Changing Behaviours: Why facts alone don’t work

Tali Sharot, Director of Affective Brain Lab, discusses optimism bias and its impact on cybersecurity communication with Steve Durbin, CEO of ISF. She emphasises people’s tendency to underestimate risks and highlights the effectiveness of reframing messages to focus on positive outcomes. Tali suggests leveraging rewards and social influence to influence behavior, which includes understanding stakeholders’ beliefs, finding common ground, and using anecdotes alongside data-driven arguments to enhance communication.

…People don’t take negative information about the future as well as they should, so you can reframe the message and say, ‘if you do this A, B, and C, then you will remain quite secure, then you will save time, you will save money…

Tune in to hear Tali and Steve talk about:

1. Tali’s research about how emotion affects memory (0:28)
2. Optimism bias has implications for the way we evaluate risk (4:25)
3. Tali considers present bias and how it shows up in organisations (9:39)
4. Why storytelling is so effective when paired with data (15:30)