Actions speak louder than words — we’ve been brought up listening to this adage. But if the research conducted by University of Chicago Booth School of Business is anything to go by, then the learning could very well be for naught! A study has found that talking about what you like, more than what you do, aids in persuasion.
This research has implications for online shopping, social media marketing and political campaigns. Marketers, for example, could collect ‘likes’ from Facebook users, rather than collecting information on what users buy, eat or own. Likewise, they could present products as ‘everyone likes it’, rather than ‘everyone buys it.’
It’s what you like
When it comes to the art of persuasion, you can attract more followers if you turn conventional wisdom on its head and stress on what you like, not what you do. A new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds that people are more likely to conform to others’ preferences, than conform their actions. In other words, people want to like what others like, but not do what others do or don’t do.
The study
In the study, ‘Words Speak Louder: Conforming to Preferences More Than Actions’ (by University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Ayelet Fishbach and former Chicago Booth PhD student Yanping Tu), researchers designed a series of six experiments, involving everyday activities such as choosing a type of chewing gum, shopping for groceries, picking a favourite mug design and watching a pet video on YouTube.
Tendency to conform
“The tendency to conform is pervasive and rooted in human psychology,” said Fishbach. “When people conform, they conform to what others like and to others’ attitudes. But in terms of what they do, they want to be different. So if you want to persuade people, you should talk about liking, not having.”
Researchers found that people conform to others’ preferences at last partially because they adopt others’ judgments as their own. When people behave as if they are not conforming, their motivation could be to coordinate or complement their actions with others’ actions.
For instance, when people mentally share an action, such as watching a friend eat a bowl of oatmeal over breakfast, they feel that they ate the oatmeal too. So, to enrich their own experience, they choose something different, such as an omelette.
But when people mentally share another person’s preference, such as liking oatmeal more than omelette, they adopt the others’ preference as their own and say they like oatmeal more than omelette.
Even when information about others’ preferences and actions are available at the same time—such as an online shopping site that lists both its bestselling products and its most liked products—people are more likely to follow what others like, rather than what others buy.