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How The AA is Using Behavioural Psychology to Win Over Customers
How do you make people feel more positive about their local train service?
You could make the trains faster and more frequent…logical but expensive!
Alternatively, you could simply let people know exactly how many minutes it will be until their train arrives…surely it’s not that simple?
If you follow the work of the charmingly wonderful Rory Sutherland you probably already know the answer.
It is indeed that simple!
As Rory would say, people prefer to wait for 9 minutes knowing that a train will in fact arrive over waiting for two minutes without knowing if the train will arrive. (highly paraphrased)
This is all down to uncertainty, or to be more precise, how humans hate uncertainty!
Not knowing the time that your train will arrive fuels fear. It makes you wonder if you will be late and your brain starts to go off on a tangent.. ”if I’m late maybe I will be fired, and if I’m fired then I will look like a failure, logically then my partner will leave me!”
Steady on…
Fear of the unknown is an evolutionary saving grace, we aren’t meant to like the unknown because the unknown is full of potential dangers! So avoid things you don’t know…
