Mike Lehr's Blog

The research behind behavioral economics is full of emotional solutions to everyday problems. By tapping into the emotional biases behind our decisions, we can expand the range of limited solutions offered by rational thought models. The exploring of emotional solutions has gone big time as the article, “Nudge Nudge, Think Think” explains in the March 24, 2012 edition of The Economist by focusing on the amount of investments governments are making in this area.

Said simply, “How we phrase things matter.” I’ve written how this can change the taste of food and even change the reactions to a bonus plan. As the article explains, nudging “shows it is possible to steer people towards better decisions by presenting choices in different ways.”

For example:

• People were three times more likely to pay an outstanding vehicular tax when the letter was simplified and included a picture of the automobile.
• Boys did better than girls did when a technical drawing class was called “geometry,” and girls did equally well or better when it was called “drawing.”
• People were more inclined to use less energy when their consumption was compared to their neighbors.

Not only does this help us solve problems, it also helps us avoid them by being aware of what we say so we don’t sabotage our well-intentioned plans. Choosing the right words for a personality can go a long way in helping us to effect the change we desire by tapping the right emotions.

For example, my wife won a bet at a party by talking a friend’s six-year-old daughter into selecting a vegetable over chocolate to eat. Understanding and appreciating the power behind words’ connotations helps us immensely here, and Roget’s Thesaurus is invaluable in our efforts.

Remember, people eat escargot not snails.

In response to my post, “Relationship Building Technique #4: Acknowledgement,” a reader emailed the following observation:

I often find this is a simple [technique], which has a very sensitive component to it and is frequently very “fake” . . . . I know of several peers whom I converse with who “appear” to be practicing acknowledging and listening to others. . . . I have noticed over time, for example, although they may seem engaged and interested at the very moment, they are either preoccupied (and do a good job of hiding it) or are insincere . . . . This is often evident in subsequent conversations with them as you realize they have very little memory of prior conversations. . . .

First, these techniques won’t have the same effect on everyone. Obviously, they didn’t work on this person. However, why this occurred isn’t simply a case of the speakers being insincere; it could just be that they were very different from the listener. The latter could have been born with  much greater sensitivity than the others were and thus greater sincerity.

As a result, despite the listener’s view, it’s very possible that the speakers felt that they were sincere. Furthermore, they might not even be self-aware enough to know they were coming across as insincere. It’s also quite possible that they didn’t care.

We need to remember that any human attribute will vary widely across individual humans. That’s why not remembering might be a sign of poorer memories than the listener’s and not just lesser abilities to express sincerity. Thus, the problem isn’t so much one of sincerity or listening but rather one of differences in personalities. It’s going to be very difficult for less sensitive people to convince those with higher sensitivities that they are being sincere.

There is no place that the revisiting of our unconscious urges are taken more seriously than in retailing. The Economist article “Retail Therapy” appearing in the December 17, 2011 edition gives a great historical accounting of the rise and fall . . . and rise again of the application of Freud in business which Ernest Dichter is noted for introducing. As the article asserts:

Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational.

Increasingly, researchers are finding Dichter’s assessment that “most people have no idea why they buy things” to be correct.

Of course, “Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago.” However, as we saw earlier, it took science almost a hundred years to acknowledge that the subconscious existed. Meanwhile, “businesses were recognizing the limits of quantitative studies . . . which offered little genuine insight into how customers behaved.” Said more directly, you can’t rely on customers to tell you what they might buy.

The failures of online dating showed this truth as well as research into people’s internet surfing habits. The Atlantic’s article, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” which appeared in its April 2011 demonstrated that it’s “not what [people] say they want, nor what they ‘should’ want, but what they choose when they have a chance.”

If this applies to purchases, it also applies to all decisions. Names can affect decisions about scientific grants, and information that judges know is wrong can affect their decisions. So, if people don’t behave and choose as they said they would, we have no one to blame but ourselves for not looking deeper into the real emotions powering us.

We know each of us is different; however, the degree of difference is clearly underestimated. We experience this whenever we exclaim we cannot understand why someone does something, whenever anyone gets thrilled or appalled over something we don’t. I once worked with a sales manager who found it incomprehensible that a sales person wasn’t motivated by money.

As an example of how different we can be, I posted a while back that the ability to praise was a function of personality. This is an easy, enjoyable event for some and quite an arduous for others. In the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, I found another example of our vast differences when I read Lauren F. Friedman’s article, “I’m Not Sorry”, citing the work,  The Disposition to Apologize, of Andrew Howell and his colleagues at Grant MacEwan University. As examples, Friedman mentions some people who have difficult apologizing. Those who possess:

• A low degree of compassion and agreeability
• Low self-esteem
• An overly grand view of themselves (very egocentric)
• A strong sense of justice

The point is that we can approach any human attribute – praising, apologizing, intelligence, athleticism, dedication, nurturing, courage, trustworthiness, relentlessness, sensitivity or any countless others – the same way: each having a myriad of variations and intensities across all humans. For instance, we know there is a difference between men and women, but “How big is that difference?” I often suggest to people that they imagine differences between any two people to be ten times greater than they think they are.

Again, this shows up when we can’t fathom why someone would think or do something and when we believe their “cure” is quite simple: “Just do what I do!” Both are signs of greatly under appreciating how different we are.

So, the boss walks in and harshly reprimands an employee. Unknowingly, she probably just shot his productivity down for the day. A while ago I worked with a company in which it was fairly common practice for the owner to come in late Monday morning and severely reprimand his employees. I witnessed what that did to their productivity for the week.

What we often don’t realize is how much words, phrasing and general conversation can affect people. In the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, Tori Rodriguez in her article, “What Just Happened?”, cites several studies including ones in which:

• “. . . people who were unconsciously exposed to images of fast-food logos became more impatient . . .”
• “ . . . when participants recalled an illness-related memory, their pain tolerance decreased.”
• Participants were “unknowingly primed toward goal pursuit” simply by reading something “that included words such as ‘success’ and ‘achieve.’”

While Rodriguez recommends that we become more aware of this “priming” as she calls it by recalling what we “saw, heard and thought about in the past few minutes,” we can also raise our awareness concerning how we negatively influence people accidentally. Moreover, we could use this priming for good. For instance, simply wishing people luck can improve their productivity and performance.

That means we need to beware of that “constructive criticism” we offer. If it really is that constructive and helpful, we should position it as advice, assistance or simply help. Consider too, if we never compliment an employee. It’s as though we never watered a plant.

Next time you want to motivate someone, it might be as simple as talking about something positive, enjoyable and yes, even humorous.

Beauty’s power often influences us without our knowledge and thus distorts our decisions. In other words, we think we are making them based upon objective criteria, but we’re not. In order to understand this better, it helps to see beauty beyond something feminine and physical.

In the August 27, 2011 issue of The Economist, “The Line of Beauty” reviews three books examining the “economics of good looks.” While it focuses on physical attractiveness and implies it’s somewhat the same as beauty, it includes a masculine aspect to the concept. For instance, it cites:

• Homely NFL quarterbacks earn less than their comelier counterparts, despite identical yards passed and years in the league.
• Attractive people also have an easier time getting a loan than plain folks, even as they are less likely to pay it back.
• [Attractive people] receive milder prison sentences and higher damages in simulated legal proceedings.
• . . . looks have a bigger impact on earnings than education . . .

However, the real point is that beauty applies much of this power below our consciousness. For example, in none of the citations above did anyone think these:

• Quarterbacks are attractive so we should pay them more.
• Loan applicants are attractive so we should give them a loan.
• Prisoners are attractive so they should get milder sentences.
• Plaintiffs are attractive so they should get higher damages.
• Employees are attractive so they should get paid more than those with better educations.

Moreover, the overwhelming number of folks making these decisions didn’t feel that people’s attractiveness was influencing them. Now, if this can happen with physical attractiveness, imagine the impact beauty can have. Disciplines such as advertising, marketing, merchandising and retailing contain many examples of beauty’s sublime power.

Other links in this series:

• Beauty as Power
• Beauty as Power (Part II): Attraction vs. Beauty
• Beauty as Power (Part III): Appreciation

As people’s careers progress, they tend to become more risk adverse, less willing to accept challenges. Much is because they feel they have too much to lose if wrong. Enough of these people in a company can retard its growth and our own too. Awareness of their existence will help to protect us.

In “The Paradox of Excellence,” an article in the June 2011 of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas DeLong and Sara DeLong write “high performers often let anxiety about their performance compromise their progress” even to the point that they “would rather do the wrong thing well than do the right thing poorly.” As a result, they tend to prefer options that worked well in the past to those that are best.

Early in their careers, things might have come more easily to them. As they progress and tackle more difficult assignments, they begin to function more and more on the outskirts of their attributes and skills. Rather than expand those limits they consolidate their gains, preferring consensus over what is right. As the Delongs attest, their careers flatten.

However, enough of this excellence in the right positions will flatten the company’s growth too. This conservatism will affect budget decisions, product development and talent acquisition. Expense control supersedes investing; existing products supersede new ones; the proven candidate supersedes the game changer. It helps to explain how the best and the brightest can bring about demise.

If we work for such people, the expansion of our limits could slow too. The challenges we seek will be thwarted by the conventional. It’s important to realize their existence and to avoid being blinded by their excellence and allowing our talents to rot under their light.

Our names unconsciously influence people. We humorously smile at actors who change their names making them more appealing. Yet, some people relate because they wish their parents had given them better names.

Even in a field striving for objectivity such as science, your name can influence the peer review process. In the August 20, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article “A Black and White Answer” reports racial name research by Donna Ginther of The University of Kansas indicating it does. The article also references the 2003 racial name study, Racial Bias in Hiring, by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan at the time of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which names influenced who received job interviews.

While the article focused on the racial connotation of names, an October 23, 2008 article of The New York Times mentions research about non-racial correlations focused on similar names, initials, sounds and letters. Of course, if we overlay the concept of branding from advertising on these two areas of research and the territory between them, we come back to “what’s in a name?”

From an intuitive perspective, what connotation does each of our names have? What feelings do people get when they hear it? How do we feel when we run across names far different from ours, ones we can’t pronounce? Subconsciously, do they trigger our defense mechanisms? All you need to do is look at popular baby names to know we do not distribute names randomly even if we account for ethnicity.

What we can learn from science in this research is that no matter how objective we think we are it is no match for the unconscious emotions truly driving our decisions.

People often marvel that more managers don’t use inexpensive morale builders. Of course, many of the same also wonder, “How did that person become a manager in the first place?” It’s that we tend to feel negative power is more powerful than positive power is; thus, we will tend to feel the former would be a more powerful leader.

An article in the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled, “Why Fair Bosses Fall Behind” by  Batia M. Wiesenfeld, Naomi B. Rothman, Sara L. Wheeler-Smith, and Adam D. Galinsky provides research supporting this. In terms of powerfulness, they found that rude managers consistently scored higher than respectful managers did.

To illustrate this, I sometimes ask: Which dog would you prefer as a pet, a collie or a pit bull? Frequently, people select the collie. I then ask: If you lived in a high-murder neighborhood, which would you choose? People frequently switch to the pit bull. While the workplace isn’t that dangerous, evolution and the days of uncivilized life long ago still affect us. Then, we required leaders unencumbered by sensitivities to protect us. It’s why some of the world’s most ruthless, modern dictators (i.e. Stalin) are still admired today by significant portions of their native populations.

In everyday business life, we often experience this bias when people disqualify others as leaders because they “aren’t tough enough.” Negative power is very overt, easy to see. Contrast this to the positive, subtle power inherent in the inexpensive morale builders. That’s why we often see Darth Vader as a very powerful Star Wars figure even though he was the slave of the Emperor.

Thus, when we promote the rude, the Dark Side has successfully seduced us by triggering our insecurities and fears.

Intuitive approaches often work because we don’t believe they do. Advertising is an excellent example: it influences us because we often believe it doesn’t.

This extends to our complaints about politicians not answering the question. Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton researched this and were asked to “Defend Your Research” in “People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty” appearing in the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review. They found:

People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

In fact, when answerers perform the dodge effectively, less than half of the people could remember the question accurately. The key rests in the answer’s first ten words by disrupting the cognitive link we have for the question and expected answer. In everyday life, we like to complain about the fast-talking salesperson; however, on a higher level, fast-talking becomes eloquence. It’s here that we increasingly trust and like eloquence more than honesty.

Even though I promote the practical understanding and application of intuition in business on this blog, people can use intuitive approaches for ill or good. For instance, my guest 12 Most post, lists ways to influence people intuitively to build morale; however, people can use these techniques for questionable purposes too.

How do we defend ourselves? There are two broad introductory ways:

1. Realize people can influence us intuitively and subconsciously even if we believe they can’t
2. Raise our awareness regarding intuitive approaches

In this way, we can begin accounting for these natural biases in our decision-making and actions. However, believing others can influence us without our knowledge is scary for many of us, especially if we believe in the supremacy of the conscious mind and free will.