Deliberation vs. Execution stage in Claims: When to Influence Behavior

When is the best time to convince a friend to eat healthy? In the supermarket while selecting groceries, or an hour later once the freshly baked cookies are on a plate?

Behavioral science has shown that any attempt to influence behavior, whether an honesty pledge or a legal disclaimer, has little effect once people enter execution mode - a psychological state where cognitive focus shifts entirely from evaluating options to completing an action already decided upon. Their commitment is locked in.

In execution mode, customers operate on momentum, task-completion drive, and sunk effort, rendering behavioral nudges virtually useless. In a claims process, this is once the customer has already answered several questions and in some cases, logged in. At this point, one cannot expect to achieve greater than 1-2% impact on claims as damage has already been done - missing out a huge opportunity to tackle the estimated 10% fraud.

To meaningfully shape choices, interventions must happen early, while customers are still in deliberation mode - the cognitive state a person experiences before committing to a specific decision or course of action. During this phase, the brain remains open, reflective, and objective as it evaluates possibilities, weighs pros and cons, and determines feasibility. An ideal time to foster and predict honesty.

It seems logical to resist moving an honesty pledge to the very start of a claim flow, arguing that high upfront dropouts reflect non-intent noise, such as users landing on the wrong page or getting interrupted.

However, this misses the point. The fundamental purpose of an honesty pledge is to increase truthfulness and reduce inflated or fraudulent claims - not to minimize top-of-funnel dropouts. As such natural dropouts occur at the same rate for both a test and control groups early in the process, any valid calculation of effect automatically accounts for this baseline noise.

The true measure of success is comparing the proportion of customers who start the process and ultimately submit a claim across both groups, as well as the value of those claims. Moving the HonestyPledge upfront intervenes before users commit to an inflated narrative, historically delivering a 3–5% reduction in overall claims frequency and value - read more here

If the objective is genuine cost savings and behavioral insights, the HonestyPledge must be deployed where it has real effect. This is precisely why a court requires witnesses to raise their hand and swear an oath before giving testimony - and not after.

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Dan Ostergaard is co-founder and CEO of HonestyPledge GmbH, a Swiss-based startup created alongside team of EPFL alumni. He was global head of integrity at Novartis and spent 10 years advising organisations such as Airbus, Heineken, UBS, JnJ, Nestle, Roche, Novartis, GSK, Novo Nordisk, ING, Maersk, Moevenpick, PwC, Deloitte and EY.

Dan holds an LLM from King’s College London, an MBA from Monterey Institute, and Executive Education from Harvard Business School.