St. George University

The Underlying Emotions

We first identified six potential causes of applicant’s psychological state as they search for medical schools. A number of these are universal and others are specific to SGU’s audience.

Fear of Leaving Home: Stress of leaving their established support networks.

Culture Shock: Most prospective students not only need to leave their hometown, but also their home country.

“Doctor Factory” Stigma: Many perceive non-US based medical schools to have a lower quality of education.

Residency Risk: Concern about acceptance into US residency program.

Financial Burden: St. George’s University is one of the most expensive medical schools in the world.

Second Choice: Individuals often apply to SGU as a second choice.

The Behavioral Diagnosis

We then identified handful of behavioral biases that may be driving these emotional experiences.

Present Bias : Losses (leaving home, financial burden, expended effort) are happening in the present, whereas any possible gain is in the distant future. We care about the present – it’s difficult for prospective students to justify such a large immediate investment with payoffs in the distance future.

Loss Aversion : Present bias is compounded by loss aversion. Even if outcomes were contemporaneous, losses feel twice as bad as equally sized gains feel good. Prospective students are weighing the costs and benefits of enrolling at SGU, the benefits must be more than twice as convincing as the costs.

Risk Aversion + Ambiguity Aversion : While the costs of enrolling in SGU Medical School are definitive and salient, the benefits are distant and uncertain. Our ambiguity aversion causes us to prefer to gamble on certain rather than uncertain odds, even if the expected value is lower. Unfortunately, there is no way to claim that obtaining a residency after graduation is 100% certain. 

Status Quo Bias : It’s easier to do nothing than to do something. This makes going to medical school in general a challenge, and the added component of total relocation only magnifies the issue.

Regret Aversion : We anticipate regret for actions (applying to medical school and not getting in, or going and not being admitted into a residency program) much more than we anticipate regret for inaction (not applying at all).

Drafting Behaviorally Informed Approaches

Based on these insights we proposed four approaches to test. Each approach rooted in behavioral science.

Authority Bias : Mitigate a sense of risk and ambiguity aversion by manufacturing SGU as a social norm endorsed by successful alumni.

Endowment Effect : An approach that leverages this effect by allowing applicants to “build their own” medical experience experience.

Similarity-Attraction Effect : Mitigate inertia driven by fear of the unknown by drawing attention to similarities between prospective applicants and current students.

Loss Aversion : Reframe potential gains as losses and create a sense of “investing in your future.”

Testing & Validation

Before redesigning the experience we conducted an off platform randomized control trial determining which intervention would have the highest likelihood of success.

Participants were briefed on a theoretical medical school and then presented with one of the five conditions above.

We then measured intent across a number of dimensions including:

• Expressed Interested
• Perception of Student Lifestyle
• Perceived Educational Caliber
• Overall Reaction

The winner was clear – the Similarity-Attraction Effect.

Building Similarity into the Experience

Armed with a data driven behaviorally informed approached, we redesigned and deployed the landing page incorporating the Similiarty-Attraction Effect as the foundation of the experience showcasing current students from various backgrounds and demographics.

We then split tested our version against the ole to verify performance.