The “Shaken Self”: Self-Confidence and Product Choice

I’m always excited when science finally catches up with marketing.

A man walks into a sociologist’s office, and is asked to write a short essay highlighting his healthy life habits. He does so. Afterwards, he’s offered a choice of two small rewards for his work: an apple, or a pack of M&M’s. He makes his choice and leaves.

After that, another man walks into the sociologist’s office, and is asked to write a short essay highlighting his healthy life habits. As he’s about to begin, the sociologist asks him to write it with his non-dominant hand. After he does so, he is offered a choice between an apple or a pack of M&M’s.

This second man, who wrote with his non-dominant hand, is significantly more likely than the first to choose the apple. Why would that be?

A lot of excellent research is starting to emerge dealing with the relationship between “state” self-confidence (short term mental states) and purchasing habits. The study I’ve just referenced came out of Stanford last year. It was published in Advances in Consumer Research by Leilei Gao, S. Christian Wheeler, and Baba Shiv, and talks about the concept of the “shaken self.”

Rethinking the Core Human Needs

Okay, everybody…I need your help with this one.

Normally when I post an entry, it’s because I’ve reached a conclusion. This one is different. It’s unfinished. I’ve thought about this entry for a long time, and I’ve taken it a certain distance, but I need some help and feedback to finish it. In this entry, I talk about a new way of thinking about our core psychological needs. I’ve got a good start, but there are some inconsistencies I discuss at the end, and I’m not sure what to do with them yet. So, when you get to the end, please let me know your thoughts. Here we go:

There’s a good reason that Maslow’s Hierarchy has survived as long at it has: it covers every rational need you could think of. When you look at the model, it just strikes you as sensible and exhaustive. The first level of needs is Physiological, and you think, well that’s obvious. Without food, water, air, and the like, we don’t make it very long…so I can see that. What’s next? Safety needs, like health, property, security, etc. That also makes a lot of sense. When our immediate security is threatened, we feel a ton of anxiety. So that one is also easy to buy. What’s next?

Image via Wikipedia

Next is Love and Belonging. Possible to survive without it, be we know that people have gone seriously nuts in isolation. So yeah, that makes total sense. From here on, we get a little more abstract. Fourth level is Esteem. These are qualities like self-confidence, respect, and achievement. Who among us doesn’t know someone who’s seriously off-kilter because of how they perceive their own value? What the hell: who among us hasn’t struggled at some point – even a little bit – with issues of how we perceive our own value? So that level seems to belong. The fifth level is Self-actualization, which sounds nice, but few of us really have an internal notion of what that is. It sounds like something that would really make us happy, if we ever got there.

These categories are broad, and seem to capture everything, but actually, they don’t quite. If I could pick one bone with this otherwise excellent model, it’s that it emphasizes rationality. We’ve since come to learn about man that not only is he far from rational, but that his most interesting tendencies seem on the surface completely irrational. The man with the gambling addiction, which of Maslow‘s needs is he fulfilling? How about the woman who drives a wedge between her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend? How about the friend of yours who has to top everyone’s experience story, like that Kristen Wiig character from Saturday Night Live?

Kristen Wiig as Penelope, the Attention Seeker

One could argue all three of those examples into a Maslow category, but it feels like a stretch. I wanted to understand our core psychological needs and drives in a way that spoke more directly to our everyday lives. So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a new model.

I stumbled upon a talk that performance coach Tony Robbins gave to the 2007 TED Conference (I geek out and watch those talks whenever I can). He espouses his own model of six core psychological needs. While I am not a drinker of the TR Kool-Aid, I thought his model was interesting for a couple of reasons. His six needs are 1) Certainty, 2) Uncertainty, 3) Significance, 4) Comfort and Love, 5) Growth, and 6) Contribution.

His model is interesting for a number of good reasons. First, he is the first person I’ve known to list “uncertainty” as a need. It’s irrational to need uncertainty; if we were all acting in our own rational self-interest, we would want life to be as predictable as possible so that we could reap the most advantage. We typically try to eliminate unpredictability, but Robbins acknowledges that we also crave it. He also posits that we need to contribute to causes greater than our individual selves as a prerequisite to fulfillment. One could argue this is implicit in Maslow’s self-actualization, but this model gives contribution the individual emphasis it really deserves.

Tony Robbins at the 2007 TED Conference

I played with a couple other different needs models as well. I took a look at Max-Neef’s “Human Scale Development,” Cialdini’s Influence Triggers, Jonathan Haidt‘s Moral Matrix, David McClelland‘s Achievement Motive, and some other ideas from Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and other contributors. But something keeps bringing me back to Robbins’ contribution, because I see insights in that model that I don’t really see in some of the others. True, there are examples that I can’t make fit into Robbins’ model, but I don’t think that’s as much a problem with the model as it is with its phrasing. I think that using Robbins’ model as a starting point, we can come up with a truly psychologically insightful model of rational and irrational needs.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. These are the six categories of psychological need as best I can articulate them (physiological needs are omitted). They are not mutually exclusive, meaning that one event can satisfy multiple needs at once. It’s not perfect, and I’ll go through some inconsistencies at the end. Please leave comments with your ideas for how to refine this idea.

9 Strategies for Influencing Others

The Hay Group is a management consulting firm that does its own research into motivation strategies and produces self-assessment materials for students and clients. I recently took one of their assessments for an MBA class on leadership strategies. The assessment was called the “Influence Strategies Exercise,” and told me how much I rely on each of nine separate influence strategies. Their workbook then went into detail on each strategy, and the context under which it would work. Here are the nine strategies:

My Opponent is Hitler – Why Negative Ads Work

“I am a Christian war hero charity donor who will create jobs, lower taxes, increase Medicare and make the sun shine every day. My opponent dresses in women’s clothes to perform Satan-worshiping ceremonies, when he’s not luring small children into his unmarked van.”

Please take a look at these two example TV spots from candidates running against each other fr the vacant U.S. Senate seat in Illinois:

Here is the first, from the Kirk campaign against Democrat Alexi Giannoulias:

Now here’s the “Alexi for Illinois” ad about Republican Mark Kirk

As negative ads go, these are two of the less colorful of the 2010 midterm election cycle. No one is portrayed as a demonic sheep, for example. I see these ads multiple times a day, particularly on Sunday mornings when the talk shows are on.

I’m sure that like me, they both make you roll your eyes. One candidate is a military intelligence veteran who’s here to save us from a mobbed-up failed banker, and the other is a family business owner and staple of the community who is here to save us from a corporate elitist who takes away money from laid-off workers, and eats his young.

We know that both are obviously disingenuous. And they paint a picture of two candidates who are basically equal in everything but voting record: equal in cynicism, equal in lack of class, equal in hackery, equal in personal agenda, etc.

Yet, these ads work. They work even though we think they don’t. They work even though we believe ourselves better people than those who would be affected by such obvious hyperbole. They just work. They’ve always worked.

Here’s why negative advertising works, even though we believe ourselves to be unaffected by such classless tactics.

The Secret Triggers Behind The American Identity

"The white folks wouldn't let us into they're wagon circle, so we made our own." --Blazing Saddles

Picture a wagon train from the old west. What do they do when they encounter an Indian war party? They circle-up, point all their guns outwards, and pray.

That picture is the prototypical metaphor of America. It goes a long way to explain who we are and why we want what we want.

About six months ago, I started wondering why the Tea Party had caught on so strongly in America. There are several general reasons, but no obvious causes for such strong emotion. Its core platform has to do with deficit spending, which does not have the emotional wedge of abortion, immigration, crime, or national security. The movement seems to be thriving on an anti-taxation platform despite the fact that so far, taxes have not increased. By contrast, Clinton actually raised taxes midway through his first term, and it did not spark the visible outcry we see today.

The Tea Party makes a nice, visceral example of American moral and political outcry, but my questions are broader than that. Is there some subtle nerve being hit here, that runs deeper than the obvious surface issues? Some secret anxiety that runs through the core American identity, of which this is just one example?

It seems to me that secret triggers are working below the visible surface of these issues. And I believe that these triggers are core to the fundamental American political traditions and beliefs.

Why We Want What We Can’t Have, and Can’t Have What We Want

I was walking a friend of mine home the other day, and she was telling me about the kinds of men she had been meeting recently. We started talking about whether you could be into somebody just because they were “off-limits” to you in some way: already attached, emotionally unavailable, constantly busy, runs in high social circles, borderline-inappropriate age difference, etc.

She was pretty sure that she wasn’t affected by any of these considerations, or at least, not consciously. My gut, on the other hand, was telling me that the “off-limits” factor might be pretty significant. I once staged a live adaptation of the book, “He’s Just Not That Into You,” and I remember a lot the reprinted letters in the book were sent by women in some of these very situations.

One was sent by a woman who talked with a lot of enthusiasm about how busy her “boyfriend” was in the filmmaking business, and how “important” that made him…so important in fact, that she hadn’t heard from him in forever. Another talked about how secretive her boyfriend was, and how his unwillingness to tell her anything substantive made him “intriguing.”

While researching, I found the blog Miss Adventures in L.A., in which the author goes into great detail about her obsession with a man who makes himself very unavailable.

Many of these writers openly admit that their obsessions make them sound perhaps a little pathetic, but I don’t think they are pathetic. I think there’s something inescapably attractive about that which is inaccessible. Askmen.com agrees. Their dating advice columns say flat out that “Women don’t feel attraction for men that are pushover wuss bags. Women feel attraction for men who are a challenge.”

My First Blog Mention, and It’s a Big One!

People-triggers has been cited by Inside Influence Report!

Inside Influence Report is the blog produced by Dr. Cialdini’s professional training firm, Influence At Work. Its purpose is to apply Cialdini’s principles of influence (and the scientific research surrounding them) to contemporary business practice. The blog lists Dr. Cialdini himself as an author (with co-authors Dr. Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin, CMCT), and follows his interviews, projects and public events.

So, this is humbling and way cool!

Inside Influence Report produces current influence-related articles based and very recent scientific research. Here’s their most recent article on the reasons people choose to “go green.” I am gratified to see that the status transaction figures into the research!

Inside Influence Report: What causes people to be keen to go green?.

The Power of Charm: How To Win Anyone Over In Any Situation

I just recently finished The Power of Charm, by Brian Tracy and Ron Arden, which was a recommendation to me from a friend of mine with excellent taste.

This book is about projecting charm, and covers material similar to Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and other famous books on the topic. The authors cover techniques to come across as attentive and appreciative, so as to charm others by giving them a feeling of importance.

This book proposes improving yourself from the outside, in. That is to say, if you adopt the physical characteristics of an attentive listener, with appropriate head tilts and eye contact, you will eventually become an attentive listener on the inside. One of the co-authors is an actor, and he compares this way of working to the British system of character development (As opposed to Americans, who tend to work on inner motivations first).

Tracy (an internationally-known self-help guru) and Arden emphasize what they call the “5 A’s”: Acceptance, Appreciation, Approval, Admiration, and Attention. The book covers physical techniques in attentive listening, speaking slowly and precisely, lavishing smiles and praise, 2nd Person-orientation, etc.

These are wise traits to focus on. Everyone could become a more attentive, focused listener, and improving that trait will almost universally make one seem more likable. Likewise, we could all find more ways to give honest praise.

Here’s my thing: there’s another element to this type of material that is always missed by self-help authors. And it’s every bit as important as the five A’s.

The Six Weapons of Influence – Part 6: “Scarcity”

So far in this six-part article, we’ve covered five of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s six “weapons of influence”: Reciprocity, Commitment/Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, and Authority. Now for the sixth and final weapon, the one that may have the most viscerally powerful effect on us:

Weapon number six: “Scarcity: The Rule Of The Few”

Scarcity is the reason why someone who’s breaking up with you seems much more desirable than she did when you were thinking about breaking up with her.

The Scarcity Rule is the sales tool that is most obvious to us when we see advertising: “Sale ends June 30th”; “The First Hundred People Receive…”; “Limited Time Only”; “Offer Expires”; et cetera ad nauseum.

Remember this one well: the only thing more motivating than a limited supply of something is a rapidly diminishing supply of that same thing. It creates a hell of an itch. Now, we not only want an item for its utility, but we want to possess it simply to possess it.

When I was first learning the principles of direct response marketing, my mentor taught me early on that no promotion ever went out without a very explicit expiration. Sometimes promotional prices (set not by us but by our vendors) would be steady for months at a time. So month after month we would announce that prices would expire at the end of the month (factually true; we didn’t know for sure what prices would do in the coming month), but the month after that we would announce a similar promotion at the exact same price. This would go on for months.

But those promotions unfailingly encouraged end-of-month sales, even though the prices never changed. Why? Because the prices were expiring at the end of the month. They never actually expired, but that didn’t matter.

The Six Weapons of Influence – Part 5: “Authority”

So far in this six-part article, we’ve covered four of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s six “weapons of influence”: Reciprocity, Commitment/Consistency, Social Proof, and Liking. Now it’s time to talk about the weapon that really scares me…

Weapon number five: “Authority: Directed Deference”

The Authority Rule is the reason no one questions the guy with the clipboard at the head of the velvet rope line. Well, that and the really big bouncer dudes who flank him.

Bill Murray, studying "negative reinforcement on ESP abilities"...and hot college chicks, in Ghostbusters

Cialdini opens this chapter very dramatically, putting the reader in the hypothetical situation of participating in a research study involving negative reinforcement (electric shocks) on memory quiz answers (kinda like Bill Murray in the beginning of Ghostbusters). You’re the volunteer who receives the shocks, and there’s another volunteer behind a two-way mirror who, under the direction of the researcher, administers the shocks.

The shocks begin mild, but as the wrong answers accumulate, so does the electrical intensity. Soon it reaches the point where you yell out as you receive them. You finally scream that you want to quit the study, but your pleas get no response. The other person simply repeats the next question into the intercom.

You can’t think straight anymore, and all your answers come out wrong no matter what. The pain is searing. You stop answering and just remain silent, but the examiner interprets your silence as an incorrect response and continues administering higher voltage…

You may think the story is starting to sound like something out of Orwell, or some really bad dream. Now here’s the kicker, and this really shocked me…

This experiment was actually done with real people.

Only one thing was different.

The person receiving the shocks was an actor, pretending to be in serious pain. The experiment was not testing the quiz answers at all. It was testing the behavior of the other volunteer, the one who was administering the shocks. They wanted to see how much pain a person would be willing to inflict on another innocent person, simply because someone in authority told him to do it.