Category: psychology
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #13–Talk to the unconscious
“We want them to type in their email and click on the “Join” button”, was the response from my client as I asked him what was the one action he wanted people to take on his landing page. Good. That was clear. But now the question was what else should be on the landing page…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #10 Pitch When People Feel Regret
Of all the situations and feelings that motivate people to take action, regret is one of the most powerful. People don’t like to feel regret and will do a lot to avoid it. That’s not surprising, but you might be surprised to find out that the more opportunity people feel they have, the more regret they tend to…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #9 Give Feedback Without Praise
During this series on 365 Ways To Persuade and Motivate I’ve had a few posts about rewards and also some about the desire for mastery. One way to reward people is to give them praise (“Wow, you did a great job on that report”). And because we want to motivate people, and we think praise…
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365 Ways to Persuade And Motivate: #8 Use The Right Reward
Since starting to write the last few blog posts on rewards I’ve had some questions on what is a reward. So I thought I’d take this blog to write about what makes a reward a reward and how to pick the “right” one. When B.F. Skinner researched rewards he didn’t call them rewards. He called…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #7 Give Rewards Unpredictably To Sustain A Behavior
In the last blog post I wrote about using a continuous reinforcement schedule when you want to establish a new behavior. And I hinted that you should change that schedule after the behavior is established. One of the reward “schedules” that BF Skinner researched is called a variable ratio schedule. It’s called “variable” because you…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #6 Reward Every Time To Establish A New Behavior
Rewards are one of the most common ways that people think of to get other people to do stuff. In the talks that I give on the topic I tell people that rewards are actually one of the least effective ways to get people to do stuff! Rewards are one of the seven ways I…
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365 Ways to Persuade And Motivate: #5 Point Out How People Are Connected
When people feel connected to each other then they are more motivated to work together. Even pointing out how people are connected in small ways affects behavior. Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the effects of belonging on behavior. In one of his experiments, Walton found that when college students believed…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #3 Small Steps
One of the best ways to motivate people is to stimulate a desire for mastery. People are naturally curious and this curiosity helps people master their environment. People want to learn, improve, and master skills and knowledge. One of the things you can do to stimulate this sense of mastery is to break things into…
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365 Ways To Persuade & Motivate: #2 Use The Word “Because”
In the first blog post of this new “365” series I cited new research on eye contact. But sometimes I think it’s important to go back to “foundational” (i.e. old!) research. So #2 in the series comes from research conducted in 1978. Ellen Langer (Professor of Psychology at Harvard) published a research study about the…
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Red Or Blue?: Research On Screen Color That May Surprise You
How does color affect our behavior when we are doing things online? Does it make a difference what the color background is? Does it depend on what we are reading or doing? Can you affect people’s decisions and behavior by changing the background color of a particular page or screen? Research by Ravi Mehta and…
