The Subtle Science Of Persuasion

No matter what field of expertise you are in, I have no doubt the need to persuade other people features somewhere in your role. I thought, therefore that you might be interested in the theory of an article I recently read.

Persuasion itself is not as hard as it may seem according to American Psychologist Dr Robert Cialdini – it is a matter of pulling the appropriate trigger. The example he cites is the notices we have all seen in hotel bathrooms to reuse towels to protect the environment – our concerns about global warming are apparently enough to make us reuse towels at least once during our stay. But is this the limit of the effectiveness of the signs – could more people be persuaded to reuse their towels and more often – by use of a different message? An experiment was set up by American academics to assess this. They compared the results of the first notice against those of a different notice which stated that most guests in the hotel recycled their towels. The academics were amazed to see a leap of 26% in the numbers of guests reusing their towels. The experiment was taken one stage further by displaying a sign that said that most of the guests who stayed in that room recycled their towels and reuse rose by 33% compared to the first message.
This experiment demonstrates a theory called “social proof” – where we use other people’s behaviour as a guide to our own. Other persuasive strategies that Cialdini refers to are reciprocation – the powerful obligation we feel to return favours, authority – our willingness to defer to experts, consistency - the need to keep our actions in line with our values, scarcity – the less available a resource – the more we want it – hence the power of the advertising slogan “Buy now while stocks last”! Finally, liking – the more we like people the more we want to say yes to them.

Given that the business workplace could be considered as a place where we would want to persuade others to our way of thinking, the power to persuade is clearly a key skill. The power of these principles that Cialdini refers to is that they trigger deep-seated psychological mechanisms, which we follow to prevent us getting into danger. Social proofing is one of the most basic – if you were a fish it would better to follow the rest of your shoal to avoid ending up as another creature’s lunch!

These techniques are simple yet powerful – but don’t use unscrupulously as when they are employed as weapons any short term gains are most likely to be followed by short term losses.

Tennis

I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed my fix of Wimbledon this year! Although our home players didn't get through to the final stages - the matches this weekend have been fantastic - today's men's competition was edge of the seat stuff and the ladies final (or the Williams' show!) was, as always, entertaining.



For me though, it was brilliant that players like Chris Eaton, up and coming men's player, came seemingly out of the blue to give an incredible performance and of course Laura Robson won the Girls' Singles title final at just 14. A quick glimpse through the Sunday paper headlines - shows that it seems she grabbed more space than the Williams' girls match! If either are our next hope for a champion let's hope the media get behind them and stay there - not only do they have to work their way to the top and compete with the best but they have to win the hearts of the journalists as well -we have a knack of supporting our sports stars when things are going well but also of retracting that support when they hit a rough patch. In sport, as in business, there are peaks and troughs of performance and it's in the tougher times that we really need to feel people are behind us.

I for one, look forward with more than hopeful anticipation for future grand-slams.

Have a great week!