Improving behaviour

An easy way to improve behaviour

You’ve finished your shopping and are returning to your car to go home. You come to a gate back into the car park and find it temporarily fenced off, but with just enough of a gap for you to just squeeze through. There’s a sign directing you not to use this entrance and to use one about 200 yards away. You don’t see any real reason for not using the gate except the sign warns you not to. What do you do?

Interestingly there’s another sign instructing people not to chain their bikes to the fencing.

Hidden from sight watchers were there to see whether people obeyed the instruction to go around to the other entrance. The experimenters only changed one thing – for half the time there were four bikes left leaning on the fence, for the other half the bikes were actually chained to the fence.

The results are startling. When the bicycles were simply positioned next to the fence, 27% used the gate and stepped through the gap in violation of the sign. However, when the four bikes were locked to the fence in violation of the other sign, 82% of the participants stepped through the gap! This demonstrates that people are much more ready to break rules when there is evidence of other unconnected rules being broken.

Another experiment showed similar results; where people behaved in a much less honourable and ethical way when there was rubbish on the floor compared to a tidy environment.

This is another example of what Robert Cialdini calls ‘social proof’ - where people are much more likely to do something when they see other people doing it. And the implications are huge. When the authorities wanted to reduce crime in New York they famously mended the broken windows and removed the graffiti. Almost overnight the crime rate went down. What about your environment? Could it be that small and unimportant rules being seen to be broken are causing a ripple effect into things that do matter? Maybe this could be the answer to people not attending scheduled meetings or training events, or low-level bullying, or turning up late, or bad attitudes etc. Schools have long known the impact of maintaining a strict uniform has on behaviour.

Call to action:

Look around and decide where you are being lenient on agreed rules. Areas to consider include:

* Scruffy displays/posters/notices
* Agreed dress code
* Tidiness of staff areas (kitchen, toilets, etc)
* Your own appearance! (Sorry – thought it might be worth mentioning)
* Timekeeping
* What about a tidy computer desktop (especially when projecting)?

Now decide how important each of these rules are, and either scrap them, or very publicly enforce them. Choose the right ‘rules’ and apart from a nicer place to work you may just find that seemingly unassociated issues just fade away!