But how much has been slipping through your fingers by having a team that keeps aiming its arguments to that part of the brain that’s only in charge of 5 % of the decisions? Other businesses are starting to recognise the need for this skill in their team members. People are catching on. Don’t get left behind.
Why is it that people who have been in the same industry for a long period of time admit the same thing? They tell you it seems to be getting harder to convince other people. In sales specifically, you might hear admissions like, it’s getting harder to sell people. I didn’t have to make this many proposals to get this little amount of yeses.
Today I’ll explain the science that lets us understand why this is happening. Not only where you understand how people make the lion’s share of their decisions, but you’ll also understand why what your sales, marketing and advertising teams are doing is getting less and less effective.
You’ll understand how your team’s efforts in PR and customer service are finding it harder to build trust and get their message heard because of people’s shortening attention spans and expectations. Your people in HR are likely experiencing difficulty getting people to accept and act on changes or engage with educational programs.
And finally, leadership. Why is it harder now to build and maintain trust with staff or management teams to get them to follow when maybe past decisions might have created doubt? Why is it harder now than it used to be to get team members to connect with a broad strategy and connect to it on a daily basis? And perhaps most importantly, why do we struggle with moving people from just agreeing to actually buying in and acting on it?
I’m going to be leaning on the work of Professor Daniel Kahneman, who died in March, 2024. Daniel Kahneman was a professor in psychology and a behavioral scientist. He won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, which may be somewhat unexpected. I mean, what would someone in the field of psychology and behavioral science figure out that had such a big impact on economics that he’d win a Nobel Prize for it?
The explanation is that a significant portion of his work was focused on decision-making, and decisions have a profound impact on economics. Old economics had the belief human beings are logical, rational creatures, and we would therefore use logic and reason to formulate our decisions. Well, Daniel Kahneman proved that that was incorrect, and that was one of the main reasons why he won a Nobel Prize.
Here are some of the automatic activities that system one would do. Judging the difference in distance between two objects. Turning to the direction of a sudden sound. Detecting hostility in a voice. Reading words on a large billboard. Understanding simple sentences. And driving a car on an empty road.
The thing to remember for now is that system one works fast, effortless and automatic. It produces impressions, intuitions and feelings without voluntary control. And it operates below the level of conscious awareness, most of the time. It is the intuitive part of the brain. I’ll circle back to system one in a moment, but let’s jump to system two now.
System two often accepts the quick answers provided by system one without questioning them, unless it is forced to intervene. Here are some of the diverse activities that system two would do, but they require attention and are disrupted when the attention is not available. Bracing for the starting gun at a race.
Focusing on a voice of a particular person in a crowded or noisy room. Monitoring the appropriateness of your behavior in a social situation. And parking a car in a tight car space. Comparing the overall value of two washing machines and checking the validity of a complex logical argument.
Now, I need to remind you of the caveat. It requires attention to use system two. And we have a limited budget for attention. When your attention is diverted elsewhere, or you have run out of your budget for attention, you will not perform these tasks well. So, if we compare system one and system two, we could summarise this way. System one is fast. System two is slow. System one almost takes no effort. Whereas it takes a lot of effort to use system two. System one is automatic, always working, listening in the background. Whereas system two is lazy and typically won’t engage unless forced to.
When we’re driving home and sometimes you can’t remember what turnoff you took, that’s because you were not driving, system one was.
You could leave the hardware store and head to the library where you can borrow books on timber types, door construction, types of glass, varnishes, paint. And for a month or three, you could educate yourself about everything involved about making a quality door. You could then do some courses in door construction to learn the latest techniques. And finally, five months later, you could return to the hardware store and make an educated decision about which door to buy.
But I’m guessing you don’t have the time for that. Instead, you might remember that expensive things tend to be better. Expensive equals good. And if you just spend a little bit more money than you were originally thinking, the chances are that you will get a door that is of higher quality, will keep your family safer and will last you longer. And you know what? Chances are is that that is exactly what will happen. It is not guaranteed, but most of the time more expensive things tend to be better which is precisely why that rule of thumb is in your head.
Now it’s not guaranteed that this is always the case. Sometimes things that are more expensive are not the best choice, have lower quality and don’t last as long, which is why we say that system one is error prone. It doesn’t work perfectly all the time, but most of the time it does. And so the shortcut, the rule, expensive equals good, affords us a shortcut to a quicker decision. And we can move on with our day.
The internet wasn’t around yet, so I was working my way through the various brochures to find the right speakers for me. With a brochure in hand, went to consult my father, Martin, because he was an enthusiastic amateur cinematographer using Kodak Super 8, 8mm cellulose film for home movies. This was before the era of VHS and Video 8 and Hi8 video. Goodness, I feel all of a sudden.
I appreciated my dad’s input on Hi-Fi and electrical equipment. So in a friendly and supportive way, he made me aware of the fact that I had likely selected those speakers because they looked cool and they had those round circular drivers exposed and because the speakers were big. He pointed out that what was actually most important about speakers was actually the sound. He made time for me and together we went to a hi-fi store called Correct in Rotterdam, where they had a large showroom with speakers where you could sit down and listen to them. It included the ones that I had selected from the brochure and many others.
You can guess what happened, of course. The ones I selected, whilst they were cheaper, sounded very ordinary. They looked great though. But quickly we had found other speakers that sounded a lot better. One of the main contenders was this set of speakers which were still reasonably big, which was of course important to me. And they were from this speaker company that I didn’t know called JBL. The front of the speakers was covered with this gray speaker fabric.
Well, I had to admit that the sound was awesome. They looked reasonably boring compared to the ones that I had selected, which had those cool circular drivers showing on the outside. My dad and the salesperson assured me that this was a high quality brand with a long history and that these speakers would last me for many years. Of course, they were more expensive, which my bank account didn’t agree with. But having heard the difference and the advice from my father and the sales assistant, it made sense to purchase these speakers.
My father assisted me somewhat with the financial restrictions that I had and the decision was made. I remember being happy with the purchase, but also disappointed that they looked so boring. When I came home and set them up in my room, I was delighted to discover that the front fabric was on a frame and actually came off, revealing even more cooler looking drivers underneath. I was even ⁓ more happy.
When I found out that when I went to large music events or discotheques, which I didn’t used to go to that often, it was typically enormous JBL speakers plastered all over these professional places. And then of course I was proud as punch that I had the same speakers in my bedroom.
I knew my father knew a lot about audio and visual equipment. The principle of authority shows us that we’ve followed the advice of people who have superior knowledge and wisdom compared to us. The same thing applied for the salesperson who clearly knew what they were talking about, which again is activating the principle of authority.
The fact that the company Correct had set up an entire room for the purpose of its customers being able to sit down and in a comfortable environment, listen to all the different speakers, would have activated the principle of reciprocity and liking. I can’t remember this detail, I mean, it’s 36 years ago, but I imagine that the salesperson would have told me which of the speakers they had were the most popular. This would have been another shortcut for my brain. More information for system one. Social proof. We follow the actions of others.
My mother always used to comment that once an idea jumped into my head, I always needed to act on it immediately. And I have to admit that I’m still very much like that. But I would guess that between the idea of me needing speakers and finding the brochure and buying them in the shop, it would have been probably less than five days. Had I been a more patient person, and discovered the JBL brand and then subsequently figured out that this brand was often used in large public events and discotheques, this would have activated the principle of authority again.
Now, don’t worry, I will explain all these principles in much greater detail in coming episodes. But all of these principles are information system one can act on. They are all shortcuts for the brain to use. And those speakers, by the way, in case you’re wondering, they came with me to Australia. They still sound amazing and they get used nearly every day. Maybe in the end they’ll end up in the home of my daughter one day. A great example, reinforcing the rule that expensive equals good.
Come to think of it, the tight ass Dutch teenager inside of me got control and I bought some relatively inexpensive speakers, which after plugging them in clearly were very low quality, so they’re going back. Nowadays, with easy access to the internet, doing research and shopping is very different. You probably recognise some of my behavior in your own. I jumped on YouTube and I looked for a review on desktop speakers.
Some young fellow had a whole bunch of speakers that he had tested and was sharing his insights. While I’m not sure about his qualifications or level of authority, his insights are the opinion of someone else. And we follow the advice of others which is social proof. He had 117,000 views on that video, so clearly other people like me value what this guy had to say. So listening to him was probably safe to do. I did look up JBL specifically, but they don’t seem to offer this type of speaker at this time. They did used to have something, but on various websites people had left poor reviews about these speakers.
I could have investigated further, could have rung stores, I could have spoken to salespeople, but seeing the average score people had given about these speakers was a shortcut for me. And I quickly drew the conclusion that this is something that JBL might not be good at. Decision made because of social proof. And I moved on.
First of all, you might be puzzled to realise that many of our daily decisions are made on autopilot without system two, the lazy controller, even engaging. Secondly, you might be wondering why this percentage is increasing. This has to do in part with our attention span. Back in the 80s, we had an attention span of 20 minutes. You might be familiar with the story that the attention span of the goldfish is nine seconds. Our attention span is now seven seconds. Yes, we’ve been beaten by the goldfish.
You pick up the phone because you need to make a call. You unlock it and immediately 26 apps pop up asking you to decide to interact with them. You notice the red dots on social media and messenger app icons indicating messages and notifications which are asking you to make a decision to interact with them. You might open one app which leads to a flow of information towards you. You open a message which might lead to another message, maybe a link to something else, a website, a news article. 20 minutes later you put the phone down and you think to yourself, what did that pick that thing up for?
You didn’t even last seven seconds. Two seconds you were gone. As Dr. Cialdini would say, we live in the most information overloaded stimulus saturated environment that has ever existed on the planet.
Well, let’s look at that in an example. Let’s imagine the process of buying a house, which is a pretty large and impactful decision in any of our lives. When you decide to start investigating buying a house, you might start on a real estate app or a map to decide what area you want to live in. You might consider whether a suburb is a good investment over time, taking into account how surrounding suburbs appreciate in value compared to this one.
You might investigate the schools that are in the area because the kids have got to go to a good school, and you might calculate how much time and fuel it would cost you to drive to work every day from that suburb. You may then proceed to inspect homes that are for sale. Armed with a notebook or a spreadsheet, you take notes of everything. The number of rooms, their sizes, and the size of the garden or balcony. You pay attention to how close transmission lines and street power lines are to the house because you don’t want to have a front row seats to the radiation that they produce. You might consider the distance from shops and many other things and you write it all down. You think about the impact that this will have and which home is right for you.
Now that is all system two work. But how many times have you spoken to someone and they’ve just bought a house and they say something along the lines of, well, it was a bit above our budget, but we just love the place. We had to buy it. That’s not logic and reason. That wasn’t system two. They did do all this system two work but when decision-making time came, system one took over. There were other decision triggers in the situation.
This is what happens unless we know the science. When we sit down and contemplate how we’re going to get people to interact with our lead generating efforts, to agree to a meeting or a call, or how to convince people to buy our product or service, to follow our requests, to do as we ask, to participate in training and trust what we are saying, to buy into our vision, to not only say yes, but also do what they say they would do, to get our team members to form a strong, loyal bond to the company and each other, to be motivated to do their work.
When you and your team members are sitting down and coming up with ideas to accomplish that, you and your team members are consciously thinking and you are therefore in system two. And system two tends to come up with the types of information that needs system two in the other person to process and consider that information. We can see from the increasing dependence on system one for decision-making, indicated by the percentage increasing from 90 % to 95 % or maybe more.
And from the shortening attention span of our audience, the people receiving our message, that they don’t have the time or the bandwidth anymore to process your system two rational reason why your proposal is a good match for them. You and your team are therefore causing more uncertainty in your audience and they push back from you and your wonderful, genuinely good for them, good value proposal. They decide not to decide. And when that happens, your team members experience the fact that they didn’t get a yes as having received a no. But in too many cases, that could have been a yes. If they had only used the available science to identify the facts that were naturally an ethically in the situation that your audience wants and needs to hear from you in order for them to make an easier system one decision.
Maybe now you can start to appreciate and contemplate the impact this has had on your success so far. You might be successful because you’re turning a nice profit, but how much has been slipping through your fingers by having a team that keeps aiming its arguments to that part of the brain that’s only in charge of 5 % of the decisions? This also explains why the impact of making communication changes based on the science of ethical persuasion can have such a big impact in recovering those successes that are lost every day without using that science. Let me highlight a few examples of how big an impact that can have.
In coming episodes, you’ll hear how by adding a single sentence to what a receptionist was saying to incoming callers, which included another one of Dr. Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, booked appointments went up by 20 % with a single sentence. And when Bose was having an underperforming sales campaign and Dr. Cialdini recommended a change in the headline of their ad, which of course activated yet another one of the principles, sales results shot up by 45%.
The impact of not using this is so significant, you cannot afford to keep trying to do without the science or to let your competition get the hang of this before your team does. This is, I would say, one of the reasons that organisations like the World Economic Forum rank this skill so highly and consider it urgent to be developed.
Additionally, research done by Cashnet suggests that other businesses are starting to recognise the need for this skill in their team members. People are catching on. Don’t get left behind. Daniel Kahneman says, it’s system one that runs the show. That’s the one that you need to move. And he has been asked many times, how do we do that? How do we move system one? And many times he has answered, talk to Dr. Cialdini. Because what Dr. Cialdini and I, as well as other Cialdini Certified Trainers teach, is all about moving system one and providing your team with a systematic approach to use their full brain power their system two to come up with genuine information that qualifies as decision triggers for system one in your audience.
If you’d like to learn more about system one and system two, then I’d recommend getting Daniel Kahneman’s book, which is called Thinking Fast and Slow. If I’ve explained it clearly enough, and you’d rather read about persuasion science, then consider Dr. Cialdini’s book, Influence. Alternatively, if you already own it, dive back into it. If you’ve read or listened to Dr. Cialdini’s book and would like more practical viewpoints on how to apply what you’ve read in Influence, then the book I wrote with some of my colleagues is an excellent complement to Dr. Cialdini’s book. It is called How to Hear Yes More Often. You could purchase it and Influence together at your favorite online retailer. Reading is great, but it rarely provides you or your team with the application skills or confidence to utilise them.
If you’re ready for you and your team to learn how to be ethically more persuasive with others so that you increase the chances that others say yes to you, if you want to build relationships, reduce uncertainty, and motivate people to action in a scientifically sound way that is fun to learn and doesn’t take that long, then I’d be delighted to assist you through training or consulting.
Visit my website for more information, some complimentary tools, or to book a discovery call.
