One of the most popular courses at Yale's management school tackles the topic of influence and persuasion, lecturer of that class Zoe Chance, says these skills can help change the world - but ethics has to be foremost.
Yale behavioural scientist Dr Zoe Chance Photo: Ian Christmann
Chance is a behavioural scientist, writer, teacher, researcher, and climate philanthropist, and she's obsessed with the topic of interpersonal influence.
In her new book, Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change and Making Good Things Happen, Chance has explained what she calls the new rules of persuasion and the science of encouraging people to say yes.
Her work essentially is directed at helping people live richer, happier, healthier lives, and her book draws on research in neuroscience, psychology and behavioural economics along with her teaching at Yale.
Chance talked to Jim Mora about why people are more inclined to say yes to us if we become more comfortable saying no.
She says it's important to help people feel more comfortable in themselves to help them connect better with other people.
"Both of these things together have us being more influential and persuasive as we come across as being more confident. A lot of the influence we have, and the charisma that other people perceive has to do with our attention on them and our ability to listen to them and focus on them.
"Our generosity to others has other people be more generous with us with their attention."
Behavioural economics describes two systems (technically known as system 1 and system 2) underlying our decisions, Chance said. She has named them the judge and the gator (as in both alligator and negator).
"These two systems ... are in competition and collaboration to determine 100 percent of our thinking and our behaviour. And what people don't realise is that while the gator part is unconscious and the judge part is conscious - even though we perceive ourselves as being more conscious - actually the unconscious part is vastly more powerful and influential.
"So when we're thinking of influencing someone else we need to consider first and foremost the gator part, which is fast, intuituive, automatic, habitual, emotional."
Alligators are a good mascot for this thinking reflex she said, as both are incredibly efficient.
"They can go up to three years without eating anything at all, so their dominant response to almost everything happening in the world, is nothing. Their dominant response is to ignore almost every opportunity or potential threat or random thing going by.
"And that's what people do, and we're trying to influence them but mostly what's happening is they're just ignoring us altogether."
With alligators, to get them to respond to meat thrown toward them, to get any response "you've got toget it in their bite-zone, make it easy," she said.
And for people that's true too: "Ease is the most powerful determinant of behaviour."
She said people tend to think of facts, figures, data and proof as what is needed to sway the judgement side of our decision-making and to convince people to an offer or argument, but that misses an important step.
"The truth is information isn't influentual until they're already interested, and then, as they process the information being influenced by the gator they are influencing the judge to rule on the case - in our favour."
Chance's behavioural change strategies have been used as the basis of Google's global food guidelines, aiming to assist people to make healthier choices.
She said the use of influence to do good things is at times curtailed because of people's concerns about the ethics of using it and whether it is manipulation - and that sometimes means opportunities for mutual benefit, and to do good, are lost.
"I believe that if we define manipulation too broadly to mean just doing things that people don't know that we're doing to try to influence them, what happens is we hold ourselves back from trying to influence people because we don't want to be manipulative.
"So I believe it's helpful if we take other people's wellbeing into consideration when we define manipulation. Instead of saying: this is ethical manipulation, to say: 'actually it's not manipulation if you're doing something that does consider their wellbeing - and if they knew what you were doing they wouldn't be upset about it."
"So I don't see Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King as being manipulative, but I understand how ... other people would characterise them that way."
Another common hang-up people have about influence which "keeps us playing small" is the idea they should not ask for too much. That if they ask for too much they will be seen as greedy, and that will make the person they are interacting with not like them.
But, Chance said research showed that was not true. Asking for more can lead to more ceiling for you to give concessions when it comes to negotiations, which can help sway the other party's decision process and make them feel you are generous because of giving those concessions, as well as to feel they themselves are a good negotiator.
But one of the best tools in using influence is to take a step back, and to rethink our own motivations, she said.
People who are passionate, creative and invested in their cause tend to draw other people's interest and buy-in, so if we don't have that particular glint in our eye, we should take the time to think about what it is we really want.
She said it was helpful to drill down into our own thinking and motivations here, and to "test" and "experiment", to explore this, because better direction and understanding of what we want and why would ultimately help us end up at the best direction - as well as help us to get there and help us influence those who can help.
