we try to be seen as generous and kind,
31	01:44	and we try to avoid being seen as selfish or a mooch.
32	01:48	Whether we are aware of it or not, this is a big part of why people do good,
33	01:52	and so small changes that give people more credit for doing good,
34	01:57	those changes can make a really big difference.
35	02:00	Small changes like switching from a hotline,
36	02:03	where nobody will ever find out about your good deed,
37	02:06	to a sign-up sheet
38	02:07	where anyone who walks by can see your name.
39	02:12	In our collaborations with governments, nonprofits, companies,
40	02:15	when we're trying to get people to do more good,
41	02:18	we harness the power of reputations.
42	02:22	And we have a simple checklist for this.
43	02:24	And in fact, you already know the first item on that checklist.
44	02:28	It's to increase observability,
45	02:31	to make sure people find out about good deeds.
46	02:35	Now, wait a minute, I know some of you are probably thinking,
47	02:38	there's no way people here thought,
48	02:40	"Oh, well, now that I'm getting credit for my good deed,
49	02:42	now it's totally worth it."
50	02:44	And you're right.
51	02:45	Usually, people don't.
52	02:47	Rather, when they're making decisions in private,
53	02:50	they worry about their own problems,
54	02:52	about what to put on the table for dinner or how to pay their bills on time.
55	02:56	But, when we make their decision more observable,
56	02:59	they start to attend more to the opportunity to do good.
57	03:03	In other words, what's so powerful about our approach
58	03:06	is that it could turn on people's existing desire to do good,
59	03:11	in this case, to help to prevent a blackout.
60	03:15	Back to observability.
61	03:16	I want to give you another example.
62	03:18	This one is from a collaboration
63	03:20	with a nonprofit that gets out the vote,
64	03:22	and it does this by sending hundreds of thousands of letters every election
65	03:26	in order to remind people and try to motivate them to go to the polls.
66	03:30	We suggested adding the following sentence:
67	03:34	"Someone may call you to find out about your experience at the polls."
68	03:38	This sentence makes it feel more observable when you go to the polls,
69	03:43	and it increased the effect of the letter by 50 percent.
70	03:48	Making the letter more effective reduced the cost of getting an additional vote
71	03:52	from 70 dollars down to about 40 dollars.
72	03:55	Observability has been used to do things
73	03:57	like get people to donate blood more frequently
74	03:59	by listing the names of donors on local newsletters,
75	04:02	or to pay their taxes on time
76	04:05	by listing the names of delinquents on a public website.
77	04:08	(Laughter)
78	04:12	What about this example?
79	04:14	Toyota got hundreds of thousands of people to buy a more fuel-efficient car
80	04:18	by making the Prius so unique ...
81	04:22	(Laughter)
82	04:24	that their good deed was observable from a mile away.
83	04:28	(Laughter)
84	04:30	Alright, so observability is great,
85	04:33	but we all know, we've all seen
86	04:36	people walk by an opportunity to do good.
87	04:40	They'll see somebody asking for money on the sidewalk
88	04:43	and they'll pull out their phones and look really busy,
89	04:46	or they'll go to the museum and they'll waltz right on by the donation box.
90	04:50	Imagine it's the holiday season
91	04:52	and you're going to the supermarket, and there's a Salvation Army volunteer,
92	04:56	and he's ringing his bell.
93	04:57	A few years ago, researchers in San Diego
94	04:59	teamed up with a local chapter from the Salvation Army
95	05:02	to try to find ways to increase donations.
96	05:06	What they found was kind of funny.
97	05:08	When the volunteer stood in front of just one door,
98	05:12	people would avoid giving by going out the other door.
99	05:16	Why?
100	05:19	Well, because they can always claim, "Oh, I didn't see the volunteer,"
101	05:22	or, "I wanted to get something from over there,"
102	05:25	or, "That's where my car is."
103	05:27	In other words, there's lots of excuses.
104	05:30	And that brings us to the second item on our checklist:
105	05:33	to eliminate excuses.
106	05:36	In the case of the Salvation Army,
107	05:38	eliminating excuses just means standing in front of both doors,
108	05:41	and sure enough, when they did this,
109	05:43	donations rose.
110	05:47	But that's when things got kind of funny,
111	05:49	even funnier.
112	05:51	The researchers were out in the parking lot,
113	05:54	and they were counting people as they came in and out of the store,
114	05:57	and they noticed that when the volunteers stood in front of both doors,
115	06:01	people stopped coming out of the store at all.
116	06:03	(Laughter)
117	06:06	Obviously, they were surprised by this, so they decided to look into it further,
118	06:11	and that's when they found that there was actually a third, smaller utility door
119	06:16	usually used to take out the recycling --
120	06:18	(Laughter)
121	06:19	and now people were going out that door in order to avoid the volunteers.
122	06:23	(Laughter)
123	06:26	This teaches us an important lesson though.
124	06:30	When we're trying to eliminate excuses, we need to be very thorough,
125	06:34	because people are really creative in making them.
126	06:36	(Laughter)
127	06:41	Alright, I want to switch to a setting
128	06:43	where excuses can have deadly consequences.
129	06:48	What if I told you that the world's deadliest infectious disease has a cure,
130	06:52	in fact, that it's had one for 70 years,
131	06:55	a good one, one that works almost every time?
132	06:59	It's incredible, but it's true.
133	07:02	The disease is tuberculosis.
134	07:04	It infects some 10 million people a year,
135	07:06	and it kills almost two million of them.
136	07:09	Like the blackout prevention program, we've got the solution.
137	07:13	The problem is people.
138	07:16	People need to take their medication
139	07:17	so that they're cured,
140	07:19	and so that they don't get other people sick.
141	07:23	For a few years now, we've been collaborating
142	07:25	with a mobile health startup called Keheala
143	07:28	to support TB patients as they undergo treatment.
144	07:31	Now, you have to understand, TB treatment, it's really tough.
145	07:34	We're talking about taking a really strong antibiotic
146	07:37	every single day for six months or more.
147	07:39	That antibiotic is so strong that it will make you feel sick.
148	07:42	It will make you feel nauseous and dizzy.
149	07:44	It will make your pee turn funny colors.
150	07:46	It's also a problem because you have to go back to the clinic
151	07:49	about every week in order to get more pills,
152	07:52	and in sub-Saharan Africa or other places where TB is common,
153	07:55	now you're talking about going someplace pretty far,
154	07:58	taking tough and slow public transport,
155	08:01	maybe the clinic is inefficient.
156	08:03	So now you're talking about taking a half day off of work every week
157	08:06	from a job you desperately can't afford to lose.
158	08:09	It's even worse when you consider the fact that there's a terrible stigma,
159	08:13	and you desperately don't want people to find that you have the disease.
160	08:16	Some of the toughest stories we hear are actually from women
161	08:19	who, in these places where domestic violence can be kind of common,
162	08:23	they tell us that they have to hide it from their husbands
163	08:26	that they're coming to the clinic.
164	08:29	So it's no surprise that people don't complete treatment.
165	08:33	Can our approach really help them?
166	08:36	Can we really get them to stick it out?
167	08:40	Yeah.
168	08:42	Every day, we text patients to remind them to take their medication,
169	08:46	but if we stopped there,
170	08:47	there'd be lots of excuses.
171	08:49	"Well, I didn't see the text."
172	08:51	Or, "You know, I saw the text, but then I totally forgot,
173	08:54	put the phone down and I just forgot about it."
174	08:56	Or, "I lent the phone out to my mom."
175	08:59	We have to eliminate these excuses
176	09:01	and we do that by asking patients
177	09:03	to log in and verify that they've taken their medication.
178	09:07	If they don't log in, we text them again.
179	09:09	If they don't log in, we text them yet again.
180	09:12	If, after three times, they still haven't verified,
181	09:16	we notify a team of supporters
182	09:17	and that team will call and text them
183	09:20	to try to get them back on the wagon.
184	09:22	No excuses.
185	09:25	Our approach, which, admittedly, uses all sorts of behavioral techniques,
186	09:29	including, as you've probably noticed, observability,
187	09:32	it was very effective.
188	09:34	Patients without access to our platform
189	09:37	were three times more likely not to complete treatment.
190	09:43	Alright,
191	09:44	you've increased observability,
192	09:46	you've eliminated excuses,
193	09:48	but there's still a third thing you need to be aware of.
194	09:52	If you've been to Washington, DC or Japan or London,
195	09:56	you know that metro riders there
196	09:57	will be very careful to stand on the right-hand side of the escalator
197	10:01	so that people can go by on the left.
198	10:04	But unfortunately, not everywhere is that the norm,
199	10:06	and there's plenty of places where you can just stand on both sides
200	10:09	and block the escalator.
201	10:11	Obviously, it's better for others
202	10:12	when we stand on the right and let them go by,
203	10:15	but we're only expected to do that some places.
204	10:18	This is a general phenomenon.
205	10:20	Sometimes we're expected to do good
206	10:22	and sometimes not,
207	10:24	and it means that people are really sensitive to cues
208	10:27	that they're expected to do good in a particular situation,
209	10:31	which brings us to the third and final item on our checklist:
210	10:35	to communicate expectations,
211	10:37	to tell people,
212	10:38	"Do the good deed right now."
213	10:42	Here's a simple way to communicate expectations;
214	10:44	simply tell them, "Hey, everybody else is doing the good deed."
215	10:48	The company Opower sends people in their electricity bill
216	10:52	a small insert that compares their energy consumption
217	10:55	with that of people with similarly sized homes.
218	10:59	And when people find out that their neighbors are using less electricity,
219	11:02	they start to consume less.
220	11:04	That same approach, it's been used to get people to vote or give to charity
221	11:08	or even reuse their towels in hotels.
222	11:12	What about this one?
223	11:14	Here's another way to communicate expectations;
224	11:16	simply do it by saying, "Do the good deed" just at the right time.
225	11:23	What about this one?
226	11:26	This ticker reframes
227	11:28	the kind of mundane task of turning off the lights
228	11:31	and turns it instead into an environmental contribution.
229	11:36	The bottom line is, lots of different ways to do this,
230	11:39	lots of ways to communicate expectations.
231	11:41	Just don't forget to do it.
232	11:43	And that's it.
233	11:44	That's our checklist.
234	11:48	Many of you are working on problems with important social consequences,
235	11:52	and sometimes you might need to motivate people to do more good.
236	11:57	The tools you learned today can help you with this.
237	12:00	And these tools, they don't require that you raise additional funds
238	12:03	or that you develop any more fancy technologies.
239	12:06	They just require harnessing reputations
240	12:09	by increasing observability, eliminating excuses
241	12:12	and communicating expectations.
242	12:16	Thank you.
243	12:17	(Applause)

Erez Yoeli: How to motivate people to do good for others