Translator: Carlos Castillo Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
Imagine you're on a shopping trip.
You've been looking for a luxury line of dinnerware set
to add to your kitchen collection.
As it turns out, your local department store
has announced a sale on the very set you've been looking for.
So you rush to the store to find a 24-piece set on sale.
Eight dinner plates, all in good condition;
eight soup and salad bowls, all in good condition;
and eight dessert plates, all in good condition.
Now, consider for a moment
how much you would be willing to pay for this dinnerware set.
Now, imagine an alternate scenario:
not having seen this 24-piece luxury set,
you rush to the store to find a 40-piece dinnerware set on sale.
Eight dinner plates, all in good condition;
eight soup and salad bowls, all in good condition;
eight dessert plates, all in good condition;
eight cups, two of them are broken;
eight saucers, seven of them are broken.
Now, consider for a moment
how much you would be willing to pay for this 40-piece dinnerware set.
This is the premise of a clever experiment
by Christopher Hsee from the University of Chicago.
It's also the question that I've asked hundreds of students in my classroom.
What were their responses?
On average, when afforded the 24-piece luxury set,
they were willing to spend £390 for the set.
When afforded the 40-piece dinnerware set,
on average, they were willing to spend a whopping £192
for this dinnerware set.
Strictly speaking, these are an irrational set of numbers.
You'll notice the 40-piece dinnerware set includes all elements
you would get in the 24-piece set, plus six cups and one saucer.
And not only are you not willing to spend what you will for the 24-piece set,
you are only willing to spend roughly half of what you will for that 24-piece set.
What you're witnessing here
is what's referred to as the "dilution effect."
The broken items, if you will, dilute our overall perceived value
of that entire set.
Turns out, this cognitive quirk at the checkout counter
has important implications for our ability to be heard
and listened to when we speak up.
Whether you are speaking up against a failing strategy,
speaking against the grain of a shared opinion among friends,
or speaking truth to power,
this takes courage.
Often, the points that are raised are both legitimate
but also shared by others.
But, sadly, and far too often,
we see people speak up but fail to influence others
in the way that they had hoped for.
Put another way, their message was sound,
but their delivery proved faulty.
If we could understand this cognitive bias,
it holds important implications
for how we could craft and mold our messages
to have the impact we all desire:
to be more influential as a communicator.
Let's exit the aisles of the shopping center
and enter a context in which we practice almost automatically every day:
the judgement of others.
Let me introduce you to two individuals.
Tim studies 31 hours a week outside of class.
Tom, like Tim,
also spends 31 hours outside of class, studying.
He has a brother and two sisters,
he visits his grandparents,
he once went on a blind date,
plays pool every two months.
When participants are asked
to evaluate the cognitive aptitude of these individuals
or more importantly, their scholastic achievement,
on average, people rate Tim
to have a significantly higher GPA than that of Tom.
But why?
After all, both of them spend 31 hours a week outside of class.
Turns out, in this context, when we're presented such information,
our minds utilize two categories of information:
diagnostic and non-diagnostic.
Diagnostic information is information of relevance
to the evaluation that is being made.
Non-diagnostic is information that is irrelevant or inconsequential
to that evaluation.
And when both categories of information are mixed,
dilution occurs.
The very fact that Tom has a brother and two sisters
or plays pool every two months
dilutes the diagnostic information,
or more importantly,
dilutes the value and weight of that diagnostic information -
namely, that he studies 31 hours a week outside of class.
The most robust psychological explanation for this is one of averaging.
In this model, we take in information,
and those information are afforded a weighted score,
and our minds do not add those pieces of information
but rather average those pieces of information.
So, when you introduce irrelevant or even weak arguments,
those weak arguments, if you will,
reduce the weight of your overall argument.
A few years ago, I landed in Philadelphia one August evening for a conference.
Having just gotten off a transatlantic flight,
I checked into my hotel room, put my feet up,
and decided to distract my jet lag with some TV.
An ad caught my attention.
The ad was an ad for a pharmaceutical drug.
Now, if you're the select few
who've not had the pleasure of witnessing these ads,
the typical architecture of these ads is
you might see a happy couple prancing through their garden,
reveling in the joy that they got a full night's sleep
with the aid of the sleep drug.
Because of FDA regulations, the last few seconds of this one-minute ad
needs to be devoted to the side effects of that drug.
And what you'll typically hear is a hurried voiceover that blurts out,
"Side effects include heart attack, stroke,
blah, blah, blah, blah ..."
and will end with something like "itchy feet."
Guess what itchy feet does to people's risk assessment
of heart attack and stroke.
It dilutes it.
Imagine for a moment an alternate commercial
that says, "This drug cures your sleep problems.
Side effects are heart attack and stroke."
Stop.
Now, all of a sudden, you're thinking, "I don't mind staying up all night."
(Laughter)
Turns out, going to sleep is important, but so is waking up.
(Laughter)
Let me give you a sample from our research.
So, this add that I witnessed
essentially triggered a research project with my PhD student Hemant
over the next two years.
And in one of these studies,
we presented participants an actual print ad
that appeared in a magazine.
You'll notice the last line is devoted to the side effects of this drug.
For half of the participants, we showed the ad in its entirety,
which included both major side effects as well as minor side effects.
To the other half of the participants,
we showed the same ad with one small modification.
We extracted just four words out of the sea of text.
Specifically, we extracted the minor side effects.
And then both sets of participants rated that drug.
What we find is that individuals who were exposed
to both the major side effects as well as the minor side effects
rated the drug's overall severity to be significantly lower
than those who were only exposed to the major side effects.
Furthermore, they also showed greater attraction
towards consuming this drug.
In a follow-up study, we even find that individuals are willing to pay more
to buy the drug which they were exposed to
that had both major side effects as well as minor side effects
compared to just major side effects alone.
So, it turns out, pharmaceutical ads,
by listing both major side effects as well as minor side effects,
paradoxically, dilute
participants' and potential consumers' overall risk assessment of that drug.
Going beyond shopping expeditions,
going beyond the evaluation of the scholastic aptitude of others
and beyond sort of evaluating risk in our environment,
what this body of research tells us
is that in the world of communicating for the purposes of influence,
quality trumps quantity.
By increasing the number of arguments, you do not strengthen your case,
but rather you actively weaken it.
Put another way, you cannot increase the quality of an argument
by simply increasing the quantity of your argument.
The next time you want to speak up in a meeting,
speak in favor of a government legislation that you're deeply passionate about,
or simply want to help a friend see the world through a different lens,
it's important to note
that the delivery of your message is every bit as important as its content.
Stick to your strong arguments
because your arguments don't add up in the minds of the receiver -
they average out.
Thank you.
(Applause)