Thinking About Sapolsky in a Bank Branch

COCenk Onur Ozan ·27 Aug 2026Published 27 Aug 2026 ·4 min read

A small moment in a bank branch last week reminded me once again how complex human behaviour is. The impatience on the faces of the people in the queue, the teller clicking quickly through the screens… I realised that a quiet story was running through this interaction, repeated hundreds of times a day. Biology, stress and social context were mixing together even in an ordinary bank transaction.

The person who helped me make sense of that story was Robert Sapolsky. A professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford University, Sapolsky explains human and primate behaviour together with its biological, social and psychological context. For anyone working on customer and employee experience, this is more than academic curiosity; it is a way to understand experience more deeply.

One of the most striking findings from Sapolsky’s years of research on baboons in Kenya is the link between social hierarchy and stress. Baboons on the lower rungs of the hierarchy live with constantly high cortisol, which affects both their health and their behaviour. It is not hard to see the human equivalent: customers left alone with long waits, complicated processes and uncertainty, or people who work under constant supervision with little say.

Imagine you work in a call centre. You are trying to keep up with several customers at once, the phone is ringing, messages are piling up on the screen and your manager is watching your performance. The customer on the line is getting impatient over an answer that is a few minutes late. In a moment like this, hormones, stress and social context shape behaviour together. The employee’s capacity for empathy drops and the customer’s dissatisfaction rises. Measures that reduce stress, simpler processes and mechanisms that support employees improve behaviour on both sides. This link between biology and experience design is often overlooked.

According to Sapolsky, what shapes the behaviour of individuals lower in the hierarchy most is a lack of control and uncertainty. Organisations are no different. Employees who feel constantly monitored and have no say in decisions lose motivation and find it harder to cooperate. Picture an e-commerce operation where returns are stuck, staff are buried under the workload and managers step into every task. Customers are angry, employees are exhausted. Redesigning the process and giving employees more autonomy and control is one of the strongest moves available there to lift both satisfaction and productivity.

Sapolsky argues that tying behaviour to a single cause, and especially to biology alone, is misleading, because biology always works together with context. Empathy is one of the most important parts of that context. Under pressure, it becomes harder for employees to show empathy to customers; customers who feel misunderstood become less satisfied and their bond with the brand weakens. Think of an airline team swamped with ticket-change requests in a busy season. Employees who have learned to handle crises and who receive psychological support stay calmer, and customers respond to them with more understanding. You can see the trace of such a change in VoC results.

This is where VoC proves its value again. Survey results alone are not enough to understand customer behaviour; you also need to read small gestures, tone of voice and recurring patterns. A retailer that looks at the facial expressions, walking pace and in-the-moment feedback of customers waiting in line can catch the first signs of dissatisfaction long before any survey, and organising the flow of customers to shorten the wait often lifts satisfaction quickly. Behaviour is not a superficial preference; emotional reactions and stress levels shape the experience directly.

The lessons I carry from Sapolsky into experience design are quite concrete. Simplifying complex processes and keeping uncertainty to a minimum reduces stress. Immediate recognition and feedback improve the behaviour of employees and customers alike. Giving employees control and autonomy eases the pressure created by hierarchy and increases commitment. Empathy belongs at the centre of design, because it shapes human behaviour. Behavioural data deserves careful measurement too; VoC and employee surveys are among the most important tools for seeing these complex patterns.

Something I witnessed at a technology company last year is still on my mind. The customer support team was struggling with a flood of requests caused by software bugs. Management only reminded the team of procedures and offered no way forward. Customers wrote in anger, and employees under stress lost their capacity for empathy. When the company simplified its processes and gave employees decision-making authority and psychological support, both customer satisfaction and employee motivation rose noticeably. Seen through Sapolsky’s lens, it was a vivid example of how biology and social context intertwine inside an experience.

Good experience design is more than an attractive interface or an incentive programme; it requires the ability to read human biology, the capacity for empathy and the social context. No experience is really complete until you see the story behind the behaviour. At what point in your experience design do the stress of customers and employees enter the calculation?

Cenk Onur Ozan COO, Cloud4Feed

Writes about customer experience, behaviour and the decisions that follow from listening.

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