The Application:
Make their commitments active, public, and voluntary
Liking is a powerful force, but the work of persuasion involves more than simply making people feel warmly toward you, your idea, or your product. People need not only to like you but to feel committed to what you want them to do. Good turns are one reliable way to make people feel obligated to you. Another is to win a public commitment from them.
My own research has demonstrated that most people, once they take a stand or go on record in favour of a position, prefer to stick to it.
Other studies reinforce that finding and go on to show how even a small, seemingly trivial commitment can have a powerful effect on future actions. Israeli researchers writing in 1983 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin recounted how they asked half the residents of a large apartment complex to sign a petition favouring the establishment of a recreation centre for the handicapped.
The cause was good and the request was small, so almost everyone who was asked agreed to sign. Two weeks later, on National Collection Day for the Handicapped, all residents of the complex were approached at home and asked to give to the cause.
A little more than half of those who were not asked to sign the petition made a contribution. But an astounding 92% of those who did sign donated money. The residents of the apartment complex felt obligated to live up to their commitments because those commitments were active, public, and voluntary. These three features are worth considering separately.
There’s strong empirical evidence to show that a choice made actively
One that’s spoken out loud or written down or otherwise made explicit – is considerably more likely to direct someone’s future conduct than the same choice left unspoken.
Writing in 1996 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Delia Cioffi and Randy Garner described an experiment in which college students in one group were asked to fill out a printed form saying they wished to volunteer for an AIDS education project in the public schools. Students in another group volunteered for the same project by leaving blank a form stating that they didn’t want to participate. A few days later, when the volunteers reported for duty, 74% of those who showed up were students from the group that signalled their commitment by filling out the form.
Get it in writing
Let’s suppose you want your employee to submit reports in a more timely fashion. Once you believe you’ve won agreement, ask him to summarise the decision in a memo and send it to you. By doing so, you’ll have greatly increased the odds that he’ll fulfil the commitment because, as a rule, people live up to what they have written down.
Research into the social dimensions of commitment suggests that written statements become even more powerful when they’re made public
In a classic experiment, described in 1955 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, college students were asked to estimate the length of lines projected on a screen. Some students were asked to write down their choices on a piece of paper, sign it, and hand the paper to the experimenter. Others wrote their choices on an erasable slate, then erased the slate immediately. Still others were instructed to keep their decisions to themselves.
The experimenters then presented all three groups with evidence that their initial choices may have been wrong. Those who had merely kept their decisions in their heads were the most likely to reconsider their original estimates. More loyal to their first guesses were the students in the group that had written them and immediately erased them. But by a wide margin, the ones most reluctant to shift from their original choices were those who had signed and handed them to the researcher.
This experiment highlights how much most people wish to appear consistent to others
Consider again the matter of the employee who has been submitting late reports. Recognising the power of this desire, you should, once you’ve successfully convinced him of the need to be more timely, reinforce the commitment by making sure it gets a public airing.
One way to do that would be to send the employee an email that reads, “I think your plan is just what we need. I showed it to Diane in manufacturing and Phil in shipping, and they thought it was right on target, too.” Whatever way such commitments are formalised, they should never be like the New Year’s resolutions people privately make and then abandon with no one the wiser. They should be publicly made and visibly posted.
More than 300 years ago, Samuel Butler wrote a couplet that explains succinctly why commitments must be voluntary to be lasting and effective: “He that complies against his will/Is of his own opinion still.” If an undertaking is forced, coerced, or imposed from the outside, it’s not a commitment; it’s an unwelcome burden.
Think of how you would react if your boss pressured you to donate to the campaign of a political candidate. Would that make you more apt to opt for that candidate in the privacy of a voting booth? Not likely. In fact, in their 1981 book Psychological Reactance (Academic Press), Sharon S. Brehm and Jack W. Brehm present data that suggest you’d vote the opposite way just to express your resentment of the boss’s coercion.
This kind of backlash can occur in the office, too
Let’s return again to that tardy employee. If you want to produce an enduring change in his behaviour, you should avoid using threats or pressure tactics to gain his compliance.
He’d likely view any change in his behaviour as the result of intimidation rather than a personal commitment to change. A better approach would be to identify something that the employee genuinely values in the workplace – high-quality workmanship, perhaps, or team spirit – and then describe how timely reports are consistent with those values.
That gives the employee reasons for improvement that he can own. And because he owns them, they’ll continue to guide his behaviour even when you’re not watching.
