To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (13 page)

“Positivity” is one of those words that make many of us roll our eyes, gather our belongings, and look for the nearest exit. It has the saccharine scent of the pumped-up and dumbed-down, an empty concept pushed by emptier people. But a host of recent research testifies to its importance in many realms of life, including how we move others.

Consider, for instance, a difficult negotiation in which each side is trying to sell the other on its position. The conventional view holds that negotiators shouldn’t necessarily be nasty and brutish but that they should remain tough-minded and poker-faced.

A few years ago, a team of behavioral scientists led by Shirli Kopelman of the University of Michigan tested this proposition by simulating a series of negotiations. In one experiment, they presented their participants, executives who were pursuing MBAs, with the following scenario. You’re planning a wedding. Several weeks ago, you made provisional arrangements with a catering company that had provided a good-faith estimate of $14,000 for its services. Now you are about to meet the caterer’s business manager, who’s come bearing bad news. Because of market fluctuations, the estimate has increased to $16,995. What’s more, the caterer has another client ready to take the date if you don’t sign the contract.

Unbeknownst to the participants, they’d been divided into three groups. And while the “business manager” (a specially trained actor) gave each of the three groups precisely the same explanation for the changed price, and offered identical terms and conditions for the catering, she varied her emotional approach. To one group, she displayed positive emotions. She “spoke with a friendly tone, smiled often, nodded her head in agreement, and appeared cordial and inviting.” To another, she “spoke antagonistically, appeared intimidating, and was insistent.” To the final group, she “used an even and monotonic voice, displayed little emotion, and spoke in a pragmatic manner.”
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The business manager’s affect had a significant effect. Those who’d heard the positive-inflected pitch were twice as likely to accept the deal as those who’d heard the negative one—even though the terms were identical. In a subsequent similar experiment, in which negotiators were able to make counteroffers, those who’d dealt with the negative person made far less generous counteroffers than those dealing with someone positive on the other side of the table.
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Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina is the leading researcher on positivity—her catchall term for a basket of emotions including amusement, appreciation, joy, interest, gratitude, and inspiration. Negative emotions, she says, evolved to narrow people’s vision and propel their behavior toward survival in the moment (
I’m frightened, so I’ll flee. I’m angry, so I’ll fight
). By contrast, “Positive emotions do the opposite: They
broaden
people’s ideas about possible actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and . . . making us more receptive and more creative,” she writes.
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The broadening effect of positive emotions has important consequences for moving others. Consider both sides of a typical transaction. For the seller, positive emotions can widen her view of her counterpart and his situation. Where negative emotions help us see trees, positive ones reveal forests. And that, in turn, can aid in devising unexpected solutions to the buyer’s problem. Other studies show that positive emotions can expand our behavioral repertoires and heighten intuition and creativity,
¹⁰
all of which enhance our effectiveness. What’s more, as we saw in Kopelman’s study, emotions can be contagious. That is, the effects of positivity during a sales encounter infect the buyer, making him less adversarial, more open to possibility, and perhaps willing to reach an agreement in which both parties benefit. And when both sides leave the table satisfied, that can establish a sustained relationship and smooth the way for subsequent transactions.

Positivity has one other important dimension when it comes to moving others. “You have to believe in the product you’re selling—and that has to show,” Hall says. Nearly every salesperson I talked to disputed the idea that some people “could sell anything”—whether they believed in it or not. That may have been true in the past, when sellers held a distinct information advantage and buyers had limited choices. But today, these salespeople told me, believing leads to a deeper understanding of your offering, which allows sellers to better match what they have with what others need. And genuine conviction can also produce emotional contagion of its own. For instance, Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin of Northern Illinois University have found that inserting a mild profanity like “damn” into a speech increases the persuasiveness of the speech and listeners’ perception of the speaker’s intensity.
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“I believe in these products,” Hall told me. “I know damn well that when you buy one of these brushes you’re going to have it for years.”

But fear not, those of you who prefer to salt your life’s stew with several shakes of negativity. Remember: Interrogative self-talk is the smart choice when
preparing
to move someone. And positivity during your efforts doesn’t mean coating yourself or others in a thick glaze of sugar. In fact, a particular recipe—a golden ratio of positivity—leads to the best results.

In research she carried out with Marcial Losada, a Brazilian social scientist who uses mathematical models and complexity theory to analyze team behavior,
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Fredrickson had a group of participants record their positive and negative emotions each day for four weeks.
*
She and Losada calculated the ratio of positive to negative emotions of the participants—and then compared these ratios with the participants’ scores on a thirty-three-item measurement of their overall well-being.

What they found is that those with an equal—that is, 1 to 1—balance of positive and negative emotions had no higher well-being than those whose emotions were predominantly negative. Both groups generally were languishing. Even more surprising, people whose ratio was 2 to 1 positive-to-negative were also no happier than those whose negative emotions exceeded their positive ones. But once the balance between emotions hit a certain number, everything tipped. That number was 2.9013, which, for the sake of readers who don’t need the precision of the fourth decimal place, Fredrickson and Losada round up to 3. Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1—that is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassment—people generally flourished. Those below that ratio usually did not.
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But Fredrickson and Losada also found that positivity had an upper limit. Too much can be as unproductive as too little. Once the ratio hit about 11 to 1, positive emotions began doing more harm than good. Beyond that balance of positive-to-negative, life becomes a festival of Panglossian cluelessness, where self-delusion suffocates self-improvement. Some negativity—what Fredrickson and Losada call “appropriate negativity”—is essential. Without it, “behavior patterns calcify.”
¹⁴
Negative emotions offer us feedback on our performance, information on what’s working and what’s not, and hints about how to do better.

Hall seems to have found the proper mix. He says that he tries to begin his day with one or two sales calls that he knows will be friendly. He also seeks positive interactions throughout his day. For instance, in one three-hour stretch I was with him, he visited a restaurant to ask after a friend who worked there who’d been ill. He stopped a longtime customer on the street to catch up on what was going on in his life. He entered a clothing store, was greeted by its proprietor with a hearty “Mr. Fuller!” and the two embraced, albeit in an awkward bro hug. These experiences help him “keep going, keep going” after other visits, where he leaves muttering under his breath at people’s rudeness.

Fredrickson sees the healthy positivity ratios of Hall and others as a calibration between two competing pulls: levity and gravity. “Levity is that unseen force that lifts you skyward, whereas gravity is the opposing force that pulls you earthward. Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded, and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery,” she writes. “Yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant.”
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After: Explanatory Style

At the end of each day, Norman Hall boards a Golden Gate Transit bus and rides back home to his wife in Rohnert Park, about ninety minutes away. Some days he reads. Other times he sleeps. Many afternoons he just thinks. But how he thinks about his day—in particular how he explains its worst aspects—can go a long way in determining whether he succeeds. This is the third component in buoyancy.

One of the towering figures in contemporary psychological science is Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania scholar who helped originate “positive psychology,” which treats happiness, well-being, and satisfaction with the same intensity and analytic rigor with which the field has long treated dysfunction, debility, and despair. One of Seligman’s signal contributions has been to deepen our understanding of optimism.

Seligman arrived at the topic from the other end of the emotional tunnel. As a young scientist in the 1970s, he’d pioneered the concept of “learned helplessness.” First with studies on dogs, and later with research on humans, Seligman pushed back against the prevailing behavioralist view, which held that all creatures, whether they walked on two legs or four, responded systematically and predictably to external rewards and punishments. Seligman’s work demonstrated that after extended experiences in which they were stripped of any control over their environment, some individuals just gave up. Even when conditions returned to normal, and they once again possessed the ability to seek gain or avoid pain, they didn’t act. They had learned to be helpless.

In human beings, Seligman observed, learned helplessness was usually a function of people’s “explanatory style”—their habit of explaining negative events to themselves. Think of explanatory style as a form of self-talk that occurs after (rather than before) an experience. People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something, explain bad events as
permanent
,
pervasive
, and
personal
. They believe that negative conditions will endure a long time, that the causes are universal rather than specific to the circumstances, and that they’re the ones to blame. So if their boss yells at them, they interpret it as “My boss is always mean” or “All bosses are jerks” or “I’m incompetent at my job” rather than “My boss is having an awful day and I just happened to be in the line of fire when he lost it.” A pessimistic explanatory style—the habit of believing that “it’s my fault, it’s going to last forever, and it’s going to undermine everything I do”
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—is debilitating, Seligman found. It can diminish performance, trigger depression, and “turn setbacks into disasters.”
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By the mid-1980s, after learned helplessness had become a staple of introductory psychology courses, Seligman and some colleagues began wondering whether the theory had a sunnier flip side. If people with a downbeat explanatory style suffered, do people with an upbeat style thrive? To find out, Seligman and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Peter Schulman sought a territory awash in disappointment, one whose inhabitants every day faced wave after wave of negative reactions: sales.

The two researchers assembled nearly one hundred sales agents from the Pennsylvania region of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. These men (and a few women) held classic sales jobs. They made cold calls to set up appointments, met with prospects to pitch policies, and earned their living from commissions on the sales they closed. Seligman and Schulman gave all the agents the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), a psychological assessment that offers a series of vignettes, the responses to which locate the person’s explanatory style on a pessimism-optimism spectrum. Then they tracked the agents’ performance over the next two years, measuring how much insurance they sold and the total commissions they earned.

The results were unequivocal. “Agents who scored in the optimistic half of explanatory style sold 37% more insurance than agents scoring in the pessimistic half. Agents in the top decile sold 88% more insurance than those in the bottom decile,” they discovered.
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Next, in response to Metropolitan Life’s concern that about half of its sales agents quit their jobs in the first year, Seligman and Schulman studied a different group—more than one hundred newly hired salespeople. Before these agents started their jobs, the researchers gave them the ASQ. Then they charted their progress. Agents who scored in the pessimistic half of the ASQ ended up quitting at twice the rate of those in the optimistic half. Agents in the most pessimistic quarter were three times as likely to quit as those in the most optimistic 25 percent.
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In other words, the salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style—who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal—sold more insurance and survived in their jobs much longer. What’s more, explanatory style predicted performance with about the same accuracy as the most widely used insurance industry assessment for hiring agents. Optimism, it turns out, isn’t a hollow sentiment. It’s a catalyst that can stir persistence, steady us during challenges, and stoke the confidence that we can influence our surroundings.