Changing Someone's Mind

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Changing Someone’s Mind: A Powerful New Approach

Jun 22, 2021 North America

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Nano Tools for Leaders® — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Jonah Berger, Wharton marketing professor and author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind.

The Goal:

To change minds, organizations, industries, and the world — stop trying to persuade, and instead, encourage people to persuade themselves.

Nano Tool:

No one likes to feel like someone is trying to influence them. The natural reaction to being told what to do, whether it’s to support a change initiative, accept a starting salary, or stop smoking, is to resist by pushing back. The more you allow for autonomy and allow people to participate in the process, the more effective you’ll be. Use one or a combination of four proven tactics for helping guide people to make the choice you prefer.

Provide a menu: Allow people to choose a path from a selection of your choice, giving them more say in how they’ll get where you are hoping they’ll go. Advertising agencies do this when presenting work to clients. Instead of offering one idea, which the client could then spend the rest of the meeting poking holes in, they offer two or three. This “bounded choice” provides autonomy and the greater likelihood one of the ideas will be chosen.

Ask, don’t tell: Statements like “junk food makes you fat” and “smoking causes cancer” don’t change minds. Asking questions instead shifts the listener’s role, much like providing a menu does. Rather than counterarguing or thinking about all the reasons they disagree with a statement, they’re occupied with the task of answering the question (voicing their opinion about the issue — which most people are more than happy to do). Questions also increase buy-in. Because the answer they give is theirs, it’s more likely to drive them to action. Think about how “Do you think junk food is good for you?” would work better than the statement.   .... '