Isegoria

Jonah Berger explains how to change anyone’s mind, the subject of his new book The Catalyst, starting with the advice to reduce reactance:

People like to feel like they’re in control — in the drivers’ seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along. Psychologists call this negative response “reactance.”

Decades of consumer behavior research shows that people have an innate anti-persuasion radar. They’re constantly scanning the environment for attempts to influence them, and when they detect one, they deploy a set of countermeasures.

To avoid getting shot down, allow for agency. Guide the path but make sure people feel like they’re still in control. Smart consultants do this when presenting work to clients. If you share just one solution, the clients spend the meeting trying to poke holes in it. To shift this mind-set, good presenters often share multiple options. That way, rather than focusing on flaws, the clients focus on which option they prefer, which makes them much more likely to support moving forward.

Another way to reduce reactance is to highlight a gap between someone’s thoughts and actions, or between what they would recommend to others and what they themselves are doing. A clever pharmaceutical executive in one of my courses told me about a colleague who was wedded to a failing project. She asked him what he would recommend if someone at a different company was considering doing something similar. Given all the information we have now, he acknowledged, it wouldn’t make sense. Then why are we still doing it? she asked. The colleague shuttered the project a month later.

Highlighting such dissonance encourages people to try to resolve it. In the 1990s, researchers at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Santa Cruz used this idea to get students to save water during a shortage. They asked some students to encourage their peers to take shorter showers, while completing a survey on what water-saving steps they themselves were taking. Then they timed the student volunteers’ showers. Exposing the gap between students’ attitudes and actions reduced their water use by more than 25%.

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