Achieving the mental inertia to change the human mind is a challenging task, because the brain has evolved a powerful set of biases that resist the burning of scarce energy that momentum requires. Established mindsets require little energy to retrieve and apply, while new mindsets draw a large electrical current. Therefore, the mind tends to prefer the thoughts it has. And stubbornly resists new ones.
If your business success depends on shifting mindsets, keep reading to better understand the major sources of the mind’s subliminal stumbling blocks that thwart your influence strategies. And to get a summary of Professor Jonah Berger’s well-researched tactics to dislodge them.
Stumbling block 1: The reactance bias.
The most common tactic used to change the human mind is the push approach. But it typically fails and often backfires to produce an opposite effect because the mind is preconditioned to push back. The human mind has evolved a powerful innate anti-persuasion system called the reactance bias, which triggers suspicion when persuasion is in the air or autonomy is under threat. The bias causes the mind to automatically retrieve counterarguments, but often fires up to take the mind in exactly the opposite direction. The reactance bias is to blame for the big anti-smoking and obesity campaign failures, causing significant increases in the hazardous behaviours the campaigns aimed to eliminate, despite rational evidence that the products were hugely harmful to consumers. When teenagers were told on TV to stop an online washing machine pod challenge because the risks were lethal, they consumed more, all thanks to subliminal reactance triggers.
Strategies to overcome the reactance bias involve avoiding the push or influence tactics that alert the mind to trigger the bias and the automated defences it fires up. Asking questions (rather than telling) is an effective way to bypass the reactance bias. The questioning method gets the mind to self-frame, self-interrogate, and arrive at its own conclusions, ensuring that the mind’s high need for control, autonomy, and agency isn’t usurped, and that conclusions are seemingly self-created. Another way to temper the reactance bias is to offer options that satisfy the mind’s keen need to preserve choice.
Stumbling block 2: The endowment bias.
The human mind is biased to prefer the status quo over change. There are a few key reasons for this. Firstly, the brain is reluctant to waste the energy already invested in achieving the current situation and the familiarised rules of play associated with it. Secondly, the unfamiliar requires the energy-conscious brain to allocate scarce spare mental fuel reluctantly to evaluate new rules and uncertain consequences that a shift demands. But mostly, it’s because the brain has evolved a bias to avoid loss that it’s evolved heuristics that are more likely to come with a new option. (The brain fears loss about 2.8 times more than it values gain.)
Strategies to limit the endowment bias friction involve surfacing the costs and consequences of maintaining the status quo and framing the loss that inactions cause (helping the mind to easily see the difference in consequences between what they’re doing now and what they could be doing).
Stumbling block 3. Distance
Research shows that every mind has a valence for every value and belief it holds, and a centre point for each. It’s also clear that the mind has an inbuilt restriction on the distance it will allow itself to move from that point. Efforts to move a mind too far from its centre usually result in a mental shut off.
The standard approach to shifting a mindset usually involves the supply of rational argument supported by facts, logic, and figures. But behavioural scientists now know that doesn’t work. Firstly, the science shows that the brain makes 95% of its decisions in the unconscious areas of the mind where emotion rules and facts and figures can’t be processed. Secondly, thanks to confirmation bias, the mind intuitively selects and references data that supports its concretized mindsets – and actively resists investing the energy needed to consider information that conflicts with it. (So, the subliminal mind literally blinds itself to facts and figures that don’t support its memorized beliefs and values.)
Without changing words, please edit to fix spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors. Use UK English spelling. Mental momentum only happens by prompting a mindset to move a short, acceptable distance from the centre at a time. This tactic helps the mind to establish a new middle point – allowing the mind to acclimatize to the shift – and accept new in-range data. The pace of shifting the brain’s middle on any issue is also governed by how strongly a belief or value is held, and the shift tolerances of a mind. Too fast on the fortress of strong beliefs or values, and the blocks come up.
A useful tactic to shift the middle on a strongly held belief by a meaningful distance starts with finding unsticking positions (a common point), and then pivoting to shift the field of reference a short distance to a new middle point. (Small, incremental shifts at a time allow the mind to gradually widen its change scope – and absorb the evidence that supports change.)
Stumbling block 4. Uncertainty
Change of any kind creates levels of uncertainty. And because uncertainty attracts risk and loss, the mind has evolved to fear and avoid it. Research shows that the degree of uncertainty shapes the mind’s momentum and decisions significantly. In the face of too much uncertainty, the mind typically defaults to do nothing.
Successful strategies to overcome the uncertainty bias help the mind to sample change before committing to it – or provide the evidence that helps the mind to anticipate the consequences of change reliably. The more predictable, easy to understand, and less risky the change appears to the brain, the more momentum is likely. Making it easy to trial the proposed change is a very effective way of paring down uncertainty. Being clear about what the proposed change means is also an effective tactic. Removing lock-in terms and conditions helps to reduce the uncertainty barriers that block decisions to consider new options.
Stumbling block 5: Corroborating evidence (Social reinforcement)
People have a range of strong or weak attitudes towards things. The strength of attitudes gets formed and reinforced over time to concretise in the brain’s memory system, together with automated behaviour templates associated with each memory that fire up on cue.
When attitudes are weak, beliefs and behaviours tend to be more easily shifted. But when they’re fortress strong, huge inertia is needed to change them. (For example, how often and easily have you shifted your core political beliefs or base views on climate change if you have strong views on them?)
The conventional approach to shifting strong attitudes is the frequency one; make the same point the same way repeatedly. Perhaps vary the channel and message to avoid tune-outs from over-familiarity. Reach and frequency tactics tend to work adequately when attitudes are weak. But get blocked when beliefs and values are very strong. (Because the brain is biased to discount information that doesn’t fit with reinforced beliefs – and it reacts negatively to persuasion, more especially when iron-clad attitudes are assailed.)
The most effective strategies to shift strongly held attitudes leverage the human bias for social proof – or the referencing of the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of others. The weightier an issue and the more vague or ambiguous the situational clues, the more the mind will seek the influence of others.
The degrees of connection to others, similarity of others, the number of others, the concentration of others, and the timing and context of the corroborating evidence flowing from others play the biggest role in the efficacy of a social proof strategy.
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