Hear Yes! More Often With the Science of Influence: Dan Norris at TEDxSanAntonio 2012

[Music] hi good morning everyone I want to ask you to consider a really important question how do we ethically influence other people how do we persuade them to become more likely to agree and the reason that I think we need to ask ourselves this is that very few people know that there's a whole field of research out there on how we're influenced how we persuade people and I argue we should know about it whether we like it or not the only Common Core competency of of some of the most critical things that we do is

influence uh whenever we communicate whether it's leadership or uh negotiation or parenting or sales or team building or any of those other things when we communicate we are influencing and we are being influenced now I I have to admit I I became aware of this because I bungled away a lot of influence opportunities you know and and probably the most significant was when I was attempting to end a relationship with a woman i' been seeing and she had a terrible temper and because of that I decided to break up with her at dinner because they

could be Witnesses and that might be handy and so when I finally worked up the courage to say we need to talk she looked at me and she said well I wanted to talk to you too and so while I might be a coward I'm at least chivalrous so I said well you go first and she said you know Dan I don't think we should see each other anymore and at that point I leaned forward and I said well well why what happened and hold on maybe we can work this out and I remember driving

home thinking what's wrong with me well think about it in your own lives from a from a serious perspective how many times have we had the right advice or the best idea or a suggestion that somebody really should have followed but we couldn't craft our message the best way well that's why we need to know about the science for the last 10 years I've worked with leading researchers like Dr Robert chalini to help bring the science out of the laboratory and into our day-to-day work lives and so during our short time together I want to

tell you about this science and give you some ideas about how you can ethically use them when you go back to your world now the first principle of influence I want to share with you is called reciprocity we feel an obligation to give to those who have given to us you know and think about it in your own lives you know if if you're like my lovely wife and I you have uh you know your first child and the first birthday rolls around and you decide to go out to Chuck-E-Cheese or what we affectionally call

the Temple of the Rat God and while you're there all of a sudden all the kids in the neighborhoods in your church they come and they celebrate but what happens after that's done and you go back to your regular World you've lost Saturdays for from now on because you're now obligated to go to their birthday parties you know because they came and supported you we have to go and support them now what's the science say about this well obviously there are things that that we typically think of as gifts you know taking people to lunch

or giving somebody a present but there are many other things that we can leverage that have that same impact for example they did a study with surveys and they found that they had about a 34% response rate with the survey but they decided to add for half of the sample group they decided to add a letter and in that letter they had uh a a personalized message to the person receiving it so if your name was Sally you would get a message that said Sally I'm really looking forward to your feedback you're very insightful I

can't wait to hear what you have to say Dan when they did that they had more than double the response rate and what was even more interesting is the responses came more promptly and they had more robust data so what does that mean for us well look for ways that you can honestly benefit and invest in other people how can you make their world better so think of things like feedback and suggestions and compliments and other information that that could really help them one other thing that you should consider is how we approach things like

trust when we meet somebody or we bring somebody on our team we always say the same thing hey you're going to have to earn my trust think about the influence message there I don't trust you welcome aboard you know instead bring them on and say you know what we don't know each other but I'm going to trust that you're going to make good decisions and I look forward to partnering with you or when we do things for people don't minimize the impact we use language like uh it was nothing somebody says thank you uh no

big deal no problem think about what no problem really means normally you're inconvenient to deal with normally you're a pain in the key Easter however today you weren't so bad thanks for not being a problem so use language that that is indicative of a a gift I'm happy that I could do that for you I'm glad that you found that helpful hey isn't that what friends do for one another the second principle I want to tell you about is consistency when we go on the record when we tell people what we think feel or believe

we feel an enormous amount of pressure to remain consistent with that and there's some great research around it they did at a uh a racetrack in Vancouver they walked up to people who were waiting in line to get their betting ticket and they asked them what's the likelihood your horse is going to come in first and their answers were very non-committal but then they waited till they actually got to the window they bought their ticket they gave them money took their ticket away and the researchers asked them the same exact question what's the likelihood that

your horse is going to come in first instead of the non-committal answers they were convinced hey this is going to happen my horse is coming in first we can finally redo our kitchen well what changed they went on the record they made a commitment it would be psychologically inconsistent to buy a ticket that you thought was going to be a loser and so how can we use this knowledge well one if you know that somebody has made a commitment if they value efficiency or savings or happiness connect your recommendation to that value that commitment that

they've made but most importantly ask more questions when we're influencing we tell people what they should do we tell them how they should behave we tell them how they should show up well that's a bad idea from a research perspective one of the things that we should do is ask questions so for example if you have a good idea for your company don't tell them hey I think this is a great idea you should do this ask them when you've looked at my proposal what are some of the advantages you see what are some of

the benefits that you think would come out of buying this product or if you're leading others you know ask them some questions let's say somebody's using foul language at work ask them hey Harvey when you yelled and cursed at the employees what unintended message did you send you get them to tell you now the next principle I want to share with you is consensus when we see lots of other people doing something we tend to feel like we should go along that we should follow and think about it in your own lives how many of

you had a parent that said some version of hey if all the other kids in the neighborhood jumped off a cliff would you research has bad news for you so what's some of the science behind it well in a charitable giving study one of the things they found is that when they went door too they would keep a list of the neighbors who actually donated money and as the list got longer it increased the likelihood that other people would donate tech companies have seen this there's a a manufacturer or or an app designer who makes

children's apps and one of the things they found is when his apps show up on iTunes under the top 10 most popular downloads increase by thousands of percent by th% I mean just an incredible amount so how do we use this well again if you know that ethically that there's a lot of people who support your way of thinking you should bring that up you should say here's why many others think this is a good idea here's why other companies like you have made the same decision those things will persuade people more to your way

of thinking now the next principle I wanted to talk to you about was Authority we look to those with Superior knowledge or wisdom for guidance on how we should respond and the science behind it is interesting you know when we it makes sense when if somebody has expertise we should go and do what they're suggesting but what's interesting is from a psychological standpoint it's not uh that we always validate authorities we look to people who just look like authorities you know one of the things I love about some of the scientists is they have a

really demented sense of humor and they came up with a study where they had someone jwalk into traffic to see how many people followed them now they didn't D endanger any but it was hilarious and they had the same man dressed two different ways the first time they had him in jeans and a t-shirt the second time they put him in a in a suit with a tie and they found when he jaywalked into traffic 300 and 50% more people followed him out just on the basis of how he was dressed so what does this

mean for us well if you're trying to communicate to somebody that you do have expertise or they're not listening to your message look for ways you can introduce that some businesses some some individuals have put their certifications not up in their Lobby they don't put their degrees up behind their desk they actually will put it um you know in in places where people can see it and so when you walk in you'll see their degrees out on the on the front one of the other things that that's a challenge with authority is if we bring

up our expertise people can doubt us people can doubt us if we say wow you know I'm by far the smartest person in the room and you should go with what I have to say you can bet no one's listening to you so what can we do we can have other people introduce us have a friend or a colleague bring you over and say hey this is uh Harvey here's Harvey's background and he's really smart and he knows a lot about this and here's how long he's went to school people will find that to be

much more persuasive now the next principle I want to share with you is scarcity and scarcity is an interesting one we find that which is dwindling in availability or uh something that we're unlikely to get to be very desirable you know and it even works with h girlfriends you're planning on breaking up with you know all of a sudden it changes uh how attractive they are and so when you think about scarcity there's lots of great examples uh for example the flu vaccine a few years ago health organizations and and government agencies really struggle to

get people to take the flu vaccine then they had a problem and the problem was the vaccine uh didn't have they didn't have enough vaccine suddenly there was a shortage and the media reported it and as soon as people heard that there was a shortage of the vaccine people became just really committed to getting it there were lines everywhere they had to make sure that they turned people away who weren't CH uh uh children or the elderly what changed well it was just that scarcity and so how do we use that well one of the

things that we've been taught one of the things that we've been taught is that we should always focus on features and benefits here are all the great things that you'll get if you follow my way of thinking reality is it's not the features and benefits that's most persuasive it's what you stand to lose by not using those features and benefits so one of the things you can do is ask people questions maybe blend in some of the consistency to say what would be some of the disadvantages if we go this route how might this negatively

impact you if we don't move ahead those messages will tend to draw people forward you know show them what they stand to lose now the last principle I want to share with you is liking we tend to be more persuaded by those we know and like but what we don't realize is complete strangers can evoke the same feelings of liking that we've had for people that we've known for years I mean think about it when you've been away from home and you run into somebody at the at the airport who's from your same Hometown you

know you say well where are you from well I'm from Flint Michigan I'm from Flint Michigan where' you live Maple Street oh my God my grandma lived on Maple Street and the next thing you know you're talking to this person for an hour you know it's it's that similarity and so when we're influencing other people our job is to go out and search for and most importantly comment on similarity this is why the water cooler discussion is so important when we have that that time to really connect the uh socially we tend to build trust

we tend to trust people we know have things in common with us one other thing that creates a lot of liking is praise praise produces liking we like those who like us and most importantly tell us so you know we know we're awesome when other people recognize we're awesome they're awesome too you know and and we bungle this away all the time because we focus on what was wrong what didn't go well well think about it with your own kids if you ask them to clean up the living room we go in there a few

minutes later and there's a few spots of toys on the floor we don't compliment them on the clean spots we go to the parts where they missed and so we walk up and go hey you you missed a spot here Molly you missed this one right here it's so much more influential to come out and go oh my God look at all these clean spots look at that clean spot that's amazing oh my go I haven't seen this corner that clean in a long time high five all a sudden they're going oh my God there's

another one I could get a compliment for that and so we need to look for those areas where we can honestly praise other people too and so as we wrap up today one of the things I want to challenge you to do is boldly reconsider boldly reconsider some of the preconceived notions that we have about influence go out and seek out what the science really says because the difference between the almost right influence approach and the actual best influence approach is significant thank you for your [Applause] time