Being able to change people’s minds and influence behaviour is a vital and necessary skill. But you’re probably not good at it. It’s ok though, because few of us are. Do you want to know why and how a different way of changing minds based on diverse thinking can help you? If so, then read on…
Changing minds drives research
- Winning business is getting clients to change agency and work with you
- Recruiting participants is getting people to change their immediate plans and do your survey
- Actioning recommendations is getting clients to change their intentions
These are three ways our industry depends on our ability to change people’s minds. Now, we’re clearly quite good at it. If we weren’t, our industry wouldn’t exist. But could we be better? Yes. Much better. But how? Enter Jonah Berger’s book ‘The Catalyst’.
Stop pushing
The University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Jonah Berger says it bluntly:
“Change is really hard. And too often people try to achieve change by pushing and pushing.”
The problem with pushing people into doing things is that they push back. This makes enacting change harder. For us as researchers, this often means we drown clients in evidence thinking it’ll mean they’ll follow our recommendations. But it won’t. Instead, we’re making them less likely to.
So why don’t we try removing the barriers to change instead of pushing?
Start catalysing
‘The Catalyst’ argues that we need to overcome five major barriers to change:
- Reactance – stop pushing people back and offer them agency
- Endowment – overcome the status quo via loss aversion
- Distance – use information people are familiar with to drive change
- Uncertainty – reduce uncertainty by offering freemium and making things reversible
- Corroborating evidence – use multiple evidence sources in light doses
By writing a book on changing people’s minds, Berger is duty bound to convincingly persuade us why the methods for overcoming these barriers work.
Luckily, he does just that….
Diverse and historical power
‘The Catalyst’ combines thinking from fields such as marketing, behavioural science, healthcare and law to name a few.
Berger says this was “very deliberate”. Elaborating that “you see similar things at work in different areas”. This means there’s corroborating evidence (ironically) that ‘The Catalyst’s’ principals are broad and useable in many ways.
Berger also proves that great thinking needn’t be new. ‘The Catalyst’ uses existing work to support its perspective. As Berger says, “lots of famous studies existed that proved the book’s points”. Because we’re all obsessed with the latest and greatest, we often forget that the thinking which has stood the test of time is often more robust than new ideas.
For a diverse audience
‘The Catalyst’ has many learnings for researchers. Experimental design skills, interviewing techniques and how to best use evidence to name a few.
But these don’t even scrape the surface.
At heart, ‘The Catalyst’ is a behavioural science book. And as Richard Chataway says, “we’re all in the behaviour business”. This means ‘The Catalyst’s’ audience is as diverse as its thinking.
Again, Berger says this is deliberate:
“The hope is that the book’s audience is broad – marketers, substance abuse counsellors, business leaders, political leaders and organizers of social movements. The hope is that is can help a wide set of people solve problems”.
This means the learnings for us as researchers span wider than our core skills of speaking to people, testing hypothesis and insight communication. Examples include:
- The value in giving agency – important in managing young researchers
- The cost of doing nothing – vital to remember as we innovate our offer
- Respecting change’s achievability – critical to consider when we ask for participant’s time
- Associating with the audience – fundamental to all communications
Changing how we change things
‘The Catalyst’s’ approach to changing minds and behaviours goes against the marketing norms of push tactics. Changing the status quo is hard. So how do we move from push tactics to finding barriers and removing them?
I don’t have the answer. But you’re in luck. I know a good book that does.
Learn how to get better at changing minds and behaviours by finding out more about ‘The Catalyst’ here.
