In this Brainfluence episode, host Roger Dooley sits down with behavioral scientist Eva van den Broek and advertising creative Tim den Heijer, co-authors of the intriguing new book, The Housefly Effect: The Nudge Psychology That Steers Our Everyday Behavior. Together, they dive into the quirky yet profound ways that tiny changes—think a simple housefly sticker in a urinal—can dramatically shift our decisions and habits. Join us as Eva and Tim unpack the stories and science behind these small interventions, from the power of naming an “effect,” to surprising marketing strategies, the influence of groupthink, and real-world examples like the “Cobra Effect.” Along the way, you’ll learn why imperfections can make products more appealing, how unintended consequences play out in public policy, and why sometimes being nudged in the right direction matters more than knowing exactly why you changed your behavior. Whether you’re a marketer, policy maker, or just curious about how our minds work, this episode is packed with playful insights and practical advice on harnessing the subtle art of nudging.
Listen or Watch
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
VIDEO:
The Housefly Effect – Key Moments
00:00 – Introduction: What Is the Housefly Effect? Meet the guests and get a quick overview of the concept behind the “Housefly Effect” and how tiny nudges can transform behavior.
00:43 – Why Small Changes Have a Big Impact in Behavioral ScienceTim den Heijer and Eva van den Broek explain why subtle environmental cues can create outsized changes in our habits and choices.
01:53 – The Origin Story: Schiphol’s Famous Housefly Urinal Nudge Discover the real case study that inspired the book’s title: how a fake fly in an airport urinal cleaned up behavior worldwide.
04:13 – The “Effect Effect”: Why Naming Psychological Principles Matters Why are people more persuaded when a bias or phenomenon has a catchy name? Learn how the “effect effect” helps people remember and buy into behavioral science.
06:43 – Dunning-Kruger Effect Explained: How Overconfidence Affects Marketers Find out how the Dunning-Kruger Effect—overestimating knowledge or skill—impacts decision-making in marketing and creative industries.
10:01 – Political Messaging: Simplicity or Substance? Trump vs. Clinton Strategy What behavioral science explains the effectiveness of Trump’s simple messages versus Clinton’s detailed policies? Hear how political success often hinges on behavioral psychology.
14:19 – The “But You Are Free” Technique in Persuasion Can giving people freedom of choice actually increase persuasion? Explore the “but you are free” effect in campaigns and society.
15:33 – Perfection vs. Authenticity: Does Making Mistakes Build Trust? Dive into the “Pratfall Effect”—why imperfections can make people and brands more likable and authentic.
18:24 – Smashing Your Brand: How Distinctive Brand Elements Work Can just part of a logo or a brand color trigger recognition? Tim den Heijer discusses branding lessons you can take from political copywriting and beyond.
19:38 – The Cobra Effect: How Good Intentions Backfire (Famous Policy Failures) Learn about the notorious “Cobra Effect” and how unintended consequences can undermine well-meaning incentives and public policies.
24:18 – Avoiding Groupthink in Policy and Business Decisions What can organizations do to prevent costly groupthink mistakes? Get practical advice from Eva van den Broek and Tim den Heijer.
27:36 – Bringing Behavioral Science Into Organizations—At the Right Time Why waiting until failure to call in behavioral experts is a mistake, and how to integrate nudges earlier for real results.
27:49 – Where to Find the Authors Online & Closing Thoughts Connect with Eva van den Broek and Tim den Heijer and wrap up the insights from this episode.
The Housefly Effect – Quotes
— Tim den Heijer [00:02:53 → 00:03:03]
— Tim den Heijer [00:01:36 → 00:01:49]
— Eva van den Broek [00:04:20 → 00:04:25]
— Tim den Heijer [00:04:46 → 00:05:07]
— Eva van den Broek [00:05:49 → 00:05:56]
— Tim den Heijer [00:07:44 → 00:07:54]
— Tim den Heijer [00:08:33 → 00:08:46]
— Tim den Heijer [00:09:01 → 00:09:12]
— Eva van den Broek [00:12:20 → 00:12:40]
— Tim den Heijer [00:16:49 → 00:16:59]
About Eva van den Broek
Eva van den Broek holds a PhD in behavioral economist and is the founder of Behavioral Insights in The Netherlands. She is an expert in behavioral science who works closely with policymakers and leaders in large organizations to drive positive change. Throughout her career, Eva has recognized the complexity of decision-making, emphasizing that people don’t always make choices for the “right” reasons—even when those are the choices organizations want them to make. Rather than focusing solely on convincing people to act for ideal motives, she advocates for reshaping environments and options to encourage better outcomes. Eva is pragmatic about human nature, highlighting that it’s often more practical to design systems that nudge good decisions than to expect everyone to act from perfect reasoning. Her insights challenge organizations to think broadly about how real, lasting change happens.
About Tim den Heijer
Tim den Heijer is a creative strategist, copywriter and founder of B.R.A.I.N. Creatives. He is a behavioral science enthusiast and advertising expert who found inspiration close to home, just a short drive from Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. Alongside Eva van den Broek, Tim seized the opportunity to write a book that delves into the quirky realities of human behavior they often discuss in their lectures. Fascinated by moments where tiny changes lead to outsized results, like the dramatic impact of a simple painted fly in a urinal at Schipho, they sought a metaphor akin to the butterfly effect to anchor their stories. For Tim, solving everyday issues with creative behavioral insights is at the core of his journey as a thinker and storyteller. Tim has 20 years of experience in advertising and has worked for some of the biggest brands on the planet.
The Housefly Effect Resources
Amazon – The Housefly Effect
LinkedIn – Eva van den Broek: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evdbroek/
LinkedIn – Tim den Heijer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timdenheijer/
If you like Brainfluence…
- Never miss an episode by subscribing via iTunes, Stitcher or by RSS
- Help improve the show by leaving a Rating & Review in iTunes (Here’s How)
- Join the discussion for this episode in the comments section below
Full Transcript:
Full Episode Transcript PDF: Click HERE
Roger Dooley [00:00:05]:
Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley. Today I’m excited to be joined by Eva van den Broek and Tim den Heijer, the authors of the fascinating new book the Housefly Effect, the nudge psychology that steers our everyday behavior. Eva is a behavioral scientist and a founder of Behavioral Insights Netherlands, while Tim has extensive experience as an advertising creative and co founder of Brain Creatives. Together they’ve combined their expertise to explore the surprising ways that subtle cues in our environment, the house flies, can have a significant impact on our choices and actions. Welcome to the show, Eva and Tim.
Tim den Heijer [00:00:41]:
Thank you.
Eva van den Broek [00:00:41]:
Thank you so much.
Tim den Heijer [00:00:42]:
Great to be here.
Roger Dooley [00:00:43]:
Books about behavioral science interventions often emphasize that tiny things can create bigger changes. You know, we’ve got nudge from Thaler and Sunstein, we’ve got the big small from Cialdini and his co authors Explain the housefly effect. House fly is a pretty small thing.
Eva van den Broek [00:01:05]:
Definitely, and that’s how we, how it got started. But actually Tim really had to convince me to use this, this little house fly for our purposes. I wasn’t convinced at the beginning.
Tim den Heijer [00:01:17]:
Yes, well, we got the opportunity to write a book about behavioral science and about the things that we both speak on in lectures. And we were looking for an angle to sort of decide what’s going in the book and what’s not going in the book. And we were really interested in, just like you mentioned, those instances where the symmetry is off, where you can do something small and get a big change or maybe make a small mistake and get a big problem. So we thought those were fascinating and we were discussing, well, if we want a lot of people to enjoy this, we need like a central metaphor for that. And like there’s the butterfly effect for, for that. We were inspired by the famous fly in the urinal, which actually the first time the fly was put in the urinal was I think about 10 minutes car drive away from where we are right now, Schiphol Airport. For the listeners who don’t have that knowledge yet, Schiphol had a problem that guys are a little bit messy at the urinal sometimes, and then the floor needs to be cleaned, which is also very inconvenient for travelers because then the toilet obviously is closed down. And what fascinated me as an advertising guy is that they solved it in a way I would never have thought of.
Tim den Heijer [00:02:39]:
I would have come up with a campaign with a joke with some way to make people feel good about themselves or something like that. I wouldn’t have come up with painting a little flight in there. And guys just aim at it and the problem is solved. It just happens. So I think for us, the book is partially about small things with large impact, but also about those moments when behavior change just seems to happen of its own accord. And that really fascinates us. And that’s what we called the housefly effect.
Eva van den Broek [00:03:07]:
That still didn’t quite convince me. Right. Because I still found it a very. Well, not the kind of topic I wanted to start my lectures with or my. I don’t know. So it took a while until I saw that was actually some. That also, when talking to other behavioral scientists who all, of course, knew about this little example, they seem to think. The international ones seem to think there was a peculiar dog.
Eva van den Broek [00:03:34]:
And that, in the end, was one of the reasons that I went along with Tim’s idea. It actually works well, it seems in the Netherlands, where people don’t like rules that much. Perhaps. I’m not sure whether that’s true, but that gave it extra attraction to me, this specific phenomenon.
Roger Dooley [00:03:53]:
Right. Well, I mean, despite the topic, which is kind of unappealing, you know, I think that it is a fantastic example of a ridiculously simple, inexpensive thing that has a relatively profound effect on behavior. So, I mean, it’s. It’s a great example. But I. I understand your reservations, Ava. Now, you know, you talk about the effect effect. Can you explain what the effect effect is?
Eva van den Broek [00:04:20]:
This is another thing that Tim told me about, although I’m playing the scientist here. This is in fact. Yeah. It’s just the fact that people listen to you more closely when you give things a name. Right. When you scrape a certain example as part of a bigger set of phenomena, I guess.
Tim den Heijer [00:04:39]:
Yes. So, for instance, for years I have been telling, as an advertising creative people, if you want to get some attention to your product, it has to look different from what else is on the shelf. And they would be like, yeah, yeah, sure, I suppose you’re right. But we have reasons to make our spaghetti look like the Italian flag, just like all other spaghetti. Right. When you say now you have to use the von Restorff effect, which is saying the same thing, but now it has a name. They’re like, oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, we should.
Tim den Heijer [00:05:09]:
We should use that effect you mentioned. So that is the effect effect. People are more interested in something once it’s been called an effect. So I think one point we had in mind when we were making the book is that people who write and present about behavioral science don’t always take their own medicine so they can explain how to engage an audience without actually engaging their audience sometimes. And we really wanted to do that differently. So we said, okay, we’re going to use those effects to engage the audience, but we’re also going to tell them how to. How we do it. So we named the book after an effect using the effect effect.
Tim den Heijer [00:05:43]:
And then inside the book, we explained, okay, we used it this, this because we really wanted you to read the book.
Eva van Den Broek [00:05:48]:
Yeah.
Eva van den Broek [00:05:49]:
And luckily that doesn’t hurt. Right. People knowing that they’re being tricked into something are still tricked into something is one of the things that behavioral science learning teaches us.
Roger Dooley [00:06:02]:
Well, I think it’s great, and that’s really good advice too, because certainly many of our audience members are trying to apply these various behavioral science tools to market better or even in other parts of their business. But often they have to convince other people that this is a good thing. It’s a good idea to do this. And by citing a name, it makes it that much more persuasive than saying, well, you know, studies show that X happens by actually naming it and maybe tossing in a famous scientist too, if there happens to be one that makes the whole thing a lot more credible.
Tim den Heijer [00:06:40]:
So.
Roger Dooley [00:06:41]:
So that’s really great. The Dunning Kruger effect is a thing. Again, our audience members may or may not be familiar with it, but when people think they know more than they do, that’s pretty common. And we’ve all found that in business where maybe it’s the boss, maybe it’s somebody in another department thinks they know way more than they actually do, that they’re more competent than they are. Explain how that fits into marketing.
Tim den Heijer [00:07:08]:
Well, I think from my perspective, I think people in marketing. Well, as Cialdini shows us, right. People in marketing had great intuition for these kinds of effects even before scientists started naming them and testing them in the laboratory. Which has also led to the idea among people in advertising and marketing that our intuitions are infallible, that if I’m under the shower and I have an idea about how behavior works, then I’m just going to convince my client that this is how it works. Right? And then we have a blind spot for all the stuff we don’t know, and we can be a little bit overconfident. And also since we’re advertising people, we’re pretty convincing. So it can be also to ourselves. Disasters can happen.
Tim den Heijer [00:07:54]:
When you’re very confident and your intuition has a great track record and you’re very persuasive, you can tell a client, believe me, this is going to work. And later get into some Trouble?
Eva van Den Broek [00:08:05]:
Yeah.
Eva van den Broek [00:08:06]:
May I comment to that? The people that marketeers happen to convince are usually other marketeers. Right. All these prices that Tim told me about were about people thinking that it was a great campaign, whereas testing it. No, that was something that only scientists would do. Of course. You wouldn’t ruin good idea by testing it. I really was intrigued by how marketeers worked coming from another side.
Tim den Heijer [00:08:33]:
Well, in performance marketing, there are people who are very serious about testing, but in creative marketing, to be honest, a lot of testing is basically done to shut up the client. We’ve tested it. Now we can prove it works. Now let us do the thing that we thought we should do rather than testing to say, I really want to learn something new. My intuition may be off. I may have a blind spot here. I want to find out more about my audience and about how to reach my goals. I think if we go to the other side of the Dunning Kruger effect, that says that people who know lots and lots and lots about something tend to be very humble about it and say, oh, but I don’t know everything yet.
Tim den Heijer [00:09:14]:
I can’t really say anything about it. Which means that maybe people who could actually have great advice don’t share it because there are too many ifs and buts about it.
Eva van den Broek [00:09:25]:
Well, I think that’s actually nice about our collaboration because I do tend to make things sound more complex than Tim does. Tim.
Tim den Heijer [00:09:32]:
So now you’re saying I’m on one.
Eva van Den Broek [00:09:33]:
End of the spectrum and you’re on the other end.
Eva van den Broek [00:09:35]:
You are playing into that. Yeah.
Tim den Heijer [00:09:38]:
You need to figure out how much you need to know to make a good decision, which isn’t everything, but it’s also not a little bit. And you really have to understand, well, look at all this knowledge we have as a tool, and when. When do I have the right tools to make a good decision? And that’s something we try to help people with with the book.
Roger Dooley [00:09:58]:
I think this leads us into another topic here. You talk a little bit about Donald Trump and presidential politics, and we are now in the final two weeks of the presidential election here in the US And Trump really confounded the experts eight years ago when he not only won the nomination, but the presidency. But at the time, I talked about something kind of what we were talking about with the Dunning Kruger effect, where if you compare the way people talked about the two candidates talked about their policies on immigration. Hillary Clinton was a policy wonk. She was actually an expert on policy. So her immigration policy had nine points, and they had various acronyms in some of these points for different programs and so on. And it was definitely a well thought out policy. We might not agree with all of it, but at least plenty of thought had gone into it.
Roger Dooley [00:10:51]:
On the other hand, Trump’s messaging was very simple. We’re going to build a wall. And that to me was a key part of his strategy. And so you talk about Trump in your book a little bit. What behavioral strategies do you see help explain Trump’s success?
Tim den Heijer [00:11:09]:
I think simplicity of messaging is one of them. I think there’s. Without choosing sides politically, I think there’s a. Republicans have, from our perspective, looking at it from across the ocean and maybe not being as invested, I think have. Have a larger acceptance of the fact that people are very busy, maybe aren’t very invested in politics and will just be surfing the channels and pick up a couple of minutes of politics and not need to be able to process that. Whereas Democrats tend to have very well thought out positions, but also want to inform people a lot. And well, it’s very hard to inform people into behavior. So I think if you put it a little more strongly that the idea that if you can prove that you’re right, people will do what you want them to do, I think that can be a real hindrance sometimes in politics.
Eva van den Broek [00:12:10]:
And trying to convince people to do something for the correct reasons is something else that I think is not always perhaps necessary. I work a lot with policymakers and with people higher up in bigger organizations. And then for instance, when Diversity and Inclusion manager wants to get to towards some goals in their organization, they would say things like, no, no, no, but I don’t want people to be tricked into making the right decision. I want people to make the right decision for the right reason. Whereas, come on, that’s not something we can influence. I mean, you could, but that’s so much more an intensive process to get people to. You could also change circumstances, context, options, all these other kind of things that do influence us. I’m not saying that political choices should be manipulated into something, but I do think that there’s lots of bad choices made for the right reasons.
Eva van den Broek [00:13:12]:
And the other way around.
Tim den Heijer [00:13:14]:
Yes. And the, the partisanship is another thing to think about. I’ve been involved in some political campaigns in the Netherlands and one that worked really well was where we asked people, are you going to vote for our candidate? And they said, no, I’m not. I’m going to vote for a different party because that’s what feels good to me. Sure, that’s fine. But can you explain to me, can you think of a reason why people are going to vote for our candidate. And then they would say, well, he is a strong leader, he has great ideas, he’s really trustworthy. So he could make these ads where we showed even people who don’t vote for him think he’s a great leader, which really worked well.
Tim den Heijer [00:13:49]:
But to do that, we had to first accept that we’re going to show the fact that other people make other decisions, and that is fine. And we’re not going to do a fighting ad where the other party is like the enemy. So there are different ways to approach it, I think.
Eva van den Broek [00:14:04]:
And I love this story because Tim came up with that. Well, this was something that came up a long time ago, long before we knew each other. But I back then already used it as a brilliant example in my courses. So I was a fan of him before I knew him.
Roger Dooley [00:14:19]:
That kind of reminds me of the but you are free effect. I wonder if by sort of giving people permission to vote for the other party, you could actually be more persuasive for them to vote for your party or your candidate, where, you know, instead of saying, you have to vote for us because, you know the other person is evil, they’re going to destroy the country or whatever, you know, be a little bit more open, saying, yeah, you know, you’re free to make your own choice, but here’s why you should choose us. Do you think that could possibly work, or is that just not going to happen in the kind of environment we have now?
Tim den Heijer [00:14:51]:
Well, I think it would be refreshing. I do think that people. Well, there’s a lot of evidence for that as well, that if you really push people to do something that they don’t want to do, they will just become more entrenched and actually they become more fanatical about not doing it. And of course, we’re here in the Netherlands where people are allergic to rules and regulations and somebody telling them what to do. So we’re sort of used to always finding a little way around them and give them a little nudge or a little fly in the urinal rather than saying, the rule is that you need to do this, this. But yeah, I think that sometimes the more soft ways of. Of influencing behavior can be much more effective. Yeah.
Roger Dooley [00:15:33]:
Do imperfections make people or products more attractive? In some ways it seems. It seems wrong. But do you talk about that in your book?
Eva van den Broek [00:15:42]:
Well, that is one of the. So in our book is filled with examples, and most of the funny and great and memorable examples are from Tim, because my examples are all from policy Making environments complex. Black’s fake and all that. No, no, that’s not. Well, anyway, I think this was one of the examples where I had the theory, but I didn’t know of many instances of it. And Tim could come up with a lot of them actually with, with brilliant marketing campaigns where this was the case and all that. But it actually seems to be an effect. It’s called the Prattful effect, right.
Eva van den Broek [00:16:22]:
That professors who, I don’t know, spill coffee or what, be more trustworthy at least, perhaps even likable. And of course, it depends. This is one of these kind of behavioral science effects that you’d want to see replicated in lots of kind of different settings and contexts and all that. I don’t know how strong exactly it is, but it does seem to work in many campaigns.
Tim den Heijer [00:16:49]:
Actually, one way to look at it is maybe if you are. If what you present is absolutely perfect, you are building a little bit of a barrier to behavior into your product or the way you present yourself, because the human mind knows that nothing in the world except my wife is perfect. And so it’s going to look for little faults. It’s going to say, this is. This looks too good to be true. I have to think about this. I have to figure out what’s wrong with it, because something has to be wrong with it. Then if you, for instance, say, like I think a restaurant in Texas advertises a one star review they got from a vegan who said, there’s no vegan food here, here, but they’re a meat barbecue restaurant.
Tim den Heijer [00:17:28]:
So they use that bad review to, to sell the restaurant. Then people can also think, maybe they can smile at the joke, but they can also think, okay, fair enough. And I understand that they’re not great at everything. They’re not great at vegan food, they’re great at meat, sure enough. And now I understand how it works and now I can trust them.
Eva van den Broek [00:17:45]:
There’s a big discussion these days in the Netherlands because there was this big supermarket campaign that forgot apparently to put their brand on the newspaper ad. And everyone is now talking about whether was truly the case, whether they really forgot out of being. Trying to. Well, whatever, I don’t know, of course. Do you know?
Tim den Heijer [00:18:04]:
I don’t know if I. I have worked for a client, it wasn’t my mistake, who actually forgot to put their URL to respond to in a. In an ad. So it does happen.
Eva van den Broek [00:18:14]:
Ouch.
Tim den Heijer [00:18:14]:
So I wouldn’t be convinced that it was a clever trick, but it would. It’s smart of them to leave.
Eva van den Broek [00:18:19]:
I Think he’s playing the prattful right now that he is making mistakes as well.
Roger Dooley [00:18:24]:
Martin Lindstrom talked about, I think, I think it’s Martin that talked about smashing your brand. Where people should be able to recognize your brand just by fragments of it. You know, the color, the font or something, you know, things like that. And that’s when you’ve achieved, you know, truly a great brand. When people don’t need to see your entire logo in its proper colors and proper position and everything. When just some portion of it, even maybe a sound is enough to evoke the brand. So maybe there’s that.
Tim den Heijer [00:18:55]:
Well, if you look at, for instance, I saw this interesting analysis. If you look at some of the copy on Donald Trump’s website and on Kamala Harris’s website, then it’s very easy to see which is from which website. Even if you take away all the branding and you just have to have the copy. If it’s something like make America the number one energy manufacturer in the world, by far. Exclamation point. Yeah. You know who that is. And the other side, well, some of that as well.
Tim den Heijer [00:19:27]:
And I think a great brand should always speak in its own way. So that’s so recognizable that you can indeed leave. Leave the logo behind. Yeah.
Roger Dooley [00:19:38]:
Now, I always love a new effect that I haven’t heard of. Explain what the cobra effect is.
Tim den Heijer [00:19:45]:
So this is, this is a great story that maybe we shouldn’t fact check to death. But the story goes like this. In Delhi, India, there were way too many cobra snakes and it was dangerous. And so the government thought like true economists, and they said, okay, we’re going to pay people to catch those snakes for us. If they bring us a snake, they get a little bit of money and then we get rid of the snakes. This is not thinking in terms of housefly effects, which are also often second order effects. Right. Because people in Delhi were pretty clever and they figured out that if a mommy snake and a daddy snake really like each other, then in a couple of weeks you’ll have or months, you have a bunch of snakes that you can bring to the government and that they will pay you for.
Tim den Heijer [00:20:31]:
So they started breeding these cobra snakes, which became a big problem. And then the government made another decision. They said, well, we’re stopping this right now. We’re not paying for the snakes anymore because this is, this isn’t working. So then people in Delhi were left with all these snakes in their house that they could, you know, that they had no use for. So they put them in the parks and Actually, the problem became much, much bigger. And so to. To pay someone an incentive to do something that works disastrously the other way.
Tim den Heijer [00:21:02]:
That’s the cobra effect. And I think you had the example by the archaeologists about it, right?
Eva van den Broek [00:21:06]:
Yeah, there’s. There’s more examples of these. What I’m. What’s popping up in my mind right now is something that actually the Dutch government just completely ruined. There was this. There was a. What’s that? Sorry, I’m missing out on one specific word. Stat.
Eva van Den Broek [00:21:27]:
Ah.
Eva van den Broek [00:21:29]:
So the amount of money that you receive back when you bring your empty bottles to the store.
Roger Dooley [00:21:34]:
Okay. It’s a deposit in the Deposit, Right?
Eva van den Broek [00:21:38]:
Just deposit. There was something that was increased a bit on tin cans and all that. In the Netherlands, it was just introduced on tin cans. We had it on other bottles, but actually it was only a tiny amount. So people didn’t think it was worth the money to completely bring it back to the stores. But of course, homeless people would try to get into the garbage bins and get them out and bring them, collect them and bring them to the store. Now, you could say that’s a great side effect. There’s people making money from it that need it more than the people drinking beer in the park.
Eva van den Broek [00:22:12]:
However, the homeless people were completely destroying all the bins in all the parks. So right now in Amsterdam, it’s a major, big mess because all the garbage bins are open, and then the birds come and they empty it. And this whole campaign and policy measure is completely backfiring at the municipality right now. So there are these cobra snakes examples in real life, in everyday life, all over the place, I think. But the cobra one is just such a beautiful one that we couldn’t leave it outside.
Roger Dooley [00:22:44]:
Right. Well, there’s great examples of unintended consequences, although, you know, I think that undoubtedly at least one person in the room saw how that could possibly go wrong. Because as soon as you mentioned, it got to the point where there were a lot of cobras and the government put a bounty on cobras. My mind immediately went to people finding ways to get more cobras, whether going out into the countryside and collecting them or breeding them at home. And I have to believe that not everybody in the room thought this was a brilliant idea. But, you know, somehow you get this sort of groupthink effect, and it’s. Nobody’s. People are afraid to speak up because the boss wants to do this, and, you know, it ends up not being great.
Roger Dooley [00:23:27]:
And even, I think even the can thing, that’s. It’s a little bit Less obvious because I mean many places have had a can bounty or deposit for years and years and years and it’s worked pretty well. Where often you do see homeless people picking up cans on the street and the such where they’re, you know, they can, but the consequence of just emptying trash bins and such to making a huge mess, that’s, that’s a bigger problem. But a good example there though because it does show that you should do things to avoid group think, to avoid that sort of consensus decision making where people are afraid to speak up because. Well. Okay, well, what are some interventions that you would suggest?
Eva van den Broek [00:24:18]:
I actually, I advised some parties on this specific topic. So the problem here is that there’s not enough intake points. I think people just have to carry their bags with cans for too many kilometers before they can hand it in. The easy thing would be to make it much more expensive. That’s not something you would expect or expect from a behavioral scientist, I guess. But here I really think we have a brilliantly working system where there’s a higher amount of deposit on the bigger bottles. Come on. The solution is obvious here.
Eva van den Broek [00:24:55]:
I think since that didn’t go well with the specific parties that I was working with. I guess the other thing I could say is just test it right before you do it. Test it in a tiny neighborhood, see how it works, see what people do with it and see if it’s worth the effort. And if not we have to come up with something else.
Tim den Heijer [00:25:13]:
And actually now in Amsterdam, I haven’t seen the results from it, but it looks like a very clever idea. There are these special bins that you can put your can in that are actually meant for homeless people or whoever needs the money to take them out of and bring them back. So they don’t need to go into the regular bins and break these open. And it’s cleaner for them, it’s more humane.
Eva van den Broek [00:25:33]:
Birds don’t like the birds.
Tim den Heijer [00:25:37]:
So I think that’s a good way to use it. At one point I thought was interesting about this, the group think is that I have the idea that when that a lot of organizations like behavioral science to a point and then they get a little, then they get, we need a grown up solution to this. It’s going to be about money. We’re actually going to pay people to do it or we’re going to find them if they don’t do it. And then it sort of feels like we’ve been playing around with this behavioral science for long enough now we just need a serious solution. You know, and I think when organizations get into that mindset, you can also see it for in emails that companies send out to their clients. Those will be inspired by behavioral science. You’re doing well.
Tim den Heijer [00:26:26]:
Most of our other clients are doing slightly less. All those insights, but then if there’s a problem with your payment, it’s legalese. It’s like, okay, playtime is over. Now the grownups need to run the company and send these people a scary letter. Which of course is exactly the moment at which you would need someone like Eva to advise you, okay, these people have stress. These people may have money problems. How are we going to work this?
Eva van den Broek [00:26:55]:
Super interesting what you’re noting here, because in policy making, it’s completely the other way around. Only by the time they hit a wall, they really can’t solve it. With the usual law making kind of, I don’t know, penalty kind of solutions. They come to the behavioral team, throw everything to the other side and say, okay, you behavioral people, please come up with a solution now for us. We can’t do anything anymore. And I think, well, starting a bit earlier with thinking about the consequences on actual people’s behavior would be very beneficial in both ways. Right.
Tim den Heijer [00:27:34]:
It’s not something you can turn on and turn off.
Roger Dooley [00:27:36]:
Right. What you’re saying, I think is that it would be a smart thing to, to involve the behavioral experts earlier in the process rather than after everything has failed. So I think this might be a pretty good place to wrap up. Eva and Tim, where can people find you and your ideas online?
Tim den Heijer [00:27:53]:
We’re both on LinkedIn. I’m also a little bit active still on X, formerly known as Twitter, which is a little bit better for English speaking because a lot of my content on LinkedIn tends to be Dutch. So. Yeah, and just Google our names and you’ll find lots of stuff.
Roger Dooley [00:28:08]:
Okay, well, thank you so much for being on the show.
Eva van den Broek [00:28:11]:
Thank you so much for having us. It was a thrill.

