When people are asked if they think there are more English words that begin with the letter 'R' than have 'R' as their third letter, most say there are more words that begin with 'R'. This is because it's easier to quickly think of words that begin with 'R' than to think of words where 'R' appears third.
While this intuitively might make sense, it is also clearly wrong. Significantly more words have 'R' as their third letter than their first — around three times more, in fact. (That last sentence had no fewer than five of them.)
Persuasion researchers have long known that something that can make a message more appealing is not necessarily how detailed or accurate it is but rather how easily people can think about it.
One demonstration of how our decisions can be influenced on the basis of how easy it is to think about what is being offered comes from research conducted by Michaela Wänke at the University of Mannheim, Germany.
In one of her studies, people interested in buying a new car were given information about BMWs and asked, "There are many reasons to choose a BMW. Can you name ten?"
After considering the answers to this question people reported that the car they would be most likely to purchase was... a Mercedes!
According to Wänke, this counterintuitive finding, like the 'R' word test, was all to do with the ease — or otherwise — with which people could generate reasons for choosing a BMW. Making the task more difficult by asking for ten reasons resulted in more negative evaluations of BMW and, as a result, more positive evaluations of a competitor.
So when it comes to persuading others, what is the optimum number of reasons to ask for? This study suggests only one or two.
One potentially important implication for anyone involved in communicating information about products and services to others is this. Only ask your audience to generate arguments in favour of your products and services if you are confident that they will be able to do so easily. And limit those reasons to just one or two because these are likely to be the more important ones. Asking for more might mean that you end up generating more negative opinions than positives ones.
Asking, "How easy is it for my target audience to come up with reasons why they like my product or service?" before trying to persuade them might be a productive thing to do. If you believe they are going to find it easy, then ask for just one or two reasons and concentrate on those.
On the other hand, if you believe they will find the task difficult you might be better advised to ask them to come up with lots of reasons why they would choose one of your competitors. In these cases, ten sounds like about the right number of reasons to ask for.
Steve Martin is co-author of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion. Visit scienceofyes.com; Twitter #scienceofyes
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