How to make your writing more persuasive
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton conducted a simple experiment, which earned her a PhD in psychology from Stanford.
She organized volunteers into two groups — “tappers” and “listeners”. She gave each tapper one among 25 popular songs. The tapper had to communicate this song to the listener by tapping on a desk. The listener had to guess which song was being tapped. This is a great experiment to try if you have a generous volunteer. Just tap the most popular of songs that both of you know and ask them to guess it.
All right. Getting volunteers to perform bizarre Morse code rituals is all fun and games. But what made Newton’s experiment worthy of a Stanford PhD?
Here’s the insight. When the tappers were asked to guess what percentage of listeners would recognize their song, they estimated about 50%. They believed that 1 in 2 listeners would be able to guess their song. But the listeners fared a lot poorer. Merely 3 out of 120 attempts, or a dismal 2.5% were successful. As the tappers tapped “Happy birthday” or “Jingle bells”, expecting even kindergartners to guess them, the listeners were clueless. The look on the tappers’ faces seemed to say “How could you not guess this?” or “How could you be so stupid?”.
Before you proceed, just try tapping a song you know for about 10 seconds and observe what happens…
