‘Keep looking when cooking’: Behavioural insights could save lives

There are four crucial elements to designing and implementing a behavioural insights intervention:

• Framing of the problem
• Designing experiments
• Interpreting results
• Implementing interventions based on results

This article covers the principles of how BI is applied in practice around the world.

This example illustrates the process of problem framing and experiment design via an example from New South Wales in Australia.

Could a goggle-eyed spatula be the key to preventing housefires?

That’s what one Australian fire service set out to discover. New South Wales (NSW) Fire and Rescue used behavioural insights to design its winter awareness campaign in 2015, working to tackle kitchen fires with the simple exhortation to “keep looking when cooking”.

Results of the push were encouraging. But it’s the planning process that’s especially instructive. Susan Broomhall, Behaviour Specialist at NSW Fire and Rescue, explained in an interview with Apolitical how she blended data analysis with insights from psychology, economics and more to design the simple but powerful campaign.

Framing the Problem

When Broomhall began work on the agency’s annual winter fire safety campaign, she was careful to zero in on a genuine issue, not the problem that happened to have the highest-profile.

Crucial in planning any behavioural insights intervention is framing the problem. Given the time of year and the prominence of the issue in the media, many in the agency wanted the campaign to focus on the dangers of indoor heaters.

But Broomhall suspected that kitchen fires were a more pressing problem that didn’t get enough attention from the government. To build her case, Broomhall delved deep into the agency’s data to isolate not just the problem, but the behaviour that led to it.

“I undertook quite a bit of analysis work,” she said, “ripping apart our incident data, our fire data, to see things like area of origin, or room of origin.” She found that 50% of fires were happening in the kitchen. But more than that — this correlated with “unattended” fires.

That tendency to leave cooking fires unwatched was the behaviour the agency needed to address. A literature review Broomhall undertook of similar data from other developed countries backed up the urgency of the problem.

Once she’d persuaded her bosses that kitchen fires were the right problem to address, the team was able to identify more granular behavioural information.

“In the past, we’ve had campaigns that show the aftermath of a fire, that say your family’s going to burn in the fire because you’ve done something wrong. Psychologically, that’s really disempowering: people shut down”

NSW Fire and Rescue bought a lifestyle segmentation dataset to better understand lifestyle habits such as how households consume information or where they spend their time. Using this, Broomhall was able to “triangulate the data” to spot specific trends — households, for example, usually experienced fires at 7pm when it was time for dinner. Cash-strapped university students were the most likely to experience toaster fires in the bedroom.

“You need to understand how people are living, how these problems come up in their environment, and then with that understanding, you can create a message that resonates with them,” Broomhall said.

But framing a problem isn’t just about the issues you do choose to tackle — it’s also about deciding which to ignore.

“There were a lot of issues that we needed to address, with such a limited budget, such a limited amount of time, such a limited capacity,” said Broomhall.

She ended up taking a hard-nosed economist’s view. The fire and rescue service typically looks at three kinds of outcomes from fires: damage to property, human injury, and human fatalities.

“A fatality you could argue, on an emotional basis, is far worse than an injury,” said Broomhall, but emotion-led decision making is something she “doesn’t have the luxury” of. An injury — which someone may have to treat for the rest of their lives — is much more costly than a fatality. Kitchen fires resulted in an especially high rate of injuries compared to other fire locations.

Designing the experiment

With the nature of the problem understood and the agency bought in, Broomhall had to develop hypotheses to test, based on her understanding of the existing scientific evidence.

From her reading of the psychological literature, Broomhall knew she was looking to deliver a message that was “empowering”.

“In the past, we’ve had campaigns that show the aftermath of a fire, that say your family’s going to burn in the fire because you’ve done something wrong,” she said. “Psychologically, that’s really disempowering: people shut down.”

Meanwhile, Broomhall wanted to keep her message “as simple as possible” — “that’s behavioural economics 101,” she said.

Of 420 households who received the spatula and a brochure via the mail, 93% said they had already practiced “keep looking when cooking” as a behaviour

And it needed to be front of mind; something that would be present for the target audience as they cooked, not seen outside of the context where they needed to remember it.

The core message — “Keep looking when cooking” — hit those first two bases. It was simple, and it was fun.

Meanwhile, Broomhall sought out delivery mechanisms for the campaign that would keep it in front of the mind and actually change behaviour.

One favourite was a spatula bedecked with a pair of staring eyes, as well as the slogan on its handle, so even a non-English speaker would have the message drummed in as they stirred.

Of 420 households who received the spatula and a brochure via the mail, 93% said they had already practiced “keep looking when cooking” as a behaviour.

Winning buy-in

For Broomhall, one last key piece of advice in planning a behavioural insights experiment is to consider the psychology not just of the target population, but of the stakeholders involved in planning and executing it, too.

To be sure of getting buy-in for the project, said Broomhall, “I looked into the psyche and the perspective of every single stakeholder.”

For example, Broomhall thought carefully about her messaging when recruiting firefighters to visit houses as part of outreach for the campaign. “Traditionally... firefighters saw themselves as predominately ‘responders’,” she said.

“The job has therefore attracted people who are willing to run into burning buildings however, curiously, these same people are not necessarily always comfortable holding a conversation with a member of the public.”

But Broomhall has conducted research into the best modes of engaging with a firefighter and found that with the right framing, you can get these frontline operatives on board. “I frame it as a benefit to them in that educating the public to save themselves means they (the firefighter) can just deal with the fire,” she said.

Key Takeaways

-NSW Fire and rescue began by framing the problem they should tackle, identifying a highly damaging behaviour that they could change through rigorous data analysis.

-They developed a message to test by applying insights from psychology and economics to the problem.

-To win buy-in for experiments, consider messaging to internal stakeholders as carefully as that to end-users.— Josh Lowe

(Picture credit: Unsplash)