A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You All! See you in 2016.

What do you know about spear phishing? by Dr Emma Williams

The world of hacking, cyber attacks and cyber crime has increasingly come under the spotlight in recent years, with various documentaries, films and mass media coverage raising awareness of cyber security issues across the general public. In line with this, organisations have had to become more cyber-aware, channelling significant resources into the development of adequate security systems, processes and procedures in order to keep electronic data safe.

Technical advances in the security of computer systems has meant that the individual user of a system has become increasingly targeted as the potential ‘weak spot.’ By persuading a user to click on a link within an e-mail and enter personal details, such as user accounts and passwords, or to inadvertently download a file containing malicious software, attackers are able to access a system more easily than through technical means alone. This manipulation of human behaviour by persuading an individual to engage in a particular action has become known as social engineering.

One common method of social engineering in online environments is spear phishing. This involves the targeting of particular individuals or groups with tailored phishing e-mails that mimic organisations or individuals known to the person, or refer to topics that are of particular interest to them. Whereas generic phishing e-mails use a mass-market approach targeting as many people as possible, such as 419 scams whereby an individual claims to have millions of pounds in a foreign bank account that they require help to move in exchange for a proportion of the money, spear phishing attempts are likely to have been preceded by online data gathering of the target individual, group or organisation. This may utilize information found on social media websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, corporate websites, and any other information that can be easily accessed. By using this information to tailor communications, attackers are able to maximise the likelihood that their communications will be trusted and that the target will undertake the desired behavior with minimal consideration (e.g., click a link, open an attachment, respond to the sender, provide sensitive information or forward the communication on to colleagues).

Unlike longer-term persuasion attempts, which focus on the development of a relationship with the individual (commonly seen in online romance scams and the grooming of young people), the one-off nature of spear phishing communications means that they have a single opportunity in which they must persuade the individual to respond. This results in the use of a number of influence techniques that are primarily focused on:

•         Instilling a sense of urgency, such as requiring a response within 24 hours to prevent account closure or providing time-limited or time-relevant information.

•         Providing information of interest or use to the individual, whether by professing information that will be perceived as important or required to complete a work or personal task, or referring to information that is likely to ‘grab’ attention and induce curiosity or credulity.

•         Encouraging emotional responses, usually through fear or panic relating to a potential threat or loss (freezing an account, removing or restricting access or availability, identity theft) or by inducing positive emotions, such as excitement, desire, pride or hope relating to excessively large prizes, ‘too good to be true’ offers, limited opportunities or miracle cures.

•         Exploiting compliance with authority, whereby individuals are instructed to complete a task (such as processing an invoice or reading a policy document) by someone impersonating a relatively high status individual within an organisation.

•         Focusing on contextual or work-related communication norms, including cultural holidays or events (e.g., Christmas, Easter, World Cup), activities (e.g., parcel delivery updates), and common or targeted work or personal topics (e.g., policy updates, delivery notifications, invoices to finance personnel, update personal details forms to HR personnel).

The combination of these techniques is likely to maximise the likelihood that an individual will respond, particularly if they are distracted, overloaded, in a rush (seen in the ‘Friday afternoon scam^[1]’), or have a particular need for something that cannot be met through conventional means. In more complex influence attempts, e-mails may be preceded or followed-up by phone calls or other communications from the attacker.

But what persuades people to click on a link, open an attachment or view a video in these online settings? Unfortunately, research in this area is still relatively sparse. In addition, the complexity of trying to understand what motivates an individual to engage in a particular action in any given situation means that it is very difficult to pinpoint where best to address this problem. For example, is more training and awareness required? Or do systems and processes need to be designed differently to limit potential vulnerabilities in human decision-making? Are some people more vulnerable than others? Or are people more vulnerable when they are doing a particular task, working in a particular role or in a particular mood? These are the questions that are starting to be explored by an increasing number of researchers, including ourselves, and we await with anticipation the further development of this research field.

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[1] Bloomberg (2015) A London Hedge Fund lost $1.2 million in a Friday Afternoon Phone Scam, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-07/friday-afternoon-scam-cost-hedge-fund-1-2-million-and-cfo-s-job

Behaviour Change and Linguistic Relativity: The Power of Words by Dr Kate Muir

I’m pretty sure everyone would agree that words have power: we’ve all read a book, heard song lyrics or a speech that has stayed with us or influenced us in some way. I’d go even further and propose that of all the myriad influences on our thoughts and behaviour, none is more important than language. Let me explain what I mean. This idea is the basis of linguistic relativity, the theory that language influences our thoughts, and how we perceive the world . The strong version of this theory claims that language actually dictates thought - that the language we speak constrains our perception and cognition. A limited vocabulary means an equally limited worldview. If you don’t know a word, you quite literally are unable to perceive, or think about the concept that word represents. The crux of the argument is that humans rely on internal categories and concepts, in order to understand the flux of information we are bombarded with. The language we speak is part of this system of organisation; verbal labels assist us in making sense of and navigating our way through the world. Languages segment our experiences and perceptions in different ways – speakers of another language will literally see and describe the world differently. Take colour perception, for example. We perceive a particular wavelength of light, and label it with a colour name; this system is going to vary depending upon the language we speak. The colour one language defines as ‘green’, for example, may not even exist in another. There is indeed some evidence that language has a significant influence upon colour perception. Roberson, Davies and Davidoff studied a Papua New Guinean tribe called the Berinmo, who had only five basic colour terms, compared to ten in English. The figure below shows how the five Berinmo colour terms (box b) roughly map onto the English (box a; after Davidoff ).

Berinmo participants consistently showed poorer performance in tasks involving colour terms. For instance, Berinmo participants showed inconsistency in picking the best example of a colour category, whilst English participants exhibited high consensus. Berinmo participants also had poorer memory for colours than the English participants. This suggests that both sets of speakers relied on naming strategies during the memory tests, and as the Berinmo’s colour terms cover various shades of colour, their verbal labels were not helpful to them. The strong Whorfian view of this evidence indicates that these two cultures, because of their varying colour terms, literally see different colours. These days, the weak version of linguistic relativity, that language merely influences thought but does not determine it, is more accepted. Languages spoken around the world differ in their representations of time, space, shapes and objects; thus, the language spoken biases the way speakers of different languages think about these concepts. For instance, in English, we use front/back terms to talk about time (the past is behind us, the future is ahead) whereas Mandarin uses up/down terms (the past is up, the future is down). Speakers tend to show a bias towards thinking about time in the same way as the terms used in their language: Mandarin speakers are quicker to confirm that March is earlier in the year than April if they have just seen a vertical array of objects, than if they had seen a horizontal array. The opposite is observed for English speakers . Other research demonstrates that bilinguals categorise objects differently according to the language they use at the time . Language can thus be seen to influence many aspects of cognition and behaviour. In my view, language isn’t just a means of communication; it is a weapon of sorts. Change a person’s language, and you change the person. My point is this: in studying and implementing behaviour change, we should not underestimate just how influential language can be. If we are to encourage positive behaviour change and influence society for the better, we should choose our words carefully.

[1] Whorf, B. (1956).  Language, thought and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. New York: Wiley.

[1] Roberson, D., Davies, I. & Davidoff, J. (2000).  Colour categories are not universal: replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129 (3), 369 – 398. 

[1] Davidoff, J. (2001).  Language and perceptual categorisation.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5 (9), 382 - 387.

[1] Boroditsky, L. (2001).  Does language shape thought?  Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time.  Cognitive Psychology, 43 (1), 1 – 22.

[1] Athanasopoulos, A., Bylund, E., Montero-Melis, G., Damjanovic, L., Schartner, A., Kibbe, A., Riches, N. & Thierry, G. (2015).  Two Languages, Two Minds: Flexible Cognitive Processing Driven by Language of Operation.  Psychological Science, 26 (4), 518 – 526.

Marketing as a force for sustainability: the sociological perspective

By Dr Fiona Spotswood

As we repeat like a stuck record to our undergraduate marketing students, marketing is about providing stakeholder value. As such, marketing is pretty much everything a business does, from managing the supply chain to engaging with customers and keeping employees happy. To be sustainable, an organisation needs to keep going and to keep making profits. It’s not going to do that if the resources it or its suppliers disappear or become so scarce that the prices of its products skyrocket and alienate its customers so its profits plunge. Sustainable businesses make profit and therefore marketing is a force for sustainability.

That marketing is a force for sustainability was the subject of a Chartered Institute for Marketing seminar I attended this morning, and presenter Victoria Hurth from Plymouth University has, with colleagues, drawn up a framework for assessing the true sustainability of a business organisation. It starts, she explained, with a new basic paradigm for marketers. The ‘sense and respond’ paradigm, which means marketers seek to understand their customers and provide products accordingly, is outdated, unsustainable and shirks their responsibility as the powerful creators of unsustainable needs. A new paradigm is the ‘relate and co-create’ approach, which is more about a focus on all stakeholders, including the customers of the future, and about working with these stakeholders to create sustainable business practices that meet everyone’s needs. Other parts of Victoria’s framework include taking leadership, focusing on the future, putting marketing at the heart of business practice and of course measurement. Her vision is that if embedded in business practice, the framework can create organisational culture change.

Victoria lingered on the subject of ‘needs’ for some time. There are various models which explain how ‘needs’ impact us. Essentially, humans have a basic set of needs which underpin all our activities, and particularly consumption. These have been sorted hierarchically (by Maslow, most famously), weighted differently and variously described and listed. But essentially they are fairly stable over time and geographies. In a sense, ‘needs’ are at the heart of traditional behaviour change thinking; the downstream, individualist version. People ‘need’ to eat energy dense food, use their cars to get around, go on long haul holidays and buy mountains of cheap clothing. Traditional ‘behaviour change’ works to combat these needs by persuading people that they don’t ‘need’ to do these behaviours after all and that there is an alternative. This route has severe limitations, however, and rather ignores the power of marketers in shaping the ways the needs are ‘solved’ in unsustainable and unhealthy ways.

Where my research interests intersect with Victoria’s is at this point. What if, as I would argue (vociferously), there is an alternative paradigm for framing the notion of ‘behaviour’ or ‘needs’ in the context of behaviour change, in form of Social Practice Theory. According to this SPT, behaviour is the function of societal structures; sets of meanings, competences and materials, for instance, which combine to frame the performance of different practices. Practices, such as car driving, food shopping and so on, are performed but are also entities for study and can be the focus of intervention.

Take the practice of eating breakfast as an example. It is performed every day by most people. It is societally structured by the materials (available foodstuffs), competences (cooking skills) and meanings (no one eats broccoli for breakfast) that make up the practice. People perform the practice within this set of elements and it can be studied as an entity by looking at how these elements interrelate and exist in relation to other, overlapping practices. However, breakfast cereals are so often not the best nutritional choices for us. If we try and persuade people that their ‘need’ for Crunchy Nut Cornflakes is misplaced, we are battling against a practice which is embedded in society and shaped strongly by a powerful marketing machine which has established a strong set of meanings – and products (materials) around breakfast that involves the message about ‘eating breakfast cereal as standard’ and that ‘low fat is best’.  Neither of these are ‘true’ or indeed helpful, of course.

Thinking about ‘behaviour’ and ‘needs’ once again, it is possible to see how Social Practice Theory could enable us to study the role of marketing on the practices which make up our lives and to study the potential for sustainable business practices on changing these practices so that our behaviour becomes ultimately more sustainable, or healthy, or both.

Materialism is a good example. Research has identified that British children are some of the most materialistic in Europe[i]. The ‘behaviour’ at play is over-consumption; the ‘needs’ are those of parents to provide material goods for their children to prove their worth or allay their guilt, and for children to own the latest stuff to mark out their territory in the social hierarchies of the playground. But what is just as important to focus on is the impact of business (i.e. marketing) on the practice of consumption, parenting, childhood socialising and so on. Marketers provide the material goods with which children trade popularity and parents seek to buy affection and allay guilt. Marketers provide the meanings associated with these material goods; that without the latest (fill in the gap) you are a failure in some way. The competences with which the material goods are associated are intrinsic; brand knowledge and knowing how to brag to your friends without sounding arrogant. (This is based on a research by Nairn and Spotswood, 2015[ii]). Thus, examining materialism through the eyes of Social Practice Theory highlights the role of marketing in creating the conditions in which unsustainable and harmful behaviour is performed. As such, it also highlights the role of marketing in creating a more sustainable business model in which these unfavourable fallouts are less likely to occur.

Perhaps it is simpler to look at this approach when considering a behaviour that is harmful to the environment, like driving. A ‘behaviour change’ approach might be to persuade more people to cycle. This has its place, but a sustainable marketing model would be to consider the future of burning fossil fuels at the present rate and realise churning out more cars in the present model isn’t going to deliver value to all stakeholders in the future. But people ‘need’ cars. They want them, demand them, so the ‘sense and respond’ model would have the industry producing more cars because that is what is demanded. But Social Practice Theory would allow us to focus on why and how the practice of driving has become so embedded in society, and realise that the ‘meanings’ associated with it are in large part created by the marketing of cars; they are sexy, fast, comfortable and linked to status and power. Simply meeting the demand for more car consumption, however, is an unsustainable model. Rather, car manufacturers and their marketing departments could be focusing on changing the meanings of the ‘practice of car driving’ so that the focus is on energy efficiency, technological longevity, safe disposal and so on. The meanings change, then so do the ‘needs’ of customers and the business model is sustainable because there will still be customers, resources and products (and therefore profits) in generations to come.

The relationship between ‘marketing as a force for sustainability’ and a sociological perspective is apparent if not developed. The next stage is to unpick this relationship and frame it as part of the future ‘behaviour change’ agenda. 

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[i] http://www.agnesnairn.co.uk/policy_reports/child-well-being-report.pdf

[ii] http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/23340/3/EJM%20resubmission%20FINAL.pdf

Who are we?

'We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.' - Aristotle

Who are CSBCI?

Based in the Faculty of Business and Law at the UWE, CSBCI adopts an inter-disciplinary, multi-method approach to the study of behaviour change and influence. With expertise ranging from social marketing to behavioural analytics, nudge to social policy, and attitude-behaviour links to ideology, the membership of the Centre reflects our belief that significant advances in the behaviour change field are only possible by bringing together both complementary and opposing perspectives.

Our origins - Bristol Social Marketing Centre

CSBCI began in 2007 with the formation of the successful Bristol Social Marketing Centre (BSMC). BSMC established a reputation for ground breaking social marketing research and interventions in a range of areas, including travel behaviour, early detection of cancer, breast-feeding and fire safety. More recently this work has expanded significantly to include approaches well outside the focus of social marketiThe Bristol Social Marketing Centre word cloudng, including sentiment analysis of social media, social networks and influence, privacy and security attitudes and inter-personal influence. The development of a Behavioural Research Lab within BSMC moved the focus further from a single approach, and led to the move to rename and refocus the centre more widely to behaviour change and influence.

Research

Much of our research is concentrated in social-cultural and socio-psychological insights with the goal of understanding, predicting and changing behaviour in a range of areas, including travel mode choice, health behaviours, security and privacy choices, inter-personal interaction, sustainability and community.

Members

Members of Centre for the Study of Behaviour Change and Influence come from a number of diverse disciplinary backgrounds (including applied and social marketing, social policy, health promotion, social and applied / cognitive psychology, media studies, human factors and computer science). The Centre is therefore able to bring a wide range of approaches, skills and competences to questions of behaviour change.

Project Work

Members of CSBCI have been involved in projects funded to the tune of over £10 million from more than 60 successful projects from a variety of sources, notably the Department for Transport (DfT), Department of Health, Sport England, Cancer Research UK, the National Health Service, UK Research Councils (ESRC/EPSRC), EU Framework 7, as well as central and local Government. It hosts the ESRC seminar series on “Behaviour change: past, present and future’.

CSBCI projects have achieved national and international standing, for instance in the use of social marketing in cancer detection, and members are on the editorial board of international academic journals as well as advisors to the UK Government, EU and larger corporations. In addition, the members of the centre have won numerous awards, including Best Paper at the Academy of Marketing, Dean’s Prize for Research Excellence, Golden Mouse Award (for best research video at ACM CHI) and Literati Awards.

Collaborations

CSBCI has welcomed international visiting academics and PhD students, and continues to welcome visitors from academia, the public sector and commerce.

Welcome to the new Centre for the Study of Behaviour Change and Influence blog

Following our re-branding in July, we are now fully up and running as the Centre for the Study of Behaviour Change and Influence. As part of our new look we are launching this blog to enable you to keep up to date with news from the Centre. This will also be the place to read short articles written by our researchers, as well as views and comments from the team on all things 'behaviour change'.

If you have any suggestions for content or any general comments or questions then we would encourage you to get involved in the conversation via the comments section of this site. You might also like to follow us on Twitter @csbci_uwe.

More information about the Centre and the work that we do can be found in the following post - 'Who are we?', but for now we welcome you and look forward to keeping you up-to-date with all of our activities and general musings.

The CSBCI team.