Introducing Behavioural Photography: Applying Behavioural Science to Images
For many years, my work in ethical persuasion has focused on a deceptively simple question: what causes people to say YES? We know that the words we choose matter. The order in which information is presented matters. Demonstrating expertise can matter. Showing that other people like us have already taken an action can matter. Reducing uncertainty before asking someone to make a decision can matter.
But persuasive communication has never consisted only of words.
Before someone reads the headline on your website, considers the argument in your proposal or listens carefully to what you have to say, they have likely already seen something. A photograph. An illustration. A person’s face. An outfit. A product in use. A gesture. An environment. And what they see may already be influencing what they notice, think, feel and ultimately do.
This is an area I have become increasingly fascinated by,
and it has now led to the creation of a new website and a discipline I call Behavioural Photography.
What is Behavioural Photography?
The definition I’ve developed is:
Behavioural Photography is the application of behavioural science to the creation and selection of visual content intended to support specific behavioural objectives.
The central idea is straightforward. When creating or selecting an image, we shouldn’t ask only: Does this image look good?
We should also ask: What behaviour do we want this image to support?
That question can lead us somewhere very different. An organisation rarely commissions photography simply because it wants photographs. A professional-services business may want prospective clients to trust it enough to make an enquiry. A charity may want people to donate. An employer may want suitable candidates to apply. A retailer may want people to purchase. A business introducing a new procedure may want employees to understand and follow it.
The image is therefore not necessarily the end product. The behaviour it helps support is part of the end product.
An image doesn’t have to look persuasive to influence behaviour. Even something as simple as that can provide visual clues that affect what feels normal or appropriate.
Images are already influencing behaviour
An image can do considerably more than make a website, advertisement or brochure visually appealing. It can help communicate expertise. It can reduce uncertainty. It can create familiarity or highlight similarity. It can evoke emotion, attract attention, direct someone’s eyes towards important information, make an unfamiliar experience easier to understand or make more clear what happens next. And sometimes seemingly small differences between images can produce remarkably different outcomes.
One example I explore in the opening Behavioural Photography article comes from a real-world campaign designed to encourage people at a shopping centre to eat lunch before the traditional lunchtime rush. One poster increased the desired behaviour by 24.8% compared with displaying no poster. That’s a terrific result.
But another version increased the behaviour by 75.1%. The wording and general communication objective remained the same. The important difference was the photograph. In relative terms, the second version produced 202.8% more of the desired behaviour than the first. Both images could have been professionally photographed. Both could have been technically excellent. The first image clearly worked. But one contained visual information that was considerably better aligned with the psychology underlying the behaviour the campaign was trying to encourage.
That raises an interesting question for anyone responsible for persuasive communication:
How often might our images be working—but substantially below their potential?
The missing part of persuasive communication
This is where Behavioural Photography connects so naturally with the work we already do at Ethical Persuasion. There is an enormous body of behavioural research examining human decision-making, attention, emotion, social influence and persuasion. There is also an enormous body of expertise devoted to photography, videography, illustration, design and visual communication. What interests me is the territory where those two worlds meet.
For example, the direction in which a person within a photograph looks can influence where the observer directs their attention next through a phenomenon known as gaze cueing. The number of people shown performing an action can communicate information about what others are doing. Legitimate visual indicators of expertise can contribute to perceptions of credibility. Facial expressions and body language can influence emotional responses.
Behavioural Photography extends beyond the Principles of Persuasion themselves. Relevant mechanisms can include:
- attention,
- emotion,
- gaze cueing,
- body language,
- emotional contagion,
- familiarity,
- contrast,
- priming,
- processing fluency, and many others.
The objective isn’t to turn photography into a laboratory experiment or replace creativity with science. It is to bring the two together.
The same ethical standards still apply
There is also an important ethical boundary. Behavioural Photography isn’t about manufacturing visual evidence to trick someone into making a decision. If an organisation doesn’t possess expertise, we shouldn’t create imagery designed to falsely suggest that it does. If customers aren’t enthusiastically using a product, we shouldn’t manufacture misleading social proof suggesting otherwise.
The principles I’ve taught throughout my career in ethical persuasion apply just as strongly to imagery. Persuasion preserves choice. Manipulation and coercion do not. The opportunity is to become more deliberate about identifying and communicating truthful visual information that has genuine psychological value.
A new home for Behavioural Photography
Behavioural Photography shifts the conversation from how an image looks to what it helps achieve. When visual content is created for a specific behavioural purpose, outcomes such as attention, engagement, enquiries and conversions can often be measured and compared.
I’ve therefore created BehaviouralPhotography.com as a dedicated home for exploring this subject. Over time, I’ll be publishing research, practical examples and applications for photographers, videographers, designers, marketers, business owners and anyone else responsible for creating or selecting imagery.
Some articles will explore individual mechanisms. Others will look at how organisations can build collections of Persuasive Assets—visual resources deliberately created to perform different behavioural functions. And some will explore what this emerging discipline could mean for professional photographers and other visual creators.
The first substantial article is now available and provides the complete introduction to the idea, including the research example I’ve touched on here and some of the mechanisms we’ll explore in considerably greater depth.
Read: What Is Behavioural Photography? The Science Behind Images That Influence Behaviour
In the meantime, there is one question you can start asking immediately whenever you create, commission, select or generate an image:
What behaviour do we want this image to support?
Once you start asking that question, it becomes surprisingly difficult to look at images in quite the same way again.
For insights into the visual clues of what we wear, consider viewing or listening to the episode on trappings on the Ethical Persuasion Unlocked podcast.
