How to Get People to Do Stuff

Susan Weinschenk: I really don't think so, although I can see where you get it from the title. I really wanted a title for the book that was simple and easy to understand. I actually did some research on book titles before I came up with this title, and I want this book to appeal to a broad audience and I'm also hoping that it's one of those books that lasts for a long time. And when I did my little research on book titles, I found that book titles that had really simple words that were easy to understand were the ones that lasted the longest, so that's actually why I picked that title. But, back to your question about tricking people, no, it's really not about tricking people. The idea is that if you understand about psychology and about what makes people tick you're going to be better able to interact with people, to decide in a particular situation what strategy should you use in order to motivate people to do something. And I don't mean do something that they really don't want to do, but there are so many things that we all want to do together. There's when you're working on a team and you want the team to gel together, you're working with an employee and you're hoping to motivate them to do the best work they can do, and I don't think these are bad things to try and get people to do. I mean, essentially, you're encouraging them to do things that are both good for them and good for whatever team or organization they're working with.

Rachel Salaman: What do you make of the increased interest in persuasion techniques that we've seen in recent years?

Susan Weinschenk: Well, it's interesting. There does seem to be a lot out there on persuasion techniques, and I think the interest in persuasion kind of comes and goes, but I think some of the recent interest these days has to do with all the really wonderful research about neuroscience and the brain and psychology that is coming out. So, I think people are always interested in how to be persuasive and how to motivate other people, but now we actually know so much more about the science behind that.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you describe seven drives that motivate people, and you show us how we can use knowledge about those drives to get people to do things. If we could just talk about the first one now, which is the need to belong. What are your main points here?

Susan Weinschenk: We are very social animals and we have a very strong need and desire to belong to a group, and that need motivates us so much. We will do a lot, and sometimes avoid some behaviors, in order to stay connected to a particular group; I sometimes call this the "tribe." We all have a tribe that we want to be part of, so whether this has to do with belonging to a set of friends, or belonging to a group at work, or feeling like you're part of your neighborhood, this need to belong is really strong and you can use that need to belong to motivate people to take certain actions.

Rachel Salaman: So, could you give us an example of that?

Susan Weinschenk: Well, in that chapter I talk about, for instance, what makes ideas go viral in social media, on YouTube. If you understand what motivates people then you can use that to help your particular video, your particular idea go viral. For instance, we know from the research that a message or video or an article that invokes a strong feeling, actually either positive or negative, will be something that will tend to go viral – people will pass it on to others. We know that if there's passion involved from a particular person, if a person is making an appeal and they're obviously very passionate about it, that will tend to go viral. So, if you want your message to go viral this is something that you might want to think about, because what you're doing is getting people excited about the idea and they feel that they want to belong, they want to be part of this idea.

Rachel Salaman: Your book is packed with strategies, and another of the strategies in this section is an unusual one: get people to say "no." How does this work?

Susan Weinschenk: Well, this is actually based on two ideas: one is the idea of reciprocity, and the other is the idea of concession. So, let me talk about reciprocity first. What we know is that when we do a favor for someone they feel indebted to do a favor back to us, and this is largely unconscious, as in most of the things I talk about in the book are largely unconscious. So, if I do you a favor you will feel like you need to do a favor back to me. So, keeping that in mind, what happens is, if I make a request of you, if I ask you to do something and you say, "no," now I have made a request but you said, "no," so you owe me, you're going to feel like you owe me. So, then if I come back with another request that's perhaps not quite as large a request, a little easier for you to do, you're going to actually tend to say "yes" because you want to get rid of that feeling of indebtedness. So, if you can actually ask people a question that you think they'll say "no" to first, you have a much higher probability that the next question they'll say "yes" to, compared to if you had just asked them that second question first.

Rachel Salaman: Now that is one of the strategies that some people might think, "Ooh, but I'll be manipulating someone if I act like that." What would you say to that to put their mind at rest, ethically?

Susan Weinschenk: You know, I think ethically we do have to think about this all the time, and so it's a question of what you're asking the person to do and trying to get them to do, is that a bad thing to try and get them to do? Certainly you could use the strategies in the book to get people to do stuff that's not good for them, and I hope you don't do that, so I think it's up to all of us to really stop and think, "OK, this thing I'm trying to get people to do, is it bad for them, is it bad for society to have them do this?" And so I think if I'm trying to get my children to clean up their rooms, that's not a bad thing, if I'm trying to get my team at work to work harder, I don't think that's a bad thing. So, I think you do have to stop and ask yourself, "Before I use any of these strategies, if I succeed and the person I'm dealing with does do what I'm trying to motivate them to do, is that OK? Is that bad for them in any way?"

Rachel Salaman: So, for you, there are no ethical issues in how you get someone to do something, as long as what you get them to do is ethical in itself, is that right?

Susan Weinschenk: I think in terms of the strategies in this book, yes, people ultimately do have a choice about whether they agree, or say "yes" or "no."

Rachel Salaman: Now, you say that laughter is important in persuasion. Can you explain this and tell us how it might work in a business setting, because you don't think of offices as being full of laughter, do you?

Susan Weinschenk: Laughter is very interesting, one of the things that laughter does is bond a group. So, if you want a group of people to bond it's really helpful if you can get them to laugh about something. And you don't have to use a joke to do that, in fact, most laughter doesn't come from a joke, most laughter just comes from everyday conversation, but we know that if we can get people to do something together at the same time and laughter is part of this, or singing or dancing (although I think you're more likely to have laughter in the workplace than you are singing and dancing!), but anything that you can get people to do synchronously, so that they're doing it together in real time. When that happens, the research now shows that there's a chemical, oxytocin, that is released, and oxytocin is a chemical that bonds the group, it's the bonding chemical, when you release oxytocin you feel closer to whoever happens to be near you at the time, so that's one reason why laughter is so important, it bonds the group.

Rachel Salaman: Also, in this section you say that competition isn't always a good motivator, which will surprise some people. So, when does competition work, and when doesn't it work?

Susan Weinschenk: The research on competition shows that when there are 10 or fewer competitors, or when you think there are 10 or fewer competitors, they don't even have to be physically present. If someone just tells you, "Oh, there's eight people that are competing for this job," or whatever it is that you're competing for, when there are 10 or fewer competitors then you will be more motivated that the competition will tend to improve your performance. The other thing is that this is one of the very few areas where there are gender differences, so, in most of the research that I talk about and write about, there are very few gender issues, and this happens to be one of them. So, we know that competition is more motivating for men than it is for women, so if you have a group of 10 or less men and you introduce competition, that will improve their performance; if you have a group of 10 or less women, that will improve their performance but really just a tiny bit, and if you have a mixed group of men and women, the men will tend to improve in performance but the women will not, they may even go down in performance. And then, for everyone, as the group gets larger, like, if you're competing with 20, 30, 100 people, then the effect on performance tends to go down and down and down. So competition actually works best if you've got fewer than 10 people, and if they're mainly guys.

Rachel Salaman: The second of your seven drives in the book is habits. Can you explain how this fits in to getting people to do things?

Susan Weinschenk: Yes. It might at first not make a lot of sense, because you think, well, habits have to do with me, not getting other people to do things. But I think that some of the new research on habits is so interesting and surprising; we realize now that creating a new habit can be very simple and easy. We tend to think that it's hard to create a new habit, it takes a long time and a lot of intention from the person who is going to have the habit, but actually habits can be very easy to create. Eighty percent of what you do in a day is based on habit, and you've created all of these habits without even realizing you've created them. So, the key to habit creation is, if you want to create a new habit, you have to connect it to an existing habit. So, I explain this in the book, and obviously you could use this on yourself, but you could also use it as a strategy with other people, because you can set up a situation. If you know someone has a particular habit, then you can set up a situation where you can encourage them to create a new habit by attaching it to an existing one.

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Rachel Salaman: The next drive you talk about in the book is the power of stories, and in this section you talk about personas and how it can be useful to turn on a persona in some situations. Could you just talk a little bit about that, and also address how people can stay authentic if they're turning on a persona?

Susan Weinschenk: Yes, so what I mean by persona is the self-personas that we all have. So, essentially we all tell ourselves stories, and, again, most of this happening unconsciously. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, and we have many self-personas. I have a little story about who I am as an author, I have a little story about who I am with my family, I have another story around I sing jazz vocals with a small group, so I have my persona as the jazz vocalist, so we all have these little stories and these are our self-personas. So, in the book I talk about the fact that if you are trying to communicate with either an individual or with a group of people, you will be much more be able to really have your message resonate with them if you understand what are the self-personas that they have that are active. So, for instance, if I'm giving a talk to my local school board and I want to see if I can influence them to spend some money on fixing up some part of the school building, I'm going to be much more effective if I know what are the self-personas that those people have, what are the stories that they tell themselves. For instance, you might have someone on the school board where they're telling themselves, "I am a very careful person with the budget. What I really like is that we make our decisions very carefully and we spend money only when it's absolutely necessary." The message then that I would give that person about my project and how to motivate them to say "yes" to spend some money to fix up the building would be very different than if their self-persona was, "I'm a person who feels that children come first in the community." Now, both of those self-personas are valid, there's nothing wrong with having one persona over another, but if I know what the personas are and how many different ones there are in my audience I can tailor my message to best fit that persona.

Rachel Salaman: So that's a little different from turning on a persona yourself, isn't it?

Susan Weinschenk: I actually don't recommend you do that, I think being authentic is one of the best things you can do to communicate. People really resonate with people that they feel are being passionate about their idea, and I don't think you can convey passion if you are being inauthentic, I think you have to be authentic to convey passion.

Rachel Salaman: You also point out the power of writing things down, which is interesting. What have you observed about that?

Susan Weinschenk: There's research that shows that when we write something in longhand, so we actually take pen or pencil and write it on paper, it activates a different part of our brain than if we are, for instance, typing. And when people write things down in longhand two things happen: they will tend to remember it better, and they will tend to be more committed to what they wrote down, and I find this fascinating. These days, how much of what we do is writing out in longhand, for some of us very little, we're all at the keyboard and typing it into our computers. I tend to use my computer a lot, but there are some things that I will write out on a piece of paper, when I'm sitting down to set my goals for the year, either my business goals or my personal goals, I tend to do that with pen and paper, and now I do it on purpose with pen and paper, but before I just tended to do that. I know there are people, for instance there are students, when you're trying to learn something, who do much better, a lot of students these days in college will bring a laptop and type their notes while they're sitting in class, but if you are a student who has trouble, some students don't learn information as quickly as others, then I really recommend if you don't want to take notes during class because stuff goes by too quickly, you should at least take your typed notes and rewrite some of the most important points by hand into a notebook.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you talk about carrots and sticks. In fact, this is another one of the drives that you focus on. Can you share some of your advice about using rewards?

Susan Weinschenk: Rewards can be extremely powerful, but there's some things about rewards that I think most people don't realize. One is, first of all is, that rewards are very powerful in some situations, but in many situations some of these other things that we've been talking about, and especially one we haven't talked about yet, the desire for mastery, can be much more powerful than rewards, so that's one thing to keep in mind. But if you are going to use rewards, there's a whole science behind rewards, there's an immense amount of research about when should you give the reward and how often, and there's all this research behind it that I think a lot of us don't realize. So, for example, if you're trying to establish a brand new behavior, get someone to do something that they've never really done before, then you need to reward them every time they do it. But, once they've established that behavior you actually need to back off and not reward them as often, because if you want the behavior to persist over time it will actually persist longer – and people will do the behavior more – if you only reward some of the time rather than all of the time, and I think a lot of people don't realize that.

Rachel Salaman: It's also interesting that you say that punishment is less effective than reward, could you explain that?

Susan Weinschenk: Yes, so, in the research on rewards and punishment it's actually usually called reinforcement and punishment, and that's because there's actually three things, there's not just reward and punishment, there's positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment. So, what reinforcement or reward is all about is you give someone something in order to increase behavior. In positive reinforcement you give someone something they like in order to increase a behavior you want more of. In negative reinforcement you give someone something that they don't want, or you take something away in order to increase behavior. But with punishment you actually give someone something they don't want in order to decrease behavior, it's radically different in terms of the behavior of the person. When you give someone something they don't want in order to decrease behavior, the research shows that that works only as long as you are applying that punishment and so it doesn't lead to permanent to behavior change, so as soon as you take the punishment away the tendency is for the person to go back to doing what they were doing. So punishment is probably one of the least effective things you could do in order to change behavior.

Rachel Salaman: The fifth drive in your book is instincts, so what are your main points here when it comes to getting people to do things?

Susan Weinschenk: We are basically animals, and I don't mean that in a negative sense, but I think sometimes we overestimate our conscious thought and our rational logical thought, and we have to understand that basic instincts which I talk about, which are sex, food, and fear, and those three instincts are very strong and they determine a lot of our behavior, largely unconsciously. So, you just need to know that. So, if you're trying to get people to do something, then, for instance, fear of loss can be a very powerful motivator; people will take action now because they're afraid of losing an opportunity. If you just think of an e-commerce website, when you're buying shoes and it says only three left in stock, it's like, "Oh my gosh, I should buy it now!" So, these are very powerful motivators.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned desire for mastery a little earlier, and this is your sixth drive that motivates people. Could you talk a little bit more about that one?

Susan Weinschenk: Yes, desire for mastery being one of the very strongest drives. If you think about a baby, how does a baby learn to walk? How does a baby learn to talk? It's not because we've given them rewards to do so, and it's not because of their self-personas, it's because they want to do it, they want to master this skill. Think about how people spend so much of their time doing something for no reward at all, the hobbies we have, the people who will spend hours and hours quilting or making something in the woodshop or adding to Wikipedia, these are things that people are doing that they're not getting paid for at all, they may not even get any recognition, it may not even make them part of a group, but just that desire to master a skill or master a body of knowledge is programmed into us, we are very curious and we want to do that. So, you can tap into that, if you can stimulate in someone the desire for them to really learn the skill, so, if, for instance, you want them to learn how to use a particular software at work, and instead of saying, "We really need you to use this," you could say to them, "We think it would be great if you would become a master at Excel spreadsheets, if you learned everything there was to learn about it, and could really be an expert in it, then we think that would be good for you and it would be good for the team," and, "Is that something that you're interested in doing?" So, making it part of that desire to master that skill or that knowledge can be very motivating.

Rachel Salaman: In this part of the book you offer some really useful tips on giving feedback, I wondered if you could share some of those using the example of the barista in the book?

Susan Weinschenk: Yes, I use the example of someone who is learning to be a barista in a coffee shop. And what's important about giving feedback, there are a couple of things that are important, one is that you really need to give feedback right away. So, in the case of the person who is learning to be a barista, if they are new at the job, and at the end of the day I sit down with them and tell them everything they did right and everything they did wrong, that's not going to be as effective as if I can catch them right after they've done a particular task and give them feedback right then. So, that's one thing, it's important to give feedback right away, and it's important to do it in what we call in psychological terms, "elaboration." So, the feedback should not just be, "You did that wrong," or, "You did that right," but there needs to be information in there. Again, if someone is trying to master something, you need to give them information so they know how to adjust what they did. So, you need to say, "You didn't rinse out the filter correctly, in order to rinse it out correctly you have to take it off and do this and do that," so you need to elaborate on the feedback. Then, the third part that I think people often get wrong is that you don't want to connect praise with the feedback. There's some new research out about negative feedback and positive feedback, I was just listening to this on the radio the other day and about negative feedback was better than positive feedback. Well, it's not really that it's negative feedback, it's not that if I tell you you're doing a terrible job that's better than if I tell you you're doing a great job, the point is I should take that subjective aspect out of it entirely if I'm trying to stimulate the desire for mastery. The feedback needs to be objective. I don't have to tell you, "Oh, that was great," I don't have to tell you, "Oh, that was terrible," I just have to tell you that that was correct in terms of the task, or incorrect, and then give you that elaboration. The idea is to be objective and to not attach praise with it. When you praise someone for something, and then right after that you tell them how you want them to do it differently, it actually confuses them, it's like, "Well, did I do it right or did I do it wrong?" When you're using the desire for mastery, praise is a reward and you don't need to give rewards, you're using desire for mastery instead of reward.

Rachel Salaman: We should just talk finally about the seventh and final drive, which is tricks of the mind. Now, you do use the word "trick" here, how much is this section about tricking people?

Susan Weinschenk: I was a little hesitant about using the term "tricks of the mind," and I thought maybe people will think I'm trying to trick people and that's really not how I'm using it. The tricks of the mind is just all the fascinating and bizarre ways our brains work. For instance, in this chapter I talk about Daniel Kahneman's idea of system 1 and system 2 thinking, and what we now know is that most of the thinking that we do all day long and most of the ways that we react to things are based on quick, intuitive, largely unconscious types of thinking, and that's our normal mode, we walk around reacting to things in this quick intuitive way, and, for a lot of the day, that works and that provides us with good information and it means that we're able to make decisions and drive our car and have a conversation, but it also results in some very bizarre leaps of illogic that we may not realize that we're doing. So that's what I have in this section, some of these strange things that our brains will do because we're not really paying that much attention.

Rachel Salaman: I should mention that we have a review of Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking Fast and Slow," in the book insights section of the Mind Tools site; that's a book that's cited a lot in this section of your book.

Susan Weinschenk: Yes, it's a great book.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered so much ground here today, what would you say are the most important tips that people could take away?

Susan Weinschenk: I would like people to take away the idea that there is a science behind how you can motivate people, that I think when we're dealing with someone and we would like to motivate them to do something we tend to just do what we did last time, or do what our parents did with us, and we don't realize that we can stop for a second and think about the particular person or group, and we can think about the particular situation, and we can choose what strategy is likely to work better for this person in this situation and that by doing that we can be a lot more effective in our interactions.

Rachel Salaman: Susan Weinschenk, thanks very much for joining us.

Susan Weinschenk: Thanks for having me Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Susan's book again is, "How to Get People to do Stuff: Master the Art and Science of Persuasion and Motivation."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.