The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence (8 page)

Y
es” might just be the most beautiful word in the English language when we’re trying to persuade others to take a particular course of action. But oftentimes getting someone to simply say yes to our requests won’t be enough to get the job done. This is especially the case when there is a delay between someone agreeing to take action and the point at which the action is actually carried out. Many of us will be able to recall times when a colleague or coworker readily agreed to help us—“Sure I’ll bring up your proposal in the meeting next week,” or “Of course I’ll send that report over to you,” or “Leave it to me. I’ll happily connect you with the new VP”—only to subsequently fail to deliver on the promise. It’s probably not the case that people are paying lip service to your requests (or at least one hopes they are not). It’s just that so many other things are vying for their attention that between agreeing to your request and carrying out that task, their initial commitment to you can get crowded out.

Fortunately, persuasion science points the way to a small but often ignored strategy to encourage people to follow through with their initial commitments: Have them form a specific plan for where, when, and how they will go about accomplishing the task to which they have committed. Behavioral scientists call these specific plans
implementation intentions
.

A good illustration of the big differences that can be gained by making a small additional change to help facilitate implementation intention comes from a series of studies conducted by researchers David Nickerson and Todd Rogers. They wanted to know whether asking potential voters to form a specific plan for how they would get to the polls on Election Day would actually influence whether these voters would follow through on their intention to vote. To answer this question, they conducted an experiment in which a large sample of individuals eligible to vote in the 2008 presidential primary were called at home using one of several different scripts.

The first script was the “Standard Script,” which sought to encourage people to vote by reminding them about the election and informing them that voting is an important responsibility. The second script, the “Self-Prediction Script,” was essentially the same as the Standard Script with the addition of a question that simply asked whether the person intended to vote. This Self-Prediction Script was based on previous research suggesting that asking people to predict whether they will perform a socially desirable behavior increases the likelihood that they’ll do so by encouraging them to say yes, which then leads them to feel committed to that course of action.

The third script, however—the “Voting Plan Script”—was identical to the Self-Prediction Script but included three follow-up questions designed to encourage those individuals who signaled their intention to vote to create a voting plan on the spot. These questions were, “What time will you vote?” “Where will you be coming from?” and “What will you be doing beforehand?” The central idea was that by answering these specific questions, individuals would more easily generate a concrete plan that would take into consideration all of their other obligations that day and that it would be easier for them to follow through come Election Day. Finally, there was a control condition that did not involve any contact with the potential voters whatsoever.

Realizing that asking people to report whether or not they voted after the election could produce a whole host of biases and inaccurate data, the researchers instead examined the official voter turnout records to see who did and did not end up actually voting in the election. The results clearly showed that the most effective script was the Voting Plan Script, which increased turnout by more than 4 percentage points compared to control. What’s more, the researchers found that this script had the most impact among households in which there was only a single eligible voter, increasing their turnout by 9.1 percentage points.

Although there are several possible explanations, the evidence appears consistent with the possibility that multiple-eligible-voter households are much more likely to spontaneously generate concrete voting plans than single-eligible-voter households because they have more schedules to juggle. That suggests that the single-eligible-voter households have more of an opportunity to benefit from being asked to generate a plan by an outside party than do multiple-eligible-voter households.

It’s clearly evident from this research that simply hearing “yes” from another person is often the starting point, rather than the ending point, for persuasion. To optimize the likelihood that people will follow through with their intentions, it is necessary to consider asking a couple of extra and specific questions about how they plan to go about accomplishing the goal they’ve promised to pursue.

This doesn’t need to be done in a micromanaging or demanding way. In fact, the questions could simply relate to small details or specific aspects of the task. For example, the leader of a weight loss club could, at the end of each session, gently inquire about how her members will be getting to the next session, what time they will leave work, and if they have made arrangements to have their children looked after. She might even share these implementation intention plans with other members, with two additional benefits. The implementation plans are made public to others (nicely aligning to the commitment and consistency principle), and members might uncover information about each other that cements future commitments—for example, two members realizing that they live close by each other and therefore could travel together to future sessions.

In a slightly different vein, staff members might improve their effectiveness in persuading colleagues from other departments to attend a regular weekly meeting by making a small change to the standard question “Are you able to attend the meeting at 4 p.m. this Wednesday?” and ask instead, “What are your plans just before this Wednesday’s 4 p.m. meeting?”

The remarkable impact made by a small change to a question asked has also been demonstrated in a study designed to help people get back to work. Recognizing that claimants who visited job centers would typically be asked what job-seeking activities they had conducted in the two previous weeks, the question was changed to direct their attention to a future implementation intention: “What activities will you undertake in the next fortnight that could help you to secure a job?” The study, conducted by the UK government’s Behavioural Insight Team, provides an excellent example of a small change resulting in a big difference. In a three-month trial period, jobseekers who were asked to form implementation intention plans were up to 20 percent more likely to be off unemployment benefits after 13 weeks than jobseekers in a control group that was asked the standard question.

This persuasion strategy has been used to promote another really important behavior: immunization. Behavioral scientist Katherine Milkman and her colleagues conducted a study at a large company offering free flu vaccinations to its employees. In this experiment, all eligible employees received a mailing reminding them to get a flu vaccination at one of the company’s on-site clinics, and that reminder included dates and locations of those clinics. There were two additional conditions to this study. In the first condition the reminder card prompted employees to write down the date that they were planning to get the flu shot. The second condition was similar to the first condition but took the implementation intentions one step further: In this condition, the reminder card not only asked for the date but also the
time
that the employee was planning to get the flu shot. The researchers found that the reminder card that prompted employees to write down just the date boosted flu vaccinations by 1.5 percentage points relative to the standard control message. But the card that prompted the more specific information—both the date and the time—resulted in a boost of flu vaccinations by 4.2 percentage points.

Although these percentage increases may seem small, consider the big difference they could make in a large multinational company: The vaccinations could prevent these employees not only from having to endure the flu, but also from passing it around the office, infecting others. What’s more, this study is especially interesting in that, unlike the other implementation intention studies we described above, the employees were asked to state (or in this case, to write down) their intentions in private rather than in public. While the studies we have previously discussed typically advocate commitments that are made publicly, this study suggests that even commitments made privately can be effective, demonstrating the versatility of this persuasion strategy.

S
ometimes, no matter how hard we try and no matter how well informed we are about how to persuade others effectively, our strategies will fall short. There can be dozens of reasons why an otherwise properly employed influence strategy fails to yield the desired results when trying to convince people to do something they
should
but do not necessarily
want
to do. Regardless of whether you’re trying to convince someone to support your favorite charity, eat healthier, switch their business from their current supplier to your firm, or just adopt a new way of working at the office, one of the most common explanations for lack of persuasive success is also one of the simplest: People recognize they should change their behavior, but they just don’t feel like doing it
right now
.

Research conducted by social psychologists like Dan Gilbert, Yaacov Trope, and Nira Liberman suggests that people typically think about events that occur in the
near future
and events that occur in the
distant future
quite differently. Whereas individuals tend to think about near future events in very concrete terms, they are much more likely to think about events that seem far off in the future in more abstract terms. For example, if you were to ask your coworkers to volunteer for a weekend at a local homeless shelter, their evaluations of that task are likely to differ depending on whether you’re asking them to help out this upcoming weekend or on a weekend eight months from now. If you are asking them about the upcoming weekend, they are likely to focus on the concrete costs they will incur if they agree to volunteer—for instance, they won’t have the opportunity to go shopping, they might miss the weekend’s big game on ESPN, or they’ll simply lose the chance to catch up on some sleep.

On the other hand, if you are asking your coworkers to volunteer on a weekend eight months from now, they are more likely to evaluate your proposition at a much more general level, including how the request relates to their own general values, morals, and ideologies. Therefore, those considering the request to volunteer many months from now are less likely to ask themselves whether they
want
to do it and more likely to ask themselves whether they
should
do it. With the subsequent realization that being helpful is consistent with their values, they become more likely to say yes to that request and follow through on that commitment.

Behavioral scientists Todd Rogers and Max Bazerman call this commitment strategy “future lock-in,” and deploying it requires making a small but important change in your approach. Rather than asking people to agree to a change right away, you should ask them to agree to a change that will be implemented at some point in the future—assuming of course that it is a change that benefits them and ideally aligns with their personal values. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this small modification, researchers told study participants about a proposal to increase the price of gas by 20 cents a gallon as a way of helping to reduce overall gas consumption. However, half the participants were told the policy was going to be implemented as soon as possible, and the other half were told that it would be implemented in four years. When the policy was expected to be put in place immediately, only 26 percent supported it, but when it was expected to lie dormant for four years before being officially implemented, many more people, over 40 percent in fact, were willing to support the gas price rise policy. A number of other experiments run by the same team of researchers showed a similar effect in other domains, such as charitable giving and health-related choices.

Behavioral economists have shown the effectiveness of this technique in another important domain: saving for the future. In one of the most powerful demonstrations of this persuasion strategy,
Nudge
coauthor Richard Thaler and his research colleague Shlomo Benartzi showed that they could drastically boost participation rates in 401(k) plans. Using what they called the “Save More Tomorrow” program, rather than asking workers to participate in the program immediately, they instead asked workers to commit to putting a portion of their future salary increases into the plan. Although this program was successful for many reasons, one central reason is that it effectively shifted workers’ thoughts about the program from the concrete terms associated with it (e.g., “I’ll have less money in my paycheck each month”) to more abstract terms about how it would help them achieve their broader values and goals (e.g., “I should do this because it’s important and the right thing to do for my family”).

The results of this research suggest that if you believe that you will encounter resistance with your requests for an immediate behavior change, you might be more successful if you instead ask your target to commit to the change at a given time in the future. For example, imagine you are a manager who has been charged with persuading employees to adopt a new system or procedure in your organization that will be beneficial to all concerned. Imagine further that, because previous attempts to install change in the organization haven’t been as successful as had been hoped, you expect a struggle to get these plans implemented. One small difference in approach would be to get a head start by asking employees to agree to making the change in three months’ time. Doing so would likely result in greater initial agreement to the new procedures as well as in increased future commitment,  compared to just asking them to accept immediate change.

Another potential area for deploying future lock-ins is in subscriptions to common services such as Internet broadband, cable TV, and cellular phone plans. In order for customers to get the most attractive deals, suppliers often require them to be immediately locked in to a fixed-length contract of, say, 18 or 24 months. When learning about these instant lock-ins, some customers might object because they have focused on the immediate and concrete costs of the deal. However if that contractual lock-in was to occur three months after the beginning of the contract, it might not only reduce the overall number of customer objections, but also benefit the supplier by allowing them to keep each customer for an extra three months. And everybody wins, since the customers would have flexibility in that first three months to decide whether they were satisfied with the service.

Of course we recognize that in an ideal world it would be preferable not to have to wait at all. But sometimes, as we occasionally pointed out to our editors, a little late is certainly better than never.