We wanted to help businesses understand how to apply behavioural science into their organisations and make it more mainstream.
Ripple is full of real examples of how small behaviour changes can have wide-reaching effects in the real world and taps into the process of the evolution of behavioural science.
As behavioural science has slowly seeped into our collective consciousness, there have been three major stepping stones. The first, an epic stride, was the acknowledgement from academics that humans, contrary to the long-held assumption of economists, do not always behave rationally. Work from the godfathers of behavioural science during the 1970s to the 2000s – Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely and Robert Cialdini – revealed hundreds of our brains’ systematic biases and decision-making shortcuts.
The second stepping stone was the concept of applying behavioural science in the real world, which was popularised by Thaler and Sunstein in their 2008 book, Nudge. This inspired politicians from both the US and the UK to probe whether these decision-making shortcuts and biases could be used to help the general public make better decisions for themselves. We all want to save money in our pensions, for example, but we would rather have the instant gratification of a higher pay check than the delayed benefit of a comfortable retirement. Politicians realised that they could take advantage of the fact that our brains prefer to go with the flow of the default option and so implemented automatic enrolment into workplace pensions. Not only does this nudge help citizens to reach their savings goals, but it also helps governments, whose weighty burden of catering for an ageing population is lessened.
These were the first two great leaps in the evolution of behavioural science. But we’ve barely made it across to the third stepping stone – the widespread application of the wonderful and varied learnings from behavioural science to the real world. Up until now, we’ve uncovered plenty of problems and potential behavioural solutions, but with no roadmap for actually bringing these solutions to life. We’ve lacked a practical toolkit for the messy process of applying behavioural science in the real world; particularly in the world of business. In short, we wrote Ripple to answer those who are thinking “What next after Nudge?” and for those who were wondering “How on earth do I start to apply behavioural science in the private sector?”
That’s what Ripple does. It gives you case studies to illustrate the many opportunities and pitfalls of applied behavioural science, and it gives you the practical toolkit to actually get behavioural science projects off the ground. You will learn how to apply and embed behavioural science in your business, and you will be inspired to make the world around you work better for human brains.
Here is a short video on why we felt the time was right for Ripple.
Why we wrote Ripple in the way we did.
In this second short video, we share why we've purposely designed the book to make it easy to read and understand - critically employing the behavioural design principles to reduce cognitive overload, make information salient and using simple and therefore more trustworthy language.
