How can behavioural science and psychology be leveraged to drive meaningful change around climate action? What unintended consequences might arise from heavy-handed government mandates versus more subtle interventions? And in the face of the climate crisis, is it ethical to actively promote the use of fossil fuels?
This week on Cleaning Up, Michael welcomes Ogilvy UK Vice-chair Rory Sutherland to explore the role of psychology and behavioural science in tackling the climate challenge. Rather than relying solely on policy, regulations, and technological solutions, Sutherland argues that understanding human decision-making and tapping into our innate psychological drivers could be key to catalyzing widespread behaviour change.
From the power of "satisficing" and "psycho-physics" to the importance of signaling and subconscious hacking, Sutherland delves into the hidden forces that shape our environmental choices - both for better and for worse. The conversation also grapples with the ethical quandary of whether actively promoting fossil fuels is justifiable, even as a "messy intermediate phase" in the transition to clean energy. This episode challenges viewers to think beyond the conventional approaches to climate action and consider how a deeper understanding of human psychology could unlock more effective, and even counterintuitive, solutions.
For those interested in data on which advertising groups continue to work with fossil fuel companies, please see: https://cleancreatives.org/f-list. Asked about WPP (Ogilvy’s Parent Company) and Ogilvy’s inclusion on the F-list, WPP commented: "WPP and Ogilvy have not commented publicly on the accuracy or validity of the F-List’s research. However, several of the contracts named on the F-List are wrongly attributed to Ogilvy. They are in fact relationships with an entirely different agency, OGR, formerly known as Ogilvy Government Relations. Other than ownership by WPP, OGR has had no connection to Ogilvy since 2011 and they rebranded last year to avoid historical confusion."
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Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.
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Michael Leibreich
The question is, at this point, with our scientific knowledge today, is promoting fossil fuels acceptable?
Rory Sutherland
Personally, I don't believe in this refusal to engage. Okay, what you do is an ethical question. The fact that you engage with someone in conversation is not. Do you genuinely think that there's a way to get to this point that you aspire to without going through a kind of messy intermediate phase.
ML
When you say messy intermediate phase, I don't remotely disagree with that. We are going to have, and there's going to be gas and oil and coal and so on used for decades. That's not the issue. The issue is whether we should be actively promoting it.
ML
Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. One of the great challenges of climate action is getting people to change their behaviour. We've surely reached the point where most people understand what they would need to do to reduce their carbon footprint. They would need to change their vehicle perhaps for an electric vehicle, upgrade to electric heating, maybe a heat pump in their home, fly less, eat less meat and so on. And yet they don't do it. My guest today is an expert in how to change human behaviour, how to sell them different services and different products. Rory Sutherland is Vice Chair of Ogilvy UK, the advertising agency, and he's the founder of their Behavioral Science Unit. He's also the author of the book Alchemy, which is all about how to work with human psychology to achieve your goals in the market. Please welcome Rory Sutherland to Cleaning Up.
ML
Rory, thank you so much for joining us here today on Cleaning up.
RS
Oh, it's a pleasure. Great honour.
ML
Very good. Now we'll start in the traditional way. Could you explain who you are, what you do? But the short version.
RS
I am the Vice Chairman of the advertising agency Ogilvy in London. I also founded a behavioural science practice within the agency. I write occasionally for the Spectator, and I suppose I describe myself sometimes as a behavioural science impresario. I'm not a behavioural scientist, per se, but I do everything I can to raise the stature and salience of psychological and behavioural solutions in pretty much every realm of both commercial and government life.
ML
I'm glad you describe yourself as the behavioural science impresario, because I was going to accuse you of taking the kind of the academic work of people like Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Dan Ariely, and sort of using it for nefarious corporate goals to flog stuff.
RS
That is the long term plan, obviously. But I mean, it's worth noting, by the way, there probably is a problem that generally, just as in Milton, the devil has all the best tunes, there is an element where slightly shady people, including actually possibly psychopaths, are disproportionately good at marketing and persuasion. So at the very least, if you popularise these techniques and make them more widely known, it does actually help people protect against them when they're used for malign reasons. There's a tendency to assume that marketing of necessity must be misleading or in some way encouraging people to do things they otherwise wouldn't have done, because there's this fundamental lie from economics that people left to their own devices have kind of perfect utility functions. Okay? They know, regardless of context, exactly what it is that will most benefit them. So the idea is, marketing must be interfering without pure process. This is utter nonsense. One of the most important things to understand is that a lot of people go, ‘Well, you need marketing when you don't have a very good idea, and you need to add a bit of magic fairy dust.’ If you go back through history, the best idea that anybody ever had, conceivably, is the smallpox vaccine. And you look actually at the history, I kind of naively assume that Jenner comes up with the vaccination against smallpox, and everybody goes, ‘fantastic. Ed, great work. We're all off to vaccinate our kids. Well done. Have a knighthood and a stack of money.’ In fact, he had to spend his whole life fighting against habit, religious opposition, vested interests in the variolation business, who saw that they'd lose out if Jenner’s vaccination became more popular. Practically every significant idea requires marketing, simply because behavioural change isn't the natural mode of human beings. Our default mode, if you like, is habit and social copying: Do what I did before, do what everybody else did. And then, thirdly, it's come up with a post-rationalisation for what I've always done has been the right thing all along. Those seem to be three really powerful forces that resist effectively. They're kind of frictional forces in human behaviour, right?
ML
Well, we got stuck straight in, which was great, because you've done a few things there. So we are recording this one week after the US election, in which two extraordinary marketers — I don't want to call them psychopaths on this show — have pulled off quite an extraordinary coup. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, both, you know, you could say examples of how you were saying that sort of the shady characters have got all the best tunes. But you also went into quite a long sort of, I don't want to call it rant, but explanation of why, an exposition of why, marketing is not inherently evil. And I agree with that. I mean, I didn't push you on that, but it's quite good that you've proactively said marketing actually can be used to inoculate people against bad ideas.
RS
We'll come to this later. But you could argue that the best idea with the worst marketing, if you had to make a list of those things, nuclear power generation would have to come fairly high on the list. In other words, something which is probably fundamentally a pretty good idea and an essential part of our future. You know the fact that there is automatic opposition to all kinds of things that simply involve, perhaps people admitting they were wrong, people who have a very big reputational sunk cost in the opposite opinion? Okay, once you understand that, you realise that… Don't get me wrong, what I'm not suggesting is that climate change is so simple that there are very simple, purely psychological solutions. I'm just saying that if you want to solve the big sudoku of climate change, which is immensely complicated, with huge quantities of unintended consequences, etc, I don't think you'll do it without putting psychology on the table from the get go. And it tends to be used… marketing tends to be used at the end. In other words, the economists or the engineers or the lawyers do the serious, grown up stuff at the beginning and then hand over once all the decisions have been made to a bunch of marketers who do the coloring in. And I think that's fundamentally a mistake. You actually have to look at psychology right from the beginning and say, ‘Very nice theory. But seriously, will anybody really do this?’
ML
Absolutely, I've seen this happening in real time with the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, where there was this political process, the policy makers that decided there would be 17 of them, there'd be 169 sub goals. There'd be this, that and the other. And they then sort of threw it over the fence to the marketers, and said, ‘Here we go, sell this.’ And of course, it's very difficult to sell something like that. But let's do this because, you know, I'm going to take as a starting point the book: Alchemy. And this is where you sort of lay out your stall that says that people are not just kind of logical calculators. And in fact, your thesis is that it's a good thing in many cases, that they're not logical calculators. And for me, the jumping off point was the quotation, allegedly from David Ogilvy.
RS
Although we have no evidence that he said it, let's…
ML
Let's ascribe it to him, because we can. There's nobody else vying for it. But what's the quotation?
RS
The way the quotation actually goes, supposedly David Ogilvy said, or somebody similar said: ‘The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say.’
ML
Wait, so let's slow down, because this is so important. So they don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say.
RS
Bluntly, there is a famous thing called the intention action gap, which is, you will research people, and you will find all kinds of well-meaning intentions that they will give you, including perhaps voting for the Democratic candidate, which they don't actually do when it comes to the point of action. And that's really partly because, you know, I don't want to take on the mantle of a brain scientist, but there are large parts of our behaviour which are governed by parts of the brain which aren't really… sometimes described as opaque to introspection. In other words, we think we know why we're doing things, or we have a lovely, what you might call reverse-engineered rational explanation for why we did something, but the real reason… I'll give you a comic example, which I think is comic, which is, if we're being completely honest with ourselves, the reason we go to bottle banks is not really because we care massively about recycling glass, but because the act of smashing bottles inside a large metal container is kind of cathartic and enjoyable. Now that's, by the way, not totally irrelevant as an insight, which is, if we can make benign activities just a little bit more enjoyable, just a little bit more emotionally rewarding to the monkey brain, maybe that's not a bad solution.
ML
And there's an example that you use in the book which is very striking, which is, why do people brush their teeth?
RS
And the official reason, you're absolutely right…
ML
Is dental hygiene. Everybody says it's dental hygiene.
RS
Absolutely right. It's dental hygiene. Of course, it's, ‘I want to avoid plaque and tooth decay and gum disease.’ But if you look at people's real behaviour logically, when do we clean our teeth? Well, first thing in the morning, unless we've just got Zoom calls, in which case we don't bother. Before a date, almost certainly before sex, in the early stages of a relationship, okay? What I'm saying is that our motivation, deep down, for cleaning our teeth is probably more to do with fear of bad breath than it is long term concerns for dental hygiene. And we know this because toothpaste is always mint. A lot of people don't like mint. There's a large proportion of people who never buy mints. And yet all toothpaste is mint flavoured. And the probable reason is it reassures you that your mouth is clean and fresh smelling. And so that's one of those interesting things where… Now you could argue, and I might, if you're a consequentialist, ‘well, the reason why people do things doesn't really matter.’ In fact, there's an extreme argument that says it's best not to use up people's reserves of altruism if you don't have to, by which I mean, if you can find a selfish reason for people to do an altruistic thing, fine, then they can save their altruism for something a bit more painful.
ML
Now we're going to get on to lots of examples in the climate space. So for instance, if your electric car accelerates really fast, then you don't ask people to make a sacrifice to have an electric car. You're not you're not taxing them psychologically to switch to electric.
RS
Very interesting point about electric cars, which I would make the point of, which is that the problem, or at least the stated problem, is range anxiety. Actually, if you think about it, quite rightly, billions are being spent trying to increase range by getting better batteries, which can charge faster or store more energy per kilogram in the short to medium term. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to reduce anxiety than it is to increase range. And by the way, I think there are a lot of people who should never have an electric car. This is one of the reasons I don't like government targets. You know, if you are, let's say, someone retired who lives in the country, who drives 26 miles a week to the shops. To be honest, you having an electric car is a waste of a good battery, unless it can be used for storage or in some other way. You don't want that person to have an electric car because it's a stupid waste of the technology. Now reducing anxiety, which I think is comparatively easy to do. If you gave me a budget of 30 million and I was allowed to bribe Google Maps, I could reduce a lot of anxiety. It's really infrastructure anxiety, by the way, not range anxiety. I could make a big difference with 1% of an engineering budget, along with a bunch of other behavioural people, we could come up with 30 ideas which stop people being anxious about range.
ML
Let's come back to the specific sort of climate relevant situation, because I wonder. I just want to touch on the infrastructure on which all of those decisions sit. In your book, you call it the four S's, so you've got Signalling, Subconscious hacking, Satisficing and Psychophysics — which is a P, not an S, but you get away with it. Can we just go through those? Just give us what is signalling?
RS
Signalling is that we are all advertising ourselves all the time. There's a very good book by Will Storr called The Status Game. I don't think I could do a better job of writing a book on status. Geoffrey Miller earlier wrote a book called The Mating Mind, which is that humans devote an extra — just as plants produce petals, I would say a flower is a weed with an advertising budget, and peacocks produce tails — humans put a huge amount of investment in their behaviour to effectively advertise things about themselves. And those things, by the way, tend to be costly, because costly signals are more convincing than cheap signals. So an inordinate amount of human activity, including a hell of a lot of consumption, isn't really directed at what an economist would call conventional utility, okay, it's directed towards effectively displaying something about yourself. Now, Miller would say that's largely about mate selection. I think that's a significant part of it, but also there are all manners of reasons why you might wish to signal status, in terms of, for example, simply garnering cooperation or forming coalitions in the kind of evolutionary environment, there were all kinds of reasons why you might want to signal status. And the argument is that this is on the motherboard. It's innate. Now, by the way, it's also important that anybody who wants to understand human behaviour — and I would argue business and government and everything else — understands the signalling instinct. One of the reasons, by the way, it's important in your field, is that quite often in the real world, complex problems are solved obliquely, but there is a very strong urge from people who are charged with a problem, not necessarily to solve the problem, but to signal that they care about it. Now, when you wish to signal that you care about something, and this applies to governments and businesses, what you tend to do is you tend to do the most obvious thing that they clearly care about, because look how much money they're spending on doing the opposite. Sometimes that money would be far better spent, but less visibly spent with an oblique solution. But for signalling purposes, I want to show I care about this quite often, the behaviours that are adopted, and that's that applies in an institutional setting, not just an individual setting, aren't actually the best solution to the problem, and so quite often, the solution will come in from left field. You made a wonderful point, actually, when we last talked, which is that the government might want to discourage drinking for one reason or another. What's utterly peculiar and fascinating is that no alcohol and low alcohol beers have risen to massive prominence through a process we don't fully understand, to be honest, but that seems to be in a spontaneous, bottom-up solution to a problem which achieves something that actually government could only dream about, which is people go out happily, have one pint and then two non alcoholic pints and go home perfectly happy.
ML
And the subtext here is fascinating. The subtext here is that this signalling, so this is one of your four S's, and it's inherent to human nature, and it can be destructive because it causes overconsumption. I'm very struck that in Japan, there's a word called mottainai, which is about the reverence of elegance and saving and reuse. And we don't tend to, some people do, but in general, and particularly, perhaps in the US, we don't tend to signal status by…
RS
Religious groups like the Quakers, the Puritans would have actually had that idea of modesty. There are religious, particularly Protestant groups, which did actually attach a value to it. The Scandinavians have this idea of Lagom. One interesting thing, by the way, have you ever met a really rich Scandinavian because they actually lead an incredibly modest life in quite an attractive, but not ridiculous house.
ML
I've spent time in Norway, where everybody has a sort of shipping company in an oil field.
RS
But the weird thing is, what you discover about the rich Scandinavians is that they also have a massive villa in Italy with three Ferraris and a swimming pool made of gold. They actually like bling, just like everybody else. They just don't do it at home.
ML
Now let's move on to subconscious hacking. Let's take it as a given that people want to signal. Their status is important, and they'll put meaningful resources into it. Next thing is subconscious hacking, and I'm thinking, this is stuff like the placebo effect and risk aversion and so on.
RS
An awful lot of decisions are taken before we're even aware of making a decision. We also come to conclusions without really being aware of why we reach them. And so what is undoubtedly true is you can present information in a way that will make people highly receptive to something and/or reject it effectively, for reasons of an emotional response, which, in a way, has bypassed what you might call rational sense. And so there are ways in which you can do this. I mean, very simple ways.
ML
Give us an example.
RS
A perfect example is what used to be called pilchards. Someone ingeniously discovered they're actually part of the sardine family, and they've been rebranded as Cornish sardines. And the volume of sales and the price you can charge for them goes up massively. Chilean sea bass used to be Patagonian toothfish. There are lots and lots of cases where that literally is a simple rebranding of something which changes people's emotional response.
ML
To give another nuclear example, since you brought nuclear power into it, there's Windscale, where there was a horrendous fire. Now it is now called Sellafield, which sounds much more sort of, it's got a nice sort of up-north ring to it, very reliable.
RS
That's a very simple thing, but simply understanding how the heuristics that people are using, I'll give you a beautiful example of this, which is fascinating in a way. This is why it's wonderful working in a behavioural science practice. A colleague of mine, Mike Hughes, when working with a television company, pointed out that television companies now faced — true also, I think, of mobile phone companies — faced a problem in the five to 10 years going forwards in getting people to upgrade with the frequency they might have done. And I said, ‘Well, why is that?’ And Mike said, ‘it's the bezel.’ There was previously a sign on your mobile phone or your television that it was, frankly, a bit old, which is that it had an inch and a half deep bezel. If you checked into a hotel room, you'd look at the TV. Now, you didn't turn the TV on. If the TV had a thick bezel, you'd go, ‘Oh, what a crock of shit.’ You know, they could at least upgrade the TV. And if the TV had virtually no bezel, you went, ‘Oh, marvellous television.’ You had no other information about the television, you hadn't even switched it on, but you reached a judgement based on that. Now, interestingly, you might argue the reason why Apple is introducing somewhat spurious lenses to its phone is that it needs an external signal that you have the latest phone, and without adding a few lenses, no one can actually tell.
ML
Okay, so you can't just put ‘NEW, IMPROVED’ and hope that people are persuaded.
RS
It’s always baffled me a little bit, because most mobile phone buyers are not really serious photographers. They take lots of… actually, they mostly take selfies with a camera that's on the opposite side to all those lenses. So what's going on there? Maybe an attempt to actually replace the bezel as a signal of obsolescence.
ML
Let's move on. So that's subconscious hacking. So we do things for reasons we don't fully understand. Now satisficing — and I think this is one that's very important, because this is to do with risk aversion.
RS
I simply explain this with: the reason McDonald's is the most successful restaurant in the world isn't because it's very, very good. It's because it's incredibly good at not being bad.
ML
Same with Starbucks. Never get a bad cup of coffee, but never a good one.
RS
No. But, I mean, funny enough, I’m actually a defender. I mean, we all have our opinions, but actually a large part of what we're trying to do is actually not optimization, its variance reduction. And I think economics gets that wrong. I mean, economics gets everything wrong, in my view, in its attempt to actually model and predict human behaviour. The assumptions it makes are absurd. You know, perfect information, perfect trust, a known stable utility function. I mean, come on. That is merely a complete contrivance designed to make economics mathematically tractable. It's not a real basis for understanding human motivation at all or predicting human behaviour. Humans have evolved to satisfice because they don't want to die. It's a very bad evolutionary move to exit the gene pool, particularly before you've reproduced. And consequently, humans make a lot of decisions from the basis of ‘what's the worst that can happen.’ We want to minimise the worst case scenario. And once you understand that… I'll give you a classic example, okay, the sale of solar panels. I would totally happily go and spend £2000 on solar panels tomorrow. Let's say they could trickle charge my car, or they could just reduce my electricity bill for a bit, and I could mess around with the app and have a bit of fun. And then once I liked it next year, I'd buy £2000 more. What they ask you to do is effectively cover your roof with them. Punt £25,000 on something which may end up not working, and with a 2% chance that the people do structural damage to your roof. Once you understand that worst-case scenario modelling of the human instinctive human brain, you realise this is a bit of a non-starter. If you get a heat pump, they ask you to rip out your boiler, correct? If you want to get a government subsidy for installing a heat pump, I think one condition of that is you remove your gas central heating. Fundamentally, it'd be perfectly sensible if you said you can keep your gas central heating. You can have a subsidy for the heat pump, but you just have to sign a thing saying your gas from now on is five times as expensive. So you have a real incentive…
ML
That one’s quite hard to do from an engineering perspective, you've got two systems that are going to….
RS
I thought there are hybrids?
ML
There are hybrid, but they're kind of designed to be hybrid. They're not just two completely separate systems all trying to cram into the same little room.
RS
What about an air to air heat pump?
ML
Oh, you know why those are not, in a sense, supported or subsidised in the same way is a whole story, because that's the easiest thing.
RS
My brother’s doing this, so he's a physicist, and so he knows all the s— about heat pumps.
ML
Coefficient of performance, that’s the words you’re looking for. It’s a family show
RS
Thank you, and my brother is — one room at a time, or occasionally two or three rooms at a time — he's installing air conditioning units, which 95% of the time are used for heating rather than cooling, and he's keeping his oil boiler in reserve for a massively cold spell. Okay? And then I said to him, Well, why don't you get a subsidy for that? And he said, Well, they don't like subsidising air conditioning units because they're frightened that people will use them as cooling units, and that will increase energy consumption. It's Britain, mate. That's a fair argument in southern Italy.
ML
Even in the UK, it's fine because we've already got 3, 4 or 5% of our power in the summer provided by solar, which is exactly at the right time to run a cooling unit.
RS
And incidentally, we also have brick or stone homes for the most part, so it's got to be pretty hot for a few days before you have trouble sleeping. You know, we have a bit of a buffer. Now, there is no reason whatsoever — if you ask my brother to rip out his existing boiler and demand that he dig up his garden and install loads of piping, there's not a chance in hell he would have done that. So all I'm saying is that at some point in solving the sudoku of climate change, someone early on has got to be asking the question — before we effectively set a load of targets or norms — we've got to ask the question, will people humanly be prepared to do this.
ML
And specifically, though, satisficing is, you've got to get above a certain… you've got to eliminate the downside. You don't have to shoot for the best upside.
RS
There's a similar guy, this guy called Arvind Chhabra, who says the same thing about investing, which is that his theory about investing is that it's not expected wealth maximisation over time. It’s that all human beings are trying to do three things. First one is, don't go bankrupt, don't go extinct, so avoidance of catastrophe. Second thing is what you might call incremental wealth generation through progressive improvement. And the third thing is trying to get lucky, right? Which is effectively exposing yourself to the opportunities of asymmetric upside. And actually, what differs between people is not that everybody's doing three of those things. It's the ratio of the three that varies with age, existing wealth and everything else. Much more interesting model of human motivation than the standard one, by the way.
ML
Let's move on to the fourth S, which is actually a P, psychophysics. What is that?
RS
So, a very simple thing, which is we, I mean, Americans know this. I rather like the fact that American weather forecasts have the temperature, which is as measured by physicists, and then the ‘feels like.’ And the feels like temperature is effectively a psychological measure of heat, which takes into account humidity, breeze, and I think, but someone will probably correct me, knowing your audience, there'll probably be some meteorologist out there. I think also it looks particularly at the heat at kind of head height. So I can't quite remember the details, but it compensates for the fact that humans are six feet high. Fundamentally, we spend an awful lot of our time trying to optimise for objective physical measures on the assumption that these translate directly into human benefits and preferences. And there are a few interesting things. The example I always gave as an example of utterly brilliant psychophysics is the Uber map. Sorry to people who've heard me say this so many times before, but it is so good, which is actually what people mind about waiting for a cab, if you ask them, they'd say, I want the cab to turn up quickly because I hate waiting for a cab. The insight in Uber is that if you give people — or Deliveroo, for that matter — is if you give people a nice map with the cab on it, they're not that bothered. Whether it's five minutes or 15 I'm not saying you can take an hour, okay, but they're not that bothered, because what really pains them about the wait isn't the duration, it's the degree of uncertainty. And so psychophysics is understanding, in a sense, what drives emotional responses to things, and what drives our emotional responses. The reason I call it hacking is there are gloriously clever and ingenious psychological solutions where you can actually spend very little and make someone feel great.
ML
The example I love of this is elevators. You have a hotel, your lifts are too slow. What do you do? Invest huge amounts of new lifts or put a mirror…
RS
In between the two elevators so people can spend the time waiting for the lift in mild voyeurism or grooming activities or whatever. Even better in the US now, just put a weird screen with stock prices on. And Americans, for some weird reason, as long as they can look at the NASDAQ, they never get bored. But no, absolutely right?
ML
I mean, in my world, well, what used to be my world of skiing, of course, what they then did is tinted the mirrors. Had it sponsored by Piz Buin, the suntan lotion. People are absolutely happy. They'd stand and look at themselves looking nice and brown forever.
RS
So it exaggerated the tan and so effectively just appealed to people's narcissism.
ML
Absolutely, absolutely.
RS
There's a lovely story which is told about Winston Churchill, which is he's at a banquet in the mid 50s, or shortly, I think, after the Queen took the throne. He's, of course, newly Prime Minister again, and there's a Commonwealth and Empire banquet at Buckingham Palace, and someone comes up to Churchill and says, ‘We've got a bit of a problem, because one of the heads of state, we don't know who it is, has actually stolen one of the pepper pots.’ I think it is. Now, that sounds pretty trivial, you know, it wouldn't really matter if that were at a normal restaurant, but apparently they're solid gold, and they date back to George the Third, and it's a bit of a problem. So they go, ‘Well, what the hell do we do?’ Because we can't really accuse them straight off. You know, how on earth do we get them to return the pepper pot without creating a diplomatic incident? Now, in the world of physics, trade-offs are hard to resolve, okay? In the world of psychology, paradoxes can be resolved. What Churchill does, apparently, and I regard this as an absolute act of genius, is he says, ‘Don't worry, I'll take care of this.’ He picks up the matching salt shaker, puts it in his top pocket, waits for the head of state to be standing more or less alone and unobserved, and sidles up to her, pulls the shaker out of his top pocket, and says, ‘I think we've both been spotted. We'd better put these back.’ Now, the genius of that, if you think about it. I mean, could I have thought of that? And the answer I've come to is that, given six months, I might have come up with it. The genius of a man who can come up with that in the spot, which is if you portray yourself not as an accuser, but as a fellow offender, the whole nature of that social exchange is completely different. One of the joys of psychology is precisely that it doesn't obey the laws of physics. It isn't linear. Actually trade offs. You can turn a negative into a positive. You know, Stella Artoise — reassuringly expensive. Guinness — good things come to those who wait. Avis — we're number two, so we try harder. You can actually turn a weakness into a strength, using that kind of ingenuity.
ML
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ML
I want to do a rapid fire round, if we could. And I do mean nice and rapid. And this is where I get to abuse having the founder of the behavioural science practice of Ogilvy here. And I'm gonna get free advice, free ideas. So how would you sell public transport?
RS
Okay, this is very interesting. I have to say that one thing that annoys me about the environmental movement is it automatically assumes the demise of the car. Now, ultimately, let's call it the car like object, which is a vehicle that someone drives themselves, or at least commandeers, and which moves around at a time to suit the passenger and leaves from a place they want to leave to a place they want to go. Okay, one of the things that Pete Dyson and I effectively reached an accommodation about, okay, which is, I'm a car lover, and he's a massive triathlete, an incredibly enthusiastic cyclist.
ML
Pete Dyson... you’ll have to explain.
RS
He’s my co author of transport for humans. And we both come at this from opposite sides of the fence, but we both agreed about one massive thing, which is, what you need to do first is increase people's repertoire of transport use. So there are a hell of a lot of people... There are various businesses, broadly speaking, this would be true of say, Ocado or supermarket home delivery. If you can get people to do it three or four times, it then forms part of their repertoire of behaviours in perpetuity. Now that's not to say that once you've used Ocado four times, you never go to a shop. It simply says you consider it as an alternative. And so my suggestion for this is that you put up the car tax disc by £100 pounds, but you give people in return £150 worth of public transport vouchers, which say it's absolutely fine to use a car, but it's not fine to use a car habitually without considering other alternatives.
ML
And this is why I think there was such a pushback by opponents of cyclists and cycle lanes after COVID, because so many people had tried it because they didn't want to go on public transport. They'd suddenly tried walking and cycling, and it was absolutely vital to sort of return that behaviour to the pre COVID status.
RS
Problem would be, if you wanted to genuinely get rid of the car? Well, first of all, there's a massive business problem with delivery of goods and services. Secondly, you'd have to relocate about a third of Britain's housing stock. Okay. Now, if you want a really slow and inefficient way to solve climate change. That's probably it.
ML
Let's move on from public transport…
RS
Because if you can…what's the phrase? A successful country isn't one where the poor have cars. It's one where the rich use public transport. I entirely agree that we should educate people to make much more intelligent use of the different transport repertoires, and therefore there is a large proportion of people, perhaps 50% of the UK population, who are what's called rail rejecters. Even though they probably haven't travelled on a train for 15 years, they've conceived a massive animus against trains, and they don't even consider it, even for situations where it's probably obvious.
ML
And the idea is get them to sort of try it, use it for a period, and that increases the repertoire and take it from there. Let's go on, because this is the rapid fire round. What about…
RS
We should also consider video conferencing as a transport option.
ML
Absolutely.
RS
So let's actually broaden our horizons. Now, one of the problems is you've got to depart… I actually said, ‘look for the price of a few miles of motorway, you could give the entire UK population premium Zoom.’ And I spoke to Zoom, expecting them to go, ‘yeah, yeah., whatever.’ And their idea of actually selling to a nation interested them. They didn't reject this. And the price you'd get would be really, really good. Now interestingly, why does that not happen? And the answer is it's because it's called the Department for Transport, not the Department of Stopping People Moving around so much. And one of the things I've got to be really careful here, because we probably have airline clients. You once mentioned the phrase, was it ‘fun per tonne’? In other words, let's look to reduce carbon emissions in the areas which are least enjoyable. And I would argue, very short term business travel can be now easily replaced with video alternatives. And if I'm being absolutely honest, one thing I would quite like to see would be a high level of taxation on what you might call short duration trips by air. I don't think city breaks are all that great. I think they're done for bragging reasons. Do people really enjoy a city?
ML
I'm going to just break in here because you're disappointing me.
RS
Oh, I don’t mean to disappoint.
ML
Let me tell you why. Because, you know, I'm looking for you to come up with clever hacking, right? I want you to be hacking and when you said, ‘oh, people are just going on on city breaks for, for bragging rights,’ Well, of course. Because you said it, one of the four S’s is signalling. So how do you make…
RS
A very large part of consumption is probably done for signalling.
ML
So how do you make it not a signalling benefit? So when you go on a city break, everybody says, ‘you're some kind of loser.’
RS
There is a Swedish word, isn't there, called flygskam or something, which means ‘flight shaming.’ There's a corresponding word (tågskryt), which is ‘train brag’. It isn't train brag, but it's something like that in Swedish, which is that, effectively you change the status currency. So it's higher status to arrive in Amsterdam by train on the Eurostar than it is to fly.
ML
It's called the staycation.
RS
It’s called the staycation. Great rebranding idea, by the way. There are lots of these interesting ideas where simple language can do two things, because when you create a name for something, you create a norm for something. Downsizing, in terms of elderly people moving into smaller homes. If you say, you know, we're empty nesters at the moment, so we decided to downsize, it sounds like a choice. Without that phrase, it looks like a compromise. You've been forced to move out of your house because you couldn't afford it. So you can undoubtedly normalise benign behaviours by giving them a name exactly like ‘staycation.’
ML
Now before we finish, I want to just move on to one other topic, and that is, we've been talking about how you use these techniques, your behavioural techniques, your impresario-ing, you know, using these behavioural techniques, and you…
RS
Just go back one tiny step. Okay, all I'm saying, I'm not suggesting, ultimately, the vaccination problem with Jenner was solved because in the middle of the 19th century, they mandated smallpox vaccines with a mandate that I think continued until the 1970s when it was effectively eradicated. My simple contention is you have legal mechanisms to get people to do things. You have economic mechanisms, which tend to revolve around incentives or bribing people. And then you also have persuasion. You have seduction. Now my only argument is we should try persuasion first. Now, just to give one example, simply encouraging people and giving them information to put on the dishwasher, washing machine, tumble dryer later in the evening, when they're probably nuclear-powered to a degree — rather than at peak times — maybe you don't even need economic incentives to get people to do that. Maybe it can be a point scheme. I think Octopoints is being developed. Maybe it can just be asking nicely. Shouldn't we try that first? There's also a problem, by the way… Let me explain why persuasion is better than the other two mechanisms where it is possible. The great thing about persuasion is that if you have a good reason not to be persuaded, it doesn't punish you. Now let me give you a great example of this. If you say to people, it's mandatory that you mustn't put your tumble dryer on during the day, the first phone call you'll get will be from the London Fire Brigade, who will say, what you're doing is you're forcing people who work nights to leave their flat with a tumble dryer turned on and it's a massive fire risk. Or they're people who have, for example, someone whose bedroom is downstairs from their kitchen and they'll be putting their washing machine on so it hits the spin cycle at two in the morning. If you've got a good reason not to be persuaded, people go, ‘Yeah, fair enough, you don't have to do that.’ Now with economic or other incentives, they tend to be broad brush and crude.
ML
So you won't find me disagreeing. It was actually one of the reasons why I pulled you up, because you got into banning weekend breaks.
RS
No I didn't say ban, I said you could tax shorter stay journeys on the basis that everybody's kind of… we live in a shit climate, everybody's kind of entitled to a week or two in Spain, give people a break, right? Okay, but at the same time, there are forms of transport, which a combination of flygskam and maybe some economic incentives might be quite effective. I agree with you, let's just try persuasion first.
ML
Okay, so now where I was going, though, is that these techniques, we've talked so far about using them, sort of working with the grain, to reduce the impact of climate change, to reduce the use of fossil fuels. You've talked about solar, we talked about EVs, we've talked about using nuclear. We talked about all of these things that we want to have happen. But we have to talk about the other stuff, right, the fossil fuels.
RS
I can't speak for everybody in a large company. Just as I have worked with tobacco companies on vaping products,
ML
You’re working on them now.
RS
Exactly, I have worked with fossil fuel companies on their electric car charging networks. I mean, don't forget that the principal deployment of an ad agency, if it's doing its job, is to change behavior.
ML
But is that right? Is that an appropriate response?
RS
Personally, I don't believe in this refusal to engage. What you do is an ethical question. The fact that you engage with someone in conversation is not. So emphatically, if you are actually essentially doing something dubious. But there's this new idea of complete purity, which is that any involvement with anybody essentially is what you might call… it's almost like religious dietary law, that you mustn't be associated with anybody unclean. But they're part of the solution. I mean, the fast food industry is part of the solution.
ML
I'm also an advisor to an oil and gas company, and I'd like to think that I'm helping them to figure out how to do less of that and do more of the clean stuff. But what I'm not doing in any way is promoting oil and gas, and I think there's a difference between saying you have to engage with people. I mean, look, we're still heating our homes with gas. I still drive a petrol car. That's not new news. I've talked about it quite often on Cleaning Up and other shows. But there's a difference between saying ‘engage’, and promoting.
RS
By the way, the solution will be messy. By which I mean that, it was complexity that got us into this mess. It's highly unlikely there's some silver bullet that gets us out.
ML
But Rory, the question is: At this point, with our scientific knowledge today, is promoting fossil fuels acceptable? And if it is acceptable, that's interesting. If it's not acceptable, then what does that say about the people who are doing it?
RS
Without knowing what they are doing… if you are arguing, that actually, ultimately, these businesses are part of the solution. And incidentally, there will, I suspect, always be quite a lot of use cases where, let's say the gas industry is probably necessary. I don't think, if I'm being blunt about it, I don't think, unless you have a huge investment in nuclear to provide the base load, most of the time. I think part of the solution will involve using some sort of fossil fuel and then compensating for it, I don't see how you can do that. I mean, there's an even tougher question, which is, given that although the UK is probably responsible for 5% of emissions — carbon emissions — historically over time, at present, it's about 1%. Norway is probably 0.1% or whatever. Is the best use for an ingenious developed country to continue to make money from these things — i.e. not tank your economy — and invest disproportionately in an idea that would be applicable universally, that will help solve the problem. We have a comparative advantage in R&D in the UK.,
ML
But you jumped from saying we shouldn't ban things, and we shouldn't go cold turkey on fossil right? That's very different from saying that we should be promoting it.
RS
Just as we have an adversarial legal system, okay, it's an argument that deserves to be heard. Because one of the things that's problematic about this discussion, I'm absolutely serious about this. One of the things that's problematic about this discussion is that an awful lot of the conversation is driven by virtue signaling of some kind or another. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, virtue signaling, by the way, but signaling, as we know, sometimes leads people to positions which are deeply impractical or unattractive. And consequently, do you genuinely think that there's a way to get to this point that you aspire to without going through a kind of messy intermediate phase?
ML
I mean when you say messy intermediate phase, that I don't remotely disagree with. We are going to have, and there's going to be gas and oil and coal and so on, used for decades. That's not the issue. The issue is whether we should be actively promoting it. So Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN says that oil, gas, coal companies should not be allowed to advertise. Cigarette companies have been banned from advertising. Why is it that we tolerate companies… So BP’s ‘And not or’ campaign… ‘And not or’ means promoting equally the clean solutions and the fossil that keeps the lights on. Now the fossil will keep the lights on, I don't argue with that. The question is, should we be normalizing and promoting it?
RS
If the alternative is a kind of extremely dogmatic position, which is completely untenable and impractical, then yes. Do you see what I mean? There's a huge danger here. Now Aesop, who I always regard as the first behavioral scientist. In Aesop's Fables, he talked about the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and that's someone who loses credibility, because they keep saying something which is untrue. There is also an opposite problem, which I think leads to a lot of conspiracy theories, which is the boy who refuses to mention wolves. Now what I mean by that is that one of the reasons you can have conspiracy theories about, for example, migration or great replacement theory, is because there are certain subjects which the media just refuses to tackle. In other words, they shy away from it. They take an absolute position. They'll refuse to mention, for example, the ethnicity of a criminal. Now, I have a problem with that for a simple reason, which is that… There's a famous thing called the Barbara Streisand effect — you probably know of this — which is she has a house, it's filmed as part of a program on coastal erosion, which is available online. She demands that her house is taken off the internet or footage of her house, at which point the number of views of her house goes from five to 50,000. Everyone knows where her house is. If you are trying, if you create a totally imbalanced media environment, and a totally imbalanced debate, where there are these large areas where you're not allowed to go at all, okay, I think you actually achieve the opposite of that which you aspired to. Which is that people start believing the whole thing is bulls—. Because you refused effectively… Essentially when you create an imbalanced media diet, it has completely unintended consequences where people start believing the opposite, with dangerously high levels of credulity.
ML
So how do you deal with the UK gas industry, which has an industry association called the Energy Utilities Alliance, and they have a PR wing…
RS
Nothing to do with me,
ML
No, that was nothing to do with you. But what they do is they have a campaign, and the agency rather foolishly boasted about this marvelous campaign that was so successful, so many acres of newsprint and media mentions. And the intention was to spark outrage about heat pumps. Is that ethically appropriate in your industry, and what should be done about it?
RS
So who funded them?
ML
Well, the UK gas industry, via its industry association, or directly, a PR company was charged with sparking outrage about heat pumps. And of course, the Telegraph was full of it and so on.
RS
By the way, it's an extraordinarily easy thing to do. There's outrage about electric cars. I mean, there's even hostility to air fryers, if you like, right? Okay, so anything new is very, very easy to manufacture outrage.
ML
And is that appropriate when those new things are exactly the things that we need?
RS
One thing we have to be alert to is where well intentioned activities, including government legislation or, indeed, economic incentives or disincentives may actually be counterproductive. Which is that if you say there's a government mandate that you have an electric car, the natural reactance of people is to think that electric cars can't be much good, because the government needs to force me to drive one, when if you look at the data, okay, nearly everybody who drives an electric car never goes back. So you know, it's a vanishingly small percentage of people who, once they make the transition to an electric car, return to an internal combustion engine.
ML
Can I give you an example of a mandate which you will love? I think there was a point when the EU, bless them, decided that we must not have powerful vacuum cleaners. And the first thing I did the next time I was in Europe was to buy the most powerful vacuum cleaner possible before they were banned. And the reason is, I am convinced that I can vacuum clean more quickly and therefore save electricity, save energy, by using a more powerful vacuum cleaner.
RS
A vacuum cleaner is turned on for such a vanishingly small part that the whole thing is a nonsense. I mean, it's undoubtedly possible to aggregate all vacuum cleaner use across Europe and claim you can make a difference in this way. But that strikes me as fundamentally insane. I mean a lot of harm has been done to environmentally beneficial products by having environmentally beneficial products which basically aren't much good, and therefore effectively stigmatizing a behavior which you could get people to adopt for entirely self-interested reasons. I mean, electric cars, by the way, on a hell of a lot of dimensions, are simply better cars. Now I'll get a lot of angry people effectively pushing back against this, but it's astonishingly easy, as we saw, by the way, when Jenner comes up with vaccination. In the late 18th century, I think James Gillray was producing cartoons ridiculing the idea of vaccination and showing people with cows coming out of their arms. They're turning into cows and growing horns. It's incredible by the way, we forget this applied to mobile phones. Would I work on a landline campaign? Yes, actually, I think there are reasons to have landlines. But the point I'm making is that I think we have to understand the whole media environment in which people operate, and I think that sparking outrage, we need to be alert to this, because it's astonishingly easy to do, because there's a chunk of people who are late adopters, who love nothing more than fundamentally reverse engineering a justification for their current and past behavior, and essentially, then using it to disparage. Even if there are remarkably small negatives attached to a new behavior, they will nonetheless ridicule people's that. I mean, I was abused on Oxford Street for using a mobile phone in 1989. People actually shouted abuse at you from passing cars. So it's very, very easy. There's always this counter reaction. I'm not sure that a lot of well intentioned behavior, like not mentioning the alternative, for example, or suppressing alternative points of view... I think that's slightly dangerous for the whole issue. What's your percentage, by the way, your percentage probability that the whole thing is misdirected?
ML
Sorry?
RS
In other words, do you hold a possibility that the entire CO2 emissions thing might be a misdirected effort, or an example of what’s called the Abilene effect, I think it's called, which is where a group of people effectively conceive of a wrong-headed idea, which becomes incredibly strong simply because no one wants to break ranks. ML
It's a fascinating question,
RS
We need to ask that question, by the way, it's not impossible. Knowledge of behavioral science would say it's emphatically not impossible.
ML
So where I am on that as a scientist with a very strong STEM and thermo background is that it is not possible that there is no such thing as climate change, that it's not happening. Are there people, even in the science community, who've been exaggerating it, who've been using sort of excessive, exaggerated scenarios? And I've fought very strongly against something called RCP 8.5 which was a scenario promoted through the UN science, through the IPCC and so on. Absolutely there's exaggeration, right? But the chance that we kind of wake up one morning and it was all a bad dream, that is absolutely zero. Absolutely it is zero, I'm afraid.
RS
But there is… No no, I'll take your word for that. But however, there is also a group of people who are prone to exaggeration, because their prime motivation is political, in some sense, not an environmental.
ML
Absolutely, there's no question.
RS
I think you mentioned it. There was a group of people where, if you said, ‘if you could solve climate change, but it didn't come with a commensurate kind of, you know, reduction in consumption or inequality’
ML
100% there are people who are attaching all sorts of agendas to the climate agenda. But I just, you know, just to come back, and then we will need to wrap up. I think it's very different, trying to exclude, for instance, discussion about what benefits fossil fuels have brought us and how necessary they still are, and the fact that, as an example, I'll give you a great example in the Global South. Cooking with charcoal and firewood and dung is incredibly unhealthy, and the solution is LPG, right now. If you wanted to solve that quickly and stop people dying from lung disease, LPG, which is a fossil fuel…
RS
Presumably, what it is is the particulates and so forth given off by that mode of cooking, yes?
ML
Yes. Exactly. So trying to exclude that as a solution would be completely wrong. However, I think what I'm talking about is something quite different. When you've got companies that are promoting and spending money on the blanket promotion of, in a sense, resistance to climate action and the promotion of fossil fuels. And I'm not talking about removing it from the public space, I'm talking about actively promoting it.
RS
Has the media. I mean, you have to some extent. One of the functions of the advertising industry, I would argue, is to slightly correct for information asymmetries. So for example, if you are promoting an Android phone, there is an information asymmetry, which is that the launch of a new Apple phone is a media event, and the launch of Android 15 is not. So I would argue that there is a body of opinion – for example, your point about cooking — which is never heard because it's in no one's interests to promote it in media terms. And therefore someone needs to elevate that argument and argue that actually, in some cases, the perfect is the enemy of the good in quite a lot of these cases, correct?
ML
But where that plays out, I would argue, is that there are sort of, I don't know what to call them contrarian gadflies. who make a very nice living by pushing back and saying… so there's people like Bjorn Lomborg who make a living and quite a good living, Alex Epstein talks about how fossil fuels are the only moral alternative… and they make a very nice living by pushing back against what is perceived as a sort of media monopoly that says climate change is happening, we need to do something about it, so they make their their schtick to say the opposite. There's a guy called Simon Michaux who pushes back against electric vehicles by making absurd assumptions about how many minerals are needed, not just electric vehicles, but also renewables, and then suggests that there aren't enough minerals in the world. It's all nonsense, but it gets a lot of coverage.
RS
A large part of our beliefs are contrived to suit our own signaling ends. And you're absolutely right that there is always a ready market for contrarians, and it is actually, by the way, a necessary part of information, by the way. I mean, you know, it is a healthy part of it, just as conspiracy theories are a necessary byproduct of reasonably free information.
ML
And every so often, the contrarians are right. Rory, it's a huge pleasure. I'm gonna need to wrap us up. I'll let you finish that thought, and then we'll wrap up.
RS
There is an interesting question, which is that naturally signaling will lead us to hair-shirted self sacrifice, which I think appeals disproportionately to a lot of people who are… some forms of consumerism are surprisingly harmless, by the way. Interestingly, you can also see, you know, a large trend towards dematerialization happening, which is more and more of people's money is actually spent on things that have no physical manifestation. Netflix being an example. Some part of these problems will actually solve themselves. And a sensible thing, it strikes me as very strange that when you have an accidental benefit like Zoom, okay, one thing that would strike me as sensible is not necessarily to fight against things, but to take things that are already working and build on them further. And it strikes me as strange that every now and then, you know, extraordinarily lucky things fall into our lap. I think economics is obsessed with trade offs, and we have this natural mindset, which is, magic can't happen. But penicillin, vaccination, okay, they're basically, you know, unqualified goods, and what ratio, by the way, we should spend in terms of fighting things through kind of, what you might call signaling self denial, and what proportion we should devote to maximizing innovations of that kind in the pursuit of solving this problem, is a worthwhile debate to have. I think it's a perfectly interesting and intelligent point to say, would the 1% of carbon emissions produced by the UK is our best contribution to actually economically kind of slightly hobble ourselves in very, very ambitious pursuit of what is a relatively small part of worldwide emissions, or should we actually have slightly cheaper energy and invest the surplus in R&D, where we have a comparative advantage? That's a question worth asking, isn't it?
ML
As is the question of whether we would have an Octopus if we didn't have a home market for Octopus’ services.
RS
Well okay, let me end on that. Which is my final marketing point, which is, I think Octopus is brilliant. I think it's also a really interesting idea, because it is a business that acknowledges that human behavior, changing behavior, and incentivizing different behaviors, has an important role to play. Even if it's just time-shift, which has a really important part to play in solving this problem. But I would jokingly say to Greg, if you'd called yourself greentech.com and not had a pink octopus as a logo, you'd probably have about 20,000 customers. I know it pains people with a scientific or STEM background to have to acknowledge the extraordinary effect that psychology and branding and marketing can have on behavior. But the thing is that we didn't really evolve with a sense of proportion. I hate to say that maybe things would be more rational or neater if we had, but effectively, the way we perceive the world is not optimized for objectivity.
ML
On that note, yeah, we're going to wrap up. You've made a strong case for a little bit of alchemy that's needed in all of these areas that we talked about around climate change. So thank you very much for your time.
RS
Interesting, fantastic.
ML
So that was Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of Ogilvy UK, the advertising agency, founder of their Behavioral Science Unit, and also author of several books, including Alchemy, on human psychology and selling things. As always, we'll put links in the show notes to resources you might find useful. So that's of course Rory’s book, but also episodes on similar subjects. John Marshall of the Potential Energy Coalition on how to sell climate action using love and the sense of loss, and also Lily Cole on her journey from supermodel to climate communicator. And with that, I'd like to thank the team behind the scenes, and also hope that you join us at this time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.
Cleaning Up is brought to you by members of our new Leadership Circle: Actis, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle and to find out how to become a member, please visit cleaningup.live, that’s cleaningup.live If you’re enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure you subscribe on Youtube or your favourite podcast platform, and leave us a review, that really helps other people to find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues and sign up for our free newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com. That’s cleaninguppod.substack.com.