PE 13: Appeal to the Emotions

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Psychologists love to mess with economists’ heads. One of the best ways they’ve found to do this is with the Ultimatum Game. It goes like this: The experimenter makes an offer to two people. The first is given $10 and told to offer as much or as little of it as he wants to the second. The catch is that if the other person doesn’t accept the offer, no one gets the money. Here’s the question: if you are the acceptor, what is the minimum amount you would require to accept the offer?

If you were a truly rational economist, you would accept any amount greater than zero, even a penny—because it would leave you better off. But if you have blood rather than bits and bytes running through your veins, you would probably get insulted by a low offer and refuse it, in effect punishing yourself just so you could punish the other person. For the vast majority of actual human beings, emotion trumps logic in that case, and in many other cases as well.

Despite the best efforts of corporations to implement elaborate processes and systems to inoculate themselves, emotions are impossible to remove from every business decision, especially the more important ones. Gut-level Gus always has a place at the table, and effective persuaders ignore him at their peril – but they also know how to get on his good side. Gus is especially important to have as an ally because he’s the one most likely to see any decision turned into action.

In fact, we often—maybe even almost always—decide on an emotional/subconscious level and then afterwards tell ourselves or others a story that proves we used logic. We are not so much rational animals as rationalizing animals.

I probably don’t need to spend too much time convincing you that emotions can lead to less than optimal business decisions. Researchers have documented a correlation between sunny days and stock price rises, and many national stock markets fall when their country’s team is eliminated from the World Cup. Personally, we all have regretted things done or said in anger, excitement or lust. As the song says: “I know what I was feeling, but what was I thinking?”

But you may be surprised to know that emotions can actually improve the quality of decision making. We all have had the sense that something feels right, or feels wrong, and it pays to listen to your gut. (The normal metaphor is head vs. heart, but I use gut because it’s about a combination of the two.) It’s called introception, and it can actually be measured. In one experiment, hedge fund traders who were better attuned to what they were feeling at a particular time were more profitable in their trades, and the more experienced they were, the better they were at detecting their internal body signals.

Gus is fast. While Rational Randy is gathering additional data and calculating possible permutations, Gut-level Gus has already sized up the situation unconsciously and is signaling his decision through emotions. It’s like a chess master who sees a familiar pattern and knows exactly what move to choose without having to think several moves ahead.

Other studies have shown that people who have had damage to their orbitofrontal cortex, which connects their frontal lobes with their emotions, literally can’t tell what they’re feeling, and so they have severe trouble making even the simplest decisions in life.

One way to think about the emotions you feel just before you decide is to treat them as additional input for your decision. They don’t have to be decisive, but you shouldn’t ignore them or try to suppress them, either.

How to use pathos to improve your persuasion

But right now I’m not going to focus on how to use emotions to improve your own decision making. Let’s focus on how to use emotions to improve the quality your listeners’ decision-making (measured  selfishly as how likely it is that they will buy into what we’re selling).

In many ways, modern science isn’t telling us things we haven’t already known to a certain extent for thousands of years. Aristotle called it pathos, and it was co-equal with logos and ethos as a persuasive tool.

Which emotions are particularly important?

Fear: It sounds bad, but fear is the most powerful emotion you can tap into for persuasive effect. I’ve already talked about prospect theory, which tells us that potential losses outweigh gains. You might say that fear is the most rational emotion you can have, because it protects you against danger and possible loss. It can be used defensively, like IBM used to do with its FUD sale, by playing on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt associated with straying from the tried and true. Or it can be used offensively, by playing up the risk of not changing.

Anticipated regret: Mark Goulston, in his book, Just Listen, says that his long experience with top executives has shown that many are more afraid of making a mistake than in doing something right.

Shock: Sometimes people need to be jolted out of their complacency. John Kotter tells the story in his book Leading Change where an executive was having trouble selling his idea for centralizing his company’s procurement process, with a projected savings of close to a billion dollars. He had an intern go out and buy one pair of work gloves from each approved vendor, and piled them up on a conference table. When executives walked in and saw a three-foot-high-pile containing 424 pairs of gloves, they were shocked into action. As Kotter says, successful long term change in companies is not a product of analyze-think-change; it is driven by see-feel-change.

Happiness: You can also recruit positive emotions to help you sell your ideas. When people are in a good mood, they are more optimistic about the future, and more wiling to consider risks. They also are more affected by heuristics (mental short-cuts), such as whether they like you.

Pride: I’ve covered this one at length in episode 12, but let me remind you that people love to feel proud of their actions, so when you can show how their decision makes them or their organization live up to its values, it can be a powerful reason to act.

How to use appeal to Gut-level Gus

Your challenge is to know the emotional state of your listeners, and diminish or enhance it depending on how it aligns with your idea. Here are a few things you can do to get Gut-level Gus on your side:

1. Know your audience. How do they feel about the topic or situation? What is their emotional state at the time you’re talking to them?
2. Decide which emotions you want your audience to feel. As Maya Angelou said, “they won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”
3. Get in tune with your own emotions.
4. Choose your time wisely. When emotions get too hot, logic gets crowded out.
5. Name it and tame it. If your listeners are in the “wrong” emotional state, you might be tempted to ignore it, but that won’t make it go away. You need to bring it out into the open. Acknowledge what they’re thinking, and empathize. As Goulston says, people like to “feel felt”.
6. Redirect the emotion if possible. If you can’t beat it, use it. For example, if they’re feeling anxious about change, you can ask questions to get them to articulate the risk of not changing.
7. Use impact questions. “How would you explain it to your boss if that happens?”
8. Personalize it.
9. Make it vivid.