Mind games to stop death on the tracks

Mind games to stop death on the tracks

Samanth Subramanian

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WED, JAN 06 2010. 11 46 PM IST

Preventing fatalities: The sequences of yellow railway sleepers near Mumbais Wadala station help pedestrians get a better idea of
distances and how fast a train is covering them, which helps them jud

Updated: Wed, Jan 06 2010. 11 46 PM IST

Mumbai: A significant amount of Satish Krishnamurthys job brief requires him to, like a disaffected teenager, just hang
out. He once hung out for three days at a toothbrush counter in a supermarket, watching people buy toothbrushes. For
many weeks, he lurked in the corridors of the A to Z Industrial Estatewhere Final Mile, the company where
Krishnamurthy works, is headquarteredto spy on men spitting up gushers of paan juice.

Preventing fatalities: The sequences of yellow railway sleepers

near Mumbais Wadala station help pedestrians get a better idea
of distances and how fast a train is covering them, which helps
them judge its speed. Ashesh Shah/Mint

Last June, dressed in a dirty shirt and torn jeans to blend in,
Krishnamurthy began hanging out near the Wadala station on
Mumbais Harbour Line railway. Along with a colleague, Jayal
Shroff, he observed people crossing the tracks in the stations
vicinityas many as 25 a minute on average, and 45 a minute
during rush hour. Then they set about figuring out how to
save the lives of the dozen-odd track crossers who are fatally
hit by trains near Wadala every month.

At Final Mile, Krishnamurthy and Shroff are designated behaviour architects, and observation is their core research
method. Final Mile, a 16-month-old firm, deploys behavioural science to sway consumers. Ive been looking at theories of
the human brain and at cognitive neurology for the last 10 or 12 years, says Biju Dominic, chief executive of Final Mile. It
allows us to take a larger perspective of marketing through human behaviour.

Dominic helped start Final Mile even as his belief in the power of advertising, his earlier career, was waning. Theres the
old saying, he says, that 50% of an advertising budget is wastedyou just dont know which 50% it is. He is a voluble,
passionate man, so well read on the subject of behavioural economics that he is prone to beginning sentences with:
Theres a brilliant book by He talks with particular reverence about Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the
Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his work on how people judge risk and make decisions.
Final Miles bread-and-butter work happens at retail outletsthe final mile of the purchasing process, so to speak. Too
often, Dominic found, marketing to shoppers simply involved slapping part of a mass media ad campaign onto a poster in a
shop. He chose instead to search for subtler cues called nudges, tipping behaviour one way or another.

Final intervention: A triple-panel photo of an alarmed man being

run over by a train at Mumbais Wadala station. The morbid
frieze is placed at the two points where the temptation to cross
tracks is most compelling.Ashesh Shah/Mint

During his research for the Colgate brand, for instance,

Krishnamurthy found that simply classifying toothbrushes by
bristle type and size helped buyers make smoother decisions.
At a popular fast-food chain, after he sat around for three
days, he saw the importance of perceptually decreasing the
time taken for an order to be deliveredby giving diners
something to read or do at the table, sayand thus
improving the quality of service.

In the corridors outside his office, Krishnamurthy noticed that people spit to their right as they climbed stairs, and they spit
when they think theyre alone. So he painted crude pictures of men on the right-hand walls, to at least marginally destroy
the illusion of solitude. Avoiding the usual stern injunctions against spitting, he also painted a question: The people who
were here earlier didnt spit. Can you do the same? If I can get you to say Yes in your mind, he says, thats half the
battle won.

The experiment at Wadala done pro bonois probably Final Miles biggest project in terms of the number of people it
works on every day. Wadala is one of eight Mumbai stations that collectively account for 60-65% of the track-crossing
deaths in the city. Implemented fully just over six weeks ago, it has, as yet, yielded no hard data, although Krishnamurthy
says the effects are visible. Well wait to see how effective this is, says an official of the Central Railway, who did not
want to be named, before we decide whether to roll it out to other stations.

Last summer, Krishnamurthy began studying the stationmasters register each day, noting the deaths and
casualties. He noted the habit of the residents of the Wadala slums of helpfully shouting gaadi (or train)
when a locomotive appeared on the horizon. He watched pedestrians and classified them into long-
walkers, who walked along the tracks, and cross-walkers, who tended to cross often; the latter were
more frequent victims of accidents. Surprisingly, there were more deaths in broad daylight, he noted, and
more deaths during rush hour.

From all this research, Shroff identified three major decision-making principles in operation on the Wadala tracks. One is a
combination of the Leibowitz Hypothesis and the Looming Effect. Large objects appear to move slower than small objects,
and people cant judge their speed, she says. Another is the Cocktail Party Effect: The brain isnt wired to follow two
conversations, or do two activities simultaneously. If there are two trains on adjacent tracks, youll register one, but not
the other. The third is simply a flight responsea tendency to run, which minimizes good judgement.

To each of these principles, Final Mile tailored a specific intervention. A few hundred metres from the Wadala station,
Krishnamurthy points to sequences of railway sleepers painted a bright yellow. That helps your brain get a better idea of
distances and how fast a train is covering them, which helps you judge its speed, he says.

Shortly thereafter, a gaggle of schoolchildren, absorbed in conversation, crosses the tracks, prime material for the Cocktail
Party Effect. So we installed whistle boards just around the bend, telling the motormen to honk, Krishnamurthy says.
Even the honk is carefully calibrated: Two short, rapid honks instead of one long one, because that intrudes into a listeners
consciousness much more effectively.

The first few whistle signs that Final Mile put upregulation boards made of metal were promptly stolen. So we had to
create a signboard out of something not worth stealing, Krishnamurthy laughs. We had to do an intervention on the
intervention!
At the station itself, Krishnamurthy points to the final interventiona three-panel photo of a rather alarmed man being
gradually run over by a locomotive. This morbid frieze is positioned exactly at the two points where the temptation to cross
is powerful, designed to subtly counter the flight response.

Its intended to elicit an appropriate emotional memory, Krishnamurthy says. We look to faces to figure out situations,
so his face is central. We repeated the image, because it catches the eye. And it has to be life-size, not larger than life,
because it shouldnt intrude into the conscious. It should work at an unconscious level.

In behavioural theory, the unconscious is king, but appeals to his highness are never rewarded immediately. The more an
act is unconscious, the greater the time needed to change it, says R. Shankarasubramanyan, a former president of the
Indian Society for Applied Behavioural Science. The trick lies in dredging something out of the unconscious, into the
sphere of awareness, and using it in the nick of that moment.

Shankarasubramanyan, who runs his own organizational leadership firm, admits that psychology is hardly an exact science.
All the research is based on statistical data, he says. But many of the principles are standard, and there has been enough
research done to attempt using behavioural science on track crossingsat least to reduce it.

The act of crossing a railway track is, Krishnamurthy insists, largely an unconscious one. Its not that they dont know the
dangersthey do, he says, so calling conscious attention to those dangers will work poorly. Non-conscious actions
require non-conscious interventions. We cant stop people crossing entirelythat wont happen. But even if we can reduce
those deaths by one or two a month, it would be entirely worth it.