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 over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Modern Wisdom · 11 Psychology Tricks From the World’s Best Brands - Richard Shotton - #1053 · 31 Jan 2026 podcast

Now, the interesting bit is if you then go back to all the participants and you say to them, why did you think this statement was believable?

Did the rhyme or absence of rhyme influence you?

Every single participant bar one denied that the kind of form, the rhyme, the ease of processing affected them.

They all said, no, no, I was making a judgment based on the inherent information.

So it's one of these great examples of tiny little changes about the

the fluency, the ease on our ear.

Tiny little changes have a big effect, but people are really low to admit that's what influenced them.

Yeah, so I'm not overly familiar with those studies.

I know they're kind of headline results, but I think you're absolutely right that they will be set up in such a way that the experimenter knows what generated the answer, but the patient will just come up with this plausible, much more rational sounding reason to maintain kind of a sense of face and being a sensible person.

And that's absolutely true with a whole swathe of behavioral science studies.

A key theme of behavioral science is that if you ask people why they bought a particular protein bar or a pair of trainers,

The problem is they'll give you loads of answers, but most of them are just plausible post-rationalizations.

They're not a reflection of what actually motivated them.

So there's this amazing psychologist called Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, and he has a brilliant book called Strangers to Ourselves.

And essentially, the whole book is a series of studies showing that people don't know their own motivations.

So one of the worst things businesses can do, and it accounts for an awful lot of poor communications, is ask people what they want and then take those answers at face value.

Yeah, or a slightly more modern one.

1960s, there's a David Ogilvie line.

He was this kind of amazing ad guy.

And he said, consumers don't think how they feel.

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