As I mentioned in the description
of the 4D Behavior model the Environment influences significantly human behavior. In this post, I would
like to address the role of the Physical Environment in determining behavior.
Let me start with an example. If
you have ever went to an Ikea store you were heavily influenced by how the shop
is arranged. Much of your behavior in an Ikea store is determined by the
designer of the shop and not by your own will. Take a look at the picture
below:
The store is designed in such a
way that you will not miss any section of it and you will be exposed to most of
Ikea’s products.
However, this is not entire goal
of the design. Yes, you are much more likely to buy something if you see it as
compared to not seeing it. Yes, you will find for sure a certain piece of
furniture (if you can call Ikea stuff furniture) that you are looking for in a
shop in which you don’t miss anything. But
the design of the Ikea shop will do something more than just expose you to all
pieces of furniture they have for sale. It will exhaust you. If to the
complex journey in an Ikea store you add the congestion and hundreds of screaming children typical for a
week-end day, your brain will be under assault.
After you finish the “tour” on the upper floor, you will end up in the “accessories”
hall downstairs.
Here you will find a lot a nice,
cute stuff that is not particularly expensive in absolute value, although I
believe that these are in fact the products with the highest margin. After your
trip through the top floor maze invaded by screaming children, you are “ego-depleted” and most likely you will make purchases
out of impulse without giving too much thought. The result will be that you’ll
get home with at least a bag full of stuff that is extremely cute but more or
less useless.
But, before getting home, there
is a considerable chance that you will stop at the “fashionable” Ikea
restaurant (if you can call it a restaurant) and get something to eat since you
are tired, hungry and you have to drive home for at least 20 minutes.
This is only one example on how the
physical environment strongly influences our behavior. Shop design is in itself
almost a science. All (modern) stores
are designed so that people who enter them will have a “lighter” wallet when
they leave them. At the same time the physical environment influences behavior
in many other contexts apart from shopping. Let me give you some more examples.
In the years when I was
organizing trainings and conferences I have noticed a big difference in the level of interaction both among participants
and with the lecturer depending on how the room was arranged.
When the room was arranged as a “theater” or as a “classroom” (see
pictures below) the level of interactivity
was extremely low.
Theater arrangement:
Classroom arrangement:
When the room was arranged in a “U-shape”, however, the interaction
boosted and reached levels so high that sometimes I (as a lecturer) found it
hard to keep under control.
U-shape arrangement:
I don’t have a full proof
scientific explanation for this effect, but I can make some assumptions. In a
classroom or theater arrangement people do not see each-other face-to-face. The
back of the head and the side of the face are all that one sees when a room is arranged
in these manners. At the same time, when a room is arranged in a “U-shape” a
lot of people can make eye contact. Now,
several things may happen: First, people can communicate non-verbally (face and
body expression) and this may lead to more (verbal) interaction; Second, people
are seen by others and may feel social pressure to engage in discussions;
Third, the level of anonymity is severely diminished. Whereas in a theater or
classroom arrangement one can “hide” in the crowd and stay anonymous, in a
U-shape arrangement there can be very little anonymity.
My best guess is that all these
three effect co-occur and interact. What is most important is that the way in which people behave in a
conference room is highly influenced by how that room is arranged. I have
to agree that there many more factors apart from how the furniture is arranged that
influence behavior in a room. One such example is the presence of natural
light, but I will not go further with the example since this is not an “event
organizing course”.
Another example of how the physical environment influences
behavior is traffic. I guess most people who are drivers have encountered “speed
bumps” and chicanes meant to make drivers slow down. There are many ways in
which to influence how people drive and the city of Rotterdam (in which I live)
is a fabulous example of traffic management or better yet, traffic nudging.
The speed bumps and chicanes are created with a clear intent, namely to
make people slow down. At the same time, I have observed a feature that is
fully unintentional and makes people drive faster.
Did you ever drive on a motorway
made out of concrete and not asphalt? The concrete motorways are quite distinct
when it comes to driving experience. They produce a certain vibration in the
car while driving on them. Of course not all concrete motorways are identical
and they produce different vibrations, but I have a clear memory of driving on
such a road in the Czech Republic.
Coming from Slovakia into the
Czech Republic most of the way to Prague is on a concrete motorway. The legal
speed limit on the motorway in the Czech Republic is 130 Km/hour. When driving
on that motorway I’ve realized that I was driving very close (and sometimes
slightly above) this speed limit. I usually don’t do that, especially because
our car is not exactly a “speeder”; usually I drive around 110-120 km/hour.
The reason why I was driving faster
on the way to Prague was the nasty vibration produced by the concrete motorway.
When I was driving in between my normal speed interval (110-120 km/hour) the
noise and the vibration in the car were very annoying, but at 130km/hour both
the vibration and the noise were bearable.
My guess is that the Czech
authorities did not intent to make people drive faster on their motorways (although
in some central and eastern European countries the traffic police looks for any
opportunity to give fines for speeding). I believe that the motorway made out of large concrete
uneven tiles was either a cheap solution or a heritage from communist times when
little attention was given to the “user friendly” factor. At the same time, the
effect still exists and if there is an intention to increase traffic safety, it
would be a good idea to change the surface of the motorway to asphalt.
Another environmental source of influence is the exposure to scent. There
is something very interesting about scent processing in the brain, namely that the sense of smell has the shortest route
to the area of the brain that processes emotions and (long term) memory. By
the “shortest route” I refer to the number of synapses that the information
from the sensors has to go through towards its destination. At the same time
smell is the sense that adapts the fastest in the sense that we can perceive a scent
only for a short period of time; after this interval we will not perceive the
smell even if the source of it still exists.
One of the most widely known influences of scent on behavior is in fact
a “professional secret” of bakers. All bakeries either have a door opened or somehow
allow the smell of freshly baked bread to get out on the street. This “professional
secret” works better (for small bakeries) than any marketing arsenal. Simply
smelling freshly baked bread (or croissants) makes you feel a sudden need for
bread or pastry.
Apart from this “professional
secret” of bakers, scent has other influences on behavior. For example in a
study by Holland, R. W., Hendriks, M. and Aarts, H. (2005) the three Dutch
researchers found an effect of smell on how people behaved with regard to
cleanness. Half of the participants were exposed to a “cleaning product like”
smell, while the others were exposed to no smell. The people who were exposed
to the smell cleaned up biscuit crumbs (resulted from eating biscuits) more
than the people who were not exposed to the “cleaning product like” smell.
Cleaning biscuit crumbs might
sound trivial, but if the effect holds, then it would be a good idea to use
some “scent manipulation” in high traffic public spaces that need to kept clean
such as cafeterias and public toilets.
One influence of the physical environment that I have discussed in a previous
post is related to the evaluation of volume.
The main idea is that we don’t perceive volume in three
dimensions, but rather in one dimension, namely the height. This has
influences in how we judge containers and on hour drinking behavior. Similarly,
the shape of a container influences drinking behavior. The one-dimensional
perception of volume does not only influence judgment and behavior, it actually
influences how satiated we feel.
Related to the perception of
volume and drinking is our perception about food. The behavior (eating) and the feeling of satiety are influenced by the
size of the plate from which we eat. If the same quantity of food is placed
on a small plate people will eat less and feel more satiated as compared to
placing the same food on a larger plate. So if
you are on a diet, eat from small plates. The rationale is that we perceive quantity in relationship with a
reference and in the case of food the plate is the reference.
Another environmental influence on behavior comes from (background) music.
A series of studies by Adrian North (and colleagues) have shown that the
presence or absence of background music influences choice and behavior.
Moreover, the type of music is in the background plays a role in choice and
behavior.
In one study (NORTH A. C., HARGREAVES
D. J., MCKENDRICK J. (1999)), the
influence of background music on wine purchasing behavior was investigated.
The study concluded that when
French music was playing in a supermarket the purchase ratio between French and
German wines was 5:1. In other words when French music was playing the clients
of the supermarket bought French wines five times more than they did German
wines. When German music was playing in the background, the ratio of purchase
between French and German was 2:1. In other words, when German music was
playing the clients of the supermarket bought French wines (only) twice as
often as they did German ones.
In a different study, Charles S.
Areni and David Kim (1993) found that playing classical music (as opposed to Top-Forty
music) in a wine store lead to an increase in sales but not in volume. The
authors conclude that people when classical music was playing people went for
more sophisticated (and subsequently expensive) wines.
One thing should be mentioned
here. These influences work very well
when an individual experiences ambiguity. In other words, if you would
clearly prefer a wine from New Zeeland the effect of German or French music
will be virtually zero. At the same time many of the situations in which we
have to make choices are somehow ambiguous. Wine purchasing is one example, but
there are many more such as buying presents for people whose preferences you
don’t really know.
Another important thing concerning the influences of music and other
environmental influences is the issue of congruity or in simpler words the
issue of matching. One study by Guéguen N. and Jacob, C., (2010) the
authors concluded that playing romantic music in a flower shop had an influence
on sales, but playing pop music did not (compared to playing no music). The
main idea here is that there is a match (congruency) between romance and
flowers.
Similarly for the French versus
German Music influencing wine purchases. Both France and Germany are easily associated
with wine… though Germany has a stronger association with beer. I am not fully
convinced that playing Russian music would have an effect on the sales of
Russian wine; though it could have an effect on sales of Russian vodka.
In a similar line of thinking,
the use of smells has to take into account the congruency between concepts. For
example, even if the owners of a bakery would like to stimulate their customers
to keep the shop floor cleaner, I think it is not the best idea to make the
bakery smell like a cleaning product.
Before ending this post, I would
like to make a warm recommendation. A few months ago I’ve stumbled upon this
website http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/. This gentleman has a very nice collection of example on how to influence
behavior through design. Check out the design with intent toolkit (right hand
side of the page).
References:
Areni, C. S. and Kim, D. (1993)
,"The Influence of Background Music on Shopping Behavior: Classical Versus
Top-Forty Music in A Wine Store", in Advances in Consumer Research Volume
20, eds. Leigh McAlister and Michael L. Rothschild, Advances in Consumer
Research Volume 20 : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 336-340.
Guéguen N. and Jacob, C., (2010)
Music Congruency and Consumer Behaviour: An Experimental Field Study
International Bulletin of Business Administration Issue 9 p.56-63
Holland, R. W., Hendriks, M. and
Aarts, H. (2005) Smells like clean spirit. Nonconscious effects of scent on
cognition and behavior Psychology Science
16(9):689-93.
NORTH A. C., HARGREAVES D. J., MCKENDRICK
J. (1999) The influence of in-store music on wine selections Journal
of applied psychology vol. 84, no2, pp. 271-276
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