The Housefly Effect

An accessible, fun and practical introduction to behavioural science, featuring insightful examples from the laboratory, advertising and marketing, as well as from daily life.

How do house flies help save millions of euros? Presented with the image of a fly in toilet bowls in airports, cafés and other public places, men – without realizing it – aim better and splash less, thereby reducing loads of cleaning costs.

In THE HOUSEFLY EFFECT behavioral scientist Eva van den Broek and advertising expert Tim den Heijer explain how to recognize The Housefly Effect (and many other effects) in our everyday lives and how we can use it to our advantage. Sometimes the smallest things can have a surprisingly large effect.

We are not nearly as rational as we’d like to think – every day we overestimate our ability to resist temptation. Effective advertising experts use this to nudge us, making the most of our natural behaviour. In order to process the millions of decisions we make each day, our brains take shortcuts. We are fooled by drugs that don’t contain active ingredients, traffic light buttons that aren’t connected, and the obsolete ‘save’ feature in MS Word – these are all examples of placebos that can be surprisingly reassuring. There are countless things that affect our behaviour: reward and punishment, beauty and attraction, and the human tendency to follow the crowd. This book offers an accessible, fun and practical introduction to behavioural science and features insightful examples from the laboratory, advertising, and marketing - as well as from daily life.