INFLUENCE

Influence People by Leveragingthe Brain’s Lazinessby Art Markman

MAY 29, 2015

Discussions of influence are almost always focused on messages and information, the

assumption being that the best route to drive people’s actions is to get them to understand

the course of action that is best for them and then to pursue it.

YOU AND YOUR TEAM

Persuasion

You need influence to succeed.

But another stream of work on influence has also noticed that the environment affects

people’s actions. Over the past decade, proponents of the work described in Nudge by Richard

Thaler and Cass Sunstein have focused on small changes that can be made to the environment

that have a big effect on behavior. The classic example from this work is that changing the

default option from opting in to a retirement program to opting out of one can have a

significant affect on how much people save.

In all of this work, though, there is still an assumption that the environment is treated as a

reflection of information that should drive preferences. For instance, it’s assumed that people

tend to stick with the default option because they do not know enough to change it.

This view of decision-making assumes that information is always at the core of the cognitive

economy. But in fact, energy is the key currency that the cognitive system seeks to preserve.

The human brain is roughly 3% of people’s body weight and yet it uses 20-25% of our daily

energy supply. This energy is required to keep the brain running regardless of exactly what

the brain is doing. That means that time spent thinking about a choice is highly correlated

with the amount of energy consumed by the brain.

A better way to think about the role of the environment, then, is to recognize that people

want to minimize the amount of time and brain energy they spend thinking about a choice

and also minimize the amount of time and bodily energy they expend toward carrying out

actions after the choice is made. The simplest way to do both is to simply take the actions the

environment is conducive to. In other words, people are not treating the environment around

them as information in most deliberative processes. Instead, they are performing the easiest

actions with as little thought as possible.

So if we want to influence other people’s

behavior, we must make desirable behaviors

easy and undesirable behaviors hard. Take the

design of your grocery store, where impulse

purchases are often displayed on the endcaps

or in the checkout aisle. You’re not spontaneously purchasing those items because you have

more information about those non-necessary products, but based on a combination of what

the environment makes easy to do, the habits people have learned from past actions, and the

results of previous deliberations about a decision.

Consider a consumer preparing to buy toothpaste. As a child, her parents used Colgate,

though she tried Crest and Aquafresh at friends’ houses while growing up and saw plenty of

commercials over the years. In college, when she began to make her own toothpaste

purchases, she would typically search for the Colgate, but if another common brand was in

easy reach, she selected that instead. A promotion that placed a toothpaste she liked in a

special display would lead her to grab that as she charged through the store. She was

frequently frustrated by the number of times that toothpaste manufacturers changed their

packaging, making it more difficult to select one of the brands she typically bought.

In this example, none of these decisions involved significant deliberation. Instead, there were

small preferences for brands based on prior exposure and a number of selections based on

what was easy to do. Indeed, one thing that brands often do that blocks this low-effort

behavior is to change their packaging, which forces the consumer to put in effort to find the

familiar brand in an unfamiliar box.

This orientation to the environment can change or reinforce all kinds of behaviors. As I

discuss in Smart Change, one of the most successful public health campaigns of the last half-

century is the effort in the United States to reduce the number of smokers. One of the most

important factors that decreased smoking rates among adults from roughly 50% in the 1960s

to about 20% now is the environment. It is no longer possible to smoke in public buildings in

most places in the United States. Some businesses no longer allow smoking on their entire

campuses. This change to the environment makes an undesirable behavior difficult.

In the workplace, there are many ways to set up the environment to drive people toward

desirable behaviors. For example, many companies set up databases of prior projects and

their outcomes as a way of capturing organizational knowledge. However, these databases are

often difficult for employees to access and have clumsy user interfaces that make it hard for

people to find what they need. To make the archives more useful, they need to be accessed

quickly from people’s computers, and the user interface needs to make it easier to find past

reports than it is to ask a few random colleagues if they know of any related projects.

Similarly, if your aim is to get people to schedule shorter meetings, organize the office

calendar program in which the default meeting length is 15 or 30 minutes rather than an hour

and needs to be adjusted to be longer if necessary. Although people will still end up

scheduling a number of hour-long meetings, the need to expend energy to override the

standard option will shorten many of the items that end up on people’s schedules.

Anyone interested in influence should start by focusing on the environment of the individual

they are trying to affect. Analyze that environment and find ways to make desirable actions

easy and undesirable actions difficult. Remember that the human cognitive system aims to

get the best possible outcome for the least possible energy cost.

Art Markman, PhD, is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the

University of Texas at Austin and founding director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He

has written over 150 scholarly papers on topics including reasoning, decision making, and motivation. He is the

author of several books including Smart Thinking, Smart Change, and Habits of Leadership.

Related Topics: PSYCHOLOGY

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