A decision is not made
in the moment.
It is the outcome of everything that came before it. What people do is the decision they really made; what they say is the one they meant to make. We read it by setting one against the other, and using behavioural science to explain the difference. That difference is where what they really think shows itself, and where the systems around them are doing their work, or not.
What people value and believe. It shapes everything that follows, and no survey reaches it directly. You find it by listening to what they say, and then watching what they do. Across 126 studies, what people said they felt and what their split-second reactions showed matched only weakly.1
What people tell you depends on who is asking, what they think you want to hear and what they want from you. Useful, and never the whole picture.2
What people actually start, skip, delay, abandon and repeat. Every number you report comes from here. Across eight published studies that asked people what they would do and then checked, typically fewer than half did.3
The processes, technology and incentives between intention and action decide whether what people think, what they say or what they do wins out. Change those, and people do what they already wanted to do, without being asked to change how they think. That is the path of least resistance, and it is where we work.4
Sources
- Nisbett and Wilson, “Telling more than we can know”, Psychological Review, 1977. Greenwald and Banaji, “Implicit social cognition”, Psychological Review, 1995. Charlesworth and Banaji, “Patterns of implicit and explicit attitudes II”, American Psychologist, 2021. Hofmann and colleagues, “A meta-analysis on the correlation between the Implicit Association Test and explicit self-report measures”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2005: 126 studies, mean correlation 0.24.
- Krumpal, “Determinants of social desirability bias in sensitive surveys”, Quality & Quantity, 2013. Larson, “Controlling social desirability bias”, International Journal of Market Research, 2019. Tourangeau and Yan, “Sensitive questions in surveys”, Psychological Bulletin, 2007. Murphy and colleagues, “A meta-analysis of hypothetical bias in stated preference valuation”, Environmental and Resource Economics, 2005: median ratio of stated to actual willingness to pay 1.35; List and Gallet, 2001 found factors up to three.
- Our compilation. Eight studies that asked people whether they would do something, then checked. The share of those who said they would who did: Sheeran, “Intention-behavior relations”, European Review of Social Psychology, 2002, 422 studies and 82,107 people, mostly health: a median 53 in a hundred; Rhodes and de Bruijn, “How big is the physical activity intention-behaviour gap?”, British Journal of Health Psychology, 2013, ten studies, 3,899 people: 54 in a hundred (42 per cent of the sample were intenders who acted, 36 per cent intenders who did not); DellaVigna and Malmendier, “Paying not to go to the gym”, American Economic Review, 2006, 7,752 members: forecast 9.5 visits a month, actual 4.17, so 44 in a hundred of the promised visits; Harris, Maurer and Lurie, “Do people who intend to get a flu shot actually get one?”, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2009, 1,527 adults: just over half; Rogers and Aida, “Vote self-prediction hardly predicts who will vote”, American Politics Research, 2014, 29,403 people across three elections: fewer than half of those who said they would vote did; White, Hardisty and Habib, “The elusive green consumer”, Harvard Business Review, 2019: 65 per cent say they want to buy from sustainable brands, 26 per cent do, so 40 in a hundred; Ganczak and colleagues, “Does vaccinating against influenza in a given epidemic season have an impact on vaccination in the next season?”, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022, a Polish follow-up study: of patients willing to have the next season’s flu vaccine, 31.9 per cent had it; Cowe and Williams, Who are the ethical consumers?, Co-operative Bank, 2000, the “30:3” gap, 30 per cent say and 3 per cent buy, so 10 in a hundred, as reported in Bray, Johns and Kilburn, Journal of Business Ethics, 2011. Range 10 to 54; counting the two “about half” results as 50, the median of the eight is 47. Background: Webb and Sheeran, “Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change?”, Psychological Bulletin, 2006: across 47 experiments, a medium-to-large change in intention (0.66) produced a small-to-medium change in behaviour (0.36). Sheeran and Webb, “The intention-behavior gap”, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2016. Conner and Norman, “Understanding the intention-behavior gap”, Frontiers in Psychology, 2022. Stirratt and colleagues, “Self-report measures of medication adherence behavior”, Translational Behavioral Medicine, 2015.
- Fogg, “A behavior model for persuasive design”, Persuasive ’09, 2009: behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt meet. Michie, van Stralen and West, “The behaviour change wheel”, Implementation Science, 2011. DellaVigna and Linos, “RCTs to scale: comprehensive evidence from two nudge units”, Econometrica, 2022. Sheeran and Orbell, “Using implementation intentions to increase attendance for cervical cancer screening”, Health Psychology, 2000: attendance 69 per cent without a when-and-where plan, 92 per cent with one. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, “Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006: 94 tests, effect size 0.65.
The decision
stays yours.
We're not experts in your business. You are. We're experts in how people and systems behave, including the system you work inside.
So we don't hand over a recommendation and leave. We bring the plan to the point where it can be decided: the questions that have to be answered, the evidence against each one, and the person whose name goes on it.
Then you decide, and you act. The argument has already happened on paper, where it's cheap.
Workshops, user studies, design, technology and the awkward questions. We work alongside your teams and the agencies you already have, in the room and between the rooms, until the plan has decisions in it rather than intentions.
XMap® is our product for the outside half of the problem: what patients, customers, clinicians and buyers actually do, as opposed to what they say.
XMap shows you what people actually do. Uservox turns your plan into decisions with owners.
Wherever plans
outrun decisions.
Behaviour doesn't change at the border of an industry, and neither do the places where a plan quietly stops being a decision. Our clients are the experts in their domain. We're the experts in how people and systems behave, including the system they work inside. Global brands, from the United Kingdom, since 2011.
Worked with teams at
Risk says one thing, product another, and compliance signs off on a version neither quite recognises. The disagreement is real and worth having. It just never gets resolved on paper. We make the choice explicit: what has to be true, what evidence supports it, who signs. Before it reaches the backlog, not after.
Talk to usEvery studio has a roadmap and a room where the strongest opinion wins. The argument usually isn't about the data; it's about which question the data was meant to answer. We get the question agreed first, the evidence against it second and a named owner third. The next strong opinion then has something to argue with.
Talk to usA loyalty programme is a set of decisions nobody owns together. Marketing sets the mechanic, finance sets the margin, partners set the terms, and each is defensible on its own. We put them in one place with the trade-offs visible, and hand back a set of decisions rather than a set of assumptions.
Talk to usLaunch, lifecycle, access, a new indication: the pattern holds. Medical, market access, marketing and country teams each mean something different by "agreed", and the plan moves forward on the ambiguity. We make the decisions explicit: what must be true, what evidence supports it, whose name is against it. So the plan is a decision rather than a document.
Talk to usTrading, digital and store operations each have a plan, and each quietly assumes the other two will absorb the cost. Nothing looks wrong until they meet in the same quarter. We get the decisions onto one page, with the question, the evidence and the owner, before the budget commits to all three.
Talk to usAdoption is everyone's objective and nobody's decision. Product owns the build, commercial owns the sell, service owns the aftermath, and the thing that actually stops people falls between them. We make that a decision with an owner, rather than a theme in three separate plans.
Talk to usHuman first.
AI forward.
Nobody decides alone. Every person sits inside systems of other people, places and technology, and those systems shape what they do as surely as any belief. The brain is complex. Artificial intelligence is complex. We understand both, we know how to use both, and we use them to make the complex simple.
heard
Uservox means the user's voice. The user is whoever the system is failing: the customer you serve, or the person in your team who has to make it work. Everything else is shaped around that, never the other way round.
understood
Technology runs through how a business operates and how its customers connect with it. We know it well enough to design with it rather than around it, and to keep it a tool in service of people.
used with intent
Companies are unsure about AI. We are not. It learned everything it knows from people, so we read it the way we read people, by what it does rather than what it says. We know what it's worth and where it falls short, and we put it to work at a scale people alone can't reach, with a person deciding what's true and what matters.
made simple
Simple means something you can use on Monday: one picture your whole team agrees on, a short list of what to change first, and evidence anyone can open. You should never need us in the room to read it.
Talk to us.
Tell us what you're trying to decide. We'll tell you what would have to be true for the answer to be yes.
hello@uservox.com
UK +44 (0)1935 676980
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