How a Psychological Bias Makes Groups Feel Good About Themselves And Discredit Others

A subtle cognitive bias that explains why my team is talented but yours is lucky.

A subtle cognitive bias that explains why my team is talented but yours is lucky.

One of the strongest human motivations is to feel good about ourselves. Bolstering our own self-image helps us all feel slightly saner, more confident individuals.

We do this partly by thinking we’re a bit better looking, cleverer and more skilful than we really are. Although not absolutely everyone is an optimist, the vast majority of people do think they are above average in many areas.

Yes, it’s a cognitive bias, but it’s not so bad if it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Feeling good about our group

We don’t just think optimistically about ourselves, though, we have a clever way of being optimistic about the social groups we belong to as well. Naturally we prefer to think that our own family, our group of friends, our team, our company and our country are great.

One important psychological bias that helps us be more positive about our own group is called the ‘ultimate attribution error’. It’s a horrible bit of psychological jargon but here’s what it means in practical terms.

When someone from a different group to our own does something immoral, or reprehensible, or just fails in some way, we don’t bother finding excuses for them. We have a tendency to ascribe their failure to poor character or low ability.

For example, we say to ourselves: the guy from the opposition football team failed to score because he’s not that good at football. Psychologically what we’re doing here is ascribing the failure to something internal about him.

However, when someone from our own group does something bad, we work much harder to make excuses. And these excuses are of a particular type: we say it was bad luck or they didn’t really try or they were in a difficult situation. When it’s one of our own, we try our best to avoid saying it was a failure of character.

For example, when a guy whose on our team makes a mistake we say it was because he was under pressure or it was ‘bad luck’.

All this is flipped around when our fellow group member does something positive, something to be proud of. This time when it’s one of our own, we say it was because of his ability, because he’s one of us and he’s great.

Conversely, when it’s someone from another group who scores a success we say that was down to luck or because the situation was right or because they were making a special effort. In other words it was less to do with them, than with the situation being right.

My team is talented, yours is lucky

These patterns have been seen in all sorts of different contexts in psychological research. Here are a couple of examples described by Professor Miles Hewstone, an expert on the psychology of intergroup relations (Hewstone, 1990):

  • In the 1976 Super Bowl, fans of each team were asked about the cause of their own and the other team’s moment-by-moment successes during the match. Each thought their own team’s success to be a result of good play, but when the opposition did well, they minimised the influence of skill.
  • In one study, children at both elite private schools and more mediocre, state schools were asked to explain exam performance at both institutions. Those from the private schools said they did well because they were cleverer and had higher academic standards. Those at the state school were quick to point out the privileges that students at the elite school received and were not so impressed with their intelligence.

What’s interesting about both these examples is that people aren’t totally blinding themselves to reality. What they are doing is picking out and emphasising the details that support their own group while subtly discrediting the other group. They did this by explaining away their own group’s failures while attributing their successes to superior skills and innate talent.

Prejudice?

Although I’ve avoided mentioning it so far, research on the ultimate attribution error is usually focused on how it supports prejudice and stereotyping. Many of the studies show the same effects described above, but with nationalities or ethnicities instead of teams or smaller social units.

Wherever we see it, though, the underlying psychology is the same: when members of our group make a mistake it’s an accident or an anomaly, when members of another group do so, it’s typical of them.

Image credit: Joseph Shemuel

How to Help Other People Change Their Habits

Three pointers on helping someone else change their habits.

Three pointers on helping someone else change their habits.

Having written a book on how to change your own habits, in interviews I was often asked: how can I change another person’s habits?

Say I want my partner to stop cracking his knuckles or get my daughter to put down her mobile phone at meal times or start someone else exercising: how do I do that?

It’s not something I cover in the book, which focuses mainly on how habits work, how much of our everyday lives they influence and how to change your own personal habits.

Ultimately the same techniques apply; but when you are working on someone else, you’ve got to take a few steps back. Do they want to change? If not, can you persuade them? How will this attempt to change them affect your relationship?

Then, if you manage that, you can move on to using all the same techniques that you might use on yourself.

So here are three preliminary things to think about when trying to change someone else’s habits:

1. Are they open to change?

First up, and most obviously, people have to be open to the possibility of change.

People can be very defensive about their habits. They’ve taken years to develop and have become part of their identity; alternatively they are simply ashamed of them and want to try and justify them.

So, you may want your partner to stop cracking his knuckles or spending all his time on his smartphone, but is he open to the possibility that something might be done?

If not then even broaching the subject may be a waste of time. But let’s say you think they might be open to change, that brings me on to…

2. Being non-judgemental

One thing therapists are taught when dealing with patients is to be non-judgemental. There’s a good reason for that: it’s not just that no one likes to be judged, but that it sets the wrong tone. The wrong tone is: I know best what’s good for you and I’m telling you what to do. Not many people want to be ordered around like a dog.

The right tone has you both on an even footing and is warm and supportive. You’re a helpful friend who is interested in their well-being but is still accepting who they are.

As you can imagine, this can be a difficult balance. But, for most people, just avoiding being judgemental is a really great start. We humans seem to love passing judgement on anything and everything and it’s a difficult habit to give up.

3. Increasing their self-awareness

Along with detecting the seeds of change and being non-judgemental, one of the main things you can help someone else with is their self-awareness.

It’s a central feature of habits is that people perform them unconsciously and repeatedly in the same situations. To name a few good habits: we brush our teeth in the bathroom, look both ways before we cross the road and put our seatbelts on in the car before we pull away.

A vital step in changing a habit, then, is identifying the situation in which it occurs. You can help other people identify the situations by gently pointing out what seems to prompt them to perform the habit. For example, are there particular emotions or physical situations that are associated with the habit?

If so, making the other person aware of these can help them change that habit.

Working together

So getting other people to change is firstly about backing up from the techniques of habit change and seeing if the other person is open to tweaking their behaviour. You can’t make other people change if they don’t want to.

After this you can move on to all the techniques I describe in the book. I’ve listed some of these in my article on how to make New Year’s resolutions. These include things like choosing an alternative behaviour, making specific plans, thinking about things that are likely to trip them up, and so on.

These three pointers are just to get you started and by no means cover all bases. For children things are slightly different, for more seriously ingrained and destructive habits, these are only the beginning. But nevertheless these are a good place to start.

In theory with two people working together to change one person’s habit, you are in a stronger position. It’s not just that you can be their cheerleader; it’s also that you can objectively look at their behaviour and make them aware of connections that might otherwise be mostly or completely unconscious.

Image credit: chantOmO

The Single Most Effective Method for Influencing People Fast

Works like magic: a little-known influence technique that out-guns the usual suspects.

Works like magic: a little-known influence technique that out-guns the usual suspects.

Influence techniques vary considerably in how effective, ethical and easy to perform they are. At the easy, more ethical end of the spectrum, is affirming someone’s right to choose. This is a benign strategy which happens to have the handy side-effect of increasing persuasion.

But what if you are looking to use a little more effort to get a lot more persuasion-power? Then perhaps the disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) technique is for you.

A word of warning, though: the DTR technique is more of a cheap (but very effective) trick which some might find morally questionable.

OK, with the health warning over, here’s what they did in the original study which kicked off this whole line of research.

$3 versus 300 pennies

Davis and Knowles (1999) demonstrated the DTR technique by selling note cards door-to-door for a local charity. Here are two different strategies they used:

  • In the ‘normal’ condition they told people it was $3 for 8 cards. Using this they made sales at 40% of households.
  • In the DTR condition they first told people it was 300 pennies for 8 cards, immediately followed by: “…which is a bargain!” This form of words encouraged 80% of households to buy the cards.

It’s a huge effect for what is only a small change in the form of words. So, how and why does this work?

DTR works by first disrupting routine thought processes. The pitch is deliberately made hard to think about. In this case people’s attention is distracted while they try to process this cryptic ‘300 pennies’ and why anyone would mention the price in pennies rather than dollars.

Hot on the heels of the disrupt, in comes the reframe: in this case the words: “It’s a bargain!” While people are distracted by the price in pennies (for a second or two anyway), they are more likely to just accept the suggestion that the cards are a bargain.

The disruption only works for a second; the reframe has to come immediately, before people’s critical faculties come back online.

Surprisingly powerful

Many might wonder if this effect was a one-off which wouldn’t work elsewhere. This looks unlikely since the DTR technique has now been tested in 14 different studies on hundreds of participants (Carpenter & Boster, 2009).

It’s been shown to increase charity donations, encourage people to fill out surveys and help change their attitudes. It is even surprisingly effective in sales situations where people are normally wary of these sorts of shenanigans.

The types of disruptions used can be quite childish. In one study researchers trying to boost charity bake sales referred to ‘cupcakes’ as ‘halfcakes’. In another to solicit charity donations, they flipped the phrase ‘some money’ to make it ‘money some’. Neither quite make sense, and that’s the point; the disruption should only be mildly confusing, not total gibberish.

On average Carpenter and Boster found that DTR is stronger than the other standard persuasion techniques, including affirming autonomy.

Even if you don’t want to use it yourself, the DTR technique is useful to know about. If a salesman says something confusing (“Only lady one owner!”), then quickly sticks you with their reframe (“Between you and me this car is incredible value.”) make sure you take your time before making a decision and treat the reframe with scepticism.

It’s amazing how such a simple disruptive manipulation has the power to befuddle.

Image credit: Patrick Brosset

The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know

It’s supported by 42 studies on 22,000 people and it’s the easiest, most practical persuasion technique available.

It’s supported by 42 studies on 22,000 people and it’s the easiest, most practical persuasion technique available.

I’ll admit it. A few of the techniques for persuasion I’ve covered here on PsyBlog have been a little outlandish and impractical.

Things like swearing, talking in the right ear and pouring coffee down someone’s throat. The studies are interesting and fun but not widely useful.

The question is: which persuasion technique, based on psychological research, is most practical, can easily be used by anyone in almost any circumstances and has been consistently shown to work?

The answer is: the ‘But You Are Free’ technique. This simple approach is all about reaffirming people’s freedom to choose. When you ask someone to do something, you add on the sentiment that they are free to choose.

By reaffirming their freedom you are indirectly saying to them: I am not threatening your right to say no. You have a free choice.

A recent review of the 42 psychology studies carried out on this technique has shown that it is surprisingly effective given how simple it is (Carpenter, 2013). All in all, over 22,000 people have been tested by researchers. Across all the studies it was found to double the chances that someone would say ‘yes’ to the request.

People have been shown to donate more to good causes, agree more readily to a survey and give more to someone asking for a bus fare home.

The exact words used are not especially important. The studies have shown that using the phrase “But obviously do not feel obliged,” worked just as well as “but you are free”.

What is important is that the request is made face-to-face: the power of the technique drops off otherwise. Even over email, though, it does still have an effect, although it is somewhat reduced.

The BYAF technique is so simple and amenable that it can easily be used in conjunction with other approaches.

It also underlines the fact that people hate to be hemmed in or have their choices reduced. We seem to react against this attempt to limit us by becoming more closed-minded.

The BYAF technique, as with any good method of persuasion, is about helping other people come to the decision you want through their own free will. If they have other options, like simply walking away, and start to feel corralled, then you can wave them goodbye.

On the other hand, respecting people’s autonomy has the happy side-effect of making them more open to persuasion. You can look good and be more likely to get what you want. Nice.

Image credit: Lori Greig

Why People Believe Weird Things and 8 Ways to Change Their Minds

Some people believe all kinds of weird stuff including…

Some people believe all kinds of weird stuff including…

…no, actually, for a very good psychological reason I’m not going to repeat any of it here.

Let’s just say that some people believe weird stuff and leave it at that. It turns out that just one of the fascinating reasons that people accept odd ideas is that they keep getting repeated, even if only to debunk them.

So, where does all this misinformation come from, why do people believe it and how can right-thinking people counter it?

(The following is based on an excellent article by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues).

Where misinformation comes from

1. Rumours and fiction

People love sensational stories. They like to pass on tales that make the listener very happy, disgusted or afraid: anything that provokes a strong emotional response.

Neutral stories, which are probably more likely to be true, but much more boring, therefore get short shrift.

More bizarrely, people have been shown to believe things that they’ve read in novels that have clearly been totally made up. This is true even when:

  • They are obviously works of fiction,
  • and when they are told the fiction contains misinformation,
  • and when the real facts are relatively well-known.

This may be partly because people’s defences tend to be lower when they’re consuming popular entertainments.

2. Politicians

We may all be aware that politicians will say anything to get elected, but can we tell the difference between the truth and the lies they’ve told?

Studies have found that, in fact, people find it very difficult tell the difference. It seems that knowing that politicians lie is no barrier to people believing those lies.

3. The Media

The usual sources of misinformation in the media are oversimplification and the need for providing balance.

The need for balance is an interesting one because the issues themselves aren’t always ‘balanced’. For example over 95% of climate scientists agree that the Earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions, but you wouldn’t know that from many media debates on the issue, which are hobbled by the perceived need to always provide a ‘balanced’ viewpoint.

4. The Internet

There are a lot of good things to be said about the internet but it’s still a source of fantastic amounts of misinformation. Here’s a frightening fact:

“A survey of the first 50 Web sites matching the search term “weight loss diets” revealed that only 3 delivered sound dietary advice.”

Plus people tend to seek out information that confirms their existing points of view. And this is an exercise that has become much easier now the internet provides such a huge range of viewpoints. No matter what people believe they can find some other people who also believe it to back them up.

Why people believe misinformation

It’s pretty clear that lies and misinformation are floating about all over the place. But if we all know that politicians, the media and the internet sometimes lie, then how come some people end up believing it?

The problem is that the way people go about believing things (or not) is fundamentally weird. Few bother actually checking the facts for themselves; the majority use these mental short-cuts:

  • Does it feel right? In other words does the new information square with what I already believe? For example, a Republican is more likely to accept untruths about where President Obama was born because the lie is convenient.
  • Does it make sense? Things that are easy to understand are easier to believe. The mind repels complicated stuff, defending itself by saying: oh, it’s probably a lie (see my previous article: 8 Studies Demonstrating the Power of Simplicity).
  • Is the source believable? People who seem authoritative, like those in positions of power, are more likely to be believed. For example, doctors can create havoc by giving bad advice in public because people tend to believe them.
  • Who else believes it? People prefer to go along with the herd. Unfortunately people also have in inbuilt bias towards thinking that most other people agree with them, even if, in reality, they don’t (see: Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Effect).

But this still doesn’t explain why people continue to believe all kinds of weird stuff, even after it’s been proven to them that it’s false. It turns out that even once misinformation has been completely retracted and those involved have admitted it was lies, the misinformation is difficult to kill.

There are all sorts of reasons but one is based on how memory works: we tend to find it much easier to recall the gist of things rather than the exact details. Usually this is handy because it means we can learn specific things, say that cooking beef makes it easier to digest, and generalise it to the fact that cooking makes many foods more palatable.

The down side of this is that it’s easy for people to remember the gist of some piece of misinformation (the moon is made of cheese), but forget that they heard it from a totally unreliable source (a mischievous child).

8 ways to counter misinformation

So, is it possible to kill off misinformation? Lewandowsky and co-authors say yes, but it’s hard and you will need help from these 8 psychological techniques:

1. More than the truth

Changing people’s minds isn’t just about telling them they are wrong; if only it were. To be convinced people need to hear an alternative account that explains why something happened, not just that the misinformation is wrong. Ideally it should also explain the motivations for the lie.

2. Short and sweet

This alternative account, though, shouldn’t be too complicated. The shorter it is, the sweeter it will work. Give people too much and they switch off: just a few salient facts will do.

3. Don’t repeat the myth

Try to avoid repeating the myth. Remember that people find the gist of things easiest to recall. If you keep repeating the myth, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Here comes some misinformation…

You’ll have to repeat the myth once, though, so people know what you’re talking about. So tell them beforehand that there is misleading information coming.

5. Facts facts facts

Then, after the myth, keep repeating the facts. Each repetition builds up the rebuttal’s strength in people’s minds. The power of repetition to influence people is clear, see: The Illusion of Truth.

6. Attack the source

What is the source of the misinformation? And what do they know? Nothing! Encouraging people to be a little more sceptical can help.

One of the challenges here is that people tend to believe those who say things that fit in with their worldview. So that’s why it’s important to…

7. Affirm world-view

You have to keep the audience onside, even if you’re telling them things they don’t want to hear. You can do this by framing things within the audience’s world-view. For example you might say to a ‘birther’: “Hey, neither of us likes Obama or his politics, but the fact is he was born in Hawaii.”

Telling people things they don’t want to hear is a balancing act. You’ve got to go far enough to make the point, but not so far as to put them off.

8. Affirm identity

Another way of avoiding people’s natural resistance to facts they find unpleasant is to get them to affirm their identity. So you might indirectly get people to think about things that are important to them like their family, friends and ideals.

Research suggests this helps people deal with inconsistencies between their beliefs and the new information that is conflicting with it.

Mud sticks

Of course all these techniques are already used by opinion-formers and influencers, which is why it’s so important to know about them. As Lewandowsky and colleagues conclude:

“Correcting misinformation is cognitively indistinguishable from misinforming people to replace their preexisting correct beliefs. It follows that it is important for the general public to have a basic understanding of misinformation effects… Widespread awareness of the fact that people may “throw mud” because they know it will “stick”…will contribute to a well-informed populace.”

Image credit: Steve Rhodes

Psychological Distance: 10 Fascinating Effects of a Simple Mind Hack

Think distant: the incredible power of abstract thought.

Think distant: the incredible power of abstract thought.

This mind hack is simple: you imagine yourself way off in the future, or living in a different country or as a different person. The aim is to have that feeling of detachment, of stepping outside yourself, by whatever means you can.

This puts you into an abstract or psychologically distant frame of mind that has all kinds of effects on your perceptions of the world. Here are ten of my favourite examples:

1. Make challenging tasks seem easier

When you are finding a task difficult, increasing your psychological distance from it makes it feel easier:

“Activating an abstract mindset reduced the feeling of difficulty. A direct manipulation of distance from the task produced the same effect: Participants found the task to be less difficult when they distanced themselves from the task by leaning back in their seats.” (Thomas & Tsai, 2011)

So, it’s just as true of physical distance as it is for psychological distance.

2. Generate self-insight

When things go wrong in life and you’re trying to work out why, psychological distance can help:

“…directing people to analyze their feelings surrounding negative autobiographical experiences from a self-distanced perspective (i.e., thinking about oneself from the perspective of a “fly on the wall”), in comparison to a self-immersed perspective (first-person perspective), leads them to experience less emotional and physiological reactivity in the short term, while buffering them against negative outcomes associated with rumination over time.” (Ayduk & Kross, 2010)

3. Become more persuasive

When people are considering a purchase, they are more persuaded when the framing is psychologically distant:

“Findings from two experimental studies, consistently show that consumers in a predecisional mindset (i.e., consumers still deliberating on an unresolved decision), are more likely to be persuaded by messages with psychologically distant orientation, which emphasize the future or target a distant other…” (Nenkov, 2012)

4. Gain emotional self-control

Psychological distance can give us emotional distance:

“…negative scenes tended to be less negative and less emotionally arousing when imagined moving away, and the opposite when imagined moving toward the observer.” (Davis et al., 2011)

If you are a very emotional person, psychological distance can be a useful technique to control your emotions:

“a complementary matching of psychological distance to one’s habitual perspective generally leads to better emotion regulation; specifically, individuals with high avoidant attachment, who habitually distance themselves from their experiences, may benefit from psychological immersion, while individuals with high anxious attachment, who habitually immerse themselves in their experiences, may benefit from psychological distancing.” (Wang et al., 2012)

5. Beware the illusion of explanatory depth!

Not all the effects of thinking abstractly are positive. One of the dangers of abstract thinking is that it leads us to think we understand something better than we do. This is called the ‘illusion of explanatory depth’:

“…many people know vaguely that an earthquake occurs because two geological plates collide and move relative to one another, but again they know little about the mechanism that initially produces these collisions. Nonetheless, people believe they understand these concepts quite deeply, and are surprised by the shallowness of their own explanations when prompted to describe the concepts thoroughly.” (Alter et al., 2010)

So:

“Although folk wisdom suggests that we often fail to see the forest for the trees, sometimes the greater concern is that we fail to see the trees for the forest.” (Alter et al., 2010)

6. Be true to yourself

Psychological distance can make us less susceptible to social influence as it…

“…can help to guide action at a distance by consistently reflecting a person’s core values and ideals, which are likely to be shared within important relationships or groups.” (Ledgerwood et al., 2010)

In other words: when we think abstractly or with psychological distance we are truer to ourselves.

7. Become more polite

People tend to be more polite when they are thinking abstractly:

“Eight studies showed that politeness is associated with high-level construal, temporal distance, and spatial distance.” (Stephan et al., 2010)

8. Fire your creativity

From Boost Creativity: 7 Unusual Psychological Techniques:

“People often recommend physical separation from creative impasses by taking a break, but psychological distance can be just as useful. Participants in one study who were primed to think about the source of a task as distant, solved twice as many insight problems as those primed with proximity to the task (Jia et al., 2009).”

9. Improve your self-control

From How to Improve Your Self-Control:

“…participants who had been encouraged to think in high-level, abstract terms demonstrated greater self-control in enduring the discomfort of the hand-grip in order to receive more accurate personality profiles.”

10. Trigger wise thoughts

Being wise means seeing the bigger picture. Abstract thinking and psychological distance can help you do that:

“Two experiments demonstrate that cueing people to reason about personally meaningful issues (Study 1: Career prospects for the unemployed during an economic recession; Study 2: Anticipated societal changes associated with one’s chosen candidate losing the 2008 U.S. Presidential election) from a distanced perspective enhances wise reasoning (dialecticism; intellectual humility), attitudes (cooperation-related attitude assimilation), and behavior” (Kross & Grossmann, 2011)

Image credits: Michelle Catania & BMcIvr

How To Encourage People To Change Their Own Minds

Self-persuasion: let people talk themselves around to your point of view.

Self-persuasion: let people talk themselves around to your point of view.

Changing people’s minds is hard.

We resist having our attitudes adjusted by others, especially when the message isn’t directly relevant to us and we aren’t paying that much attention.

But what if you could get people to change their own minds? People will listen to themselves and will automatically generate arguments that have personal relevance for them.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Actually people are being encouraged to persuade themselves all the time. Here are a few examples:

  1. When a parent wants to change a child’s behaviour they might ask them why it is wrong, rather than just telling them it is wrong.
  2. When we’re encouraged to take part in role-playing exercises, we might espouse attitudes and values we don’t believe in.
  3. When we want to change our behaviour, say, to healthier eating, we might try to convince ourselves we don’t like the forbidden foods as much as we do.

So, there are all kinds of situations in which we are arguing with ourselves, whether it’s because we’ve initiated it ourselves, or because we’ve been subtly encouraged to do so by someone else.

Self-persuasion

But does it work? Does self-persuasion make any real difference?

Janis and King (1954) tested this by having some participants give a talk while two others listened. Then they swapped around and one of the passive listeners gave a talk to the other two on a different topic.

What emerged was that, on average, people were more convinced by the talk when they gave it themselves than when they merely heard it passively. This suggests that we really are persuaded more strongly when we make the argument ourselves, even if it isn’t in line with our own viewpoint.

The same trick works with attitudes to smoking. People are more put off smoking when they deliver an anti-smoking message than when they passively receive it (research described in Brinol et al., 2012).

We see the same effect for self-confidence. When people are told to present themselves in a self-confident way to others, they actually feel more self-confident themselves.

The explanation seems to be that we are very good at convincing ourselves because we know just what sorts of arguments will sway us.

So if you want someone to persuade themselves, you can try asking them to put aside their own attitude for a moment and try getting them to generate their own arguments for the point you want to make.

Whatever the cover story, as long as the person is encouraged to generate their own arguments, it has a chance of changing their mind.

Image credit: Gary Knight

Why Stories Sell: Transportation Leads to Persuasion

Psychological research on persuasion suggests that stories which transport people are more likely to be persuasive.

Psychological research on persuasion suggests that stories which transport people are more likely to be persuasive.

Marketers have known for years that stories are a powerful tool for persuading people. That’s partly because stories (unlike statistics) are easy to understand.

That’s why politicians try to persuade us by telling stories about their vision of the world. They do spout statistics as well, but normally only in support of some kind of grand narrative.

We instinctively understand that people resist being told what to do, but will respond to the moral of a story. So we try to persuade each other with little stories about ‘someone we know’. Then we simplify and embellish them to make the moral clear.

Engage to persuade

Research suggests that trying to persuade people by telling them stories does indeed work (Green & Brock, 2000). The question is why? Because if we know why, we can make the stories we tell more persuasive.

Stories work so well to persuade us because, if they’re well told, we get swept up in them, we are transported inside them.

Transportation is key to why they work. Once inside the story we are less likely to notice things which don’t match up with our everyday experience.

For example an aspirational Hollywood movie with a can-do spirit might convince us that we can tackle any problem, despite what we know about how the real world works.

Also, when concentrating on a story people are less aware that they are subject to a persuasion attempt: the message gets in under the radar.

Two sorts of people who may be particularly susceptible to being persuaded by stories are those who seek out emotional situations and those who enjoy thinking (Thompson & Haddock, 2011).

Stories which contain emotional elements draw in those looking for an emotional charge. Meanwhile the twists and turns of the plot and the meaning of the story draw in those looking to rev up their brains.

Whether through emotion or thought, stories that engage are more likely to persuade. The higher the emotional and semantic content of a story, then, the more likely they are to distract people from the persuasion attempt.

Crafting better stories

Highly persuasive stories need to be engaging. Here are some more factors that make an engaging and persuasive story (from Green & Brock, 2005):

  • Literary techniques like foregrounding, which is using things like irony or metaphor to make the banal and everyday seem new and fresh. It’s about shaking the reader out of the mundane.
  • Imagery is important as it helps the story come alive in the reader’s mind.
  • Suspense keep us reading for the oldest of reasons: to find out what happens next.
  • Modelling: if you want someone to change a behaviour, then you can model it. The character in the story has to go through the transformation that you want the reader to go through.

For inspiration break down your favourite novels, TV shows or films to see how the narrative works. Oddly whether the story is true or not doesn’t seem to matter that much, people are persuaded by fiction just as much as fact.

There are all sorts of innovative applications. Doctors at Harvard Medical School are given stories and novels to read to encourage humane treatment of their patients. Lawyers continually use stories in court to persuade. Public health bodies lobby TV shows to get their health issues included in popular narratives.

Persuading through narrative is as old as the hills and it works. So what’s your story?

Image credit: Stephen Poff

Can You Get Things Done Without Making People Hate You?

Psychological research on leadership locates the assertiveness sweet spot.

Psychological research on leadership locates the assertiveness sweet spot.

Some people believe that being an effective leader is about being tough and taking the hit to your likeability—like a drill sergeant. These sorts of leaders say things like: “It’s not my job to be liked, it’s my job to get things done.”

Others—but probably many fewer—think that being more touchy-feely will boost the positive will towards you and help get things done.

Is there any evidence for either extreme or can you have your cake and eat it?

That’s what Ames & Flynn (2007) tested with 3 groups of MBA students who filled in questionnaires about each other and managers for whom they’d worked. They looked at both social and instrumental outcomes of assertiveness: in other words, how much did people like them and how much did they get things done.

Here’s what they found:

  • Productivity: higher and higher levels of assertiveness produced diminishing returns. So in terms of results it’s not much better to be highly assertive than moderately assertive, but it was definitely better to be moderately assertive than not assertive.
  • Social outcomes: higher and higher levels of assertiveness lead to increasingly poor social outcomes. It was definitely better to be moderately assertive than highly assertive.

When you put both of the outcomes together you get an inverted U-shape (below; from Ames & Flynn, 2007). So that people who are low in assertiveness get less things done but people very high in assertiveness are socially insufferable.

In the middle, however, there’s a sweet spot. Whether it’s how leaders dealt with conflict, tried to influence others or motivated their teams, the assertiveness middle ground was clearly the place to be.

And it emerged that assertiveness is vital in how we evaluate co-workers and managers. It may be too little or it may be too much, but workers’ assertiveness was complained about more than other important leadership qualities like intelligence, charisma and conscientiousness.

But when people are moderately assertive, we don’t tend to notice. In the sweet spot assertiveness seems to disappear off our personality judgement radar: if you’re doing it right, no one will notice.

So the tacit belief that you get the best results in business by riding people hard is probably wrong, as is the softly-softly approach. In particular being highly assertive may work in the short-term but in the long-term the productivity gains are small compared with the social damage that’s done.

Image credit: Subharnab Majumdar

The Influence of Positive Framing

Emphasising the positive can be more persuasive than pointing out the negative.

Emphasising the positive can be more persuasive than pointing out the negative.

Say you’re the government and you want to stop people smoking. Should you put really scary warnings on the packets emphasising the health risks?

Or maybe you should tell people about the positive side of becoming a non-smoker, like having whiter teeth, smelling better and being able to run more than 20 metres without having a coughing fit.

Our instinctive reaction is to go with scaring people witless. Throw away the carrots and start wielding the big stick. The theory being that people pay more attention to frightening messages, so they are more likely to take them to heart.

As you’ll have noticed, most government agencies agree. Billions are spent each year in countries across the world on campaigns that focus on the negative. This is the way persuasive health messages are normally targeted at the public. We, the downtrodden masses, must be frightened into changing our foolish ways.

But what does the research say?

Originally it agreed that framing messages in terms of losses tends to get people’s attention, but research has begun to question this ‘common sense’ conclusion.

A recent analysis added up the results of 29 different studies, which had been carried out on 6,378 people in total (O’Keefe & Jensen, 2008). They didn’t just include health messages like smoking cessation, but also consumer advertising.

What they found was none of the expected advantage for loss-framed messages, indeed there was a slight persuasive advantage for messages that were framed positively. But this advantage for gain-framed appeals seemed to be mainly confined to disease prevention, such as encouraging people to use sunscreen. However another review of the field also found an advantage for gain-framed appeals in encouraging healthy eating (O’Keefe & Jensen, in press).

All of these findings are weird because normally bad things attract our attention more than good things and so they are processed more thoroughly. That’s why the newspapers and TV are full of alarming stories: like it or not, that’s what we pay attention to.

We don’t really know why loss-framed appeals turn out to be no more effective, and in some cases worse, than gain-framed appeals. O’Keefe and Jensen suggest it might be because we don’t like to be bullied by the government—or by anyone for that matter—into changing our behaviour.

Could be true but I prefer their second explanation which is simply that we prefer to think about nice things. Given the choice between visualising lung cancer and contemplating a dazzling white smile, I know which one I prefer to think about. And if I spend more time thinking about it, then it’s got a better chance of persuading me than if I put it straight out of my mind.

Image credit: Luca