Punctual Preachers - Clocks

Apparently starting services on time is a common problem for churches. So imagine how impressed I was when visiting one recently to see behavioural economics in action, and working!

In their famous book Nudge (book review to follow shortly) Dick Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggest many creative ideas for using behavioural economics to 'nudge' people into making better decisions. The church in question, instead of starting 5-10minutes late as people wander in and sit down, created a 'nudge' of their own...

Two and a half minutes before the scheduled start time of 7pm, a video pops up on the big screen. This video has a clock counting down the 2.5minutes, and in the background a speeded up video taken from a car dashboard as it drove around the town (you know the kind of thing). The service started exactly as the video ended, dead on 7pm.

This is genius on many counts.

Firstly, it tells people that you are serious about the start time and that you will stick to it (this of course relies on you sticking to it).

Secondly, it is a reminder to people that the service will start very soon.

Thirdly, it gives people a couple of minutes to end their conversations and find a seat (better than just a 10 second warning).

Fourthly, the video of the town is fast-paced, which sends out the right message; be quick!

In conclusion, genius. And (admittedly on the basis of quite a small sample) it works!

Recommended listening:
Clocks by Coldplay

Sailing Times - I'm A Harrier And I'm Okay

At the start of a week's sailing on the beautiful Norfolk Broads, a question occurred to me... are we rational with regards to time?

I was a leader on Harriers B - a fantastic camp for 15-18s. On the first evening on the cruise, when commanded by the Commodore, we all changed our watches to something called cruise time. Cruise time is an hour later, so at 21:45 all our time-keeping devices were changed to 22:45. The rationale behind it is that as a small fleet of yachts we need to get into moorings early each day while there is still space. So cruise time helps us be earlier. For example, we get up at 7am cruise time and are usually moored up by 5pm cruise time. This sounds a lot better than getting up at 6am every day to be in by 4pm. And because it sounds better it feels better. And because it feels better we do more at that ungodly hour of the morning. Thus cruise time works. It genuinely makes us earlier.

Admittedly there was some protest this year from one of the leaders...

Commy: I'll wake you all up at 7am tomorrow...
Matt: It's 6am!
Commy: No it's not!
Matt: You can't fool my body!

(And in fairness Matt did his very best to prove this was the case throughout the week, never knowingly getting up).

However, most of us swiftly adjusted to cruise time. We were probably better at getting up in the  morning in the mindset of it being 7am than 6am, even though it was all a trick.

According to traditional economics we, as homo economicus, should be unaffected by cruise time. We should behave just the same. It is just a simple trick - the real world time is unaffected. We are not deceived into changing our watches, we all know what we're doing and why we're doing it.

But given that we do change our behaviour when we're told that it's 7am not 6am, even when we know that is not the case, I suggest that this presents a challenge to the belief that we're all the perfectly rational homo economicus.

Recommended listening:
I'm A Harrier And I'm Okay (see verse 5)