Becoming better or more successful by reading about biases seems difficult. After reading Kahneman, Ariely, and others, I've sort of come to the conclusion that a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases. These people gain a slight edge (or many) in life. However, learning to avoid or exploit biases is very difficult - unless you just have the kind of personality that already benefits from many biases.
For example, Steve Jobs could be thought of as having a personality which benefits from many biases. A few that I remember instantly: overconfidence bias (others believe you more if you're confident) and halo effect (one positive thing, like good looks, makes people think that you're good in other things too). Probably many others. Any one of these alone - probably wouldn't result in much. He hit a delicate balance, and his personality just worked out. He probably didn't know anything about bias research, and emulating the success of his personality by studying biases would be nigh impossible. Of course, biases aren't the sole reason for his success, but can explain parts of his life, and how he influenced people.
So studying biases helps us a little. You learn to understand human behavior a little better. You can maybe fine-tune some parts of your personality. Most stereotypical geeks for example, probably don't act confidently enough. But changing your behavior radically to avoid or exploit biases is still very difficult.
>Becoming better or more successful by reading about biases seems difficult.
Recognizing biases in yourself can also be really useful. If you know that this thing you are feeling is irrational and that negotiators are trained to make you feel that thing, you become much less vulnerable to manipulation.
Re-read the bits on Consistency - more than once a good negotiator has gained significant advantage over me using techniques under that heading.
Also, the trick is to go beyond reading. Most people read once or twice, go "ah, that makes sense", and then forget about it except when it's pointed out to them a little too late.
Benjamin Franklin had this stuff figured out. If you want to become better or more successful, it has to become a part of your regular study and practice. You have to revisit the principles over and over again. You have to analyze your day each day and ask yourself what you could've done better, and decide how you're going to do things differently the next time around. So on and so forth.
>You have to analyze your day each day and ask yourself what you could've done better, and decide how you're going to do things differently the next time around. So on and so forth.
If you are negotiating big things every day, you are... well, really you are a professional negotiator and you probably shouldn't be listening to me. If you are a professional negotiator and you aren't better at negotiating than I am... you had better find another line of work.
I mean, yeah, we all negotiate little things every day, but for most technical people, even most technical people who do a little business, we have a few big negotiations every now and then, negotiations which can have serious negative consequences if we screw them up, and then a bunch of little negotiations every day that don't matter nearly as much as our technical performance.
I think those big negotiations, yeah, going over what happened, especially after a big screwup is a good idea, yeah, but it's not something that is going to happen every day. It doesn't make sense for me to spend too much time thinking about the guy who talked me into co-locating a server at cost yesterday. It's super minor compared to, say, developing a better burn-in procedure or figuring out how to set up customer-accessible zfs backups.
I also think that it's good, I mean, if you are not a negotiation specialist, to make it clear that you will give a go/no go some time after the negotiation, after you give it time to let your emotions settle and look at it more objectively. Remember that when negotiating in real time, if you are a primarily technical person, you are probably dealing with a professional negotiator, and should assume that they are as good at their job as you are at yours; this means that they are going to dramatically outclass you as a negotiator.
>You can hire these people and have them use their talents to further your own interests.
This is easier for some specialties than others.
For example, if you want to hire someone who is good at negotiation, if they are actually good at negotiation, they should be able to extract as compensation the majority of the value they add. If you are especially bad at negotiation, or if it's difficult to tell exactly how much value they are adding, it's possible for them to extract more value as compensation than they are adding to the transaction.
That is, of course, a great idea if you can make it work.
However, for that to work, you need to have a well-delineated task; you need all your bidders to be bidding on the same thing.
Let us take the very simple case of real-estate. "Sell my house, you get 3% of the total selling price."
(well, traditionally, the seller pays 6%, but 3% goes to the buyer's agent, which to me makes it seem like the buyer's agent actually works for the seller, as, well, it's the seller doing the paying.)
But anyhow, let's focus on the seller's agent, as like I said, the buyer's agent has a interest in seeing to it that the deal goes down quickly, easily, and that there aren't legal issues later, but they don't have any interest in negotiating a lower price for the buyer, except to the extent that doing so could make the deal go through faster.
So say I want to sell my house. There are some agents that will sell my house for 2%, or even 1%. why haven't those agents dominated the market? do the agents who take 3% negotiate higher prices for the buyer?
The point here is that professional negotiators have set up systems where it's hard for you to send out requests for bids on standardized tasks, because such a system would lower their compensation. I used the real-estate market as an example, because there is a very standard compensation system, but it is largely divorced from (and in fact opposed to, from the buyer's side) the "hey you, here's some money, get me the best price." task that I would like to pay them for.
note, I'm not saying that it's impossible to hire a negotiator... I'm just saying that it's a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Hiring a negotiator is dramatically more difficult than hiring someone who performs a well-defined task.
Now, I'm with you, though, in that when you can reduce that negotiation task down to something standard you can put out bids on, you are going to do very well. I'm just saying that reducing that negotiation task down to something like that can quite often be a difficult task in and of itself.
Many people would benefit from role-playing both sides of con/deception games in childhood, as emotional existence proofs of active threats which cannot be discerned visually. The film Inception shows the use of psychological firewalls, termed "militarized subconscious" in the film.
It's not difficult to use a lot of the examples from Cialdini to become more successful. Adding reviews or top clients to your website (social proof), stating that you only have 3 items left in stock (scarcity), giving free samples (reciprocity), etc.
eh, but the thing is, you don't have to "act" (I mean, you don't have to change your personality) to exploit biases. simply knowing that most people have a bias sets up a situation you can exploit when making rational decisions.
I know that confident people, for example, are thought of as being more competent. If I am in a situation where confidence does not correlate with competence, being aware that others are valuing a person for a trait that is not relevant to the task at hand can allow me, sometimes, to find someone just as competent who is undervalued by the market.
This really has nothing to do with changing your own attributes, this is just being aware of other people's biases, and taking arbitrage where you see it.
> a lot of people naturally behave in a way that exploits others' biases.
Yes. And it has to be practiced and look natural.
I remember one of the new hiries and wanna-be managers had probably read the "non-verbal cues used for persuasion" book. Was watching him during a meeting he was just going awkwardly through the motions. It was like he was checking off items from the list: Ok touch extened fingertips of one hand to those of the other [check], mirror posture of CEO [check]. It was mildly amusing and cringeworthy at the same time.
A big thing I got from learning about biases was to raise my standards of trust/truth of what other people say. Seeing how fallible people are was very powerful to me (coming from a religious background).
A colleague of mine is really passionate about Cialdini's work, and he actually put together over 50+ examples of the principles of Persuasion used in marketing, sorted by category. [1]
I personally found it quite useful to peg the principles to real-world ideas, and the visuals help with memory/recall.
As I mentioned in another comment– it's pretty easy to look at a principle in action and go, "Yeah, that makes sense." The real challenge is to then look at your own material critically, and see where you can implement it, what you're doing well, what you're missing out on, and how you can do better. That takes a lot of rigorous attentiveness and practice.
The really cool thing is– as long as you're not making stuff up (eg: faking social proof for a product that nobody actually likes), you're going to legitimately improve perceptions of your product. For instance, if you do a search for your product on Twitter and you find that there are people saying positive things about it, it's totally worth quoting those tweets on your signup page! And so on.
I had a copy of this book before my car was broken into and my belongings were stolen. I was about 75% through the book. I had to wonder if there was something in that book that could ironically explain the break-in.
If you liked this book, here are a few others I enjoyed that cover similar themes. They are all more or less about the psychology underlying every human interaction.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People (a classic by Dale Carnegie)
- Meta-Talk (Gerard I. Nierenberg, Henry H. Calero)
- Games People Play (Eric Berne)
- What Every Body is Saying (Joe Nevarro, Marvin Karlins)
- Conversationally Speaking (Alan Garner)
These books provide a great foundation for anyone who needs to deal with people on a daily basis (ie. everyone), and are especially useful if you want to be aware of fast-talkers trying to take advantage of you.
It's frustrating to see the Milgram experiment universally misunderstood:
"In the Milgram experiment the participants continued to give (ostensible) electric shocks despite very strong signs that the experiment has gone too far, just because the supervisor in the lab coat told them so."
That statement is false. It is one of the potential interpretations of the result, but it is not the dominant view (though it is conventional wisdom). Look at the actual script the (actor) scientists told the participants and look at the data of how many participants tend to object and when.
People do not inflict the fake punishment "just because the supervisor in the lab coat told them so" they are doing it because they are repeatedly told that the participant is OK and that this is part of the experiment; they know that they themselves are not scientists so have reason to defer to the expert; and they have a social understanding that an experiment which literally killed one of the participants would probably not clear the ethic committee.
For anyone else interested, here are some examples[1] of the ways in which the experimenter strayed from the script:
"In listening to the original recordings of the experiments, it's clear that Milgram's experimenter John Williams deviated significantly from the script in his interactions with subjects. Williams – with Milgram's approval – improvised in all manner of ways to exert pressure on subjects to keep administering shocks.
He left the lab to 'check' on the learner, returning to reassure the teacher that the learner was OK. Instead of sticking to the standard four verbal commands described in accounts of the experimental protocol, Williams often abandoned the script and commanded some subjects 25 times and more to keep going. Teachers were blocked in their efforts to swap places with the learner or to check on him themselves.
The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram's experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings."
You can watch one of the examples in this video[2] (at 1:30). Having administered several shocks already, the man playing the role of the teacher asks the experimenter, "Who's going to take responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?" The experimenter begins his reply by saying, "I'm responsible for anything that happens to him," which was contrary to the script, and the teacher continues with the shocks.
Later studies have attempted to replicate some of the results though,[3][4] so that is not the end of the story.
How reproducible is the empirical research this book bases its claims on? If it's about par for the course in social psych, take a peek at the Many Labs projects.... many of these clever, thought-provoking experiments have turned out to be clever, thought-provoking false positives.
These tactics are everywhere money is involved. These are used against me dozens of times a day, in advertisements, marketing, and just going about my business.
I think that everyone has a duty to render themselves immune to these and other tactics. It's idealistic, for sure, but a lot of today's societal woes make sense in the context of people mindlessly acting out others' persuasions beyond the scope of their own rational self-interest. It's especially sickening just how many of these people see only the emotional content of the arguments presented to them and nothing else....
I like to read about this, because I'm often confused about human behavior. Sometimes I'm tempted to leverage it, but I can't shake the feeling of how shallow and amoral it is, or just even dehumanizing. That said, there are times when you need to ensure certain things for yourself, free for all, and it become a competitive advantage.
Funny, I just purchased that book a few weeks ago. It's very interesting to me; I hadn't realized humans are so susceptible to manipulation (including me).
I wish you could just hand someone a list of logical, rational arguments and they would read the list and change their mind, but no, things don't work that way.
What can lead to defensive change is the emotional experience of being run over by those using such techniques for hostile ends. Prey eventually learn to identify predators who don't have visually identifying characteristics.
I think this is useful for learning how to defend against those trying to influence you. As one of the top salespeople in my field, I can confidently say this tactic is not a necessity.
Of current relevance, Cialdini discusses the statistical effect of publicized suicides on imitative suicides, and particularly on suicides by airline pilots. Disquieting stuff.
For example, Steve Jobs could be thought of as having a personality which benefits from many biases. A few that I remember instantly: overconfidence bias (others believe you more if you're confident) and halo effect (one positive thing, like good looks, makes people think that you're good in other things too). Probably many others. Any one of these alone - probably wouldn't result in much. He hit a delicate balance, and his personality just worked out. He probably didn't know anything about bias research, and emulating the success of his personality by studying biases would be nigh impossible. Of course, biases aren't the sole reason for his success, but can explain parts of his life, and how he influenced people.
So studying biases helps us a little. You learn to understand human behavior a little better. You can maybe fine-tune some parts of your personality. Most stereotypical geeks for example, probably don't act confidently enough. But changing your behavior radically to avoid or exploit biases is still very difficult.