Have you used your FitBit or Garmin to compare your steps last week to a friend’s? Increasingly, we have the means, and it seems the intent, to unlock our innate competitiveness and/or meet our desire for social approval.

The ubiquity of wearables is a recent phenomenon, but the insight into our desire for peer comparison has been around for a while. From the re-use of hotel towels, to the reduction in electricity usage, and to the greater compliance in hand hygiene, these real-world experiments offer convincing evidence.

Hotel towels.

Hotels have tried for years to encourage guests to reuse towels by using signs that draw our attention to saving the environment. An experiment that simply changed a few words on the standard sign to show guests that most of their fellow guests had reused their towels were 26% more likely than those who saw the basic environmental protection message to recycle their towels.

Electricity usage.

When utility customers are told how much energy their neighbours use, those who are consuming more than average tend to cut their consumption. Those below average usage did not increase their consumption. The study found that usage declined by 1.2 to 2.1%, and the savings were sustained for periods of many months [2]. The study showed that knowing that your neighbour uses less than you appears to be a stronger motivator than environmental concerns, or even the promise of money saved [3].

Hand washing.

In a Massachusetts hospital, a video camera was installed to view whether medical staff were washing their hands before attending to patients. Over an initial 16-week period, the video system was used to establish a baseline snapshot of hand hygiene compliance, which was measured at a very low rate of approximately 10%, without providing any feedback to medical staff. Then an electronic board was installed and medical staff were given real-time feedback on their performance (whether they washed their hands or not), along with the percentage of people on that shift who had washed their hands, and the weekly cumulative statistics. Within weeks of providing real-time feedback, the hand hygiene rate increased to more than 80% and reached a sustained rate of 90% during the next 17 months. [4]

How can this insight be applied? The recommendations below are from [5]:

1. Identify what behaviour you want to change.

2. Identify where you can best intervene.

3. Select the data to socialize, with due caution to data privacy.

4. Make the data actionable.

This topic has resonance for me right now for two reasons.

I have a client that is looking to drive up productivity at their depots. A consideration is peer comparison of productivity so that depot managers can see how they are doing relative to other depot managers. My hypothesis is that this will trigger innate competitiveness of the depot managers leading to improved productivity.

Secondly, Cape Town, where I live, is currently experiencing a severe drought. While the authorities are publicly displaying the ever-lowering dam levels, it seems that there is an opportunity, like the electricity example above, to show residents their neighbours’ usage to encourage them to be more frugal with their water usage.

References:

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/yes/200808/changing-minds-and-changing-towels

[2] http://www.nber.org/digest/feb10/w15386.html

[3] http://e360.yale.edu/features/how_data_and_social_pressure_can_reduce_home_energy_use

[4] http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/articles/2015/02/remote-video-auditing-with-feedback-boosts-compliance-infection-prevention.aspx

[5] https://hbr.org/2014/05/the-persuasive-pressure-of-peer-rankings