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This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.
What is behavioural science?
We have looked at rhetorical techniques to persuade people. However, in the past century and a half, there have been a lot more insights into how people like to intuit things, that come up in behavioural psychology. An underlying idea is that it’s tiring trying to think everything out very logically. (One reason I haven’t worked full time as an assessor is because I’ve always wanted to have a completely clear, defensible, fair, logical reason for all my decisions and it’s extremely hard work!) People inevitably introduce short cuts, therefore – especially when they are making quick, more complex decisions in less familiar circumstances. (If you’re very experienced, though, your easy, intuitive thoughts can contain a lot of quality, just as a chess master spots excellent moves without even consciously thinking about it.)
Robert Cialdini, one of the leading experts, would give seven overarching themes:
- People defer to experts
- People follow the lead of others whom they see as like themselves
- People want more of what there’s less of
- People’s decisions follow from the state of mind they are in just before they decide
- People like those who like them
- People reciprocate
- People like to align their behaviour with their clear past commitments
That’s not to say this is a completely unconscious process (leaving people ripe for manipulation, if you were so inclined!) Rather, it’s often about going with preferred behaviours.
A lot of people in the behavioural psychology field (not Cialdini, so much) would say that intuition is unpredictable and you shouldn’t just apply it if you can’t test it – which of course, we usually cannot. As such, I’d say it’s a potentially useful way of checking what experts in our field and common practice might suggest, rather than a reliable source of many great new insights.
As with emotion, these issues don’t apply when you are making a familiar, simple decisions. They are considerations more when people are doing something new, something complex, especially when they’re busy.
