Richard Shotton
speaker
1,228 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 27 Jun
Richard Shotton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
He calls it the ostrich effect.
And it's essentially the argument that if you make people feel ashamed or scared or too worried, rather than resolve the underlying issue, what they tend to do is behave like the metaphorical ostrich.
They just start ignoring the ads.
They stick their head in the sands.
Now, his study was probably done about 20 years ago.
when he was at Carnegie Mellon.
And he's given anonymized data from Vanguard in America, so this massive fund provider.
And he can see how often users are checking their stock portfolios.
He then plots that against the movement in the American stock market.
And what he finds is as the stock market goes up, people check their portfolios.
uh wealth reasonably regularly when the stock market declines people stop checking
It's not a small effect.
I think it's for every 1% drop in the stock market, people check their portfolios 5% to 6% less regularly.
And his argument is, from a narrow-minded, logical perspective, that's irrational.
The information about our wealth is equally valid, whether it's good news or bad news.
But he says people have a rule of thumb, is if something causes them pleasure, they do it more.
If something causes them immediate pain, they turn away from it.
So the danger with smoking ads or anti-smoking ads that scare people is that often, unless the change you're asking is really easy, you can cause people either to avoid paying any attention to the messaging or going through these kind of mental gymnastics to explain to themselves why that messaging doesn't affect them.
Yeah.
And it's this, I think, problem with long versus short term thinking.
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