By Stacey Kratz
“We put a person in space before we put wheels on a suitcase. My goodness. We are looking past the mark, my friends.”
That humorous aside was only one of the many quips Daniel Crosby made in his address to the McKay School community as this past school year’s honored alumni, but that aside is a telling one. Crosby’s experiences have taught him that the key to the future happiness of the human race is a more intimate focus on behavior, on human psychology and human needs, and on individuals and their potential to enact change.
“We think solving society’s problems takes so many resources, but I am telling you, behavior is the future,” Crosby said. “As we live in a society with great physical ease, our problems will become more and more psychological and more and more spiritual.”
Crosby is a psychologist who, as chief behavioral officer at Orion Advisor Solutions, helps organizations use evidence-based education, tools, and technology to see clients’ needs, build stronger relationships, and help people grow together. Crosby holds a doctorate from the McKay School’s Instructional Psychology and Technology program and has written several books. Here are a few key takeaways from his presentation:
Human-First Thinking Solves Problems
Crosby noted that if the entirety of human history was condensed into one calendar year, the pyramids were built on Christmas Day while the founding of the United States occurred late in the day on December 29. Everything that came before, he said—the struggle for enough food, a warm place to sleep, and freedom from harassment—has been achieved for many and is being achieved throughout most of the rest of the planet.
“We have solved these physiological and safety needs, but our problems have not gone away; they have moved upstream,” he said. “Where there was once a problem of bread, there is now a problem of belonging. Where there was once a problem of peace, there is now a problem of purpose.”
We live in a world of innovation, he said, but “medical, financial, and technological innovations are only as good as their users.” Problems of peace and purpose speak to needs within each human heart, Crosby said, and analysis, education, and encouraging behavioral change have a greater chance of addressing such problems: “Through problem-solving measures, we can change the world.”
Community Thinking Needs Encouragement
Crosby talked briefly about the history of policing in response to high crime rates—“the old-school approach says more cops, more cameras, more fines.” “However,” he said, “that’s kind of what got us here in the first place, so we know there are some problems there.”
In one study, behavioral scientists tried something different: they met with families in a crime-plagued community, secured images of babies who were part of those families, and hired artists to paint pictures of the babies on the roll-down grilles of local businesses. All night the community’s future looked out at its present.
The result, Crosby said, was stunning. “Vandalism went to zero and crime dropped 20 percent because people did not want to defile the faces of those beautiful babies.” This is a perfect example, he added, of leveraging “the way people are” to improve a situation.
And it doesn’t just work on crime, he said. “The future of tech is behavioral.” And streaming services are an example. The old-school approach to growing viewership was more marketing, splashier shows, and bigger stars. But then, Crosby added, Netflix simply added a Keep Watching button. “This increased viewership by a billion hours a week,” Crosby said. “Why? Because they understood the way people are.”
Seek to Serve the Underserved
Volvo, a company that is most famous for the high safety of its “chunky” cars, wanted their cars to be even safer, Crosby said. However, rather than installing better sensors, more sensitive airbags, or a similar technological solution, Volvo looked at the challenge “from a behavioral angle.”
“They saw it through the eyes of the underserved: who has been underserved by the auto industry and the finance industry and, basically, everyone?” Crosby said. “Volvo asked, ‘Why are women 71 percent more likely to get injured and 17 percent more likely to die in an auto accident?’ Because crash test dummies are shaped like men. Every bit of safety programming had been designed for a 5'11'' 180-pound man.”
By designing testing dummies that represented women, Volvo dramatically improved safety, he said: “They did it by seeing the unseen, by looking at groups that had been ignored by the industry. And they shared that knowledge at no charge with other automakers.”
Leverage Human Behavior for Good
Childhood obesity is a major challenge in prosperous nations around the world, Crosby noted. The traditional response has been things such as issuing food pyramids at a societal level and taking away kids’ dessert at home. But neither of these solutions addressed human psychology, he said: “When I’m traveling, and I get a Cinnabon instead of a salad, is it because I’m not aware which is better? Of course not. Education is a weak predictor of behavior.”
Instead, some researchers employed psychology and reoriented the order of the food for certain consumers: people saw the healthiest options first and dessert last. This simple, psychology-based fix, Crosby said, improved healthy eating behavior by 30 percent.
The same concepts have influenced organ donation. Austria has a 99.9 percent rate of declared organ donors in its population, Crosby said, while neighboring Germany has a 12 percent rate. The difference? Austria moved away from a system in which people getting a driver’s license must opt in to become an organ donor to a system in which they must opt out if they don’t want to be a donor.
“That’s leveraging human behavior for human good,” Crosby said. “People skim over the form and improve the world.”
This method reveals incentives that motivate change, such as action by authorities in India who faced the agonizing problem of 1,000 children per day dying from diseases associated with poor hygiene. “It was a completely preventable avalanche of death,” Crosby said.
To fight it, authorities “aligned incentives and behavior: they made clear soap with Matchbox cars and Hello Kitty erasers inside the soap,” he said. Children used the soap happily, he said, helping India see a 70 percent decrease in childhood illnesses. “Think about the power of looking through that behavioral lens,” he said.
Use Behavior to Drive Connection
That power extends even to loneliness and to the mental-health problems associated with it, Crosby said. He noted that at least half of American adults report being somewhat lonely and socially isolated, which the United States federal government has called an epidemic of great concern.
“Research done here at BYU shows isolation is twice as damaging as obesity and equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day,” Crosby said.
“It’s a profoundly, profoundly big deal. We find ourselves in a new world order: we have far more deaths from excess food than lack of food today. American soldiers are four times as likely to die of self-harm than to die on the battlefield.
“Gallup did a survey of people making various incomes and asked them how much money they would need to be happy. . . . At every single income bracket, people are dissatisfied. They have not found what they’re looking for. To me, this is the fulfillment of scripture—wrestling not against physical things but against kingdoms and principalities.”
Bringing people together and helping them understand where to find lasting happiness must involve behavioral and personal change, he said.
“While people’s lives have become more comfortable in many respects, they are not necessarily better,” he said. “We in the McKay School are so well positioned to fight this psychological war against meaninglessness and loneliness and dissatisfaction. It is a calling. It is a calling to be able to do this, and it is an absolute privilege.”