Prologue
A Horse-Sized Syringe
The Surprising, Baffling, Mysterious Case of Influence
You and I share a role. Maybe you never stopped to consider this role, or perhaps you think about it all the time. If you’re someone’s spouse, parent, or friend, you fulfill this role. If you’re a doctor, teacher, financial adviser, journalist, manager, or human being—you fulfill it.
This duty we all share is to affect others. We teach our children, guide our patients, advise our clients, help our friends, and inform our online followers. We do this because we each have unique experiences, knowledge, and skills that others may not. But how good are we at this role?
It seems to me that the people with the most important message, those who have the most useful advice, are not necessarily the ones who have the largest impact. Recent history is full of such puzzles, from the entrepreneur who convinced investors to pour billions into a shaky biotech endeavor to the politician who failed to convince citizens to fight for the future of their planet. What, then, determines whether you affect the way others think or whether you are ignored? And what determines whether others change what you believe in and how you behave?
The underlying assumption of this book is that your brain makes you who you are. Every thought that ever crossed your mind, every feeling you ever experienced, every decision you ever made—was all generated by neurons firing within it. Yet your very own brain, on the top of your neck, is not fully yours. It is the product of a code that has been written, rewritten, and edited for millions of years. By understanding that code, and why it is written the way it is, we will be better able to predict people’s reactions and understand why some common approaches to persuasion often fail while others succeed.
For the past two decades, I have been studying human behavior in the lab. My colleagues and I have conducted dozens of experiments in an attempt to figure out what causes people to change their decisions, update their beliefs, and rewrite their memories. We systematically manipulated incentives, emotions, context, and social environments and then peered into people’s brains, recorded their bodily responses, and documented their behavior. It turns out that what most of us believe will cause others to alter their thoughts and actions is wrong. My aim with this book is to reveal the systematic mistakes we make when we attempt to change minds, as well as to illuminate what occurs during those instances in which we succeed.
I am going to begin in my own backyard, with the story of how I was almost persuaded to ignore years of scientific training by a man whose unexpected influence on millions has baffled many.
***
On the evening of September 16, 2015, at around eight p.m., I was sitting on the sofa in my living room watching the second Republican primary debate on CNN. The 2016 presidential race was one of the most interesting in history, full of unexpected plot twists and surprises. It also turned out to be a mesmerizing study of human nature.
Center stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley, California, were two of the leading candidates: pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson and real estate mogul Donald Trump. In between discussions about immigration and taxes, the debate turned to autism.
“Dr. Carson,” began the moderator, “Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly linked vaccines, childhood vaccines, to autism, which, as you know, the medical community adamantly disputes. You’re a pediatric neurosurgeon. Should Mr. Trump stop saying this?”
“Well, let me put it this way,” replied Dr. Carson. “There have been numerous studies, and they have not demonstrated that there is any correlation between vaccinations and autism.”
“Should he stop saying that vaccines cause autism?” asked the moderator.
“I’ve just explained it to him. He can read about it if he wants to. I think he’s an intelligent man and will make the correct decision after getting the real facts,” said Dr. Carson.
While I did not always agree with Dr. Carson, I did concur with him on this issue. I happened to be familiar with the literature, not only because of my profession as a neuroscientist but also because I’m the parent of two young children, who at the time were two and a half years old and seven weeks old. So I was utterly surprised by my reaction to what Trump said next.
“I’d like to respond,” said Trump. “Autism has become an epidemic. . . . It has gotten totally out of control. . . . You take this little beautiful baby, and you pump—I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child. And we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me. Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”1
My response was immediate and visceral. An image of a nurse inserting a horse-sized syringe into my tiny baby emerged inside my head and would not fade away. It did not matter that I knew perfectly well that the syringe used for immunization was a normal size—I panicked.
“Oh, no,” I thought. “What if my child gets ill?” The fact that these thoughts were running through my mind shocked me. Nevertheless, anxiety, a feeling all too familiar to parents of all beliefs and backgrounds, abruptly took over.
“But, you know,” said Dr. Carson, “the fact of the matter is, we have extremely well-documented proof that there’s no autism associated with vaccinations.”
No matter. Proof, shmoof. Dr. Carson could have cited a hundred studies, and it would have had no effect on the storm that erupted inside my head. I was absorbed by that stallion of a needle that was about to cause my child to get very, very ill.
It made no sense. At one podium was a pediatric neurosurgeon whose ammunition included peer-reviewed medical studies and years of clinical practice; at the other was a businessman whose arguments boiled down to a single observation and intuition. Yet despite my years of scientific training, I was convinced by the latter. Why?
I knew exactly why. And it was that understanding that brought me back to reality.
While Carson was targeting the “cerebral” part of me, Trump was aiming at the rest of me. And he was doing it by the book—this book.
Trump tapped into my very human need for control and my fear of losing it. He gave me an example of someone else’s mistake and induced emotion, which helped align the pattern of activity in my brain with his, making it more likely that I would take on his point of view. Finally, he warned of the dire consequences of not following his advice. As I’ll explain in this book, inducing fear is often a weak approach to persuasion; in fact, in most cases, inducing hope is more powerful. However, under two conditions, fear works well: (a) when what you are trying to induce is inaction and (b) when the person in front of you is already anxious. These two criteria were satisfied in this case, as Trump was lobbying against the act of immunization, and his target audience—new parents—are the poster children for stress.
The fact that I understood how Trump was affecting my thoughts subsequently enabled me to pause and reevaluate the situation; I would not change my mind on this issue—my young son will receive immunizations, just as my daughter did before him. But I wondered how many other new parents out there were persuaded by his arguments. I also pondered what would have happened if Dr. Carson had done a better job of addressing people’s needs, desires, motivations, and emotions, rather than assuming that they would make the correct decision after receiving the facts.* Dr. Carson was speaking to millions, and he missed an extraordinary opportunity to make a difference. We all encounter such opportunities. You may not routinely address millions, but you address people every day: at home, at work, online, offline.
The fact of the matter is that people love propagating information and sharing opinions. You can see this clearly online: every single day, four million new blogs are written, eighty million new Instagram photos are uploaded, and 616 million new tweets are released into cyberspace. That is 7,130 tweets per second. Behind every tweet, blog, and uploaded photo is a human being like you and me. Why do millions of humans spend millions of precious moments every day sharing information?
It appears that the opportunity to impart your knowledge to others is internally rewarding. A study conducted at Harvard University found that people were willing to forgo money so that their opinions would be broadcast to others.2 Now, we are not talking about well-crafted insights here. These were people’s opinions regarding mundane issues, like whether Barack Obama enjoys winter sports and if coffee is better than tea. A brain-imaging scan showed that when people received the opportunity to communicate their pearls of wisdom to others, their brain’s reward center was strongly activated. We experience a burst of pleasure when we share our thoughts, and this drives us to communicate. It is a nifty feature of our brain, because it ensures that knowledge, experience, and ideas do not get buried with the person who first had them, and that as a society we benefit from the products of many minds.
Of course, in order for that to happen, merely sharing is not enough. We need to cause a reaction—what Steve Jobs aptly referred to as making a “dent in the universe.” Each time we share our opinions and knowledge, it is with the intention of impacting others. The intended change can be large or small. Perhaps our aim is to raise awareness for a social cause, increase sales, alter the way people view the arts or politics, improve the way our child eats, sway people’s perception of ourselves, improve people’s understanding of how the world works, increase our team’s productivity, or maybe just convince our spouse to work less and join us on a tropical vacation.
Here is the problem, though: we approach this task from inside our own heads. When attempting to create impact, we first and foremost consider ourselves. We reflect on what is persuasive to us, our state of mind, our desires, and our goals. But, of course, if we want to affect the behaviors and beliefs of the person in front of us, we need to first understand what goes on inside their head and go along with how their brain works.
Take Dr. Carson, for example. As a trained physician and scientist, he was convinced by data showing that vaccines do not cause autism. He therefore assumed that said data would persuade everyone else. Humans, however, are not wired to react dispassionately to information. Numbers and statistics are necessary and wonderful for uncovering the truth, but they’re not enough to change beliefs, and they are practically useless for motivating action. This is true whether you are trying to change one mind or many—a whole room of potential investors or just your spouse. Consider climate change: there are mountains of data indicating that humans play a role in warming the globe, yet 50 percent of the population does not believe it.3 Consider politics: no number will convince a hard-core Republican that a Democratic president has advanced the nation, and vice versa. What about health? Hundreds of studies demonstrate that exercise is good for you and people believe this to be so, yet this knowledge fails miserably at getting many to step on a treadmill.
In fact, the tsunami of information we are receiving today can make us even less sensitive to data because we’ve become accustomed to finding support for absolutely anything we want to believe, with a simple click of the mouse. Instead, our desires are what shape our beliefs. It is those motivations and feelings we need to tap into to make a change, whether within ourselves or in others.
In this book, I will describe our instincts regarding influence—those habits we fall back on when trying to change others’ beliefs and behaviors. Many of these instincts—from trying to scare people into action to insisting that the other is wrong or attempting to exert control—are incompatible with how the mind operates. The principal idea of this book is that an attempt to change someone’s mind will be successful if it aligns with the core elements that govern how we think. Each chapter will focus on one of seven critical factors—priors (as in prior beliefs), emotion, incentives, agency, curiosity, state of mind, and other people—and will explain how that factor can hinder or help an attempt to influence.
The difference between familiarizing ourselves with these factors and remaining ignorant is that familiarity will enable you to critically evaluate your behavior, whether you are influencing or being influenced. The majority of the time, I will take on the point of view of the person aiming to influence, but every so often I will flip the relationship and look at things from the perspective of the person being influenced. What goes on in your brain when you listen to another person’s opinion? Of course, if you understand one side of the coin, you will better understand the other, too.
We still have a lot of research to conduct to fully understand the factors that influence our minds, but the partial knowledge we already have is tremendously valuable. For example, understanding how the brain’s reward system is connected to the motor system reveals when people are more likely to be influenced by carrots and when by sticks. Knowing how stress affects the brain explains why people hugely overreact to negative news following terrorist attacks.
Throughout the book we will shift back and forth from the corridors of your brain, where neurons are constantly communicating with one another, to the corridors of my lab, where I record people’s behavioral and physiological reactions. We’ll also tour the world outside: a hospital on the East Coast of the United States that went from failing terribly at getting its medical staff to sanitize their hands to reaching nearly 90 percent compliance in one day, a nursing home in Connecticut where the residents’ health was improved by increasing their sense of control, a teenage girl who unknowingly induced psychosomatic symptoms in thousands, and more. My question will always be why? Why did this strategy cause a reaction but another did not? Why do we respond to John but ignore Jake? If you know what causes people to react the way they do, you will have the tools to solve the specific challenges you encounter in your own life every day.
* A study I describe in chapter 1 reveals why Dr. Carson’s approach was likely to fail and what he could have done instead.
1 “CNN Reagan Library Debate: Later Debate Full Transcript,” September 16, 2015, http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/09/16/cnn-reagan-library-debate-later-debate-full-transcript/.
2 Diana I. Tamir and Jason P. Mitchell, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 21 (2012).
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_opinion_by_country.
Copyright © 2017 by Tali Sharot