The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence (14 page)

I
n 1989, at the end of the Cold War, two ships off the coast of Malta—the Soviet cruise ship
Maxim Gorky
and the United States navy cruiser
Belknap
—were the location for the Malta Summit between US president George H. W. Bush and USSR chairman Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed after Bosnia and Herzegovina outlined a peace treaty held at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The practice of seeking “neutral” territory when negotiating has a long history, dating back hundreds of years—for example, the Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon I of France and Czar Alexander I of Russia was signed on a raft in the middle of the Neman River.

The practice of negotiating at neutral venues isn’t just limited to international peace negotiations either. When conducting contract negotiations, union representatives will frequently seek out impartial premises, preferring hotel conference rooms to company headquarters.

In the last chapter we discussed how a small change in ceiling height can influence the creative outputs of a meeting. But now imagine that the purpose of your next business meeting is to generate
commercial
results rather than
creative
ones. Could a small change in the venue, so that negotiations are conducted in your own office rather than a less familiar venue, make a big difference too?

Put simply, is there a “home field advantage”?

Ask that question to a sports supporter and you’ll get a clear answer: “Of course it matters.” When a team plays at home there is a general expectation from their supporters that they should perform better than when they play that same opponent on the road. In fact, there is no need to take the fans’ word for this; there is clear evidence to back this up. In practically every sport, other things being equal, teams with the “home field advantage” win more often.

Behavioral scientists Graham Brown and Markus Baer set out to answer whether what most sports fans intuitively know plays out in business too. They started out by recruiting pairs of individuals to take part in a series of contract negotiations, with one assigned the role of purchaser and the other the role of supplier. To replicate what happens in real life, a large part of the negotiation discussion centered on the price, with purchasers wanting to pay as little as possible and with suppliers wanting to charge as much as possible.

The researchers used a clever methodology to manipulate who had “home status” and who had “visitor status”—in other words, whether the negotiators were in their home territory or were visitors in their opponent’s territory. Each of those awarded home status was given the chance to personalize the negotiation environment by displaying their name outside the office, choosing which chair they sat in, placing posters and postcards on the walls, putting details of upcoming activities on a whiteboard, and being the guardian of the office key.

While those with “home status” were preparing their offices, those with “visitor status” were placed in a temporary location and told that negotiations would take place in their opponent’s office, which their opponent supposedly had for a completely unrelated task. Once the residents were ready, the “visitors” were brought in for the actual negotiation.

Consistent with evidence supporting the sports team home advantage, the researchers found that those negotiating in their home territory outperformed the visitors regardless of whether they were purchasers or sellers in the negotiation. This suggests that when it comes to being a persuasive negotiator, a seemingly small decision like where to hold the negotiation could have a much bigger impact on the outcome than you might at first think.

So what exactly is going on? In a sports stadium, 50,000 supporters can help sway a team’s performance, not to mention exert influence over a referee’s decisions, but neither of these factors could have played a role in these negotiations. Instead, and consistent with the ceiling-height studies described in the previous chapter, it was
the setting of the negotiation
that was having an effect. Relative to a neutral location, negotiating “at home” increases one’s confidence in the negotiation, whereas negotiating “away” decreases it.

So next time you are invited to negotiate at an opponent’s location, it may make sense to suggest a small change by agreeing to meet in a neutral location. Better still, ask them to come to
your
office, recognizing that not only will the chances of scoring a better outcome be enhanced, but so will the chances that your colleagues, like any home crowd, will go wild when they hear of your success.

I
n previous chapters we have explored the idea that certain features of an environment or surrounding can have a profound effect on behavior. People are more creative when the room they are in has a high ceiling compared to a low one because the environment subtly primes them to think in less constrained ways. College students give higher evaluation scores to their university lecturer if they have previously been given a hot rather than a cold drink, effectively priming them to literally feel warmer toward their tutor. And negotiators typically get more favorable outcomes if they arrange for deals to be struck on home soil.

In all these examples the small changes made to the environment or context had been arranged by a third party who recognized the big effect they could have without having to make people consciously aware of what was going on. But what if your goal is to influence your own behaviors rather than others’? For example, what small changes could jobseekers make in the way they prepare for a job interview that could spur them to perform better and increase their chances of getting their dream job?

Behavioral scientists Joris Lammers, David Dubois, Derek Rucker, and Adam Galinsky thought that one small change job applicants could make would be simply to think about a time when they felt powerful. The researchers set up a series of studies to test their ideas.

In one experiment, participants were assigned to the role of either a job applicant or interviewer. Before the interviews commenced, those assigned to the applicant roles were further divided into two groups and invited to carry out a warm-up task that they were told “would help them become familiar with writing about themselves.” Half the applicants were given the task of writing about an experience in which they had felt powerful, but the other half were asked to write about an experience in which they had felt powerless.

Having been suitably encouraged to feel either powerful or powerless, the applicants were then shown a job advertisement for a sales analyst role that had recently appeared in a national newspaper. The researchers asked each applicant to assume that they possessed the relevant education and experience demanded for the role and to then write an application letter for this position. Having written the application letter, they were instructed to put it in a sealed envelope and to hand it to a research assistant.

Those application letters were then randomly distributed to the interviewers who, it is important to note, weren’t aware of the writing task the applicants had been asked to undertake. The interviewers were instructed to read the applications carefully, forming an impression of the applicant and indicating how likely they would be to offer the candidate a job.

When the results were analyzed, it was clear that those applicants in the powerful group were much more likely to be offered a job by the interviewers than those in the powerless group, neatly demonstrating how the small act of writing about feeling powerful can make a big difference in the outcome.

But an argument could be made that this experiment only measured the impact of this small change in a written application. It is perhaps unlikely that people in the job market would be offered a position merely on the basis of a letter, however well it might be written. The researchers had thought of this, too. Recognizing that a face-to-face interview is often the context in which decisions about job applicants are ultimately made, they set up another experiment where participants underwent a 15-minute interview to secure a place in a business school.

The set-up for this second study was exactly as the first but with one extra feature. In addition to the two groups who were asked to write about a time when they either felt powerful or powerless, the researchers added a third group as a control condition that didn’t carry out the writing task at all.

Following the interviews, the recruiters assessed the applicants’ persuasiveness and then indicated whether they would admit the applicant or not. Consistent with results from the first experiment, writing about a time when they had previously felt powerful had a big impact on how persuasive the applicant was rated by the interviewer. Compared to the applicants in the control condition, high-power applicants were seen as more persuasive and low-power applicants as less persuasive. It was these differences in persuasiveness that ultimately influenced the overall outcome, and did so by a big margin.

Just under half of those in the control condition who were interviewed were accepted. Only 26 percent of applicants who were asked to write about a time when they felt powerless were accepted. Now compare that figure to the close to 70 percent of applicants who wrote about the time when they felt powerful that were accepted.

Put a different way, recollected power increased the odds of acceptance by 81 percent compared to the control group and by a massive 162 percent compared to the low-power group.

Beyond an obvious small change that you can make when it comes to interviewing for that new promotion or pitching to a new client, these studies have potentially significant implications for recruitment agencies and job centers, too, who could help jobseekers have better interviews by encouraging them to consider and then write down times when they felt powerful. This might be especially important for those who have been unemployed for an extended period. Note, too, that in addition to having people write these things down, it will be important to time this exercise optimally, which, in the case of a job interview, should be shortly before it takes place and not hours, or even days, before.

Interestingly, research conducted by psychologists Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap suggests another potent way to make people feel more powerful: Have them adopt a high-power physical posture. Carney and her colleagues noted that two nonverbal body language dimensions are typically linked to high or low power: expansiveness (the amount of space that one’s body takes up) and openness (whether the limbs tend to be open or closed). Whereas high-power individuals tend to assume expansive and open postures, low-power individuals tend to assume postures that are more constricted and closed.

In their study, the researchers told participants who came to the laboratory that the study was designed to test how the placement of electrodes at different places on the body could influence physiological recordings. In truth, Carney and her colleagues used this cover story as the rationale to ask the participants to pose in one of several different manners. The researchers found that participants who were asked to pose in an expansive and open way (for example, by leaning over a desk with their hands firmly planted on it, or sitting in a chair with their arms behind their heads and their feet on the desk) felt more powerful than those who were asked to pose in a more constricted and closed way (such as by sitting in a chair and crossing their arms and ankles).

Even more fascinating, those asked to engage in the high-power poses were found to have elevated testosterone (a hormone related to dominance) and reduced cortisol (a hormone related to stress). This research shows how such a minor change—how you position your body—can make a significant difference, not only psychologically but also physiologically.

Does this mean that Carney, Cuddy, and Yap would recommend that when you are being interviewed you put your shoes up on your interviewer’s desk? Of course not. But their research suggests that if you do it during a phone interview or shortly before your in-person interview, you’re likely to feel more confident, and that confidence might just be the seemingly small difference that helps you land that big job.

O
n 25 June 1967, an estimated 400 million people from around the globe tuned in to the world’s first-ever live satellite television broadcast,
Our World
. For two and a half hours, it showcased artists from close to twenty countries in an eclectic mix of performances, from opera singers and choir boys to ranchers herding cattle, interspersed with occasional educational segments explaining the workings of the Tokyo subway system and the world clock. It was the closing of this broadcast, however, that was etched into the memories of most viewers.

Having been tasked by the British Broadcasting Corporation to perform a song with an underlying message that would be understood by all, The Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love.” Given that the broadcast occurred at the height of the Vietnam War, some speculated that the song was a not-so-subtle attempt by the song’s author, John Lennon, to deliver propaganda through his art. Regardless, whatever underlying motivations may or may not have existed, few argued with Lennon’s assertion to both the connecting and healing qualities of love.

As a team of persuasion scientists and practitioners, we would assert that love has influencing qualities too. Thankfully, you’ll be relieved to learn that we are not about to suggest that you need to sing to the whole world. Instead we are going to suggest you do something much, much smaller, and that is simply to accompany your influence attempt with a single cue that acts as a signal for love.

Since the dawn of time there can be no doubting the extrao
rdinary
influence that the concept of love has had and continues to have on our lives. It is perhaps surprising then that at least until recently relatively few studies have tried to demonstrate the effects of love thoughts on persuasion.

In one study, conducted by the French behavioral psychologists Jacques Fischer-Lokou, Lubomir Lamy, and Nicolas Guéguen, pedestrians walking alone were stopped on a shopping street to participate in a survey in which they were asked to remember either a meaningful episode of love or a meaningful piece of music in their lives. After they had completed the survey and had walked on for a few minutes, the pedestrians were approached by a person holding a map and asking for directions. Those individuals who had previously been cued to think about the concept of love were significantly more helpful in the amount of time they were willing to spend in the effort.

In another set of studies, Guéguen and Lamy have shown how the simple action of including the word
love
on charitable appeals can lead to significant increases in donations. When researchers added the words
DONATING
=
HELPING
to standard charity collection boxes, they measured a 14 percent increase in donations compared to collection boxes that simply had information about the appeal. However, when the word
helping
was changed to
loving
, so the sign read
DONATING
=
LOVING
, donations increased by over 90 percent. That’s a pretty impressive uplift for a
SMALL
BIG that required a change to just one single word.

Food servers can benefit from the persuasive merits of love, too. In one experiment conducted by Guéguen, when the time came to settle the check, the food server placed the bill, which had been folded in half and placed under a plate, on the table. They then put two candies on top of the plate and left the area. Guéguen’s team carried out this exercise hundreds of times, and at the end of the study period analyzed the data to see what influence this change had on diners’ tips. It was clear that one particular group of diners was not only much more likely to leave a tip, but to leave a significantly larger tip, too. So what was persuading them to do this?

You could be forgiven for thinking that it had something to do with the two candies placed on the plate. Perhaps they were wrapped in red foil, a color synonymous with its connection to love, or maybe the candy was shaped like a heart. But the diners’ increased tipping behavior had nothing to do with the candies at all, and instead had everything to do with the shape of the plate that their check was placed under. Unbeknownst to them, there were three different-shaped plates—round, square, and cardioid (heart-shaped). Those diners whose bills arrived on the heart-shaped plate left tips that were 17 percent higher than those whose checks came on a round plate, and 15 percent higher than the diners who got their checks on the square plate.

So what is going on? The researchers believe that when people are exposed to a sign that is synonymous with love—which, in the case of the restaurant, was a heart-shaped plate—it serves as a cue that activates other behaviors associated with love. And in this case, those were the helping and giving behaviors connected to tipping.

If this love association can increase the tips of a waiter or waitress who delivers the bill on a heart-shaped plate (or maybe even just draws a heart on the check itself), perhaps charity shops could increase the sale of secondhand clothing in their stores by simply changing the shape of the price tags from round or rectangular ones to heart-shaped ones. Fundraisers might include cardioid-shaped images on the donation pages of their websites. Your children might even increase the amount of money they raise for next week’s swimming gala by prominently drawing a big red heart on the top of their sponsorship sheet before asking for sponsors.