Persuasion - Page 4 of 7

How To Spark People’s Compassion Towards Others

Fairness is not a totally stable trait, people can be encouraged to show more compassion.

Fairness is not a totally stable trait, people can be encouraged to show more compassion.

A drug used to treat Parkinson’s can make people show more compassion to others, a new study finds.

Tolcapone has been found to change the neurochemical balance in the prefrontal cortex.

The new research found that this leads to more fair and equitable behaviour.

Dr Ming Hsu, one of the study’s lead investigators, said:

“We typically think of fair-mindedness as a stable characteristic, part of one’s personality.
Our study doesn’t reject this notion, but it does show how that trait can be systematically affected by targeting specific neurochemical pathways in the human brain.”

In the study, 35 participants were given either the Parkinson’s drug, tolcapone, or a placebo.

Tolcapone was used because it is known to prolong the effects of dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to fairness.

Then people played a simple economic game in which they divided up money with strangers.

Those who had been given the tolcapone did so in a more egalitarian way.

Dr Hsu said:

“Our study shows how studying basic scientific questions about human nature can, in fact, provide important insights into diagnosis and treatment of social dysfunctions.
Our hope is that medications targeting social function may someday be used to treat these disabling conditions.”

The study brings us closer to understanding how compassion — such a crucial human behaviour — works in the brain.

Dr Ignacio Sáez, the study’s first author, said:

“We have taken an important step toward learning how our aversion to inequity is influenced by our brain chemistry.
Studies in the past decade have shed light on the neural circuits that govern how we behave in social situations.
What we show here is one brain ‘switch’ we can affect.”

The research is published in the journal Current Biology (Sáez et al., 2015)

Heart image from Shutterstock

The Amazing Effect of Mother’s Mere Presence on Infant Pain and Brain Development

Wonderful influence of mother’s presence on infants brain development and experience of pain.

Wonderful influence of mother’s presence on infants’ brain development and experience of pain.

The mere presence of the mother helps sooth an infant as well as changing genes in the emotional centres of the brain.

The new study from the NYU Langone Medical Center examined which genes in rat pups were active when its mother was either present or absent.

The study found that when experiencing pain, hundreds of genes in the rat pups brains were modified by the mother’s presence.

The pups were also soothed by the mother’s presence.

This is the first time that scientists have shown how the infant brain reacts to the presence or absence of its mother when in distress.

It is hoped the findings — presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C. — may need to new ways of treating pain in infants.

Professor Regina Sullivan, who led the study, explained:

“Our study shows that a mother comforting her infant in pain does not just elicit a behavioral response, but also the comforting itself modifies — for better or worse — critical neural circuitry during early brain development.”

The scientists analysed the amygdala — an almond-shaped part of the brain important in processing emotions.

Professor Sullivan continued:

“Nobody wants to see an infant suffer, in rats or any other species.
But if opiate drugs are too dangerous to use in human infants because of their addictive properties, then the challenge remains for researchers to find alternative environmental stimuli, including maternal presence, coddling, or other cues, such as a mother’s scent, that could relieve the pain.
“The more we learn about nurturing the infant brain during infancy, the better prepared we are to deal long-term with treating problems that arise from pain, and physical and mental abuse experienced during infancy.”

Image credit: Oleg Sidorenko

Facebook Reveals Secret Experiment To Control Your Emotions

Study in which Facebook manipulated the news feeds of almost 700,000 users for psychological research sparks controversy.

A new study of ‘emotional contagion‘ which manipulated the Facebook news feeds of 689,003 users for a week in 2012 has been widely criticised over ethical and privacy concerns.

Facebook users who ‘took part’ in the experiment did not give their consent, either before or after their news feeds were manipulated.

In fact, you may have taken part without knowing anything about it.

News feed manipulation

Working with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, Facebook subtly adjusted the types of stories that appeared in user’s news feeds for that week (Kramer et al., 2014).

Some people saw stories that were slightly more emotionally negative, while others saw more content that was slightly more emotionally positive.

People were then tracked to see what kind of status updates they posted subsequently.

One of the study’s authors, Jeff Hancock, explained the results:

“People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates.
When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred: Significantly more positive words were used in peoples’ status updates.”

In other words: positive and negative emotions are contagious online.

The study echoes that conducted recently by Coviello et al. (2014), which found that positive emotions are more contagious than negative.

The previous study, though, while it was conducted on Facebook in a somewhat similar way, did not manipulate users’ news feeds, rather it used random weather variations to make a natural experiment:

“…they needed something random which would affect people’s emotions as a group and could be tracked in their status updates — this would create a kind of experiment.
They hit upon the idea of using rain, which reliably made people’s status updates slightly more negative.” (Happiness is Contagious and Powerful on Social Media)

Was it right?

There are all sorts of conversations going on about whether or not this experiment was sound.

Media outlets have been scrambling around to see what various rules have to say about this.

Was the study’s ethical procedure correctly reviewed? Did Facebook break its terms of service?

But let’s just forget the rules for a moment and use our brains:

Was this study likely to do anyone any harm? Highly unlikely. Psychologists measure the influence of manipulations using an ‘effect size’. In this study it was d = 0.001. Trust me, this is beyond miniscule.
Should users have been told they’d taken part in an experiment afterwards? Yes, it would have been a nice courtesy — and most people would probably have been fine with it.

Big data

The reason people are jumping on the story is because of concerns about what other people are doing with our data, especially big corporations and governments.

Take Facebook itself: many people don’t realise that Facebook is already manipulating your news feed.

The average Facebook news feed has 1,500 items vying for a spot in front of your eyeballs.

Facebook doesn’t show you everything, so it has to decide what stays and what goes.

To do this they use an algorithm which is manipulating your news feed in ways that are much less transparent than this experiment.

Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton University, who edited the article for the academic journal it was published in (PNAS), told The Atlantic:

“I was concerned until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time… I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research.”

But should our justifiable concerns about being spied on, manipulated and exploited stop researchers conducting a harmless and valuable psychology experiment?

Final word goes to the study’s lead author, Adam Kramer, a Data Scientist at Facebook, who was moved to apologise:

“The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product.
We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out.
At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.
We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.”

Image credit: Dimitris Kalogeropoylos

How Your Name Influences How Believable You Are

What’s in a name?

People whose names are more easily pronounced are believed more than those with hard to pronounce names, a new study finds.

This is even true when comparing two foreign people with unfamiliar names: the one that is more easily pronounced is perceived as more believable.

The study was inspired by the idea that we don’t necessarily weigh up the truthfulness of what we hear on an objective basis (Newman et al., 2014).

There are all sorts of psychological biases going on which influence how we perceive what we are told.

The study’s lead author, Eryn Newman, explained the general principle:

“When we encounter new information, how easy or difficult it is to process plays an important role in all sorts of situations.
For example, research shows people think that food additives with easier names are safer than those with difficult names.”
To the Fred Flintstone parts of our brains, that feeling of familiarity signals something that we can trust, but information that’s difficult to process signals danger.”

For the research, the experimenters looked through newspapers and websites from around the world for pairs of names from various regions.

One example of a pair of names used in the study was ‘Andrian Babeshko’ and ‘Yevgeny Dherzhinsky’.

Participants were asked in one experiment to describe how dangerous a person was, purely on the basis of their name.

In another experiment, participants imagined they were trying to choose the safest tour guide for a trip.

Each time the more easily pronounced name, like ‘Andrian Babeshko’, fared better than the harder of the pair (‘Yevgeny Dherzhinsky’).

Similarly, previous studies have found that people with easier to pronounce names are more likely to be liked, accomplished and even elected.

Newman continued:

“What we now know from these results, however, is that the consequences of easy-to-pronounce names reach much further than previously thought.
Just think of the situations in which pronounceability could have a significant impact on people’s lives.
For example, we might ask whether the pronounceability of eyewitnesses’ names influences jury verdicts.”

The authors finish with a reference to a spoof from The Onion, titled “Bush Deploys Vowels to Bosnia“:

“For six years, we have stood by while names like Ygrjvslhv and Tzlynhr and Glrm have been horribly butchered by millions around the world,” Bush said. “Today, the United States must finally stand up and say ‘Enough.’
It is time the people of Bosnia finally had some vowels in their incomprehensible words. The US is proud to lead the crusade in this noble endeavour.”
[…]
Said Sjlbvdnzv resident Grg Hmphrs, 67: “With just a few key letters, I could be George Humphries.
This is my dream.”

Image credit: Alan O’Rourke

Unique Human Brain Area Identified that Separates Us From Monkeys

First study to compare human and monkey brains with modern MRI methods reaches fascinating conclusions.

Researchers at Oxford University have pinpointed an area of the brain that is uniquely human–perhaps part of what gives us our higher cognitive powers and separates us from monkeys.

The area, in red above, part of the ventrolateral (at the front and side) frontal cortex, is likely to help us plan for the future, learn things from others, behave flexibly, along with other complex tasks.

To reach these conclusions, Neubert et al. (2014) compared brain imaging–both structural and functional–from healthy human volunteers with that from macaque monkeys.

This allowed them to build a picture both of the brain’s structure and how the different areas interact.

Professor Matthew Rushworth, one of the study’s authors, likened the brain to a mosaic of tiles:

“The brain is a mosaic of interlinked areas. We wanted to look at this very important region of the frontal part of the brain and see how many tiles there are and where they are placed.
We also looked at the connections of each tile–how they are wired up to the rest of the brain–as it is these connections that determine the information that can reach that component part and the influence that part can have on other brain regions.”

The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was then divided up into 12 areas, 11 of which were connected up in very similar ways in both humans and macaque monkeys. This shows some of the striking similarities between the brains of humans and monkeys.

The 12^th area, though, in the lateral frontal pole, had no equivalent in the macaque monkeys, and may represent a uniquely human aspect of our brains.

The study’s lead author, Franz-Xaver Neubert, said:

“We have established an area in human frontal cortex which does not seem to have an equivalent in the monkey at all. This area has been identified with strategic planning and decision making as well as ‘multi-tasking.'”

The researchers also found that the auditory areas of the human brain were very well connected with the prefrontal cortex in comparison with the monkeys. This may underlie our advanced language skills.

Image credit: University of Oxford

Gesturing While Talking Influences Thoughts

When people gesture with their hands while talking, it helps change their thoughts.

If you ask someone to show you how to tie their shoe-laces or play Jenga, they will almost certainly use their hands to do so.

Even people who have been blind from birth, and have never seen gestures, still use them while they talk.

But these gestures aren’t just a way of communicating, they may also be a way of abstracting and encoding the information.

In a study investigating how gestures interact with thoughts, Beilock and Goldin-Meadow (2010) had participants trying to solve a test often used by psychologists called ‘The Tower of Hanoi’ task.

Essentially this involves moving some blocks from one tower onto another.

If you’re interested, here’s a little YouTube video that explains it:

After completing this, participants were asked to explain how they had solved the puzzle to someone else.

This is virtually impossible to do without using your hands and everyone gestured spontaneously, although in slightly different ways.

They then went back into to do the task again but, this time, half the participants had had one of the disks switched so that it was more difficult to lift.

Here’s the really interesting bit: people who had spontaneously gestured with only one hand when asked to explain their solution, took longer to solve the puzzle the second time.

In comparison, those who had spontaneously used both hands, though, were quicker–presumably because they immediately used both hands on the now-heavy block.

What had happened was that how people had gestured while they explained the task had changed how they had remembered to complete it.

Thinking with your hands

This finding builds on previous studies which show that gesturing can help build memory.

Studies on children have shown that when they are encouraged to gesture while they talk, it can increase what they learn (e.g. Stevanoni & Salmon, 2005).

And, from the perspective of someone learning from another, people can learn certain tasks better when the other person gestures at them.

Not all tasks or attempts to learn, though, will benefit from gesturing; it will depend on whether the particular task lends itself to gesturing.

Nevertheless, the study is a wonderful reminder of the power of something most of us do, but few think about:

“Gesturing does not merely reflect thought: Gesture changes thought by introducing action into one’s mental representations. Gesture forces people to think with their hands.” (Beilock & Goldin-Meadow, 2010)

Image credit: mrehan

10 Ways Your Voice Influences Other Minds

Deep male voices boost memory, familiar voices are easy to hear or block out, the distinctive voice of love and more…

It’s not just what you say, it’s the way that you say it.

The sound of our voices, including its pitch, accent and inflection, has all sorts of subtle effects on how we are perceived by other people.

Here are ten ways in which the sound of your voice influences other people’s minds.

1. Familiar voices jump out

Familiar voices seem to jump out of the background hubbub automatically at us.

Participants in a recent study listened to their spouse’s voice when it was mixed up with a stranger’s voice (Johnsrude et al., 2013). They found it easier to pick out what their spouse was saying compared with the stranger.

The punch line is that people also found it much easier to ignore their spouse’s voice when they wanted to.

So, familiar voices are easier to hear, and also easier to tune out.

2. The voice of love

There’s a subtle change in people’s voices when they speak to someone they love.

Despite the subtlety of these shifts in the voice, people can detect the changes by listening for just 2 seconds (Farley et al., 2013).

One of the study’s authors, Susan Hughes, explained that the voices of new lovers had a special tone:

“There was vulnerability associated with the voices of those newly in love. Perhaps people don’t want to be rejected.”

3. Women attracted to deeper voices

It’s hardly a revelation that women prefer men with deeper voices (Collins, 2000), although it does contain a mystery.

The mystery is: why? You might, quite sensibly, guess that it signals a taller man, more muscles, a hairy chest and so on.

But actually when women are tested, a deeper voice only tells a woman that a man probably weighs more. In other words, men with deeper voices can just as easily be short, fat and totally lacking in muscles or a hairy chest.

4. Deeper voices are more memorable

Deeper voiced men also enjoy a range of other advantages: they sound more like leaders (Rindy et al., 2012), consequently voters go for deep-voiced males (Klofstad et al., 2012) and women find what they say easier to remember (Smith et al., 2012).

5. Men attracted to higher voices

Just as women prefer men with low voices, men prefer women with breathy, high voices–but not too high-pitched and squeaky (Xu et al., 2013).

The idea is that a high-pitched voice signals a smaller body and a more submissive person (hey, no one said evolutionary psychology was politically correct).

6. Breathy male voices are sexy

Most know that a breathy female voices sound more attractive to men, but one surprise in the research is that a breathy male voice also sounds more attractive to women.

One theory of why breathiness is attractive for both men and women is that it makes the voice sound less aggressive and therefore more approachable (Xu et al., 2013).

7. Beware the cheating voice

A potential problem with a man having a deep voice and a woman having a high-pitched voice is that it signals attractiveness, which also means they might be cheaters!

People seem to be implicitly aware of this (O’Connor et al., 2011). One of the authors of the study, Professor David Feinberg, explains:

“Men with higher testosterone levels have lower pitched voices, and women with higher estrogen levels have higher pitched voices. High levels of these hormones are associated with adulterous behaviour and our findings indicate individuals are somewhat aware of the link and may use this in their search for a romantic partner.”

8. Love your own voice?

Everyone must have had the experience of hearing their own recorded voice back and being surprised by it. Many people say: “Oh, I really hate the sound of my own voice!”

But is that true?

A study has tested this by having people rate a series of voices, which, secretly, also included their own (Hughes, 2013). It turned out that, on average, people really liked the sound of their own voice, despite not recognising it as their own.

So, it’s not just politicians who love the sound of their own voice–most of us do.

9. Foreign accents less believable

One problem for those with a foreign accent, is that it sounds less believable.

A recent study found that statements that were read in a foreign accent were rated less truthful than those read in a native accent (Lev-Ari et al., 2010).

While prejudice may be involved, it’s more likely down to the fact that foreign accents are more difficult for the brain to process.

Unfortunately our minds apply a simple rule: if it’s more difficult to understand, it’s less likely to be true.

10. Imitate accents to understand

If two people with different accents are talking to each other, they naturally blend them to match, usually without realising.

The reason for this is partly that when we imitating someone else’s accent, it makes it easier to understand what they are saying (Adank et al., 2010).

But make sure that you keep it subtle, or it will sound like you’re mocking them.

Image credit: Marina Montoya

8 Easy Bodily Actions That Transform Mental Performance

Jump for joy, confuse for creativity, relax for better decisions, open up for pain tolerance and more…

People tend to assume that body language just expresses how we feel inside.

But it also works the other way: how we hold our bodies affects how we feel and think in all sorts of fascinating ways.

One of the early studies found that people who put pens in their mouths in such a way that it activates the muscles responsible for smiling, actually experienced more pleasure.

In the past few years the study of how bodily posture affects the mind has exploded.

Here are 8 of the latest psychological studies on what psychologists call ’embodied cognition’, or the intimate ways in which body feeds back to mind.

1. Relax for better decisions

Feeling powerful can be useful but too much power can have a weird effect on decision-making. Just look at bankers: they got too full of themselves and never questioned their decisions. And we all know how that turned out.

If you just want your decisions confirmed, then a feeling of power is good. But if you want to incorporate new information to make better decisions, then a feeling of power can be dangerous.

One study found that when people adopted more neutral poses, like keeping their hands relaxed, they were more likely to take into account new information into their decision-making (Fischer et al., 2011).

Powerful, expansive bodily postures, on the other hand, made people only notice information that was consistent with the decision they wanted to make.

2. Deep voice for abstract thinking

There’s little doubt that people tend to associated lower voices with more power.

It’s no accident that those voice-over guys that do the movie trailers sound like they’ve been gargling scotch and razors for several decades.

As you’d expect, then, when people lower their voices, they feel more powerful.

But it also has another effect: it makes people think more abstractly (Stel et al., 2011).

And abstract thinking can be important in a number of ways: it can boost creativity, self-control and increase self-insight. In fact, abstract thought is powerful in all sorts of ways; check out this article on psychological distance for more.

3. Confuse for creativity

To boost creativity, sometimes it pays for mind and body to be out of sync, according to a study by Huang and Galinsky (2011).

They had some people recalling a happy time in their life while at the same time frowning. Another group recalled sad memories while smiling. The idea was to get their minds going one way and their bodies going the other.

Participants who did this displayed more expansive thinking than those whose minds and bodies were congruent.

Expansive thinking is very useful in the early stages of the creative process. It allows two previously unconnected ideas to be brought together in new and exciting ways.

[Full study description: promoting visionary thinking.]

4. Open up for pain tolerance

Pain is highly subjective and open to influence by psychological factors.

Bohns and Wiltermuth (2012), therefore, wondered if people’s pain tolerance could be increased if they changed their posture, and therefore their mindset.

Some participants in the study stood with their arms outstretched and legs wide apart, before taking a pain tolerance test. When compared with those standing neutrally or sitting submissively, those adopting the power pose could take more pain.

This is because standing powerfully makes you feel like you have control over the pain, even if in reality you don’t.

5. Stand tall for the job

It’s well-worn advice, but no less useful because of that: when you go for an interview, make sure you stand tall…hold on, though, there’s a twist.

In a study where participants went through a mock interview, it was those who adopted expansive, high-power postures, like standing tall, who made the better impression on interviewers and more likely to be chosen for the job (Cuddy et al., 2012).

The twist is that they had to use the power postures before they went in for the interview, not during it. Adopting power postures during the interview had no effect.

So you’ve got to stand tall before you go in to get your mind in the right place.

Note: psychologists have since found that ‘power posing’ is probably not a real effect. When others have tried to copy the original study, it has not proved possible to replicate it.

6. Approach for mastery

People who are powerful tend to approach others rather than waiting to be approached. They also stand closer while talking and are more likely to invade the personal space of others.

But, according to a study by Smith et al., (2013; in press), it also works the other way around: being forced to approach others makes you feel more powerful.

In fact, participants in these studies didn’t have to physically move closer, they only had to imagine or visualise themselves as closer to get the effects.

So, simply imagining yourself approaching other important people or objects, is enough to pump up your power.

7. Sit small to eat less

The researchers in this study tested the effect of how women dieters sat while they ate (Allen et al., 2013). Did they spread out and take up more space, or did they act in a more stereotypically ‘ladylike’ way, minimising the amount of space they took up?

They found that women who were worried about their body shape, and who minimised the space they too up while seated, were more likely to eat less in comparison to those who ‘sat big’.

The exact reverse results were seen for women who were not concerned about their body shapes. Then, those who sat big ate less.

So, how much women eat can depend on the interaction between whether they ‘feel fat’ and how they sit.

8. Jump for joy

We tend to think of jumping as a consequence of joy, but why not make it the cause?

In a study by Shafir et al., (2013) people who jumped up and down felt happier than those who made neutral movements. In other words: it’s not just the joy of any movement, it’s specifically the joy of jumping up and down. And the jumping had to be actually done, just watching another person jumping didn’t work.

A reminder, if it were required, of why dancing is fun and how movements we make with our bodies feed back to our emotions.

(The masochists amongst you may want to slump for sadness—that’s been tested and it works. You see: I cater for all tastes!)

→ Want more? Then, check out 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance.

Image credit: M. G. Kafkas

How a Psychological Bias Makes Groups Feel Good About Themselves And Discredit Others

A subtle cognitive bias that explains why my team is talented but yours is lucky.

One of the strongest human motivations is to feel good about ourselves. Bolstering our own self-image helps us all feel slightly saner, more confident individuals.

We do this partly by thinking we’re a bit better looking, cleverer and more skilful than we really are. Although not absolutely everyone is an optimist, the vast majority of people do think they are above average in many areas.

Yes, it’s a cognitive bias, but it’s not so bad if it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Feeling good about our group

We don’t just think optimistically about ourselves, though, we have a clever way of being optimistic about the social groups we belong to as well. Naturally we prefer to think that our own family, our group of friends, our team, our company and our country are great.

One important psychological bias that helps us be more positive about our own group is called the ‘ultimate attribution error’. It’s a horrible bit of psychological jargon but here’s what it means in practical terms.

When someone from a different group to our own does something immoral, or reprehensible, or just fails in some way, we don’t bother finding excuses for them. We have a tendency to ascribe their failure to poor character or low ability.

For example, we say to ourselves: the guy from the opposition football team failed to score because he’s not that good at football. Psychologically what we’re doing here is ascribing the failure to something internal about him.

However, when someone from our own group does something bad, we work much harder to make excuses. And these excuses are of a particular type: we say it was bad luck or they didn’t really try or they were in a difficult situation. When it’s one of our own, we try our best to avoid saying it was a failure of character.

For example, when a guy whose on our team makes a mistake we say it was because he was under pressure or it was ‘bad luck’.

All this is flipped around when our fellow group member does something positive, something to be proud of. This time when it’s one of our own, we say it was because of his ability, because he’s one of us and he’s great.

Conversely, when it’s someone from another group who scores a success we say that was down to luck or because the situation was right or because they were making a special effort. In other words it was less to do with them, than with the situation being right.

My team is talented, yours is lucky

These patterns have been seen in all sorts of different contexts in psychological research. Here are a couple of examples described by Professor Miles Hewstone, an expert on the psychology of intergroup relations (Hewstone, 1990):

In the 1976 Super Bowl, fans of each team were asked about the cause of their own and the other team’s moment-by-moment successes during the match. Each thought their own team’s success to be a result of good play, but when the opposition did well, they minimised the influence of skill.
In one study, children at both elite private schools and more mediocre, state schools were asked to explain exam performance at both institutions. Those from the private schools said they did well because they were cleverer and had higher academic standards. Those at the state school were quick to point out the privileges that students at the elite school received and were not so impressed with their intelligence.

What’s interesting about both these examples is that people aren’t totally blinding themselves to reality. What they are doing is picking out and emphasising the details that support their own group while subtly discrediting the other group. They did this by explaining away their own group’s failures while attributing their successes to superior skills and innate talent.

Prejudice?

Although I’ve avoided mentioning it so far, research on the ultimate attribution error is usually focused on how it supports prejudice and stereotyping. Many of the studies show the same effects described above, but with nationalities or ethnicities instead of teams or smaller social units.

Wherever we see it, though, the underlying psychology is the same: when members of our group make a mistake it’s an accident or an anomaly, when members of another group do so, it’s typical of them.

Image credit: Joseph Shemuel

How to Help Other People Change Their Habits

Three pointers on helping someone else change their habits.

Having written a book on how to change your own habits, in interviews I was often asked: how can I change another person’s habits?

Say I want my partner to stop cracking his knuckles or get my daughter to put down her mobile phone at meal times or start someone else exercising: how do I do that?

It’s not something I cover in the book, which focuses mainly on how habits work, how much of our everyday lives they influence and how to change your own personal habits.

Ultimately the same techniques apply; but when you are working on someone else, you’ve got to take a few steps back. Do they want to change? If not, can you persuade them? How will this attempt to change them affect your relationship?

Then, if you manage that, you can move on to using all the same techniques that you might use on yourself.

So here are three preliminary things to think about when trying to change someone else’s habits:

1. Are they open to change?

First up, and most obviously, people have to be open to the possibility of change.

People can be very defensive about their habits. They’ve taken years to develop and have become part of their identity; alternatively they are simply ashamed of them and want to try and justify them.

So, you may want your partner to stop cracking his knuckles or spending all his time on his smartphone, but is he open to the possibility that something might be done?

If not then even broaching the subject may be a waste of time. But let’s say you think they might be open to change, that brings me on to…

2. Being non-judgemental

One thing therapists are taught when dealing with patients is to be non-judgemental. There’s a good reason for that: it’s not just that no one likes to be judged, but that it sets the wrong tone. The wrong tone is: I know best what’s good for you and I’m telling you what to do. Not many people want to be ordered around like a dog.

The right tone has you both on an even footing and is warm and supportive. You’re a helpful friend who is interested in their well-being but is still accepting who they are.

As you can imagine, this can be a difficult balance. But, for most people, just avoiding being judgemental is a really great start. We humans seem to love passing judgement on anything and everything and it’s a difficult habit to give up.

3. Increasing their self-awareness

Along with detecting the seeds of change and being non-judgemental, one of the main things you can help someone else with is their self-awareness.

It’s a central feature of habits is that people perform them unconsciously and repeatedly in the same situations. To name a few good habits: we brush our teeth in the bathroom, look both ways before we cross the road and put our seatbelts on in the car before we pull away.

A vital step in changing a habit, then, is identifying the situation in which it occurs. You can help other people identify the situations by gently pointing out what seems to prompt them to perform the habit. For example, are there particular emotions or physical situations that are associated with the habit?

If so, making the other person aware of these can help them change that habit.

Working together

So getting other people to change is firstly about backing up from the techniques of habit change and seeing if the other person is open to tweaking their behaviour. You can’t make other people change if they don’t want to.

After this you can move on to all the techniques I describe in the book. I’ve listed some of these in my article on how to make New Year’s resolutions. These include things like choosing an alternative behaviour, making specific plans, thinking about things that are likely to trip them up, and so on.

These three pointers are just to get you started and by no means cover all bases. For children things are slightly different, for more seriously ingrained and destructive habits, these are only the beginning. But nevertheless these are a good place to start.

In theory with two people working together to change one person’s habit, you are in a stronger position. It’s not just that you can be their cheerleader; it’s also that you can objectively look at their behaviour and make them aware of connections that might otherwise be mostly or completely unconscious.

Image credit: chantOmO