MARIS: But anyway, it's my great pleasure
to have Steve here at Google.
Steve is an author, business columnist
and behavioral expert, and coauthor of "The New York
Times," "Wall Street Journal," and "Business Week
International" best seller "Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven
Ways to be Persuasive," which to date has
sold over a half a million copies
and has been translated into 26 languages.
Steve's current book, "The Small Big,"
has been published worldwide this month,
and is available on Amazon.
Steve speaks about the science of influence and persuasion
and its application to a wide variety of business,
government, and nonprofit organizations around the world.
As well as an extensive list of corporate clients,
Steve has worked with the UK Cabinet
Office and the Behavioral Change Network Team
with the UK Department of Health.
He's guest lecturer on senior executive programs
at the London Business School, Cass Business School,
Oxford-- is it Said?
Said Business School, and the Judge Business School
University of Cambridge, UK.
Steve regularly features in the media, national press,
and online, including MSNBC, BBC TV, and radio, "The New York
Times," and "Wired" magazine.
His monthly columns, including the persuasion column
in the British Airways in-flight magazine
and columns for the Harvard Business Review,
are read by over 2.5 million people every month.
So please, a round of applause, and join me
in welcoming Steve to Google.
[APPLAUSE]
STEVE: Well, thank you very much indeed, Maris.
It's an absolute delight.
I'm just so happy to be here and talk to a full room
here at Google this afternoon about a subject
which I hope you'll find not only super interesting but also
relevant to your roles.
One of the things I'd like to be able to do this afternoon
is not just talk about the theory of persuasion science
but talk about the practice of influence and persuasion
as well, and specifically how sometimes just making
very small changes to the way that you make a case
or present a proposal or request of someone
can oftentimes lead to very big differences
in your persuasive success.
And so I'd like to talk a little bit about that, and clearly
key to our new book, "The Small Big."
But I thought I'd start out actually
by telling you a story.
I love this story.
It concerns the late Lord Grade of Elstree, a British peer,
who tells the story, or used to tell
the story of a young man who came to his office
one day seeking employment.
The story goes that Lord Lew would be sitting at his desk,
smoking his fifth Havana of the day.
It was, after all, around 7:30 in the morning.
And he, for a few moments, stared menacingly
at this young man, who was sitting
at the opposite side of the desk,
before standing up and placing on the desk between them
a large jug of water.
And then he looked at this young man and he said,
young man, I've been told you're quite the persuader.
So sell me this jug of water.
Undaunted, this young man got up.
He went to the corner of the room
where there was a waste paper basket full to brimming.
He picked it up and brought it back to the desk
and placed it next to the jug of water and then lit a match,
dropped it into the waste paper basket
and waited for a few moments until the flames had reached
an impressive and perhaps rather anxiety inducing level,
and then turned around and said to the peer,
is his Lordship interested in buying a jug of water?
Now the story's entertaining, but I
think it's also instructive when we think about influence
and persuasion, because there are many approaches
that that young man could have taken
to convince his counterpart.
He could have, for example, provided
some information, or try to sell this jug of water
by considering the features and the benefits
of the jug of water.
He could have used an economic argument,
and thought about how we might provide some monetary incentive
or motivation in order to persuade his audience.
But instead what he did was pull on another lever
of the influence process, not the informational motivation,
not the economic motivation, but a change in context,
an environmental motivation.
That small shift, which, incidentally,
if you think about it, did nothing
to change what was on offer.
He simply made that small shift in environment
that led to that change in behavior.
And that's the case that I'd like
to make when it comes to influence and persuasion--
particularly successful influence and persuasion.
Increasingly in this information overloaded world
that we actually live in, what we're finding now,
particularly these last two decades of persuasion science,
is that contexts will frequently trump cognitions
when it comes to successful influence and persuasion.
And sometimes all that requires you
to do as a communicator is to make very small, often subtle
changes to the way that you make a proposition or proposal
that link to deep seated motivations
inherent in all of us.
In fact, one of the things that this body of research suggests
is something rather surprising.
It's this idea that whilst there may be many tens
of thousands of different ways in which we can successfully
influence and persuade others through the use of tactics
or changes, the vast majority of most successful influence
and persuasion can be categorized
in terms of just three core motivations.
Those core motivations are that, in this increasingly
information overloaded world, we want
to make quick and efficient decisions.
We want to also make decisions in ways that affiliate us
with others and gain the approval of others.
And finally, we want to make decisions and behave
in ways that allow us to be seen in the best
possible and positive light.
So the claim that I have here, and the claim
that we make in this book, is by thinking about influence
in the context of these three core motivations
and aligning your request, or your strategy,
or your proposal or proposition to one or more
of these can significantly enhance your success.
So I want to give you a few examples and then
after we've done that, we'll talk a little bit about how
we can apply these, and maybe take a few questions.
So let's talk about the first.
This inherent motivation we have to make accurate decisions
as efficiently and as quickly as we possibly can.
What's kind of interesting about this
is that oftentimes we won't even consider
what is on offer in order to do that.
Instead, what we do is consider something--
an alternative, a comparison.
Let me give you an example.
How many of you like a glass of wine maybe in the evenings
or weekends?
There's a fair few number of you.
OK.
So consider the humble wine list.
Typically when a restaurant or a hotel bar
presents its wines to its customers,
it does so in this way.
It starts with the house wine at the top, and as you see,
as you look down the list the wine increases in price.
This is familiar to you.
And typically what we find is that when people are presented
with offers in this way, they typically
pick those items towards the top.
Not the cheapest, no one wants to be a cheapskate after all.
So they'll take the second or third ones on the list.
There's a small change that any one bar, any hotel,
any restaurant could make that significantly
alters the choices that people make.
And it doesn't require them to delete options.
It doesn't require them to investing costly resources
or incentives these choices.
It simply requires them to turn the list upside down.
And in that instance, these now become more popular.
This is a really good example I think of not only
a small change that leads to a big difference
in this instance, but also this idea of how
we use one stimulus, one proposition
to make an accurate and efficient decision about what
that right course of action is next.
Now it turns out there's a restaurant chain in Europe that
are taking this one stage further.
And what they found is that sometimes you
don't have to make what you compare something to the same.
What's interesting about the Carluccio's restaurant,
down here on the bottom, left hand side.
The first thing when you open a Carluccio's menu that you see
is a moterscooter.
You'll see it's priced here at 2,771 pounds.
That's about $3 and a half thousand.
There it is there.
Why would a restaurant sell a moterscooter,
or attempt to sell a moterscooter on its menu?
Well, it turns out that it sure as hell
makes their salads and sandwiches appear cheaper.
And that's the point that we're making here.
Oftentimes you can change people's perception
of the proposition you make, change people's reaction
to your proposal, not by doing anything
to change your proposal at all, but instead,
by thinking carefully about how you might compare something
less favorable first.
A different option, knowing that in this information
overloaded world where we seek to make
quick and efficient decisions.
That's a small change you can make
that leads to a big difference.
But here's a mistake we often make.
When we're presenting proposals.
When we're thinking about how we might craft our case,
we'll come up with lots of different options
that we're about to present, and then
discard those that are perhaps not the optimum
And we'll focus on just one option
and throw away those options that perhaps aren't optimal.
And it turns out that can be a mistake.
In the same way as when you were at school
you'd get extra marks for showing not only how you've
got to the math answer, but how you actually-- not just the
answer itself, but how you actually got to the answer.
The same is true of influence and persuasion.
Anything you could do in the early stages
of your proposition, your proposals,
to point out options that you all going to discard
increases the salience and the attractiveness of the very
next thing that you actually present.
It works in negotiations too.
I've a wonderful set of studies here
that simply show that going first in a negotiation
tends to be the optimum thing to do.
We have lots of questions sometimes
from people that say, well, if I'm
going to go into a negotiation, is it better
for me to sit back and wait for that opponent
to make their first offer, or is it better
actually if I make the first offer myself?
And the answer is, clearly, the latter.
In these studies, for example, negotiators purchasing
quite a large scale industrial units here,
we find that those buyers that presented
their option, their price first, typically came away
with about $5 million increased value
compared to those that actually waited for the opponents
to make the first offer.
So there's a key thing here-- the key theme rather here
about this idea of what you present
first matters an awful lot when it
comes to influence and persuasion.
Let's talk about the second of these motivations.
Our desire to affiliate with others.
To make decisions and behave in ways
that gain the approval of others.
Before we talk about some of the examples
from persuasion science, I think it's important at this point
to mention a dark side, a downside to this idea
of affiliating and behaving in the way that others do.
One of the things we know from extensive research
on this idea of social norms, that people follow
what many others are doing, is that it doesn't discriminate
between desirable and undesirable behaviors.
If we see that many people are behaving
in ways that are undesirable, are less
productive to the organization, we could often join them,
and we can often find that those unwanted behaviors increase
further.
There's a really good example from here in the United States.
In 2007 the Inland Revenue Services
doubled the fine for the late submission of taxes
from $100 to $200.
And the reason that the IRS gave for that doubling of the fine
was because the previous year, so many American citizens
had failed to submit their tax returns on time.
So in an attempt to motivate people to submit their tax
returns on time, they doubled the fine.
The next year there was a 22% increase in late submissions.
It's almost as if people are saying,
well, if everyone else is doing it,
then maybe I should do it too.
And this is an important consideration
when you think about trying to change behaviors, particularly
less desirable behaviors in organizations and in societies.
Often leaders will make the mistake of drawing attention
to regrettably, frequent, undesirable behaviors,
and in doing so actually serve to increase their frequency.
AUDIENCE: Just say no to drugs.
STEVE: One of my favorite examples
concerns the National Petrified Forest Park in Arizona
here in the United States.
Visitors would come up to the gate and they would see a sign.
Designed to reduce the theft of petrified wood
in crystals from the forest floor
that they were losing some 14 tons of per year.
And the sign would say, "Your heritage is being lost."
Vandalized if you like, by the theft
of small pieces of crystal and petrified wood.
Last year we lost 14 tons.
People were coming up to the gate, looking at the sign,
and thinking, we better get ours quick, then.
It wasn't a crime prevention strategy.
It was a crime promotion strategy.
So so much better if you want to influence and persuade
effectively using this core motivation to point
to behaviors that are desirable in a given situation.
Now my two co-authors, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini,
gained some notoriety a few years ago for a set of studies
concerning these small cards that you'll often
find in hotel bathrooms.
Have you seen these?
This card here, this is one from the hotel
that we're staying at this weekend.
"Help us save the planet.
It's time for us to take part in helping the environment.
Please re-use your towels by hanging them on the rack
as a signal that you want to play
your part for the environment."
Turns out there's a much, much more effective way
of getting people to reuse there towels and linens, which
concerns changing the words on this card
to instead of saying, please do it
for the sake of the environment, to instead say,
did you know that significant numbers of people
who stay in our hotel do reuse their towels and linens?
That simple message of affiliating and aligning
the message to gain the approval of others
typically increases towel reuse by about 26%.
That's a pretty big difference for such a small change.
Now consider this for a few moments.
If you want to check into a hotel,
and see one of those little cards to the bathroom
and it says the following message,
just consider for a few moments what your first reaction would
be if when you picked up the card
you read a message that said, dear guest,
did you know that the person that stayed in this room
before you reused their towels and linens.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
STEVE: Yeah, the first thing you're going to think
is, I hope they're not the same towels.
No one wants to know what the person who stayed in that hotel
room before you got up to or did.
As far as we're concerned, we're the first person
to have ever stayed in that room.
And so interestingly, people will typically
dismiss that message, that persuasive appeal
as having no relevance at all.
It will have no effect.
But interestingly, in Noah and Bob's studies,
when they changed that message to say,
dear guest, the majority of people
that stayed in this room, 107, 416, 921, reused their towel,
it was the single most effective message
of all, which demonstrates a really interesting quirk
in terms of persuasion science.
This idea that we're oftentimes not
that good at actually recognizing what
does influence and persuade us.
And to give a demonstration, those towels studies
spawned a subsequent set of research
that we were engaged in when it came to persuading people
to pay their taxes on time.
Take a look at this.
The UK government typically would send out letters saying,
please, submit your tax return by this date.
Pay this amount.
If you fail to do so by the schedule dates on this letter
there will be a fine.
The fine is 100 pounds.
It's about $160.
And they typically would get a response rate at here,
you can see about 68%, within a given time.
We made one small change to that letter
by placing a sentence across the top that simply said,
truthfully, that the majority of people
do pay their taxes on time.
And when we did that we registered
a pretty impressive increase in response rates.
OK.
We didn't stop there.
We went one stage further and said,
well, if people are more likely to reuse their towels if they
know that the person to stay in the room
before them reused that towels, would people be even more
likely to respond to the request to submit their tax
returns on time if they're told what the majority of people
in the UK doing, but the majority of people in their zip
code, in that postal code.
And the answer was, yes.
A further impressive increase.
And when we add the name of the town, Mountain View, San
Francisco, Tempe, Arizona, and key into that social identity
we get a huge increase.
That's an 83% response rate.
If you needed anymore convincing of the power
of these small changes linked to these deep seated motivations,
this is the set of data to provide
that clarity, that evidence.
Because the Inland Revenue Services in the United Kingdom
have collected literally hundreds of millions
of additional dollars in tax revenues
by simply aligning their message,
their persuasive appeal to this core motivation.
Talk about the final one.
This idea that we want to act in ways
that allow us to see ourselves in a positive light.
That's why the majority of people
think that they're an above average driver.
It's also the reason why after our sports team has perhaps
played particularly badly one weekend
we'll talk about how badly they played,
but after an impressive win we'll
talk about how brilliantly we played.
This idea of how we want to act in ways
that allow us to feel that we are seen positively by others.
This idea of a self commitment.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Adam Grate, who's a professor here a Wharton,
published an interesting set of studies just a couple of years
ago.
How do you arrange and persuade doctors, physicians
to sanitize their hands, to wash their hands each time
that they go onto a hospital ward, or each time
they go into a treatment room, or each time they
treat an individual patient.
They tested three different messages.
The first was a simple, gel in, wash out.
An information appeal.
Had no effect whatsoever at increasing
this practice of hand sanitization.
So they tried to second message.
And it was to say, it's important
that you wash your hands because it keeps you sanitized.
It keeps you healthy.
You do it for the benefit of you.
No effect whatsoever.
It was the first message, the message
that said, please, wash your hands.
Please, sanitize your hands for the sake of your patients.
It was this idea that they were almost
being reminded of the commitment that they
had made when they qualified as medical practitioners.
So what small changes could we key
into there that might lead to big differences?
Well, take a look at this.
Is a really interesting set of research
that looks at the simple act of including someone's photograph
on their x-rays and their CT scans.
Now imagine you're a diagnosing doctor.
You see lots of plates, lots of CT scans, lots of x-rays.
And your job is to diagnose them and make a recommendation.
The small change here was to simply include
a photograph of that patient on their x-ray plate
to humanize the situation in the context, and in that instance
a significant increase in the amount of treatment options
and rated caring that those physicians employed and applied
to those x-ray plates.
So one way that we can increase people's likelihood
to be seen in a positive light is
to do things that humanize interactions
and remind them of their commitments.
Here's another.
You'll probably recognize from the accent,
I'm not from these parts.
I'm from the United Kingdom.
The UK National Health Service has a significant problem
with the number of people that will make appointments
to go to see a physician, a physiotherapist, a dentist,
and fail to show up.
We have a system that is free at the point of delivery as well.
So there are no penalties or costs
incurred if patients fail to turn up.
All the expense, all the cost, all those wasted resources
is borne by the National Health System.
It costs literally hundreds of millions
of pounds each and every year.
800 million pounds at the last estimate.
How might we use one of these core motivations
to change the way that an interaction takes place that
increases the likelihood that people will show up?
Well, here's one change that we actually made.
When people phoned for an appointment, rather than
the receptionist simply put the phone down after that patient
to be given the time, and day of their appointment,
they will pause and ask simply that individual
to repeat back verbally the time and day of the appointment.
"Your requirement is at Tuesday next at 2:30.
Could you just confirm that for me please?"
Wait for the patient to confirm it,
and we registered a modest, but still significant reduction.
A 3 1/2% reduction, but a 3 1/2% reduction of an 800 hundred
million pound problem. that's like a $1.3 billion problem is
still significant.
We then actually tested another insight,
which made to the commitment even more active.
How many of you when you've been given an appointment
at a doctor's, or dentist's, or a physiotherapist have ever
been given a little card with the time
and day the appointment?
Most of you in the room is being given that.
OK.
Who writes the details on the card?
AUDIENCE: The receptionist.
STEVE: Yeah, yes, the receptionist.
It's the health clerk, the person
who is make an appointment for you.
Turns out that there is very good evidence
that that is the wrong person.
OK?
When we simply rearranged for the blank card and the pen
to be given to the individual, we now
register a very impressive reduction close
to 18% reduction in no shows.
Now an 18% reduction in a $1.3 billion problem.
That's a huge impact for such a small change.
So what I sought to have done this afternoon,
in our short time together, is to offer you an additional way
to think about influence and persuasion
beyond the traditional information, education,
and economic levers that we typically
rely on to persuade others.
And that's to align your request to just a set
of very small, but deeply rooted motivations that we all have,
and that we all deem as important.
The importance and the motivation
to make rapid, efficient decisions
in a crazy information overloaded world.
The motivation to make those decisions
in a way that align, and affiliate,
and gain the approval of others.
And to make those decisions in a way that
allow us to be seen publicly in a positive light.
And notice a couple of things about these small changes.
First, that they often required just a change in context,
not necessary a change in cognition.
Or a shift in the fundamental strategy or persuasion
appeal that you're making of someone.
We're not necessarily asking you to change
what you have, change what you offer,
change what you're proposing.
Just change the context in which it's seen.
That's the first.
The second, notice how small these changes are.
Rarely, this is a surprising aspects
of this recent and growing body of persuasion research
is that rarely do they require costly investments in time,
in money, in additional resources.
And finally notice that rarely do these insights
come about by an investigation of the best
practices within an organization.
And the best evidence I can give for that
is the data from the tax offices.
Tax officials have been collecting
your money, our money, for centuries.
You would have thought that they would have figured
out the most effective ways to do it.
They figured out the best practices.
And I'm a big fan of sharing best practice,
but remember also that best practices do have a limitation.
And the limitation being that they'll typically only uncover
those best practices that are, and insights
that are already known.
It took a team of persuasion scientists to figure out
there was a more effective way as well.
So I wonder how we're doing for time.
We just got maybe a couple of moments.
So I just did want to just finish off
with this, this question here.
This idea of will these effects work in combination?
And will they work in any context,
or are there limitations to them?
And I think that there are limitations to them.
So I don't want to present a panacea here
that this is the way to influence and persuade people
every time, but rather just offer
a set of universal principles and rules
that will guide you to a more effective outcome.
But let me just talk briefly about a couple
of these some recent studies that we sight in the book.
The first is a good friend of mine,
Paul Dolan, who is a behavioral economist at the London
School of Economics, ran a really interesting set
of experiments recently.
He found that if you send a letter to homeowners telling
them that they are consuming more
energy than their neighbors with a request
to reduce their energy consumption,
that's a pretty effective way of actually getting people
to reduce their energy consumption.
You use that peer pressure.
And in Paul's studies, he typically
found that there was about a 6% reduction in energy consumption
the following month.
He also found, interestingly, that if you
send a letter to people and say, please
reduce your energy consumption, and if you do,
we'll give you $150, that that was pretty effective as well,
typically reducing energy consumption
by about the same amount.
So the question, of course, is, what
if we combine those two things?
What if we send a letter to people
that says, please reduce your energy consumption
and fall in line with your neighbors, and if you do,
we'll pay you $150?
It turns out that when Paul did that in his studies,
people had a heating party.
Now in mathematics, 1 plus 1 equals 2.
In persuasion science, that's not always the case.
So I can't report that simply adding more persuasion tactics
to an appeal would actually lead to be more effective.
Oftentimes, it doesn't.
It actually reduces its effects, much in the same way
as if you pour all of the spice from your spice racks
into the chicken, no one is going to want eat it.
I think it's the same when it comes to persuasion as well.
Here's another example.
Back to our friend Adam Grant from Wharton,
a series of studies looking at charitable fund raising
appeals.
He found that, again, a similar approach, when people were sent
a letter saying, please donate to this charity,
and there was an appeal that targeted their ego, think
about what others will be saying about you if you do donate,
that was a pretty effective appeal.
They raised donations as a result.
A second group got a different letter,
a more altruistic approach.
Think the benefit you'll do to others by donating.
That was pretty effective as well.
And he found the same thing when he combined the two approaches.
Put that egotistical and altruistic effects together,
and it canceled out the effect.
So the key message here is to use these insights sparingly.
They are small.
They fly under the radar.
And what we're finding is that if we
try to incorporate too many, we do build resistance.
One final one, and I think this speaks to the environment
that we're here in in Google as well, is this idea of, well,
do they work equally effectively in different contexts,
for example, online?
This is a series of studies that we conducted with our friends
at Blue State Digital-- again, fund raising.
We send out emails to people asking
to donate to a particular charity
and test different messages.
And one of the messages we wanted to test
was this idea of to gain the approval
and to affiliate with others, so pointing out
how previous people like them had donated to the appeal.
And we sent those out by email and found
it had no effect whatsoever, no effect at all.
And we think what's going on here
is that oftentimes that more bloodless communication,
that email wasn't surveying to humanize that communication as
much.
It turned out that the best message in an email environment
was to simply tell people how easy it was to donate.
It only takes a minute.
And that seems to be the best message
for that context for that communication channel.
And that's where we get this significant increase as well.
So leave you with the thought that
oftentimes these small changes, we also
need to think about the appropriate context in which
they could be used as well.
But the fact of the matter is that they are all small.
And it turns out that when it comes
to influencing and persuading others,
I think we're gathering more and more evidence that small
can very much be the new big.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MARIS: Tell a little story there.
I know people here are with PG&E. We are at home
and we get these letters that say
how our neighbors are doing.
And certainly, that was like, almost like a game for us,
and we were way over our neighbors.
And so, I felt really bad, and so then we adjusted.
STEVE: Yeah, I think it's the case
that the US, through the Opower Organization,
have made great strides in that field,
those home energy reports.
AUDIENCE: So I'm curious if you could hazard a guess as
to a couple generations down the road.
We learn a couple of, sort of, small changes we can make.
Do you think as generations progressed,
we become as a group, become more immune to things?
So then these kind of things will have to be repeated?
Or is it intrinsic in our nature some how?
STEVE: Yeah, that's a great question.
AUDIENCE: The desensitization as a--
STEVE: Yeah, as we learn more about the influence process
and learn more about the strategies that do effectively
influence and persuade others, do
we become less affected by them, and perhaps desensitized
to them?
So I want to say two things about that.
I think the first thing to recognize
is that it's not just our knowledge of the influence
and persuasion process that extends and grows over time.
Our knowledge of all information extends and grows as well.
So it's not that we are growing in our insights
about one particular field to the expense of others.
So we are constantly being overloaded.
So our need to have quick and efficient mechanisms for making
decisions won't wane, if anything,
it will actually increase.
But I think there is a case to be
made when it comes to the particular tactic
or individual strategy that someone uses.
I'll give you an example.
So it turns out that if you've ever
been given a mint or a chocolate at the end
if your meal when the food server brings
the receipt and the bill along for you,
despite people saying that they are immune to such effects,
it does-- there's one.
It does influence tipping behavior.
So if a food server puts down one mint for each person
at the table along with the bill,
tips typically increase in these studies
that David Strohmetz conducted, by around about 3%.
Interesting, if they put two mints down on the table,
they don't double.
They actually quadrupole.
You get about a 14% increase.
So there's a really good example of us
responding to an obligation.
Someone's given that to us first.
Now if every single restaurant did that,
we would very, very quickly become
desensitized to that particular tactic.
And therefore, I think you would wane.
It would decrease in effectiveness pretty rapidly.
But the fundamental motive that drives
that behavior, our desire to give back
to others what has been given to us first and to live up
or obligations, that doesn't wane at all.
So I think the answer to your question
is that the individual strategies
and tactics themselves could become less effective
over time, but the fundamental set
of principles that shape and guide influence and persuasion
will increase in value as we become more information
overloaded, more stimulus saturated, and require
these shortcuts to good decisions.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned that context
is more powerful than information
or economic reasons, and then delivering this message to us
or persuade with us, could you use context in addition
to all the information you give out as an example to us?
STEVE: Well, that's exactly right.
Now I'm not saying that information, and education,
and incentives aren't important.
They are very, very important.
But consider them-- consider them like this.
Consider them like two legs of a stool.
Two legged stools are often wobbly.
What this set of research presents and offers
is a third stabilizing leg, a third lever.
and this thing about information.
It's great that we have access to just so much information,
easily accessible at the click of a button,
the swipe of a screen.
You are, as an organization, the world's curators
when it comes to information, and I
think that's an actual wonderful thing.
But remember too that we are just
overwhelmed with information.
Just simply pouring more information into an appeal
is much like pouring more water into an already full pail
of water.
It'll just spill out over the sides.
And so it's not information the influences us.
Its information in the right context
that aligns to one of these core motivations.
That, I think, is the key to successful persuasion.
It provides that additional set of tools in that regard.
AUDIENCE: Do you have any more examples
of some interesting situations where
like AB testing might be effective.
Specifically in our marketing and our advertising at Google
where an AB test, the presentation
might make the difference between the sale
of-- the purchase of an ad space versus not,
or something like that?
STEVE: Yeah, I do.
And do you know I think you're just in a wonderful position
to be able to do that with the facilities you actually have.
To craft an appeal, and just make a small, subtle change
to maybe the position of an image on a website,
or the inclusion of a social proof appeal,
or the change in words.
I mean that's essentially what we
did with those charitable studies.
We randomize three different audiences
to receive a different message.
Took 10% of the total audience that
were going to receive these emails.
Figured out which one was the most effective,
so that we can then load all the ballast onto the 90% that
haven't yet received the email.
I'm a huge fan of this idea of test and learn.
And one of the things that new technologies give us now
is the ability do that very quickly, very simply,
often very, very cheaply.
AUDIENCE: Electronics is cheap.
STEVE: Sorry?
AUDIENCE: Electronics is cheep.
It isn't paper.
It doesn't live forever.
STEVE: Yeah.
Yeah, we're in this position now where
we can test and learn a lot more effectively.
Do so on a small scale, but a big enough scale
to recognize there are some robustness to what we're
actually doing, and then we could, as I say,
load our resources on that message or that appeal
that we know is tested the best.
AUDIENCE: You provided a number of examples about big things
that were done.
Affecting a lot of people.
Taxpayers, guests in hotels.
Do you have examples of things that you've
done for one on one interactions with other people
where this comes into play?
STEVE: Yeah.
Yeah, let me give you a couple of those, because, yeah, I
think when we're talking about these big data sets,
large numbers of homogeneous transactions
allow us to be able to present a compelling case in terms
of the robustness.
But oftentimes our influence appeals
are simply down to a one to one interaction
with a colleague or a manager.
So let me give you a couple.
There's one that actually we talk about in the book.
A series of studies conducted by Terri Kurtzberg from Rutgers
University over in New Jersey, who
finds that when we are looking to build
a relationship with someone who is remote
to us, a colleague perhaps in a different city
or even in a different region of the world, something
we can do very, very early on in our email exchanges
to humanize that interaction is to place
an attachment, such a small cartoon.
So she conducted this with one to one negotiations
in organizations and found that when the individual concerned
reached out to a negotiating partner in their organization--
and in this instance, actually attached a Dilbert cartoon,
where Dilbert actually screws up a negotiation-- that
was the kind of ice breaker.
So in an increasingly electronic world we actually live in,
these small steps that just humanize an interaction
could be important things that make the difference to everyone
else that's doing the quick, efficient email thing.
So there is an immediate example in a one to one
situation reaching out to colleagues.
AUDIENCE: So that's an example of changing the context.
STEVE: Yes, I think so.
Yeah, yeah.
It gives a sense of there's someone on the other side,
not just perhaps a faceless email address.
It humanizes that interaction.
AUDIENCE: How can you guard against these techniques being
used on you?
Because sometimes I mean, these techniques
can be used in a good way and also in a bad way.
So is it like just by knowing these techniques it-selves,
is it enough to guard against them?
STEVE: Yeah, I mean that's a great question.
In fact, there's an inherent message underneath that
as well, which is that some of these effects
can be used to exploit, to manipulate, to get people
perhaps to make decisions that they wouldn't ordinarily
make if they had all the facts or all the information
to actually have.
So there's a very important ethical message here.
That one would hope that you'd only use these in a morally,
responsible, and ethical way.
I think that understanding these biases,
understanding how they do affect and influence us can help.
So one could make the argument that any book about influence
and persuasion, or any set of information about the influence
and persuasion process is not only a set of tools
to influence and persuade others,
but arguably could be used as a defense strategy as well.
I'm not entirely convinced that knowing these effects
is going to be enough.
And the primary reason for that is that we just
don't have oftentimes the space to think about
whether they are being used on us.
And I'm particularly these small changes
that are so small they often fly under the radar.
There is very good evidence from the persuasion sciences
and behavioral sciences, more generally,
that people aren't that good at recognizing
what it is in a context that does influence and persuade
them.
There's a really great set of studies
that were conducted here in California.
When researchers went door to door
asking homeowners which message would most
motivate them to reduce their energy consumption.
Perhaps be a little bit more environmentally friendly.
They rated information about how if they change their behavior
it would be beneficial to society
as the biggest motivation, followed
by the impact of having future generations,
followed by the savings they'd actually make.
They dismissed the idea that because their neighbors
were increasingly making these changes
that it would have any influence.
But then, in the tests, when those messages
were distributed across the neighbors, the neighborhoods
rather, that message of social proof
was the only message that had an effect.
So it's a really good demonstration of much
as it might not be comforting to learn,
we often aren't that good at recognizing
what does influence and persuade us.
So I'm not entirely convinced that
just learning about them will be enough.
But I think it's a good step.
AUDIENCE: More and more I think about it,
my takeaway is that you don't really
know what is actually going to work.
And it depends on the context, depends on the people.
The same message may not work in a different crowd.
So if you just had one chance, then almost, you could try,
but you don't know what the effect is going to be.
But if you were able to do some testing,
and so on, and try different options then
you have a possibility like the AB testing
where you could do 1%, 2%, and then go for a larger message.
But like the presentations and so on, you have one shot.
Where you're talking to a VP and saying, hey, here's the thing.
You could deploy the strategy which you talked about,
hey, use two of these.
You don't really know what the effect
is going to be ultimately.
STEVE: Well, I do except that to a certain point.
However, I do think that there is
a huge advantage to understanding
the fundamental principles compared to perhaps just going
with gut feeling.
Yeah?
And if we know that we can increase
the appeal, the effectiveness of our proposition,
by aligning it to one or more of these core motivations,
and that we will be in a better position
than not, that alone has got to be of huge value
compared to sitting at our desks with the spreadsheet in front
of us, the slideshow, whatever it may be,
thinking about, well, what do I think will influence this VP?
There's a set of tools grounded in good evidence that
will increase potentially the likelihood that we
will be successful.
I'm never going to say, and any person that comes into Google
and says that they found the way to persuade 100% of people
100% of the time, you want to kick them out the door.
Because it doesn't exist.
But we can, by making these small changes,
measure bigger affects in our persuasive success.
There's no doubt about that.
AUDIENCE: Got a question on just more personal as far as you
writing this book.
What was your process involved in
like finding time for yourself to get this done?
STEVE: Yeah.
And there's three of us, by the way, as well.
It's not just my book.
Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini
have also contributed equally.
So one thing that has helped is the fact
that we've structured this book slightly differently
to a traditional book, which would have maybe
a core idea and then eight or nine chapters
that it expands on.
This book is made up of actually 53 chapters,
and each chapter is no more than 1,500 words long.
So it presents an insight from persuasion science,
it gives you enough of the underlying mechanism
to get in touch with what's actually going on,
and then it rapidly moves to a, here's
what it means to you at work, at home,
whatever the situation may be.
And so writing them in that way, I think,
was a good exercise, because we could write them
as perhaps blog posts to begin with.
500 or 600 word blog posts.
Scan the latest research, read the abstracts in the journals,
pick those that we think have a good basis of application,
and then extend those chapters.
So we could write them at different times.
And we don't necessarily have to write them sequentially,
one after the other.
We could write them as the data becomes available,
and then think about the application.
So that's one of the approaches we actually made,
and that made the job a lot easier.
Of course, the challenge then is just when
you've got lots and lots of content
is how you actually organize it.
And that's where this idea of these three core motivations
came in.
That we could generally categorized them.
And that's the approach we actually took.
I think the final thing which was useful,
was the fact that-- so I'm not an academic by training.
My two colleagues clearly are.
And so to have that balance of scientifically and academically
informed insights, but then a reality check
that said, OK, well, that's all very well in theory,
but how do you apply in practice?
What does that mean to people in Google, people in organizations
that need to interact each and every day?
How do we operationalize this?
I think that was also an important aspect
of the creation process too.
Well, thank you very much indeed.
[APPLAUSE]