Geese grow on trees

But you knew that.

Actually, people once believed it, but we're so smart today that we don't. Therefore, our minds are open to all sorts of new ideas.

Not.

Here's a quick, delightful video about confirmation bias, one of the many reasons it's a miracle that we who write and speak can persuade anyone of anything.

This is a video teaser for David McRaney’s book, You are Now Less Dumb.

Two questions for you:

1) If not geese and trees, what are your audience's embedded beliefs?

2) How will you adjust for that?

Use a story to get past their biases

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency of your readers or listeners to accept only what they already believe. It could explain why your well-crafted papers, memos and speeches get nowhere. I've written about it here and here.

This cognitive bias would seem to be an impenetrable barrier, but there is a way through it: the old-fashioned story.

Steve Denning, a knowledge management and organizational storytelling consultant, has looked into this. “Analysis might excite the mind," he writes, "but it hardly offers a route to the heart.And that’s where you must go if you are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm.”

Here's an example from his own experience, as related by Cynthia Phoel:

As a program director at The World Bank in the mid-1990s Denning was at a loss for how to convince his colleagues of the value of knowledge management. Presentations built on solid research and carefully constructed PowerPoint slides got him nowhere. Then he started telling this simple story:

In June of last year, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and got an answer to a question about the treatment of malaria. Remember that this was in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it was in a tiny place six hundred kilometers from the capitol city. But the most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn’t in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn’t available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become.

This narrative succeeded in persuading Denning’s listeners to envision a broader, more ambitious future for the organization. It succeeded where analysis and argument had failed.

Business isn't as rational as we pretend. But you knew that.

What's going on in the brains of your audience

Gentlemen, start your PowerPoints.

Not a whole lot.

They're looking at you or your words, and you've assembled some dazzling arguments for your position, but when you've had your say you're worse off than before.

That's because confirmation bias is firmly in control. Researchers who have studied this know that we don't let mere arguments or evidence upset our deeply held beliefs. In fact, arguments to the contrary tend to make our beliefs stronger.

People are funny.

Is your audience even thinking? Apparently not, Steve Denning writes. He's an author, consultant and knowledge management guru. He refers to a study at Emory University:

Drew Westen and his team at Emory University conducted Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans on fifteen "strong Republicans" and fifteen "strong Democrats" in the course of the 2004 presidential campaign while they were reviewing blatantly self-contradictory statements by the two candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry. As we would expect from earlier studies of the confirmation bias, the Democrats found ways to reconcile Kerry’s inconsistencies and became even more strongly Democrat, while the Republicans had no difficulty explaining away George W. Bush’s self-contradictions so as to become even more fervently Republican.

But the fRMI brain scans showed something new. While the participants were considering the inconsistent statements, the part of the brain associated with reasoning revealed no signs of activity at all. "We did not see," said Westen, "any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

But there was something even more startling. 

Once the participants had seen a way to interpret contradictory statements as supporting their original position, the part of the brain involved in reward and pleasure became active, and the conclusion was "massively reinforced . . . with the elimination of negative emotional states and the activation of positive ones."

In the end you'll need to tap into their emotions, and there are ways to do this, which I'll explore in another post.

It's not what they think; it's what they believe

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. 

It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

~ Mark Twain

Sometimes people refuse to be persuaded. Deeply held beliefs trump argument and evidence. Brian Klapper, a management consultant, tells the story of a company like this.

The CEO of a large U.S. furniture manufacturer asked me to help him reduce customer fulfillment time from 12 weeks to four weeks. The company was using an automated conveyor belt assembly line, and when the workers were unable to keep up with the pace, they hurriedly removed the pieces from the line and put them on the floor — reminiscent of the candy factory scene from "I Love Lucy." Beside each operator was a large pile of partially assembled furniture. 

I suggested to the CEO that unplugging the line and allowing the workers to set the pace would not only result in faster turnaround, but also significantly higher quality furniture, given that the furniture incurred tremendous damage when moved from the belt to the floor. However, management was not convinced. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our suggestion, we set up a pilot line in an abandoned factory, which we ran for a month. Thru-put was 30% higher, quality reached record levels, and morale was way up. Still, management remained unconvinced, believing that workers must be directed, tightly managed, and never allowed to set their own pace.

This is not uncommon. It's a form of confirmation bias. Psychologists Lee Ross and Craig Anderson write:

Beliefs can survive potent logical or empirical challenges. They can survive and even be bolstered by evidence that most uncommitted observers would agree logically demands some weakening of such beliefs. They can even survive the total destruction of their original evidential bases.

For one who wishes to persuade, then, the first task is to understand what the other person believes. Those beliefs will even determine what the person chooses to read. Don't expect a liberal to read a conservative magazine. Don't expect an executive who is skeptical of management consultants to be eagerly anticipating the next issue of McKinsey Quarterly.

In another post I'll explore how we might deal with confirmation bias.