Lone Gunman

Com­mon wis­dom would sug­gest that the more cer­tain a per­son is on a sub­ject, the more per­sua­sive and cred­i­ble we per­ceive them to be. How­ever a study look­ing look­ing at how cer­tainty affects per­sua­sive­ness and per­ceived cred­i­bil­ity found that the oppo­site is true:

Experts are more per­sua­sive when they seem ten­ta­tive about their con­clu­sions […] but the oppo­site is true of novices, who grow more per­sua­sive with increas­ing certainty.

This result held across the three exper­i­ments described in the paper (pdf, doi), but it’s worth not­ing that this only applies in sit­u­a­tions where there is no objec­tive truth — such as in con­sumer sit­u­a­tions (the exper­i­ments used restau­rant reviews, and I imag­ine prod­uct reviews would give sim­i­lar results):

Ear­lier research […] had made the case that express­ing cer­tainty gen­er­ally increases people’s per­sua­sive power, because it boosts their per­ceived cred­i­bil­ity. [How­ever] those stud­ies con­cerned top­ics such as wit­nesses tes­ti­fy­ing in court or stock mar­ket advis­ers giv­ing stock rec­om­men­da­tions where there is an objec­tive truth or cor­rect answer. In those instances […] peo­ple might rely on a person’s cer­tainty as an indi­ca­tor of his or her cred­i­bil­ity. “In more sub­jec­tive domains like con­sumer con­texts, though, […] express­ing cer­tainty appears to have a more dynamic effect, giv­ing a mes­sage more or less impact depend­ing on who is express­ing it.”

via Mar­ginal Rev­o­lu­tion / NYT

When nego­ti­at­ing ensure that you make the first offer and make sure it’s an aggres­sive one: this is almost always the opti­mal nego­ti­a­tion strat­egy. That’s the con­clu­sion from a study look­ing at nego­ti­a­tion tac­tics and the anchor­ing effect (from the same researchers that dis­cov­ered the opti­mal start­ing prices for nego­ti­a­tions and auc­tions).

One of the researchers gives a good overview of the study’s find­ings in an arti­cle for Har­vard Busi­ness School’s Work­ing Knowl­edge that pro­vides suc­cinct nego­ti­a­tion tac­tics and rea­sons for why you should make the first offer. Top­iccs include: when you should not make the first offer, how to counter first offers, how to con­struct a reasonable—yet aggressive—offer, how to pro­tect your­self from the effects of anchor­ing, and more.

Some key points worth con­sid­er­ing (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

We might expect experts to be immune to the anchor­ing effect. Real estate agents, for exam­ple, should be able to resist the anchor­ing effects of a property’s list price because of their pre­sumed skill at esti­mat­ing prop­erty val­ues. Test­ing this the­ory, [it is clear that] anchors affect the judg­ment of even those who think they are immune to such influ­ence. But why?

Every item under nego­ti­a­tion (whether it’s a com­pany or a car) has both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive qualities—qualities that sug­gest a higher price and qual­i­ties that sug­gest a lower price. High anchors selec­tively direct our atten­tion toward an item’s pos­i­tive attrib­utes; low anchors direct our atten­tion to its flaws. […]

The prob­a­bil­ity of mak­ing a first offer is related to one’s con­fi­dence and sense of con­trol at the bar­gain­ing table. Those who lack power, either due to a negotiation’s struc­ture or a lack of avail­able alter­na­tives, are less inclined to make a first offer. Power and con­fi­dence result in bet­ter out­comes because they lead nego­tia­tors to make the first offer. In addi­tion, the amount of the first offer affects the out­come, with more aggres­sive or extreme first offers lead­ing to a bet­ter out­come for the per­son who made the offer. Ini­tial offers bet­ter pre­dict final set­tle­ment prices than sub­se­quent con­ces­sion­ary behav­iors do.

There is one sit­u­a­tion in which mak­ing the first offer is not to your advan­tage: when the other side has much more infor­ma­tion than you do about the item to be nego­ti­ated or about the rel­e­vant mar­ket or industry. […]

How extreme should your first offer be? My own research sug­gests that first offers should be quite aggres­sive but not absurdly so. Many nego­tia­tors fear that an aggres­sive first offer will scare or annoy the other side and per­haps even cause him to walk away in dis­gust. How­ever, research shows that this fear is typ­i­cally exag­ger­ated. In fact, most nego­tia­tors make first offers that are not aggres­sive enough.

 

Back­ground noises greatly affect how we taste food. I wrote about this ear­lier in the year — point­ing out that this is the prob­a­ble cause of bland in-flight meals — but how else can back­ground noise affect our per­cep­tion of taste, and can our non-gustatory senses affect how we taste, too?

To test this, mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­o­mist Hes­ton Blu­men­thal and pro­fes­sor Charles Spence con­ducted a fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ment with some ‘bacon and egg’ ice cream and some var­ied sound­tracks. The full exper­i­ment is described in a short extract from the book Art and the Senses that also neatly sum­marises the var­i­ous ways that our taste per­cep­tion can be altered by our other senses:

The dis­am­bigua­tion of the flavour of a food dish can be achieved by a num­ber of means: either visu­ally, by chang­ing the colour of the food, ver­bally by means of labelling, by pre­sent­ing pic­tures or other cues on the pack­ag­ing, and/or by the pre­sen­ta­tion of audi­tory cues. […] Fur­ther­more, even say­ing the word ‘cin­na­mon’ has been shown to acti­vate the olfac­tory cor­tex (i.e. the part of the brain that processes smells). […] Play­ing the siz­zling bacon sound­track at the ‘Art and the Senses’ con­fer­ence may there­fore have influ­enced the audience’s per­cep­tion of the bacon flavour in the ice cream sim­ply by mak­ing them think of bacon. […] It is at present an open ques­tion as to whether sim­ply writ­ing the word bacon on the screen in the front of the audi­to­rium would have had the same effect.

Is there a name for this expe­ri­ence? The best I can come up with is ‘gus­ta­tory cross­modal­ity’, but that sounds far too excit­ing (and is most likely incor­rect). I’m hop­ing for a pithy, Gladwell-esque ‘Some­thing effect’.

via @mocost

Much has been writ­ten on the pos­i­tive aspects of cog­ni­tive flu­ency (in terms of typog­ra­phy, accents, and almost every­thing else), but a recent study (pdf, doi) sug­gests that the oppo­site (cog­ni­tive dis­flu­ency) could lead to bet­ter learn­ing. The the­ory is that harder-to-process mate­r­ial requires “deeper pro­cess­ing” and that this deeper pro­cess­ing leads to supe­rior mem­ory performance.

Ear­lier this year the ever-excellent Jonah Lehrer sum­marised the study, describ­ing how long-term learn­ing and reten­tion improved when class­room mate­r­ial was set in a hard-to-read font (e.g. Mono­type Cor­siva, Comic Sans Ital­i­cized or Haettenschweiler).

This study demon­strated that stu­dent reten­tion of mate­r­ial across a wide range of sub­jects (sci­ence and human­i­ties classes) and dif­fi­culty lev­els (reg­u­lar, Hon­ors and Advanced Place­ment) can be sig­nif­i­cantly improved in nat­u­ral­is­tic set­tings by pre­sent­ing read­ing mate­r­ial in a for­mat that is slightly harder to read…. The poten­tial for improv­ing edu­ca­tional prac­tices through cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions is immense. If a sim­ple change of font can sig­nif­i­cantly increase stu­dent per­for­mance, one can only imag­ine the num­ber of ben­e­fi­cial cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions wait­ing to be discovered.

One of the study authors, in a com­ment pub­lished in a New York Times arti­cle look­ing at cog­ni­tive flu­ency in learn­ing, empha­sises how it’s not the font that mat­ters, but the pro­cess­ing difficulty:

“The rea­son that the unusual fonts are effec­tive is that it causes us to think more deeply about the mate­r­ial, […] but we are capa­ble of think­ing deeply with­out being sub­jected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim mate­r­ial in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”

Three nec­es­sary ele­ments must be present for a behav­iour to occur: Moti­va­tion, Abil­ity, Trig­ger — and under­stand­ing this is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing how to change behav­iour. That’s accord­ing to B.J. Fogg and his team at the Stan­ford Per­sua­sive Tech Lab, as described by their Behav­iour Model.

To make behav­iour change eas­ier the team iden­ti­fied the fif­teen ways that behav­iour can be changed, described each with pre­ci­sion, and related them to a spe­cific “psy­chol­ogy”. Together this infor­ma­tion became the Behav­iour Grid:

To use the behav­iour grid and to see the detailed infor­ma­tion and advice for each behav­iour type, fol­low the nec­es­sary steps in the use­ful Behav­iour Wiz­ard tool or view the grid directly.