Picture yourself alone in a mostly bare white room. In front of you are two nearly identical doors. You know that one leads to the exit, and you know that behind the other is a complete unknown. Which one would you choose?

Which door would you choose? This question was at the heart of an experiment that we were asked to run on behalf of Volvo. Because Volvo believes that understanding human decision-making helps them make better cars for their drivers, they wanted to understand why some are so much more willing than others to embrace the unknown. While choosing the unknown certainly wasn’t easy for many of the experiment’s participants, a majority nevertheless made that choice — even those who might be expected to do otherwise, or who vocalized fear or uncertainty beforehand. The choice was each person’s

own to make.

We conducted a simple social experiment with 100 participants, all whom volunteered to take part in a paid, psychological study. They answered a series of questions with a trained psychologist on camera, and then were introduced to, and took the test. Afterwards,

they were interviewed again about the decisions they made. The resulting film ran on

Vox.com, as well as on it’s parent properties (The Verge, The Drive, etc). The film was featured for 30 days, during which time it was watched for more than 286,666 cumulative hours.

The film reached 4.3 million people, and exceeded Vox’s previous benchmark for films longer than three minutes by more than double. Volvo saw site visits to the XC60 page more than double during the duration of the campaign.

It’s a bold move for a car brand with less than 1% market-share to invest in a 9 minute film exploring the differences in people who are afraid of the things they do not know, vs. people who are excited about the things they don’t know. But Volvo did just that,

and the result is an incredibly stirring, deeply emotional dive into the minds of real people, struggling to reconcile their own personal fears, with their overwhelming desire and curiosity.

During research we stumbled on an insight about people who buy Volvos - they’re optimistic about the future. From there, the strategy was born - “Explore the differences between people who are afraid of the future vs. people who are excited about it, and prove that Volvo as a company, and the people that buy their cars, share that same optimism.”

Volvo believes that understanding human decision-making helps them make better cars for their drivers, they wanted to understand why some are so much more willing than others to embrace the unknown.