The Psychological Power of Simplicity

Some Updates

Hello everyone! I’m back from my trip, feeling refreshed, and ready to ramp things up. As you might have noticed, last week I uploaded two videos. One being an interesting case study about RXBAR, another one talking about phone number formatting.

I hope to continue to upload at this twice a week interval from now on, there’s honestly just too much to talk about in regards to behavioral science. I go about my days noticing things and thinking “oh, that could be a video”. It happens so often that many times the video never gets made.

With this new cadence, hopefully that changes!

Everything in Your Life Revolves Around Cognitive Ease

I don’t know if you’ve read the book “Thinking, Fast And Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, but it’s a classic in the field of behavioral science (I highly recommend it). A major topic in this book is the idea of System 1 and System 2 thinking.

System 1 thinking is our “fast” thinking. Thinking that doesn’t require much mental effort and is more or less automatic.

System 2 thinking is our “slow” thinking. Thinking that requires us to be engaged to really process information and be critical.

It should go without saying that we tend to default to System 1 thinking, which is where our natural cognitive biases can come into play. Our “default thinking” if you will.

Our brains don’t want to think hard, that takes resources away from our bodies and doesn’t conserve energy. Our brains are lazy and want to think as little as possible.

With this in mind, let’s get into how we communicate and memorize information.

Cognitive Fluency and Messaging

In my RXBAR video, we focused on what RXBAR was able to do with their packaging in order to increase sales from $2 million/year to $160 million/year. And this really just proves an important point that clear and simple messaging matters.

Sometimes we get caught up in wanting to express the details of something to someone. We know a lot about what we’re talking about and we just want to be able to express this to another person with all the detail it deserves. Just like RXBAR’s original packaging.

The problem is it doesn’t work.

At the last company I worked for, my boss was the CEO. It was extremely important for me to sell ideas to him with simple and clear messaging. He has a ton on his mind, he didn’t want to think any more than he had to.

And while I was able to master this and grow the team I was managing at the time, I would be in so many meetings where people could NOT for the life of them simplify their messaging.

We would be in a meeting and someone would be trying to sell him an idea of a new feature for our product. But many times they would get lost in the details of how to implement the feature instead of beginning with the simple statement “we need this because users are struggling with this.”

My boss would get frustrated and the idea would get shelved because it wasn’t understood. And many times that feature was really needed for our users.

It’s hard. Life is not so easy. But our brains need to think it’s that easy (at least at first).

This is especially important if you are trying to convince someone of something. Like in sales, marketing, or politics. I’m sure we can all think of a few examples of this in politics at the moment…

Making Information Easier for Our Brains to Process

And just like it’s important to communicate information in a simple and clear way, we also need to make it easy for our brains to understand and process information. That’s where I introduced the concept of “chunking” in my video about phone number formatting.

And I think there’s probably an even bigger message here: Our brains are amazing, we can process a lot of information. But not all at once.

I’m studying for the GRE right now and there’s a lot of vocabulary that I am reviewing / learning for the test. There’s a lot that could potentially be on there. I’m getting flashbacks of when I was in high school and crammed for tests.

But now that I am a bit older and more knowledgeable about psychology, I know that I can’t possibly process all of this information in one giant way. I need to split it up, so I’m using note cards and doing a little studying every single day.

Just like we need to split up a phone number to memorize larger numbers, I think that we need to split up learning / memorization into smaller chunks to accomplish larger educational goals.

You can’t do it in one day, it doesn’t matter how smart you are.

Think about songs. We memorize lyrics to so many songs without even realizing those are sometimes PARAGRAPHS worth of words. But we split them up with choruses, melodies, and different beats. It’s just the way our brains work to make it more manageable.

Simply Put…

Life is complicated and hard. It’s up to us to make it simple for the sake of our brains.

So when we’re trying to communicate something to someone else, work with their brain’s tendency to prefer simple information. Make it easy for them.

When we’re trying to learn or memorize something, break it down into smaller parts. Make it easy for ourselves.

Work with your brain, not against it.

-Carlos

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