Explore Your Deck - Decision Science

Below are 73 ideas, principles and frameworks that can transform the way you work in fundraising, advocacy and communications. Click on a card to find out more.

Keen to explore an overall principle? Then click on on one of the MINDSPACE buttons below to explore a cluster of principles.

Affect and Emotions

Affect describes a specific mood or emotional state. Context, such as time of day, and external stimuli, like sound, impact our emotional state. This state impacts our decisions.

Agency and Autonomy Bias

We like to feel we’re able to control our actions, choices, and responses. Promoting this feeling is essential to enable positive behaviour change.

Analysis Paralysis

Our ability to make good decisions reduces with the number of choices offered. Too many choices may mean we may opt out of choosing altogether.

Anchoring

What we see or hear when making a choice — especially a number — affects our judgement on any related decision we have to make subsequently.

Authority Effect

We’re encouraged from an early age to comply with requests from individuals in perceived positions of authority though their role, dress, or context.

Availability Bias

Our decisions and opinions are heavily influenced by the information, experiences and events that come to mind more readily. These are often those most repeated.

Bandwagon Effect

The more we’re aware others are adopting or supporting an idea, the more attractive it becomes for us to join in.

Barnum-Forer Effect

We may attribute accuracy and insight to vague personality analysis we receive, often based on non-scientific questionnaires, provided they reinforce our broadly positive self-perception.

Behaviour/Temptation Bundling

We find it easier to adopt and maintain a behaviour — even an unpleasant one — if it’s connected at the same time to another behaviour we enjoy.

Bystander Effect

We may not act if we believe someone else is tackling an issue or is more competent to address it.

Certainty Compromise

We value a definite concrete outcome over uncertainty, even if we have to make significant compromises to secure it.

Character Competition

We like to compare our performance and the resources we have against others. This helps reinforce our sense of self-esteem.

Chunking and Sequencing

We process information more easily, and act more readily on requests, if they’re clustered in small, familiar, or manageable units that flow in a memorable order.

Cocktail Party Effect

Our names and even the letters in our name attract our attention even where there is other information or noise ‘static’. (Consider hearing your name mentioned in a crowd.)

Collapse of Compasion

We struggle to find agency and empathy in very large problems, so we focus on helping individuals, avoiding the bigger problem.

Collection/Pattern Bias

We like grouping information and ideas into patterns, especially patterns we recognise. Creating complete sets of things is attractive and satisfying.

Commitment and Consistency

Once we’ve made a public statement or commitment, we tend to make subsequent decisions and take actions that support it.

Confirmation Bias

We tend to look for, or more easily accept, information or opinions that support our existing choices and opinions and ignore what doesn’t.

Curiosity Effect

We like to follow up on information/issues or try to fill a knowledge gap when our interest is stimulated.

Curse of Knowledge

When we’re experts in something we find it hard to explain an idea or challenge simply and clearly to someone who isn’t.

Decoy Effect

Our preference for one of two key options changes dramatically when a third, related but less attractive option, is added into the choice set.

Default Effect

We tend to accept an option we’re cued to accept or agree to, provided it seems fluent and reduces mental or physical effort.

Door In The Face

We are more inclined to agree to a less demanding request after turning down a more demanding one.

DOSE

We enjoy activities or messages that stimulate key neurotransmitters: Dopamin, Oxytocin, Serotonin and Endorphins. These alter our mood or response.

Drop in the Ocean Effect

We worry that our gift, or the action we take, will be too small to make an impact on massive problem.

Dunning Kruger Effect

We tend to over or under-estimate our ability in a given activity. Underestimating can lead to imposter syndrome, but overestimation is just as bad.

Empathy Gap

We underestimate the influence mood, lived experience, and context has on our ability to understand and appreciate the situation of others.

Endowed Progress Effect

We enjoy seeing progress towards a goal and respond more when that progress is reinforced at certain points in a motivational way.

Endowment Effect

We place greater value on objects we own over those we don’t, especially if the object has emotional value.

Feedback Loop

We value real time responses that reinforce the immediate impact of our actions and choices and allow us to adjust our behaviour.

Fluency and Ease

Our brains are programmed to look for fluent options — messages or processes — that seem more natural, or easier and involve less effort mentally or physically.

FOMO

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a social anxiety stemming from the belief others might be having rewarding experiences you’re missing out on. This is often exacerbated by social media.

Foot In The Door

If you can persuade an individual to make a small commitment initially then it makes them more open to a larger action provided it is consistent with their values or sense of self.

Framing and Reframing

How the same information or choice is presented influences our perceptions, attitudes, and decisions. We need to reframe well-known information to change choices.

Free! Factor

We tend to welcome offers where there is no risk of loss, and FREE is a powerful incentive that guarantees no risk.

Fresh Start Effect

We’re more likely to set goals or build habits when we commit to them at the start of a new time period: a date, a season or an anniversary.

Friction

We don’t like it when processes are hard, take too much time, or are complex. Exceptions are if friction increases desirability, gives us time to consider, or adds to our self-esteem, e.g. solving a puzzle.

Gamification

We like it when game mechanics are added into non-game environments. These add an element of fun, allow us to adjust our actions, and improve our self-esteem if we succeed.

Goal Priming Effect

Motivation goes up when we’re reminded of our goals in an appropriate and timely way, and when the reminders reinforce the emotional payoffs our goals deliver.

Goldilocks Effect

We tend to prefer the middle option in any horizontal group of three choices we are presented with. (Vertical choices work differently.)

Halo Effect

We tend to form unfounded opinions about individuals or agencies based on one aspect of their behaviour which we assume extends to other aspects of their performance.

Hedonic Adaptation

We feel less pleasure about a gain and less unhappiness for a loss as time goes by. We ‘normalise or habituate’ happiness.

Hyperbolic Discounting (AKA Present Bias)

When asked to choose between immediate and future rewards, we value the early option and neglect a long-term benefit, even if the longer-term gain is clearly better.

Identifiable Victim

Our desire for agency and the need to avoid emotional overload means we identify more strongly with the one person we believe we can help than with many.

IKEA Effect

When we are actively involved in making something — physically or mentally — we tend to value it more. We also value it more than objective observers would do.

Incentives and Rewards

Our behaviour is often driven by incentives. These can be positive rewards for some behaviours or negative penalties to discourage others.

Labour Illusion

We like it when we see effort being expended to deliver a positive result for us. The more effort put in, the more we value those things and the more positive we feel towards the agency providing the service or product.

Loss/Risk Aversion

We feel more negative about a loss — perhaps 2x as much — of something than we feel positive when we make the same gain. So we avoid risk that might lead to loss.

Mental Accounting

We hold a number of mental budgets in our heads and apportion our time and financial ‘spend’ across them.

Mere Exposure Effect

As we’re more frequently exposed to and become more familiar with ideas or concepts, we are more likely to recall and accept them.

Messenger

How we respond to a message is strongly influenced by who delivers it and how we feel about them.

Normalcy

When we’re unsure what to do we tend to do what others in a group we identify with do. It makes us feel ‘normal’

Number Knowledge

We react differently to specific numbers based on our culture, life experience, and the context in which these numbers are presented.

Peak-End Rule

We don’t remember experiences equally, nor as an average. We mostly remember an experience by its most intense peak point and how it finished.

Picture Primacy Preference

We’re more likely to take notice of and remember messages when they are presented or reinforced with images. These promote stronger emotional responses than words.

Pratfall Effect

We perceive individuals or agencies we consider competent as more likeable and relatable after witnessing them make and acknowledge a mistake or weakness.

Priming

Our choices are influenced by conscious or unconscious memories of stimuli we’ve recently experienced. These can be sounds, smells, or sights.

Reactance

We react negatively to a suggested action — even if it’s to our benefit — if we feel it limits our freedom or we’re being pushed into a decision.

Reciprocity

Our brains observe a useful evolutionary social rule that when someone helps us we generally feel emotionally obliged to return the favour.

Rhyme as Reason Effect

We perceive messages as more persuasive if they have a rhythm or cadence that appeals to our sense of musicality: “It seems more true, if it rhymes for you.”

Salience

We pay more attention to and remember pieces of information or ideas that are presented in ways that are unusual and relevant to us.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Giving a word or special name to a role that someone has affects how we perceive the role and the values we attribute to it.

Scarcity

When something is promoted and perceived as scarce, we tend to see it as more desirable and more valuable even if it’s not actually rare at all.

Self and Status

We like opportunities that enhance our positive sense of self/ego status and that give us the opportunity to be viewed positively by others.

Sensory Transfer

We attribute positive or negative characteristics to messages depending on the medium and how our senses are stimulated such as weight, shape, texture, smell, taste, contrast, etc.

Serial Positioning Effect

We find it easier to remember the first and the last items in any series we are presented with.

Social Proof

We follow the opinions and actions of others in a social group (tribe) we identify with or respect, especially in unfamiliar situations.

Social Identity

We have beliefs about who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. We assess our social and professional standing relative to others we identify with. We’re more likely to act in accordance with an expressed identity.

Status-Quo/Sunk Cost Bias

We tend to stick with our previous choices even if it’s clear that the alternatives are better.

Story/teller Bias

We find stories and the people who tell them more convincing, authentic, and memorable. Stories should be simple, memorable and stimulate emotion.

Surprise Effect

We like appropriate, pleasurable, and unexpected personal gestures that demonstrate to us we’re valued or respected as an individual not just a donor.

Time (Chronos and Kairos)

We measure time differently. One way is quantitatively (by day, by week, by season). Another is by the sense of the right moment.

Zeigarnik Effect

We remember and worry about jobs-to-be-done or activities that we haven’t finished, and these continue to bug us until completed.

Have an idea, an insight or a case study you’d like to contribute?

We’d love to hear from you. You can add your input on the link below.