Summary How to Use Catalysts to Change Anyone's Mind | Jonah Berger (Youtube) www.youtube.com
2,002 words - YouTube video - View YouTube video
Interviewer Okay. So how do you change somebody's mind? What are what are the steps to that?
Jonah Berger Yeah. You know, and I would say in general, we focus as I mentioned on pushing. Right? We think if I just provide more reasons, more facts, more figures, more information, people will come around. And it makes sense why we think that.
Jonah Berger Right? You know, if there's a chair in the middle of the room and we wanna move that chair, pushing is a great way to move that chair. And if I push that chair, that chair will go. When we apply that same intuition to people though, there's 1 place we get stuck, which is that people aren't chairs. Right?
Jonah Berger When we push people, they don't just go, they often push back. They often think about all the reasons why what we're suggesting is wrong, why they don't wanna do it, and they oftentimes even do the exact opposite of what we suggest. And so the question is, could there be a better way to change minds? And and it turns out an interesting approach actually comes from chemistry. And so if any of your listeners have a background in chemistry, they'll probably, understand what I'm saying very quickly.
Jonah Berger But it's not surprising that chemical change is really hard. Right? If you wanna turn carbon into diamonds or you wanna turn plant matter into petroleum, it takes 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of years. And so, chemists often add temperature and pressure to make it happen faster. You think about a a popcorn kernel, for example, you wanna make popcorn, you stick the kernels in the microwave, adds a lot of heat, heats up those kernels, adds pressure inside the kernel, pops, the popcorn.
Jonah Berger And so temperature and pressure are usually the way to go. But there are special set of substances that chemists often use, that make change happen faster and easier. These substances clean the grime on your contact lenses as well, as the grime on your car's engine. They've helped, scientists win, dozens of Nobel prizes, and they're inside many of the products we use, every day. But what's neatest about them is the way that they work.
Jonah Berger They don't increase the temperature and they don't increase the pressure. They actually make the same amount of change happen with essentially less effort, and what they do is they lower the barrier to change. And these things are called catalysts. Right? And what catalysts do is they don't add temperature.
Jonah Berger They don't add pressure. They don't push harder. They figure out what's preventing changing, and they mitigate those barriers. And so that's exactly what the book is is all about. How can we change minds and drive action not by pushing harder, but by figuring out what the barriers or obstacles are that are preventing change and mitigate them?
Jonah Berger I think a good way to think about it is, you know, if you're parked on a hill, get inside your car, you want to get it to go, you step on the gas. If it doesn't go, you think you just need more gas. Sometimes we don't need more gas, sometimes we just need to depress the parking brake. And so what the book is all about is kind of what are those parking brakes that are preventing change from happening? What are the common barriers or obstacles that are stopping things from going, and how by identifying those barriers can we change anything?
Interviewer It's 1 of the things that I think has been really cool about doing this interview series is kinda seeing how a lot of these ideas, mesh together with what other people have talked about. And we had Chris Voss, the author of Never Split the Difference On Yeah. About a month ago. He was talking about how in negotiation, so many people wanna talk about, like, the positive benefits of doing a deal with you, but they never address all of the barriers of why you wouldn't wanna deal Yes. Do the deal.
Interviewer And, and he's like, you keep pushing the positives, but you never address the negatives. Those are always gonna be more powerful. So you have to kinda disable those before you can go into the other side, and that kinda seems like what you're talking about here. You gotta take the parking brake off.
Jonah Berger Yeah. It's certainly related, and and, you know, I think it's a good way to think about it. You know, the more you push someone, if they're digging in their heels, you can add more pressure, but the more pressure you add, the more resistance they're gonna put up. And so it's really about kind of what are those obstacles and how can we mitigate them to make all sorts of change easier.
Interviewer Yeah. So what are those obstacles?
Jonah Berger Yeah. So, I I like frameworks, and so this is also a framework book. My my second book Invisible Influence, which is the 1 we're not talking about today, that is not a framework book. So if you you wanna Jonah Berger book that doesn't have a framework, check that 1 out. But, The Catalyst, which is, just just came out recently, talks about 5 common barriers that we've seen, whether, you know, talking to great salespeople, talking to great leaders, talking to hostage negotiators, talking to substance abuse counselors, you know, even talking about a guy who got someone to announce the KKK, sort of, you know, grand dragon or whatever, the KKK got him to renounce the KKK and give it up.
Jonah Berger And again and again, looking across these sort of disparate areas, I tended to see sort of the same approaches being being used. And so the book talks about 5 common barriers, reactance, endowment, distance, uncertainty, and corroborating evidence. Put together, they spell a word and that is reduce, and that's exactly what great Catalysts do. They don't push harder. They reduce those barriers.
Jonah Berger And so each of the barriers, similar to contagious, talks a little about the psychology of how those barriers work, why they're a barrier in the first place, and give some examples of how to mitigate them and some tools so that people can apply them to their own lives.
Interviewer Do you have any, any favorite stories from the book that of examples where companies have kinda implemented some of these pieces?
Jonah Berger Yeah. You know, I'll give 1 quick example because I think it's, an easy 1 that's relevant in today's day and age. I, recently wrote a piece for HBR kind of about, how to apply some of the ideas in the in the current, situation where are we are in the world. So I'll give you an example from reactants, which I think is a fun 1. So, many of your listeners are probably familiar Tide Pods.
Jonah Berger You probably remember these little things that you drop in the laundry, so you don't have to measure out the detergent. You just put a pod, in the laundry. Okay. I'm gonna tell you a story about about Tide Pods. So, sort of over a decade now, over a decade, Tide was thinking about, hey, how can we make laundry easier to to do?
Jonah Berger No muss, no fuss. They came out with these things called Tide Pods. Basically barriers. Laundry's in over $1,000,000,000 market. They spent over a $150,000,000 on marketing.
Jonah Berger They thought they could take a big chunk of that market by making something new, adding a little technology, adding some chemistry, make doing laundry easier. They released Tide Pods, and Tide Pods do okay. They do quite well, in fact, but then there's a problem, which is that people are eating them. Now I'm gonna pause there for a second. If you're listening and going, people are eating them.
Jonah Berger Aren't they full of chemicals? You're exactly right. They are full of chemicals, yet people are eating them. Why? Because, College Humor came out with a funny video.
Jonah Berger The Onion came out with sort of a funny article saying they looked good enough to eat, and soon, mainly young people were challenging each other online to eat Tide Pods. It was called the Tide Pod Challenge. Now, imagine you're Tide, Procter and Gamble in this situation. People are out there eating Tide Pods. What do you do?
Jonah Berger You do what any company does in this situation. You tell them not to. So Tide, Procter and Gamble released a press release saying, don't eat Tide Pods. And in case that wasn't enough, they hire celebrity football player, Rob Gronkowski, to tell people not to eat Tide Pods. They put these videos online.
Jonah Berger They post post them on social media. They think that will be the end of it. Okay. Well, they hoped that telling people not to eat Tide pods would decrease interest in Tide pods. That's not what happened, and it wasn't that it had no change either.
Jonah Berger In the days after, Procter and Gamble released their messaging, searches for Tide Pods went up over 400% online. It wasn't just from people who were trying to figure out why Tide was telling people the obvious. Visits to Poison Control shot up as well. In the next 2 weeks, more people visited poison control than had in the 2 years previously. Essentially, a warning became a recommendation.
Jonah Berger Telling people not to do something made them more likely, to do it. And so, the first chapter talks all about this. It's a silly example, but it's an example of a principle of reactance. When we push people, when we try to get people to do something, when we try to persuade them, they know we're trying to do that, and so they react or push back against us. Essentially, people have an anti persuasion radar.
Jonah Berger Right? They detect incoming attempts. When we call them, try to pitch them something on the phone, we send them an email, when when an ad comes on the television, they ignore the messages, they avoid them, or even worse, they counter argue. They think about all the reasons why what we're suggesting is wrong. They're not just listening.
Jonah Berger Right? They're poking holes in our arguments. It's gonna be too expensive. It's gonna be difficult to implement. It's not gonna work.
Jonah Berger It's like a high school debate team member. And so this barrier, this anti persuasion radar makes it really hard to change minds. And so what that chapter is all about is how can we stop persuading people? How can we stop pushing them and get them to persuade themselves? How can we try to stop selling on things but get them to buy in?
Jonah Berger Giving them choices, for example, so they feel like they have more of a role to play. Asking questions rather than telling them things, which encourage them to come up and guide their journey down, down the path. Highlight a gap. Point out a gap between their attitudes and their actions or what they would recommend for someone else and what they're doing themselves. Happy to talk more in-depth about any of these, but sort of all of them are strategies to reduce that reactance, to get people to listen, and to get them to changing
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