Consider the experience of watching a commercial for a charitable cause you previously knew nothing about. In the span of a few minutes, the organization takes you from not caring about a cause to searching for your wallet to send in a donation. How do they do it? It’s simple – they tapped into right places in your mind. If you want to know how to influence those around you, you have to start with the very beginning of who they are – their brain. In this episode of Level to Power we discuss the inner workings of the human brain and how hacking into the human desire for context and choice can allow you to influence social power dynamics.
Apex Level To Power is a podcast that examines the inner workings of human interactions and teaches you how to succeed within your own interpersonal relationships. Change your level, change your life, change the world.
Episode Highlights:
- The paradox of choice
- Why the human brain loves shortcuts
- “What does this mean? How does it apply to me?”: the brain’s quest for answers
- How leaders manage meaning and why people respond to them
- Framing: providing context to a situation
- Why is language important?
- The fallacy of context-dropping
- The power of priming in social context and everyday situations
Resources:
Visit Level To Power for episode archives and transcripts
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz
The Art of Framing: Managing the Language of Meaning by Gail Fairhurst
Runaway Jury by John Grisham
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TRANSCRIPT
| Mark Gleason: | Welcome to APEX Level To Power, the podcast completely dedicated to your self-empowerment. Today’s episode is called Pitfalls of the Human Mind.
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| We’re going to lay out some important information to understand. The way we all perceive the world is through the subjective filter of our mind, and our mind is an imperfect instrument at best, so imagine if you will, you’re in a spaceship careening through space, and all you have to count on are the gauges and dials in the cockpit, and you are not sure which gauges and dials you can possibly rely on. The process that you go through to determine which dials and gauges are reliable, is a process of reason and logic.
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| In the last episode, The Philosophy and Logic Survival Guide, we spoke a bit about how logic can be used to start to determine how to steer the ship that we find ourselves trapped in, which is the human experience. As dire as that situation seems, flying in a starship surrounded by gauges and dials, our situation is actually a bit more dire than it seems, because some of those dials and gauges, if not all of them, are flawed to some degree. In other words, we’re not able to see the true measurement because our methods of instrumentation, and the gauges and dials that we’re reading have some error built into them. So it’s important to understand which dials and gauges are vulnerable to which kinds of problems if we’re ever going to steer this starship we call the human mind.
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| There’s a risk and opportunity here. The risk is that these pitfalls in the human mind make us vulnerable to influence, manipulation, and persuasion. The opportunity is that the gaps in the human mind can be filled with meaning, which is just another word for leadership. So understanding both your mind and other people’s minds and where the gaps and pitfalls are, are the first step to understanding human power dynamics.
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| We have a lot to cover today, I hope you enjoy, welcome to APEX Level To Power.
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| Escape the herd. Rise above the pack. This is the APEX Level To Power Podcast. The only place in the web that teaches you to identify, control the invisible strings that dominate all human interaction. We turn guppies into sharks. A challenge to be sure, but one that we answer, and answer with vigor. I am your faithful host, Mark Gleason, and I welcome you to the program. I invite you to our little corner of the web, leveltopower.com for more information, and to support the broadcast.
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| To continue our discussion on the nature of human power dynamics, I think it is important to understand a few basic things about how the mind works before we can delve into the concepts that underlie leadership. Leadership being the recruiting of others into our way of seeing the world.
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| To start with, we had this idea of the paradox of choice. As humans, we face near infinite choices on a daily basis, and as Brian Schwartz argues in his book The Paradox of Choice, people feel less stressed when they have less choices. When they have five brands to choose from, they feel more comfortable than when they have 50 brands to choose from. 50 is just too overwhelming. People prefer less choice. Think of yourself, when you go and visit your news site, do you want to see a hundred headlines? Or do you want to see the top five? Well this is all well and good, but who is choosing to slim down these choices? Obviously the person or system which is slimming down people’s choices has a huge amount of power as to what options are available to them, but if nature still offers near infinite choices, that doesn’t change, and people are being offered slimmed down or reduced choices.
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| Who is doing that slimming down? Who or what is doing this slimming down a choice? What people or system is taking headlines from 500 and narrowing them down to three? What search engine is taking the 80 plumbers in my area and narrowing them down to four? And what are the motivations of these people or systems or corporations when presenting you with this choice? This is something that we’re going to see again and again, in a setting of context and a removal of choice. A slimming down of options sets the stage for the power dynamic between people in society.
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| Another basic concept that is important to cover, is the idea that people are cognitive misers. Meaning that when it comes to the work performed by the human brain, that the natural instinct of most people will be to very reluctantly put effort when shortcuts are possible. This makes sens from an evolutionary standpoint. The human brain is a very expensive item to maintain, and therefore any way that we can cut the costs or shortcut the work required to solve intellectual tasks is certainly going to be a benefit. Let me give you an example problem. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Let me repeat that. A bat and a ball together costs $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Feel free to stop the audio while you work this out.
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| Okay, so now we’ll go ahead and continue, and that is that most people say without thinking that the ball must cost ten cents if the bat cost a dollar and the ball cost ten cents. But that would be wrong. The right answer is the ball cost five cents, and the bat costs a dollar and five cents. Remember, they both combined make up a dollar-ten, but the bat is one dollar more than the ball. So here’s an example where the human mind likes to make a shortcut. This is not difficult mathematical problem, but the human mind will shortcut those two numbers and say if a bat and ball together cost one-ten, and the bat cost a dollar more, let me subtract them, the ball must cost ten cents.
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| The fascinating part of this is when researchers do their testing, people will answer this incorrectly. Only 21% of students gave the correct answer to this question. They also ranked a lower confidence on this question than others. For instance, the same students were asked if a magazine and a banana cost two-ninety, and the magazine cost $2, how much does the banana cost? Now in this case there was no relationship stated. It was simply two-ninety total, one cost two, therefore ninety cents is the answer. 98% of students got that right, and they also rated this question with high confidence.
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| Somewhere, on some level, the students knew they’d taken a mental shortcut to produce a less reliable answer on the first question of the bat and the ball, so at some point, we all know that we are cognitive misers, that we choose shortcuts because in general they help us, but occasionally they produce wrong answers often that we think are true. It’s important to understand why this basic human trait of being a cognitive miser factors so heavily into the study of human power.
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| Let’s think about the human eye works. The human eye and vision captures certain still frames of a given motion, and the human brain will fill in the gaps that it hasn’t seen to that we have one continuous motion that has been created in our minds. But we actually aren’t seeing everything that our brain shows us. This is why optical illusions can be used to hack the human process of sight and fool the human brain to seeing things that are not there. While in the same way, the human need to have less choice over more combined with the human trait of being a cognitive miser and taking mental shortcuts. These two things combine and create the perfect storm for persuasion, influence and manipulation.
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| Any serious student of human power dynamics must understand that this is the landscape that we are working with when dealing with humans and human society. We are not dealing with a population of objective, rational brokers of information. We’re dealing with a society of individuals looking to cut cognitive corners and looking to narrow down their choices from many to few, even if the slimming down of choices is not following any form of rational process.
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| Let’s agree for the sake of argument that we have established that humans experience less stress with a narrower set of choices, and that they are cognitive misers looking for shortcuts to avoid intellectual work where possible. Now let us examine how this ties in with human power dynamics. Our brains, as some have put it, are meaning making machines. When we experience reality through the filter of our own subjective rose-colored glasses, we wonder two things. What does this event mean? And how does it apply to me? For example, your boss tells you, “We are opening a new Miami office.” Your response, “What does this mean? How does it apply to me?” If you already work at the Miami office, you’ll be even more confused by the opening of a new Miami office, but your response will be the same. What does this mean? How does this apply to me?
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| If your neighbor sees you, and doesn’t say hello in the morning, we wonder, “Did he see me? Is he mad? Does he remember I still have his lawnmower?” And event occurred and our response is, “What does this mean, how does this apply to me?” A pretty girl tells you she is newly single. Why is she telling me she is single? Polite conversation? Does she like my friend? Does she like me? Your response, what does this mean, how does this apply to me?
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| In the last example, you are somebody who prefers boys to girls, and listening to that example you said, “What does mean? How does this apply to me?” A coworker is found dead in the parking lot of this business. Was it a hear attack? Or is there a serial killer targeting office workers? Your immediate response is what does this mean and how does it apply to me.
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| Our brains area meaning-making machines, so here are our brains, straining to make meaning out of every event we experience in reality. Desperately looking for a way to narrow the infinitely possible interpretations, and use shortcuts to reduce the intellectual work. Well, in steps leadership. Leaders are the ones that create and manage meanings, and is because people naturally are looking for narrower sets of options to consider and are looking for shortcuts of intellectual work because they’re cognitive misers and they are prepared to be led.
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| In the book The Art of Framing by Gail Fairhurst, she writes that all leaders famous or not, know the simple but powerful lesson behind seizing leadership moments is to manage meaning. Leadership is about taking the risk of managing meaning and stepping in to a leadership role. For instance, in a confusing and chaotic situation, someone who can step in, decipher it and communicate meaning out of the complex and confusing situation, people will naturally regard that person as a leader. So when something startling happens and there are horns blasting and smoke coming out from everywhere, and you are momentarily panicked, wondering what to do, and you and all your coworkers are standing around looking, wondering what’s happening, the first person that can figure out that there’s a fire, where it is, and the safe way to go and steps up and communicates meaning out of this complex and confusing situation, they will be regarded as a natural leader and you will be grateful for them to show you this meaning and lead you to safety.
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| In a similar way, if you’re in a sales presentation and one of your potential clients voices some kind of question and you yourself have no idea what is being asked, the question was phrased in a way where you just don’t understand the relevance, or you do not understand half of the vocabulary being used, somebody on your team who can step up and correctly interpret their question and answer it will be regarded as the leader in that moment.
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| Leadership is about taking the necessary risks to positively affect the lives of others and move the tribe forward, or in a personal context, to move people’s personal lives forward. Between managers and leaders, managers pay attention to how things get done, but leaders pay attention to what events and decisions mean. Because remember, leaders are about managing meaning. So to be an effective leader you must know how to manage meaning and a skill that’s required to manage meaning which is called framing. This is a skill that I want to introduce you to, and I want to show you that you do not need to be naturally talented with language or culture or charisma or intelligence to succeed at framing. Framing is a skill that can be taught and can be learned.
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| What is framing? Framing is the ability to use language to determine and communicate the meaning of a subject to make sense of it. To judge it’s significance and to communicate to another person, or to ourselves, in a way that is meaningful, saves time, cognitive effort and provides insight. This is what framing is. A more common way of phrasing it is, framing is providing context for a situation, which we all naturally do. Our minds naturally try to fit a context to any set of events or situations, and then tries to communicate context to that situation.
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| The art of leadership therefore is to find meaning and to create frames for ourselves and others so we can provide and manage meaning. The art of leadership therefore is to find meaning and to create these contextual frames for ourselves and others so that we can provide and manage meaning. Framing is about using language, and language can help when it comes to clarifying abstract ideas, or identifying when we have certain problems in the company. Language helps to classify and put things in categories, so if someone’s performance or the company direction can be clarified.
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| Language is important because the way our memory works through associations, language helps us remember and retrieve information. When we set a frame of context, we are inviting them to look at the world in the way that we see it. We’re inviting them in to look at the world through our point of view, and asking them to adopt that as their point of view. If they choose to do it, and amazingly, even if they choose not to do it, the use of our language and the framing of our context will influence them. Because if they choose to adopt our framework of context, then they will look at the world in a similar way to us and can be counted on to ally with us on many issues. Even if they don’t accept our framing and context, the very language that we use gets put into our brain, and the fact that it is most recently accessed makes it faster to retrieve in the future.
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| This is why advertising for instance works, in particular negative advertising. Where for instance you see a commercial about a political candidate, and when they show you the commercial with dire music and dire pictures, they’re trying to communicate that this person is no good. In the moment, you may not agree with this. You may say, “I know that politician isn’t that bad, they are trying to make him look like he’s absolutely terrible.” But nonetheless, those words they use go into our repository, and studies show that these words have an effect. The words that have been put into our minds as a primer, as a context, as a landscape for the discussion are still there. We need to be conscious of that if we are going to be more immune to their influence.
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| Language is very important, but language in itself is a tool set. It’s like having a hammer and a saw but you still need an idea if you’re going to build a house. Language is not enough on it’s own. One needs careful thought behind the language. It’s important that if we’re going to frame new reality for someone, that we need to understand that our framework is going to be a setting of context. Setting context for someone in a conversation is what we’re all familiar with, and context dropping is a fallacy which is committed against us when someone is trying to lead us astray, and claim innocence while doing so. This is an important enough point which is probably helpful to go through an example of context.
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| Let’s say I told you at yesterday’s meeting, Bob leaped across the table and broke one of Alice’s ribs. That is the reality of what happened. Well this certainly sounds bad, and how I frame this to you is going to make all the difference in the world. Let’s say I give you a very high level context. For instance I say, “We all know that violence in the workplace is a big problem. At yesterday’s meeting, Bob leaped across the table and broke one of Alice’s ribs.” What I’ve done is set the context. I have created a frame of reference. A frame of context, which we will call a frame that will lead the listener to a series of conclusions.
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| Let me give you a different context. We all know that violence in the workplace is a big problem. You know Bob, that intimidating man from Accounting? At yesterday’s meeting, Bob leaped across the table and broke one of Alice’s ribs. Once again I’m providing you a frame of reference that will immediately summon some pictures about Bob, so when I say “Bob, that intimidating man from Accounting”, it sounds pretty bad for Bob. But here’s another context. Even someone who properly performs the Heimlich Maneuver to a choking person can easily break a bone. At yesterday’s meeting, Bob leaped across the table and broke one of Alice’s ribs. Of course, this completely changes the context. As before, it could be naturally assumed that Bob perpetrated some violence against Alice. In this context, it certainly sounds like quick thinking Bob leaped across the table and saved Alice from choking.
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| Another frame could be CPR sometimes requires great strength. You know Bob, that intimidating man from Accounting. At yesterday’s meeting, Bob leaped across the table and broke one of Alice’s ribs. So depending on the context of the frame that you set up, you’ll note that there’s no direct relationship necessarily between these two statements, so if you came back to me and said, “Mark, you told me the other day that Bob assaulted Alice. When in fact, he simply saved her life with the Heimlich Maneuver.” I could honestly say, “No, I made two true statements. One, we all know that violence in the workplace is a big problem, and two, at yesterday’s meeting, Bob leaped across the table and broke one of Alice’s ribs. It’s not my fault that you connected those two very true statements together and came to a false conclusion.”
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| This is the fallacy of context dropping. This is one of the most important fallacies to understand, and a fallacy being a cynical maneuver used to fool people into believing lies or to winning arguments without logic, reason and evidence. Not every example is as obvious as the one we just discussed. Clearly, if I had told you those facts in that way to deliberately mislead you, when you discovered the facts for yourself, if you ever did, you would have realized that I had misled you. But if I’m skillful at my craft as a PR person, as a politician, as a skillful leader, then I will have prepared the ground. I will have primed my audience to make sure that they are more amenable to my way of seeing things in the future.
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| Like Sun Tzu in The Art of War says, that “One must prepare the ground. Know your battlefield and prepare the ground.” So too must we, if we will be leaders, set master frames so that when it comes time to lead our group or our friends or our clients, or our spouses, or our children or our neighborhoods, or our PTA meeting, when we seek to move any social group in a given direction, it does not need to be done all at once, nor is it optimal to be done all at once. How it’s done is with slow, careful changes to the master frame.
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| In the book Runaway Jury by John Grisham, the main character is seeking to get on to a jury and influence it in some way. He’s seeking to direct the verdict, so he gets in the jury, he’s in the jury pool and he’s pretending to be someone else, and when the jurors introduce each other in the jury room, he introduces himself as a law student. This is untrue. He actually has a vendetta against the defendant and he is there to manipulate the jury. The advantages of telling the jurors that he has some legal experience should be evident. Because when it comes time to deliberate and make decisions and interpret the judge’s instructions, he will have much better credibility, or a natural credibility than if he told him he was an underwater basket weaver from a commune. What he was doing was priming them with a master frame.
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| Another example, which I don’t believe happened in the actual book, would be to show up with a newspaper, and during the jury break throw it on the table and say, “Hey look, you know this big company just victimized this helpless grandmother. Isn’t that terrible?” Now in no way is he deliberately or specifically referencing the current trial, but if this trial is a company versus an individual, he could be biasing individuals, prepping, laying the ground. Setting the master context, so when they were looking at a given situation, they will think a little bit differently about it.
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| This is true to an extraordinary degree. I mean there have been studies where they will give a test and they will time the speed of the people walking through the hallway to take the test and leaving via the same hallway. They can show how in words like gray are used, the color gray, are used in the test, that people are primed with gray and it makes them think of old, and they slowly and carefully walk out of the test. But if they’re prepped with colors like red and other exciting colors, then they will walk out as fast or faster than they walked in. This is the power of priming. If it’s happening at a basic level, then many times we don’t even truly understand ourselves, right? There’s a lot of subconscious which is going on, which is beyond our control. What we can do, we can train our minds to at least be better aware of when influence is occurring upon us.
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| I know what you are thinking dear listener. You are thinking, “Mark, these are obvious examples. I know when context is being dropped. These examples are too simple.” Well, you’re right. In the real world context and the framing of reality is a much more subtle practice, particularly by the experts. Let me give you an example from the real world. One criteria that are used to rank graduate schools are how many of their graduates within three months of graduation receive a job, and at what salary. So for instance, school A has 80% of their graduates within three months of graduating, they find a job for $200,000 a year. School B has 50% of their graduates within three months find a job for a hundred thousand dollars a year. School A is ranked much higher than school B, and for good reason. Their graduates have a higher rate of finding employment, and a higher salary, so clearly school A must be better.
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| When one looks at the reality of the situation, it is indeed true that school A let’s say, Harvard, Yale, Wharton, have excellent hire rates out of their schools, and those people have excellent salaries on average when they get hired. As opposed to another university, which is going to have a lower hire rate and a lower salary. So where has the context been dropped, you may ask. Well there’s a dirty little secret of graduate schools, and that is that they know that they will be judged on exactly this criteria, so they will be sure to take in as a graduate student people already working at a job, and already making $200,000. In other words, Harvard and Yale and Wharton, and Princeton, recruit out of let’s say, Goldman Sachs, and these executives returning to grad school already make $200,000. In some cases, Goldman sponsors their education and promises to rehire them the moment they graduate. Imagine how that impacts an admissions officer. To have a candidate and know that they have a job waiting for them at the end of graduation. They’ll have a job within three months, and they will automatically have a salary over $200,000.
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| The context has been dropped here. This is how facts have been published without the proper context. What was published was the truth. Our graduates receive more money and are more likely to be hired upon graduation. Absolutely true. The context is, if you’re already making $200,000 you are likely to make it again when you graduate this school. By dropping the context, these schools imply that the education itself was what allowed you to achieve those goals, so missing from any of the literature, is that if you are not already making the salary, you may not be making the target salary upon graduation.
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| Context dropping is particularly malicious, because it doesn’t only fool you now. If I can set up a master frame. A high-level frame that you will accept is true, then this will now be the new reality that you will live in, and the setting of these frames is how leadership happens. It is also how influence, persuasion and manipulation occur. Any student of human power needs to understand the setting of these frames, their effect upon you, and how one can use language to set the frames of others.
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| To sum up today’s broadcast, it is important that any student of human power understand the limitations of the human condition, and the trap doors and triggers that are inherent in the way that our mind functions. It is only by understanding our strengths and our weaknesses that we can hope to resist the manipulations and influences of those who would seek to control us. You change your level, you change your life, and you can change the world.
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| Welcome, to APEX Level To Power.
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| Speaker 2: | This has been the APEX Level To Power Podcast with your host Mark Gleason. The podcast where your opinion changes but you still get to feel right. One ability we cannot give ourselves is credibility. You have to give that to us, so please like, subscribe or write a review. Change your level, change your life, and you can change the world. Welcome to APEX Level To Power.
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