Influencing Others By Hacking the Brain

So last time I talked about the triune brain:
1. Neocortex — conscious/logical, new, slow
2. Limbic system — subconscious/emotional, older, fast
3. Reptilian brain — breathing/digestion/etc/who cares.
The limbic system, while subconscious, is responsible for the majority of our influence in making a decision. The neocortex is just there to veto what our subconscious has already decided if need be. And the reason for this is because the limbic system takes up a lot less energy so it’s better for us from a survival standpoint to make most decisions with that.
So what decisions do the limbic system make? Only 2.
- Approach
- Avoid
For survival reasons, we tend to have an avoidance bias. That is, a false positive of danger is much better for us than a false negative.
Overcoming Avoidance Bias
In order to overcome this bias, you’ll need to target their limbic system. In this WIIFM world, there’s 2 things people care about:
- What
- Why
“What” requires too much logic and energy to think about. Decisions based on “what” is the neo-cortex’s job. Example would be a hitchhiker holding up a sign that says “to Jacksonville” triggers the neo-cortex. You would think about where you’re headed, how many miles detour you’d need to take, and other logistics related to picking up this hitchhiker. And then you’d conclude this person is a serial killer so better to just keep driving.
“Why” is simple. If the “why” should I do something feels good, the limbic system would approach it. If it feels bad or if it’s neutral, then our limbic system tells us to avoid it. Example would be a hitchhiker holding up a sign that says “to Mom’s for Christmas.” It invokes feelings of being able to reunite a family and warm fuzzy feelings of a family getting together. You’d still conclude this person is a serial killer most likely, but probably less likely than “to Jacksonville.”
Substitution Bias. Or “Attribution Substitution.”
Substition bias is when our brains substitute a hard question with an easier one in order to try to answer a question. This goes back to us wanting to save energy and are tendency of not wanting to activate our neo-cortex in general.
Some examples:
- Will Trump be a good leader? This question is fairly difficult to answer and speculative at best. A heuristic our brains might substitute for us is: “Is Trump a confident speaker?” Yes. Most good leaders are confident speakers, so Trump must be a good leader.
- Stereotyping by race.
- This paper has a bunch more but there is a 99%+ likelihood you won’t bother reading it so I’ll put some quotes here:
Frederick (2003, personal communication) has used simple puzzles to study cognitive self-monitoring, as in the following example: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Almost everyone reports an initial tendency to answer “10 cents” because the sum $1.10 separates naturally into $1 and 10 cents, and 10 cents is about the right magnitude. Frederick found that many intelligent people yield to this immediate impulse: 50 percent (47/93) of a group of Princeton students and 56 percent (164/293) of students at the University of Michigan gave the wrong answer. Clearly, these respondents offered their response without first checking it. The surprisingly high rate of errors in this easy problem illustrates how lightly the output of effortless associative thinking is monitored: people are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.
Note: “Cognitive self-monitoring” just means having our neo-cortex monitor the impulsive decisions that our limbic system make. Think of it as meta-cognizant. Or what you do when you’re meditating, being the observer or whatever. Eckhart Tolle shit.
A study by Fritz Strack et al. (1988) illustrates the role of attribute substitution in a different context. College students responded to a survey which included the two following questions in immediate succession:
“How happy are you with your life in general?” and “How many dates did you have last month?”
The correlation between the two questions was 0.12 when they appeared in the order shown. Among respondents who received the same questions in reverse order, the correlation was 0.66.
The dating question undoubtedly evoked in many respondents an emotionally charged evaluation of their romantic life. This evaluation was highly accessible when the question about happiness was encountered next, and it was mapped onto the scale of general happiness. In the interpretation offered here, the respondents answered the happiness question by reporting what came to their mind, and failed to notice that they were answering a question that had not been asked — a cognitive illusion…
Source:
http://www.econ.tuwien.ac.at/lotto/papers/Kahneman2.pdf
So how does this relate to influencing others?
The best way to convince someone of your idea is to influence them emotionally, not logically. This is why confidence trumps content in a lot of contexts (lots of “C”s in this sentence).
In particular, the latter study changes a large amount of the respondents’ answers simply by switching the questions. If you’re a salesperson, changing the order of your questions could matter more than you think. And asking leading questions can get them to agree to your product’s benefits even if their pain point is only loosely correlated with your product.
A (bad) example would be:
“How many dates have you gone on the past month?”
“How happy are you with your life right now?”
“Our dating product has gotten almost all of our students 10+ dates within the first month, and a long-term girlfriend within the second. And if you don’t, we’ll give you all your money back, guaranteed.”
They might actually be doing just fine, but the perceived value of your product now is to make them happier in life in general. Not that they just get more dates and a soul-sucking girlfriend in 2 months.
Non-Verbals
So you’ve heard a million times that 93% of communication is nonverbal and 7% is verbal. Now, I don’t know how the hell this is even measured or how accurate it is, but the gist is true. What you say isn’t as important as how you say it.
Tangent — this is how they measured the 93–7
In 1971, Albert Mehrabian published a book Silent Messages, in which he discussed his research on non-verbal communication. He concluded that prospects based their assessments of credibility on factors other than the words the salesperson spoke — the prospects studied assigned 55 percent of their weight to the speaker’s body language and another 38 percent to the tone and music of their voice. They assigned only 7 percent of their credibility assessment to the salesperson’s actual words.
Source (you might need to sign up to ACM): http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2050000/2043156/a1-yaffe.pdf?ip=24.130.215.43&id=2043156&acc=OPEN&key=4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E6D218144511F3437&CFID=963967206&CFTOKEN=86064862&__acm__=1500869059_d454847ac264b18ce5a3fc4da8ba5623
So it’s bullshit because self-reported studies are…meh. End tangent.
But anyway, intuitively and empirically we’ve found this to be true. And if we look at our human history, language only existed 200,000 years ago and writing 3000 years ago in the 6–7 million years we’ve been in existence.
So is it so hard to believe that the majority of your (and your prospects’) decision-making process is non-verbal (not to mention irrational)?
As human beings, we’d like to be rational and make great decisions all the time. And we’d like to think we can communicate in organized form such as language to help each other make good, logical decisions.
But your perception of how your brain should work doesn’t affect how it actually works in reality.
Take this as comfort. Use it to your advantage. Whether it’s to make your marketing or sales process smoother, or hacking your own brain so that your limbic system makes better decisions, self-awareness is the first step.
So, what do you think? Are you pretty rational? Or do you notice yourself making impulsive decisions constantly?