Mastering Influence & Persuasion

I'm here today to talk with you about alligator psychology and the reason that I became an academic Wow I wish I could see y'all's faces hi the reason I became an academic was it had a lot to do with alligator psychology I was a brand manager at Mattel and Mattel is one of the companies that does more great market research putting more resources into it than any other company we had phenomenal facilities great team quantitative work qualitative work and I participated in so many research presentation discussions where the research team or my team would be presenting to senior management and we make a very good research-based case for where the company or the brand needs to move and the executives ask good questions they're engaged and it feels like we're all on the same page and then they just go with their gut in the end and I would be frustrated super super frustrated have you ever had that frustration anybody yeah a bunch of us right so uh so I ended up leaving Mattel I'm going to get my PhD to study decision-making my goal was I want to figure out how to help people make better decisions decisions that make sense based on research not going with their gut what ended up happening as I learned more about psychology was I realized that we need to work better with people who make gut decisions because that's who we are and that's what I'm going to share with you today I first need a promise we're in Florida I know a lot of people here you know from many other places a lot of people know the difference between an alligator and a crocodile raise your hand if you can see the difference between an alligator and a crocodile these are Gators ok please promise me if I show you a picture of a crocodile I'll pretend it's an alligator okay okay I'll take that laughter as a yes first a guessing game this is like how many jellybeans in the jar only its M&Ms and I'm going to ask you to predict the results of a field study research experiment that I conducted at Google where I've been working with the food team to have any Google people here this morning they all hungover from last night's shenanigans well I'm going to throw them under the bus then at Google it's a cornucopia of free food it's Nirvana free food everywhere and Googlers love love love love love M&Ms it's the most popular snack and the Google food team asked me please our employees are fantastic and they complain about gaining weight and they eat thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds of M&Ms so how could we help them make healthy choices by accident this is a picture of a break room where people are lined up for something probably M&Ms and this is what the mmm situation looks like in the break room there are these opaque containers full of bulk M&Ms and then there's a little cup it's a half cup size four ounces and you scoop as many M&Ms as you want into your cup and then there's this label that says serving size 1.7 four ounces which is obviously completely useless because how much is 1.7 four ounces we have no idea so a collaborator and I working with the team we said okay we're going to experiment with labels and we're going to experiment with portions trying to help people eat fewer M&Ms without telling them what to do because we all hate to be told what to do so the to labeling conditions we had a numeric label which for peanut M&Ms it just said serving size eight pieces okay got it right we had the visual serving size label which shows a picture of a cup and shows you how far to fill it if you want one serving size and then we had the portions condition where the label stays the same but instead of bulk mms inside that container we put fun packs Halloween sized candies my collaborator and I had different hypotheses about what would work sync in your own mind which of these three conditions if any do you think impacted the amount of M&Ms that people ate and did it make them eat more or did it make them eat less just think about it silently for a moment okay keep it in your mind and we'll come back to this particular gut decision alligator psychology those of you who have an interest in behavioral economics will have heard of system 1 and system 2 I know Dan Ariely was here at T MRE not that long ago and many of you will at least have bought thinking but Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman if you haven't read it yet its behavioral economics boils down to this in 30 seconds we have two brains in our brain behavioral economists call these just very ungracefully system 1 and system 2 I refer to them as the alligator brain and the court and what happens is the alligator brain system 1 is this unconscious fast intuitive automatic decision maker that makes almost all of our decisions we imagine though that the court our system - brain is making a lot more decisions than it is but the court is conscious slow deliberate and effortful every time the courts got to make a decision you've got to make arguments on both sides here all the evidence the testimony deliberate and then make a decision and you can't be doing other things with your brain while you're engaging the court or system - you can make a system one like a first responder because it is and system 2 is a second guesser but we don't always second-guess our decisions only sometimes think about going to the grocery store we don't think that we're making unconscious decisions when we grab food and we put it in our cart but what if every single one of those decisions was made by the court you would have to look at this brand compared to that brand despair this price compared to that one look at the nutritional information what about the volume what trade-offs do you want to make between sugar and preservatives if we had to make even simple decisions like what food to put in our grocery cart with the court we would never leave the grocery store and the way humans operate is that we think that we're making these rational decisions when most of the time we're making decisions through habit gut reflexes and automatic behaviors that we have engaged in many many times before or rules that we have like at the grocery store if your rule is you buy whatever orange juice brand is on sale then you don't have to think about it you don't have to take it to the court and you can make that decision with your alligator brain here's something really freaky even the court makes decisions with the alligator brain there was a study that came out a few years ago on hundreds of Israeli judges and these Israeli judges we're hearing parole where they were listening to parole hearings criminals were coming up to say I think I should get let out of jail judge gets to decide that is a very difficult decision in the morning when the judges are awake and refreshed and their minds are clear two-thirds of the criminals coming up for parole were released from jail and so this is the court right that is the court making the decision but gradually as more decisions are made the day wears on frustrations and just general feelings of depletion and even low blood sugar set in decision-making shifts over to the alligator and before lunch zero prisoners are getting out on parole they take a break at lunch come back refreshed again right after lunch two thirds of the prisoners getting let out on parole and as they get depleted the day wears on by the end of the day zero if even the court even people who are paid only to make rational fair decisions are making their decisions with the alligator brain we got to just work with it this is how the alligator brain decides what to do with the information that it receives first of all the alligator brains too super super lazy and has a mandate to preserve cognitive resources ignores everything unless it's new or unless it stimulates curiosity your alligator brain wants to know what around might be dangerous not just dangerous in terms of physical safety which is probably how it evolved but dangerous in terms of mental resources when you find yourself tuning out during a presentation that's because your alligator brain has decided this is dangerously complicated takes too much in too much cognitive resources for the benefit that I'm going to get and so I'm just going to be working on other things the same thing if you think you know what the presenter is going to say so think about that from your point of view as a presenter right so you need to be presenting what's new stimulating curiosity and making the case for this being important enough not just to make the decision but to have the Crockett the alligator brain decide to focus energy and resources on it alligator understands emotional alligator has emotional reactions and it takes in the big picture with broad strokes looking at evidence and not at abstraction this is why when we present data lots of times we create a graph rather than using a table it's not that our brains can't understand a table but that's the court gets numbers but it takes more resources alligator brain if you visualize data can totally get it like that without using any resources and the alligator brain also can handle anything that comes as long as there's a relevant rule only sends to the court if it's unexpected or out of the ordinary and I'll share with you some specific ways to think about working with and engaging the alligator brain since this is how we work first one is attention lots of times life feels kind of like this information overload overwhelm and it doesn't even matter what the messages are they're not sinking in because we're just not giving them our attention and this is the challenge that we face when we're trying to persuade other people and share our research share our ideas influence the people around us biggest biggest first challenge is just getting their attention in the first place and I want to share an example from Procter & Gamble anybody from Procter & Gamble currently or formerly in here hi welcome P&G coined the phrase moments of truth and it's spread through much of our industry right and it's Mott MOT if you're in the know moments of truth refers to the idea that we need to reach people to influence them when they have the highest likelihood of being willing to say yes or paying attention or caring to what we have caring about what we have to talk about Botox is a laundry detergent that's sold in Lebanon and the PNG marketing team in Beirut was thinking how do we reach people how do we reach our consumers when it's going to be a moment of truth and they'll be most likely to be thinking about and excited about laundry detergent when are we thinking about and excited about laundry detergent detergent ever right except like you know when you're doing laundry at least you're thinking about it but if you want to advertise people who are doing laundry TV advertising doesn't make sense because they're doing laundry print advertising doesn't make sense because they're doing laundry radio you know not really in Beirut when they're doing laundry they live in high-rise apartment buildings and they mostly have washing machines and they don't have dryers and they hang their laundry out to dry on the balconies and the brilliant PNG marketing team figured out we can reach them by advertising on the tops of buses this is a brilliant moment of truth advertising campaign Careerbuilder the job search site stole their idea for their own moment of truth think about for yourself when you're trying to persuade another human being when are they going to be most likely to be excited and most likely to say yes and in particular is that in the formal presentation or is it in a completely different conversation before or after moments of truth time and place very very simple but most often overlooked another way to engage attention is through what's technically called the Zeigarnik effect it's open loop and it's related to curiosity Bluma Zeigarnik was a psychologist who in the 1920s was doing her PhD in czechoslovakia and she and her friends would go to this cafe where there was this one amazing waiter who could remember no matter how big your table was even if you had 15 people sitting there every single person's drink order and food order they would go around tell him and he would deliver them perfectly and we've all had servers like this right so Blum on her friends one day said we're going to quiz him so after he had brought all of the food and drinks to their large table everybody put their napkin over their meal or their drink and they called the waiter back and I said okay tell us what we ordered and he couldn't remember he couldn't remember anybody's order this waiter who was two most had the most incredible memory he couldn't remember their order and the reason was that that open loop had been closed our brains have this natural drive to resolve anything that is left unresolved or open or uncertain this drive toward resolution is the same reason why when we go to the movies even if the movie really really sucks almost always we a chill the end right like we never walk out of a movie we just complain about it afterward because we can't because it's a story and we need to know how it ends this is an open-loop clickbait open loops stimulating your curiosity grabbing the attention of your alligator brain you never cared before probably what Will Smith might think about his son saying he wants to remove some thing Trump's IQ Hillary's IQ we don't know I don't even trust the internet to tell us what it actually is but it stimulates your curiosity even if you never cared he thought it was Bigfoot's skull but then experts told him this Oh could it be right did Neanderthals died because they didn't have jackets it's complicated not a question you have ever pondered but it creates an open loop like when you saw moving you're trying to remember the name of that actor and doing was the name of the actor what was the name of the actor work and your brain thank God for the internet right because otherwise we just sit there short-circuited contains the open moves of information we're trying to remember I sell for most of these as I was creating this slide the 10 billion dollar hole too deep to fly over by the way is a diamond mine in Russia and it's so deep that supposedly it creates a vortex and helicopters are prohibited from flying over it because they can get sucked in and Bigfoot skull is a rock Neanderthals no they didn't die because they didn't have jackets now those loops are closed oh except for the Will Smith one he doesn't know how to feel because it's just a rumor it's not even true so don't worry about it so in considering the other persons or the group's attention when you are presenting your research your information just have in your mind moment of truth best time in place and also how can I simulate curiosity about this topic that I'm going to talk about the next key force of influence is just ease ease is way more important than we realize we want to talk about behavior rather than just the decision in the motivation and to give you an alligator example anybody ever been to Gator land in Orlando okay couple of people this place you guys it's creepy it's freaky it's awesome there's three thousand alley three thousand alligators and they're in piles like this and one of the things that you can do when you're there is you can buy meat to feed them you can buy hot dogs and you could throw up throw a chunk of hot dog into this pile of prehistoric monsters and I was so excited to do this and see them roiling and writhing and fighting each other over this chunk of meat but it turns out what happens is alligators are really really really lazy and the chunk of hot dog has to fall within reach of their mouths and they're not going to move their body so if it falls right there they'll snap it and if it falls one inch away it just sits there until a bird comes down and gets it alligators alligator brain really really really really really freaking lazy and this explains why many of the companies that have disrupted not just rising above their competitors but changed entire industries have revolutionized the ease with which we can do business with them pleasure and pain is important for motivation but ease and difficulty has a much greater impact on behavior think about Amazon making it super super super super easy to get anything at all delivered to your house is it the cheapest is it the best no I don't know but it's really really easy right uber makes it easy easy easy easy easy as possible to get a ride lots of times you don't even know how much it costs right it's not that it's cheap it's not that it's the most amazing ride but it's so easy and if you're single tinder super super super super easy right to give a signal that you like someone and set up the date for some people swiping right with their some is not even easy enough and one engineer created this right swiping robot this is how lazy people are Domino's understand how lazy people are I made a fantastic campaign last year which was the idea was just let's make it as easy as possible to order a pizza let's take out all the friction let's take out all the friction you can tweet us an order you can call us you can order on your Apple watch you can text us an order if you had a particular kind of Ford you could order pizza from your car they made it as easy as possible and in one year their share price went up 12% why Pizza Hut went down 2% they didn't change their pizza they just made it easy ladies what behavior do we desire to encourage related to this household object we want our guys to put the seat down right we don't understand why they flush it and we've and we remind them put to seat down put the seat down with so many fights over this so this is a brilliant design of a toilet hello alligator brain by the way right really a design of a toilet because you can't flush it without putting the seat down so I encourage you to think about next time you're trying to persuade someone don't stop at getting them to want to do that thing how could you possibly make it as easy as it could be and reduce the friction as much as possible so they can take action on that decision as well and this video shows you a beautiful example of a moment of truth and at the same time making it as easy as possible to take action check it out [Music] is that amazing it's amazing I love it I don't expect to ever think of any campaign as cool and creative as that you don't have to think of something that secret and hidden and magical with transparent paint just consider what's the best time and place if you're trying to sell Beach vacation for people in Hong Kong obviously monsoon season and then even especially when it rains right and the fact that these these ads are just appearing on the sidewalk like magic alligator brain hello surprise attention curiosity and then makes it easy to take action with the QR code the next force of influence that I encourage you to play with it's very very common in sales and we've all been on the receiving end of scarcity ploys many many many many many many times scarcity operates through loss aversion and when someone tells you there's limited time or limited quantity or something is very exclusive loss aversion kicks in and you say you don't tell me what to do I've got a half that thing I've got out that I've got to have it I've got to have it and sometimes scarcity can lead to remorse and regret buyer's remorse anybody ever bought anything on that you regretted later yeah laughing like yeah if your hand is up here just like nuclear it's not up you're lying this is because scarcity so first there's the anchoring when something's on sale right like oh there's the regular price what a good deal that I get the sale price but sales never last forever so you've got to jump on it right now this is a silly example of drugstore circular of course limited time offer because it always is and but the silly part of it is that they use scarcity telling you you can't buy more than six bottles of fish oil and five bottles of dish soap were you going to buy seven bottles of fish oil no right but scarcity still works when you end up buying two instead of one and temporal scarcity isn't just a gimmicky kind of transactional sales thing that pharmacists use even in international diplomacy diplomats use the scarcity principle when they say to another country here's the deal that we can offer you now under the current regime when the regime changes who knows might not be so good same principle limited time exclusivity or actually this is both exclusivity and limited quantity is the second principle of scarcity and anybody ever had Kopi Luwak coffee this is the most expensive coffee in the whole entire world one back there one right here over here y'all are disgusting they're like I know I've had it too because I fall for all of this stuff even though I teach it Kopi Luwak coffee is limited in quantity because it's limited by the number of civet cats this little creature who are available to eat the coffee berries and poop them out before they get roasted and turned into Kopi Luwak coffee and sold for ladies and gentlemen $100 a pound why why have we eaten this pooped out coffee because it's cool there's hardly any of it it's exotic its exclusive it's a limited supply my experience was not that it tasted any different from any other type of coffee and hopefully they burn out all of that whatever yaki stuff is in there but it's insane this top was sponsored by Gatorland obviously Gatorland uses not really Gatorland uses the scarcity principle when they tell you we have four white crocodiles but not just limited quantity of four they're only 12 white crocodiles sorry alligators alligators I mix them up sorry for two people there are only 12 white alligators in the whole entire world and four of them aren't Gator land you've never even heard of a white alligator maybe but when you're at Gator lab like oh my god this is so cool four of the twelve in the world scarcity is also the mechanism behind playing hard-to-get and why that works this is a psychology study which didn't need to be run because we all know that hard-to-get works but here's how it went they recruited a bunch of Harvard female undergrads who were straight and they said please share your facebook profile with us and we're going to share your profile with some men and they'll tell us what they think of you and then you'll come into the lab and we'll show you their profiles and you'll tell us what you think of them of course it's a psychology experiment the men don't actually exist they're randomized profiles and pictures are all switched around etc so the women come in and they say okay researchers say here's guy number one and she likes you here's guy number two he likes you a lot guy number three he's unsure of his feelings about you so okay take a look guy number one guy number two guy number three read their profile and tell us what you think of them and the women do and they say cry number two she likes me a lot and I like him but guy number three oh my god I love him the scarcity principle exclusivity think about for yourself and your own presentations and your own research how can you employ the scarcity principle perhaps limited time limited quantity and also exclusivity is it new information is it proprietary information is it information that not many people know is it controversial information right how can you convey a sense of scarcity even in a situation where it's not necessarily limited in time not necessarily limited in quantity the next technique super simple its labeling if you've been following the election at all you've heard a lot of labeling and Donald Trump is the master at it labeling is just giving a name to the behavior that you wish to encourage or discourage you can name a person you can name a behavior name a thing to draw people toward it or push them away from it so when Donald Trump calls Hillary Clinton crooked Hillary and it sticks this is labeling inaction and Hillary Clinton has been fighting against that for months right it's very persuasive just because it's a label here a couple more examples here's a research study because I know y'all are nerds like me this is a classic study done at an elementary school where the psychology researchers are in cahoots with the principal and the teachers and sickest audience they divide the classrooms in half and in this elementary school like every other one kids are just messy you have small children anyone besides me like being neat and tidy is not at the top of their list it's not like they hate it but it's just not top of mind so they leave their trash all over the classrooms and in half of the classrooms the teachers the principal the custodian remind the students they just remind the students hey y'all you should be neat and tidy and because the kids weren't trying not to be the reminders effective and they throw away twice as much trash but the interesting part is in the labeling condition where they name the behavior they name the students meet and tidy when they say you are neat and tidy then the students throw away more than five and a half times as much trash because their behavior conforms with that label and that identity of course it's only going to work if the person thinks that this is a positive identity right but you can also have negative labels like Crickett Hillary and I'll show you a couple in a second here's another study in a school which has now been rolled out because it's so effective it's been rolled out by the USDA across elementary schools across the country which is labeling foods to make them sound tastier and students take them and eat them more they label healthy foods like if you just take a basket of oranges and put a sign on it that says fresh Florida oranges then it increases increases uptake by up to 26% simple simple simple of course they're fresh oranges we get most of our oranges from Florida you're not giving any more information but just the label of fresh or Florida oranges makes it more appealing to our alligator brain there's a negative label from marketing you might not know that the phrase often a bridesmaid but never a bride was coined by a marketing person at Listerine in 1924 imagine and this is in ads targeted toward young single women obviously imagine yourself as a young single woman in 1924 what would your worst worse worse worse worse nightmare be growing old and single and no man ever loves you and you're just all alone with your cats except that that's not even as bad as growing old and single no man to love you all alone with your cats and standing up at the altar after friend after friend after friend goes and lives the life of your dreams if all you have to do to prevent your worst worst worst worst nightmare from coming true is buy mouthwash obviously you gotta buy mouthwash right and Listerine is still around here's another negative label that's one for your alligator brain hi alligator brains moving on so think about what labels or what categories you want to create to move people toward or move people away from the desired behavior the final one this I'm calling it hot potato but understand this is just between us there's no one out in the world that called it hot potato moments of truth yes that's the thing hot potato no but it helps you remember the concept which is when faced with resistance rather than pushing back against the resistance giving giving it back to them as a problem to solve for example you are making a presentation or pitching an idea and it's just as simple as reflecting the question back they tell you yeah we're not really interested right now rather than saying oh and going away rather than saying why which actually can be slightly aggressive and put people on the spot it's just reflecting the question back saying you're not really interested right now and hot potato is a way to get get information more easily than you would have gotten otherwise that you didn't have before this is a much better illustration and this if you just took one little technique away from this talk the next one is it which is the magic question I want to illustrate it was a story that was told to us by Gloria Steinem when she came and visited my hometown earlier this year and she's an American feminist many of you familiar with her she told us a story about being on a trip to Africa where the topic of concern was sexual slavery and girls being sold into sexual slavery and she went to go visit a village after she arrived and she's meeting with the tribal elders and they're talking about these girls and magic question so simple is just what would it take rather than proposing her own ideas for how to fight sexual slavery in his village in Africa she just asks the tribal leaders what would it take for those three girls not to have left the village last year and they said an electric fence this is not something she would have thought of and she says an electric fence and they say yes because the elephants are trampling our crops of maize we can't keep them out and our food supplies are being destroyed and we don't have enough food and we don't have enough money to send our girls to school so Gloria Steinem goes back to the states she raises a few thousand dollars sends it back to the village and she returns again three years later and at least as she tells the story they're singing and there's dancing there's plenty of food and no girls have left the village this is the power of the magic question what would it take you can use this in almost any situation I use it even negotiating with my eight-year-old daughter who is the most hard-nosed negotiator I ever met but you can use this with anyone and I encourage you to so just between us hot potato is the name of it but in life giving the problem or handing the objection back to the other person is what we're talking about here so to review we've covered attention your Gator brain handles anything unless it's new and surprising then kicks it out to the court talked about moments of truth open loops in the Zeigarnik effect i left you as an open loop by the way did you notice this will close it in a sec we talked about ease for influencing behavior howie's Trump's motivation we talked about scarcity which could be limited time limited quantity and exclusivity by the way if you're taking pictures I'm happy to share slides I'll give you my email address and we talked about labeling which could be positive or negative and then finally hot potato giving it back to them and in particular the magic question what would it take to help your Gator brain put this into memory that looks a little bit weird here you go if you want to guide a gator it helps to have a leash closing the open loop ask you about M&Ms and we asked a lot of other people about M&Ms in the study that we ran we said for each of these conditions do you think people who eat more or do you think people will eat less numeric serving size and across all conditions there was a lot of disagreement but in general people said yeah I think it would help if I saw how many pieces were in a serving size and they said I think it would really help a lot if I got to see the picture that would help that would be the best and with portions they were like yeah well maybe but I might grab 10 and put them in my purse right what we found was this no effect at all of the label with the number of pieces no effect at all of the label with the visual serving size and a tremendous effect of the portions this is my interpretation of those results labels do not count they are not persuasive unless you pay attention to them and because of how the alligator brain works most of the information in life that we are exposed to we are really truly not paying attention at all and ease Trump's motivation so it was easiest to get a whole cup of mmm if there's a cup and easiest to get one pack of mms if they're in packs remember our deal from the beginning what kind of animal is this it's an alligator not a crocodile thank you I'd be happy to share thank you I'm happy to share slides and other fun resources on influence if you're curious you can email me at influence prof. at gmail.com I have nothing to tell you I promise and just remember if you want to guide a gator it helps to have a leash thank you [Applause]

Channel: All Things Insights

Views: 24,676

Rating: 4.8565021 out of 5

Keywords: market research, MRX, insights, consumer, advertising, marketing, big data, conference, event, TMRE, The Market Research Event

Id: aQoLUjZW8_o

Length: 41min 42sec (2502 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2017