The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence by Steve J. Martin, Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini Page B

have overseen a particular project within your organization, you would be well advised to assign the job of judging its success to someone else within the organization. That’s because you will be inclined to overestimate the project’s value—sometimes dramatically. Further, the less connected that selected judge feels to you, the more objective his or her assessment of the project will be.

Chapter 13.
What SMALL BIG is the key to planning persuasion?
    Y es” might just be the most beautiful word in the English language when we’re trying to persuade others to take a particular course of action. But oftentimes getting someone to simply say yes to our requests won’t be enough to get the job done. This is especially the case when there is a delay between someone agreeing to take action and the point at which the action is actually carried out. Many of us will be able to recall times when a colleague or coworker readily agreed to help us—“Sure I’ll bring up your proposal in the meeting next week,” or “Of course I’ll send that report over to you,” or “Leave it to me. I’ll happily connect you with the new VP”—only to subsequently fail to deliver on the promise. It’s probably not the case that people are paying lip service to your requests (or at least one hopes they are not). It’s just that so many other things are vying for their attention that between agreeing to your request and carrying out that task, their initial commitment to you can get crowded out.
    Fortunately, persuasion science points the way to a small but often ignored strategy to encourage people to follow through with their initial commitments: Have them form a specific plan for where, when, and how they will go about accomplishing the task to which they have committed. Behavioral scientists call these specific plans implementation intentions .
    A good illustration of the big differences that can be gained by making a small additional change to help facilitate implementation intention comes from a series of studies conducted by researchers David Nickerson and Todd Rogers. They wanted to know whether asking potential voters to form a specific plan for how they would get to the polls on Election Day would actually influence whether these voters would follow through on their intention to vote. To answer this question, they conducted an experiment in which a large sample of individuals eligible to vote in the 2008 presidential primary were called at home using one of several different scripts.
    The first script was the “Standard Script,” which sought to encourage people to vote by reminding them about the election and informing them that voting is an important responsibility. The second script, the “Self-Prediction Script,” was essentially the same as the Standard Script with the addition of a question that simply asked whether the person intended to vote. This Self-Prediction Script was based on previous research suggesting that asking people to predict whether they will perform a socially desirable behavior increases the likelihood that they’ll do so by encouraging them to say yes, which then leads them to feel committed to that course of action.
    The third script, however—the “Voting Plan Script”—was identical to the Self-Prediction Script but included three follow-up questions designed to encourage those individuals who signaled their intention to vote to create a voting plan on the spot. These questions were, “What time will you vote?” “Where will you be coming from?” and “What will you be doing beforehand?” The central idea was that by answering these specific questions, individuals would more easily generate a concrete plan that would take into consideration all of their other obligations that day and that it would be easier for them to follow through come Election Day. Finally, there was a control condition that did not involve any contact with the potential voters whatsoever.
    Realizing that