Power, Culture, Persuasion, and The Self: Communication Insights from Stanford GSB Faculty

Full Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.

Jenny Luna: What do you get when you combine world-renowned faculty, hundreds of participants of Stanford’s executive education online program, and an expert in strategic communications and a podcast host? Me2We. This event is one of my favorite all year on the Stanford campus, and today we have a special episode from this event. Matt Abrahams took the stage with four of the GSB’s most popular faculty members to learn more about their research and how it applies to improving our communication. I’m Jenny Luna, executive producer of Think Fast, Talk Smart. Get your pencils out and enjoy this peek into a panel discussion Think Fast, Talk Smart style. And stay tuned after the episode to hear from Stanford LEAD participants as they share their learnings from courses with professors featured in this episode.

[00:00:50]
And without further ado, let’s welcome strategic communications lecturer and podcast host, Matt Abrahams.

Matt Abrahams: Big thank you to Jenny. The show could not run without Jenny. I am thrilled to be here with all of you to do a live version of Think Fast, Talk Smart.

It is my distinct privilege now, not only to host the podcast in general, but to host this event for you today. Four esteemed GSB faculty members are joining us. We’re going to have a bit of a conversation. Shall we get started? Excellent.

[00:01:40]
Michele, welcome. Uh, for those of you who don’t know Michele, Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor in Cross Cultural Management and a Professor of Organizational Behavior. Michele’s research explores cross cultural organizational behavior, negotiation, conflict, and diversity. And she is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World. And Michele and I had two lovely conversations on the podcast.

We talked about conflict, we talked about negotiation. I apply some of the things you’ve taught me in my life with my two teenagers. Thank you. When we were together, we talked a lot about your useful tips to manage conflict in negotiation. And many of the challenging issues in the world today are affecting our work and our personal relationships.

Can you provide some ideas on how we can best navigate and manage conflicts around broader societal issues that affect us in our everyday lives?

[00:02:32]
Michele Gelfand: Sure. And first I want to welcome all the leaders back to campus, we’re so happy to have you here.

So what’s fascinating is that negotiation happens all the time, but many of us leave a lot of value at the table. And what we know from research is that often that’s because we are either too competitive or we’re actually too cooperative. So it’s trying to have a mixture of cooperation and competition that really helps us to create the best deals. And that means really two things. We need to really be firm on our own interests and our priorities. But also be looking out to listen to what the priorities and interests are of our counterparts.

So as an example, you could think about two sisters fighting over an orange. And at first glance, it looks like just split it down the middle or one’s going to take it all. But if they discover that one sister wants the peel to make a cake, and the other sister wants the pulp to eat it, they can actually both win. And that’s an example of understanding underlying interests.

Just one other example, it’s going to sound a little stereotypical, but this is negotiation with my husband and I. I want to go to the spa at the beach, and he wants to go to a log cabin in the mountains. Now at first glance it looks like we’re going to go on separate vacations, but we discover that my priority is the spa, and his priority are the mountains.

[00:03:36]
And so if we can figure that out, we can go to a spa on the mountains. And so that’s really the essence of understanding interest-based negotiation. The other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how we conceptualize negotiation, the metaphors we have that we bring to the negotiation table that really affect what we’re doing. Is this a battle? Is it a sport? Is it a dance? Or some people I interview say it’s like visiting a dentist, the necessary evil.

Those metaphors really affect how we behave. And so we really should be mindful of the metaphors we bring to the table because sometimes they could be mismatched. We don’t want to bring a very cooperative metaphor about dating to a distributive one issue task type of negotiation, that’s really ineffective.

Likewise, we don’t want to bring a sports or battle metaphor to a very integrative, multi-issue type of negotiation. And so it’s really about minding our metaphors and even creating a shared metaphor with our counterparts. What are we doing here? Creative, puzzle solving types of metaphors really are very constructive in this regard.

[00:04:27]
Matt Abrahams: I like this idea of minding your metaphors. And I think in our personal lives and our professional lives, we bring those metaphors to bear. And sometimes the conflict is over the metaphor we’re using, less over what we’re saying. So I challenge all of us, and I need to think about this myself, I know when I have to give my kids some strict news, I prepare for battle. And maybe what I need to do is prepare for something different. And so I like that. Thank you.

So next, Brian, I’d like to come to you. Brian Lowery is the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior, co-director of Stanford’s Institute on Race, and host of the podcast Know What You See, and you should all tune into it.

Brian’s research explores the ways individuals understand inequality. And more recently, the ways relationships shape our experience of meaning in life. Brian also wrote the book Selfless: The Social Creation of “You”. Since we last spoke, Brian, you became the co-director of Stanford’s Institute on Race. I’m wondering if you can share with us some of the efforts of the institute and what are some things those in the audience can take back around the issues of race to their firms?

Brian Lowery: Yeah. So welcome. It’s good to see you all in person.

So this little race kind of gives the wrong impression. So it’s really about the diversity of human experience. Like we look out here and you all are incredibly diverse. You’re from different places, different communities. And the question is, in society, how do we manage that? Because it turns out, around the world, that kind of diversity in people’s experience, in the communities they come from, in the places they live, creates stumbling blocks for us living together well. Living together in a productive way, everybody flourishing. And the Institute is designed to address the stumbling blocks associated with human diversity to us all flourishing together. And so you can think about around the world, different communities have varied access to healthcare, for example. Or the criminal justice system works differently for some communities than others.

And the reason I don’t want to today focus on race is because in the United States, race means something very particular. But in every community, in every country, there’s some division. And you might not call it race, you might call it something else, but whatever it is you call it, that’s what we’re talking about.

[00:06:41]
So the Institute is designed to bring together the knowledge, insights of faculty, like the faculty up here, and pair that with communities, organizations, non-profit organizations, governmental organizations. To find ways so that diverse communities can flourish together, that’s the goal of the Institute.

And so when you think about that, I hope it’s pretty obvious how you would connect that to being a leader. So if you’re a leader and you’re dealing with a diverse set of people that either work with you or a diverse population that you sell to or interact with, how do you create the situation such, or create the parameter such, that you all either work incredibly well together, that everyone has opportunities to succeed and demonstrate their strengths, or that all of your clients feel equally respected so that they want to come back to you and continue to work with your organization?

So, I think the general thrust of the Institute is a part of how we should all think about engaging both in our organizations and in the communities we live.

[00:07:43]
Matt Abrahams: I think the notion of branching beyond your organization and connecting more broadly can be very helpful, and it strikes me that some of the things Michele was talking about around negotiation and conflict play out as a result of these differences that you’re looking at.

And so I think the insights that come from the work that some of these faculty do could be helpful. So perhaps all of us can think about how we can reach beyond our organization to address some of these differences. So thank you. Deb, thank you for being here. Deb Gruenfeld is the Joseph McDonald Professor of Organizational Behavior, and Deb’s research examines power and group dynamics.

Deb is the author of Acting with Power: Why We Are More Powerful Than We Believe. The class you teach is amazingly popular and helpful to our students. You were also one of the very first guests on the If/Then podcast, and I really enjoyed listening and learning from you on that. When we spoke, we were in the midst of the pandemic.

We talked a lot about the things we can do to enhance our status and power. I’m curious, now that we are back in person, or at least hybrid, do you have some thoughts now that are newer or different from what we talked about back in the day?

Deb Gruenfeld: Yeah, sure. First, let me just join the chorus in welcoming you and thanking you all for being here with us today.

[00:08:54]
It’s a general rule of thumb when it comes to signaling power or status is the simple idea of taking space, taking more space. And in the real world, on the ground, like where we are today, we can understand what that means in terms of like physically spreading out. Like we know we’re all kind of doing that, especially if I like reach over and touch someone that I’m really taking liberties with the amount of space that I’ve been entitled to.

That’s the idea. That was the idea. So here’s an interesting thing that we noticed about going online during the pandemic. Zoom is a very interesting, and I think Skype and all of these different platforms that we’ve used, a very interesting environment because everyone gets a square the same size. So it’s like the great equalizer, you know what I mean?

Like people who are used to having power and influence based on how they use their bodies are really disempowered by this environment. I’ve had a lot of people come to me and say, you know, I don’t know what to do. I did not realize how much I rely on my physical presence in order to connect and get things done.

So there are a couple things that I’ve noticed about this environment. One is not that surprising, the second one has come as a real surprise to me. So the first one is that one of the ways you could think about taking space has to do with the way you speak. And in a Zoom environment, in a virtual environment, your voice and the way you speak is one of the only instruments you have left.

So the idea of applying the notion of taking space to the way you speak. So slowing down a little bit when you’re speaking, you know, not rushing, being comfortable owning silence. So the rule of like more time and fewer words is definitely a more authoritative way of speaking than what many of us do and what I’m probably doing right now, which is to speak quickly and try to make everything go as quickly as we can.

[00:10:47]
So that’s a little bit about speaking. I would say too, something else that’s very useful when you’re thinking about relying on the way you speak is to make sure that you make space in your mouth for your words. When we roll over consonants, it’s a low power way of speaking. It’s a non-threatening way of speaking to not make short, sharp sounds.

So something else you can think about when you’re in one of those moments where you’re trying to maximize your expertise or your authority in a Zoom environment is to just make sure that there’s space in your mouth for you to hit every sound in every word. That’s the speaking part. Here’s the most interesting thing that I noticed as someone who pays attention to how we signal power and authority all the time on Zoom.

And that has to do with the way people have learned to use space or set the stage for themselves in their little box. So here’s what I noticed. I don’t know if you have noticed this yourselves, but I’ve noticed when during the pandemic, when we were on zoom a lot and I had meetings with, you know, very important people, let’s say like the president of the university would be an example.

[00:12:01]
I noticed that the very important people showed up in a big formal room, not very close to the camera. And it makes sense if you think about it. One of the other signals of power and status and authority is psychological distance. So when we’re very close to the screen, it’s a little bit like leaning in, it’s very friendly, it’s very engaged, it’s very warm. It’s wonderful. But if you’re thinking specifically about power and authority, you might want to think of taking, creating more space around you and a more formal setting to signal that you’re an important person who owns a lot of turf. I sometimes think about it this way.

I’ll notice like, oh, they’ve got a huge desk. Is that the desk they always use? Or is that the desk they’re using for their Zoom meetings? So, you know, it’s something we often don’t pay a lot of attention to, but it is something that I’ve noticed. And I think that it’s true. Little more distance from the camera, a little more formal space around you, I think is a way of signaling power and status in those contexts.

[00:13:07]
Matt Abrahams: I’m going to purposely pause long and simply say yes. I will just add one pet peeve I have. Please, for goodness sake, get good lighting. I cannot, it just drives me nuts. People look like they’re in the witness protection program. Get some good lighting. If you don’t know how to get good lighting, ask a teenager because TikTok has got it right, at least in terms of lighting.

I think this notion of how we have to manage ourselves and our space is very different when we’re virtual. And we have new tools, and it’s interesting to see how we do that. I remember I was sharing with them when we came back for the first time and my students saw me, used to see me in the box and now they see me live, the first thing they say is, I can’t believe how short you are.

Right? And so we form perceptions of people. So thank you for that. And I’m thankful we’re in person and not virtual.

[00:14:04]
Next is Zak. Zak Tormala is the Laurence W. Lane Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing. Zak studies one of my favorite topics, persuasion and influence, and we’ve had the great pleasure of teaching some courses together.

Zak, when we spoke on the podcast, we talked about the importance of, and relevance of capturing people’s attention. Long enough so we can actually persuade them. You have some new research out on pronouns, specifically the word you. Can you share with us about what you found in your work and help us learn how we can leverage it?

Zak Tormala: That’s not how you do it.

Matt Abrahams: Okay, alright.

Zak Tormala: So don’t do that.

Matt Abrahams: Alright.

Zak Tormala: Good, just kidding. Hey everybody, welcome. I’m Zak. It’s good to see all of you. I teach persuasion in a LEAD course. So if any of you are out there, uh, great. Working the crowd a little bit.

Matt Abrahams: Yeah.

[00:14:59]
Zak Tormala: And, uh, and I’m a little self-conscious about how I’m speaking right now after hearing about rolling consonants. And I don’t even know what that means. I’m worried, I’m worried I’m not doing it. The pronoun research, so in persuasion, you won’t be surprised to hear that language and word choice matters a lot when you’re trying to reach people.

For those of you who have taken my course, you already heard a little bit about the word you and how the word you can be engaging. And so there’s long standing research in this area showing that when you use the word you in the opening lines of some pitch or message, it makes your message feel more personally relevant to the audience or the recipient, even if it’s a generic use of the word you.

But there’s something about the word you that makes us feel individually responsible or weighing in or evaluating something. So the word you is a really good way to engage your audience. Often though, this is kind of coming around to the newer research, often when we’re interacting with somebody that we’re hoping to move or shift or persuade in some way, we might be in a more adversarial context or maybe there’s disagreement. We have different perspectives on some issue we’re debating arguing and so on. Well, we found in some of our recent research is that the word you although it still engages the audience, it still gets their attention and holds, it gets them to think a little bit more and tune in, that’s still true. But it can also feel aggressive. The context of disagreement or adversarial discourse. And so what we’ve been looking at in some recent research is what you should do instead in those moments. And what we find is that changing out the word you, your, yours, those kinds of second person pronouns, changing them out for first person plural pronouns, so we, us, our, can create a more inclusive, receptive, uh, dynamic. And so what we’ve been testing is the pos, and finding, is that in a neutral to supportive context, where everybody agrees, or at least there’s no antagonism or tension, you is still great. That’s still true.

[00:16:49]
So if you learned that in my class, still true. Uh, but in those adversarial contexts, it can backfire. It grabs attention, but it makes you seem unreceptive. It makes you seem like you’re more aggressive and that triggers resistance in your audience. And so when you say we, us, our instead, so instead of saying something like you’re getting this wrong, you don’t understand this, you might say, we’re getting this wrong, we don’t understand this, something that simple.

[00:17:13]
Suddenly you seem open, you seem receptive and your receptiveness elicits receptiveness from your audience. If they sense that you’re open, they’ll be more open in response. And what we’ve found in our research in this area is that that feeling of receptiveness, following the words like us, we, our, in these settings, it facilitates persuasion.

It makes people more willing to engage with the speaker in future tasks or future conversations. And it decreases the likelihood that you’ll get censored or that your content will get blocked in some way. So we have a bunch of experiments where we put people in the role of information moderator, where they get to weigh in on a discourse that’s happening, say in an online discussion group, on Reddit or something.

And the more people use the word we in their disagreeing messages, the less likely they are to be censored. Or they use the word you in those contexts, the more likely they are to be censored. And we’ve even scraped real discussions from Reddit to look at this there and found that those pronouns predict censorship likelihood in Reddit as well.

[00:18:12]
So real people who aren’t there for our experiments also are censoring others based on their pronoun use in Reddit. So something that seems innocuous or trivial can actually have a pretty profound implication. For the, uh, communication, and people’s openness, and their, um, willingness to collaborate, open up to others, and so on. So that’s a little preview.

If you’ve taken my course, you’ve also heard a little bit about the benefits of we, us, and our already, so this is not brand new for some of the people in the audience, but that’s what we’ve been finding.

[00:18:39]
Matt Abrahams: Well, we are all very lucky to learn from what you’ve shared with us.

I can imagine that some of these frames that Michele talked about, the way we frame our conversations, our conflicts and negotiation, might invite a different type of language use, so they can pair up nicely. So, thank you. I know all of you are actively involved in new research and taking what you’ve already done and expanding it.

I’d love to hear from each of you something that you’re working on that you’re really excited about. Give us a little foreshadowing of what’s to come. Deb, would you mind starting? What’s something you’re working on?

[00:19:10]
Deb Gruenfeld: Happy to start, sure. Kind of building off what I said earlier, a lot of the work that I’ve done most recently has looked at what I call acting with power, and it really has to do with the choices that we make about how we show up in different kinds of contexts and how we can be more intentional about that.

What I’ve become really interested in lately is how investors make decisions about which teams seem like a good bet based on how the teams show up. And I’ve started to talk with investors about this. They are one hundred percent sure that they’re attentive to this, but they have no idea what they’re noticing, what they’re paying attention to.

So I’m super excited to try to get into this. One of the early ideas I have about it has to do with whether startup teams, these small teams, are coming in very hierarchical, with a clear division of labor, with, you know, an obvious leader and others playing very specific roles versus coming in more egalitarian, trying to give everyone speaking time.

I’m also interested in whether people, investors can pick up on whether there’s agreement or alignment around the hierarchy that exists versus disagreement or misalignment around it. So those are just some of the things that I’m looking at. But very excited to find out more about all of our lay theories about what makes a good team. You know, just paying attention to the dynamic of the team and what it looks like to us.

[00:20:34]
Matt Abrahams: It takes me back to this morning where many of you were involved in the LISA pitching competition and different groups had different ways of presenting their team. And how they talked about the team and that might influence how investors think.

Deb Gruenfeld: That’s it. That’s it. Yep.

Matt Abrahams: Brian, what’s something you’re working on that you’d like to share?

[00:20:49]
Brian Lowery: I’m interested in meaningfulness in life right now. So like, what makes life feel meaningful is kind of what I’m focused on right now. And we’re just backstage, I was talking about this. I think that people often confuse achievement with meaning.

So, one way to think about it is, imagine that you’re thirsty, but you don’t know you’re thirsty. You feel hungry. And so you keep eating, but you’re not satisfied. Because really, you’re not, it’s not hunger, it’s thirst. And I think achievement and meaning are a little bit like that. Sometimes we think what we need is more achievement.

What we need is get a better job, make more money, get a better home. And we chase those things because we think they’re going to make us feel better. But my guess is most of you, if not all of you, haven’t had this experience. You get these things and you’re like, something is still missing. And the thing that you can think of as well, it’s missing because I didn’t get the right house.

[00:21:35]
So I don’t have a big enough salary, there’s another job. And you chase that thing and something is still missing. Think what might be happening is that the seeking of meaning is harder to see clearly because it’s more complicated than achievement, right? One, achievement is usually easy to measure. Like, you know, if you’ve achieved the thing or not. And it’s instantly gratifying, when you get the thing, it feels like great at the moment. And so it’s only kind of in retrospect that you feel like this is not it. This is not exactly, something is missing.

Meaning on the other hand is, it’s harder to quantify. Like, what does it mean? Like, how do you know when you’ve got it? What does it look like? And the other thing about meaning is, research suggests it can feel uncomfortable. Pursuing meaning can feel uncomfortable. So it’s not like when you’re doing it, it doesn’t feel great. Even if you get it, it doesn’t feel great, but you might feel fulfilled in a way you didn’t expect.

And because meaning is more complicated and we don’t really understand it very well, we spend a lot of our times chasing achievements and feeling unsatisfied with our lives. And so that’s something I’m curious about exploring, helping people think about. How do you identify what it means when you need meaning so you’re clear about is this, am I, want more achievement or is it meaning that I’m seeking? And then how, once you identify that, how, what does it mean to pursue meaning? Like, what does that look like? And I’ll just say one more, one more thing here. What the research suggests is that achievement is about gratifying yourself. There’s a self-focused nature of it, like, I want a better house. I want whatever it is you want.

And meaning looks to be more about doing something for other people, right? So meaning is about participating in someone else’s story or participating in a story larger than yourself. And the reason it looks that way is because, um, there’s this thing called significance, right? So you want to feel significant, which means you want what you do to matter beyond just you in that moment, right?

[00:23:34]
You want to think about when I’m gone from this earth, what would I have done, right? And participating in other people’s stories will continue to persist even after you’re gone. Your achievements are gone with you. That’s just, you did it and great. Good for you. Fantastic. That’s a wonderful thing to have done, but it doesn’t persist, right?

Where participating in other larger stories can persist in a way that gives it significance, and I think that people have a hard time seeing that, but when you see it, you’re like, oh, I get that. And then you can then figure out what it means to seek a meaningful experience of life. So that’s kind of what I’m interested in these days.

[00:24:14]
Matt Abrahams: Wow. That is deep and really, really important. And I think those in this room are part of a program that is helping us define significance and what it means to have a meaningful and purposeful life. Michele, what’s something you’re studying? And what has you excited?

[00:24:36]
Michele Gelfand: I’m a cross cultural psychologist, which means that I somehow get paid to study human behavior around the world. It’s really a scam that I get this. And culture is a really interesting puzzle, because it’s all around us, it’s omnipresent, but it’s invisible. And it’s affecting us all the time. And as cross-cultural psychologists, what we try to do is make culture visible. We try to measure culture at different levels of analysis so that we can then understand why does it evolve the way it does, what consequences does it have, trade-offs does it provide.

Maybe most importantly, how do we manage it? How can we negotiate culture as we need to do that? And some of the work that I do is on how strict or permissive norms are around the world. Some of our work has been categorizing nations around the world for how tight or loose they are. Singapore, Japan, Austria, they tend to our data veer tight. Brazil, Greece, the Netherlands, the U.S. tends to veer loose. And we’ve now discovered some of the factors that caused the evolution that was surprising to us. And we’re looking at that across different levels. For example, we know that tight cultures around the world have had a lot of threat in their histories. They’ve had chronic natural disasters, invasions. They’ve had actually to come together more often than loose cultures that have had less threat and actually rules help us to coordinate to survive threat. And we see this dimension applying across levels. We’ve now zoomed into the U.S. and we can reclassify the fifty states in terms of how tight or loose they are.

We just published a book about tight-loose in Iraq across the eighteen governorates and also India, we’re now exploring tight-loose across the twenty-eight states in India. And what’s really exciting is to see some similar features that we see at the national level causing the evolution of tightness at the state level and similar consequences.

[00:26:13]
We’re now zooming into organizations and you can imagine all of you are working in contexts where you can sort of think, do we lean tight? Do we have a lot of rules and reliable punishments when people deviate or do we have more latitude? And in fact the same pattern we see exists at this level. Industries like manufacturing and hospitals, military, they’re tight because they have a lot of safety issues, a lot of threat. Or other contexts have a lot of public accountability, like law firms, accounting, and that makes for the need for rules. High tech has much more latitude, and so we can see tight-loose at that level of analysis. And what we’re doing right now is actually starting to think about what happens when organizations get misaligned. They get too tight or too loose. It’s like a Goldilocks story. We might need to veer tight or loose because of our environments, but sometimes we get too tight and we need to insert some flexibility into those systems. We call that flexible tightness. Sometimes we get all uber loose and we have to insert some accountability into those settings and structure.

We call that structured looseness. And so we’re trying to help leaders be more ambidextrous. In fact, think about, analyze the rules in your organization, make them visible and think about are you really calibrated? Should you be trying to pivot in one direction or the other? And what are the sources of resistance that you might encounter?

And so it’s really around ambidexterity. I’ll just say I have a tight-loose mindset quiz on my website so you can take it and it will give you a sense of, really, your own default. Do you like a lot of rules and structure and want to avoid making mistakes? Or do you actually not notice rules as much?

[00:27:39]
Maybe a little more risk taking, maybe a little more impulsive. And neither is right or wrong, but it helps us to understand ourselves. Culture really starts, first of all, understanding ourselves, putting a mirror to ourselves so that we can then understand the people around us as well. And I’ll just say one more thing. I veer moderately loose on my own scale. My husband is a lawyer and he veers pretty tight. And in fact, our biggest source of disagreement is how I load the dishwasher. He gets deeply disturbed. I mean, deeply disturbed. He now won’t even let me load the dishwasher. Or he redoes it. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a work of art, you know?

[00:28:13]
Um, but um, it is kind of nice to think about this as it affects our everyday conflicts. Also, we’ve been collecting a lot of data on conflicts people experience through a tight-loose lens. So if you have some stories, Please reach out and take the quiz.

[00:28:26]
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for sharing that. As somebody who leans pretty loose in general. But I’m definitely pretty dogmatic about the dishwasher. But you actually helped give me a term to label where the podcast actually is. We started very loose. And we, as we are growing, we need to bring some structure to it. I like this notion of structured looseness. I think that’s a really interesting, that’s the phase we’re in. So thank you for that, that term.

Zak, what’s something you’re researching? I’m sorry. What is something all of us could learn from?

Zak Tormala: That’s not how you do it.

Matt Abrahams: I know, but I will get it right at some point.

[00:29:07]
Zak Tormala: Yeah, so, uh, the research I’ve been doing lately, I think it’s gonna sound a little smaller. It’s a little bit more micro level stuff in some ways. Again, getting to word choice, it was just something I was talking about before. One of the things we’re looking at lately is how people frame changes that they are claiming exist in a way to persuade an audience.

So let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re reading about a scientific finding, and we’ll just make this a persuasion finding to keep it on theme here. And the finding is that if you can get your audience to nod their head while they listen to your pitch, you’ll increase their agreement with what you’re saying.

Or you could say, if you get your audience to shake their head left and right while they listen to your pitch, you’ll decrease their agreement with what you’re saying. We’ve been looking lately at how people respond to these different claims. They’re basically saying the same thing. If you put people in an experiment, you could have half of the participants nod their heads, half of them shake their heads, measure agreement, and you could compare those.

You could talk about that as nodding increases in agreement relative to shaking, or shaking decreases agreement relative to nodding. And scientific communication often makes claims like this, and this is a little bit of the inspiration for this research, is that often a researcher has manipulated some variable in their study.

[00:30:23]
You’re in condition A or condition B, and then they’ll claim that B increases the outcome or A decreases the outcome. So what’s the impact? What we find is that even when you’re describing the same fundamental phenomenon, people think increases are bigger deals than decreases. So if you ask people, how big a change do you think it creates in agreement in that example?

People say bigger, it’s bigger. If it was an increased direction compared to a decreased direction. Also, based on that, people will say that research deserves more funding if it’s studying an increase rather than a decrease. Uh, it deserves to be published more if it studies increases rather than decrease. It feels more important.

And so we have people read scientific findings and actually estimate the size of the effect that’s being described. And we see this pattern there. And we’re also looking at real scientific communication outside of our lab context and find that when researchers talk about their effects in increased terms. They’re more likely to be cited by other researchers down the road than if they talk about their findings or their effects in decreased terms.

So we started to extend this into regular persuasion, not just scientific communication, and find that people who claim that the thing they’re trying to pitch you on increases some desirable outcome, people are more willing to buy that thing or to want that thing than if they’re claiming that it decreases something.

[00:31:39]
Let’s say that if you adopt my new healthy eating program, it increases your healthy eating or it decreases your unhealthy eating. People are more impressed, they think it’s a bigger deal if you increase the healthy eating, even if ultimately you’re making people, exactly, you create the same health improvement, either way, people like the increase more than the decrease.

Matt Abrahams: Wow. You’ve definitely increased our knowledge on our word use. Thank you.

Zak Tormala: You did it right.

Matt Abrahams: I did it right. See, I get it. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed our Think Fast, Talk Smart live episode as much as I did. Before we end, I’m excited for you to hear from one of our Stanford LEAD participants, sharing their learning from Brian Lowery’s class.

[00:32:27]
Meredith Aiken: My name is Meredith Aiken, and I’m from Vancouver, British Columbia. Probably the main thing that I have applied is perspective taking. And with that is the importance of trust and building trust to be able to have both a deeper conversation, but also to make sure that people understand that you are working in the same direction. You may have different opinions on how to get there. You may have difficult messages to get across, but if as a foundational layer, people can understand and trust that you are working in the same direction and that you are supporting them. It is absolutely critical to being able to move things forward successfully.

[00:33:15]
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To learn more from our four guests, please listen to episode 67 with Michele Gelfand, episode 84 with Brian Lowery, episode 11 with Zak Tormala, and episode 12 with Deb Gruenfeld.

This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Podium Podcast Company, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. Please YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out faster smarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.