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Change the Way You Change Minds

There are three kinds of men, ones that learn by reading, a few who learn by observation, and the rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.

—Will Rogers

Once you’ve identified the behaviors you want to change, you’re ready to do what most people are looking to achieve when they buy a book on influence—to convince others to change their minds. After all, before people will change their behavior, they have to want to do so, and this means that they’ll have to think differently. But as you might suspect, when it comes to profound and resistant problems, convincing others to see the world differently isn’t easy. In fact, others are very likely to resist your attempts to reshape their views. They may tenaciously hold onto outdated, irrational, or even crazy opinions.

To get at the heart of why people resist efforts to influence their view of the world—despite massive amounts of discon-firming data—let’s return to Dr. Albert Bandura. He set out to create a theory of why people do what they do so that he and his colleagues could then come up with a method for getting them to act differently. Just like the rest of us, he was interested in exerting influence.

LEARNING FROM PHOBICS

When we last visited Dr. Bandura, he was watching a little girl in a frilly dress straddling a Bobo doll and whacking it with a mallet. His goal had been to demonstrate that humans can learn from observing others, thus averting the often tedious and painful school of trial and error. Having found that people do in fact learn from watching others in action, Bandura next turned his attention to helping people who suffered from highly inaccurate views. Albert turned his academic eye on finding a way to cure snake phobics.

Phobics provide a perfect set of beliefs for learning how to change people’s thinking. First, phobics’ feelings are not accurate, and they would benefit from having them changed. Second, phobics resist change at every turn. Learn how to alter the inaccurate beliefs of people who have clung to a wild idea for years despite the constant nagging of friends and loved ones, and you’ve got something to crow about.

To find plausible subjects, Bandura ran an ad in the Palo Alto News asking people who had a paralyzing fear of snakes to descend into the basement of the psychology department to get cured. He had hoped that at least a dozen subjects would respond. Despite the creepy tone of the ad, hundreds of people made their way to the research site. All had been seriously debilitated by their unreasonable fear of things that slither. Most had horrible nightmares, many were veritable shut-ins, and since their irrational fear extended to even harmless garter snakes, the possible subjects suffered endless ridicule and indignity. It’s little wonder that they showed up for therapy; they were desperate.

HONEST, SNAKES ARE OUR FRIENDS!

With the stage set, Dr. Bandura and his team were ready to explore influence techniques. They could now study what it takes to convince people that some of their views are unfounded—thus propelling them to change their behavior. Success would be achieved when subjects could sit with a six-foot red-tailed boa constrictor draped across their lap. How hard could that be?

None of the subjects would so much as enter the room containing a snake in a covered terrarium.

Bandura did not start with the method most of us would have chosen—he did not lecture. When it comes to confronting people who hold unrealistic fears (or just plain stupid ideas), we’ve all done it. We figure that words, well chosen and expertly delivered, can set the record straight. Bandura knew that the best way to overcome a phobia is to confront what one fears and then to be enabled to exercise control over it, but he also recognized that lectures and coercion would only reinforce the phobic’s dread and inability to act.

It turns out that phobics typically remain phobics because they rarely disconfirm their unfounded fears by approaching them head-on. Since lectures don’t work with phobics and you can’t get them to conquer their fear through personal experience, you have to find something in between—something more than words and less than personal action. This “in between” thing turns out to be one of the most highly valued tools in any influence genius’s arsenal. It’s referred to as vicarious experience.

Here’s how vicarious experience works. When you expose subjects to other people who are demonstrating a vital behavior, the subjects learn from the surrogate’s successes and failures. Watching others in action is the next best thing to experiencing something on your own. It’s also far safer than, say, touching a six-foot nocturnal predator. In Bandura’s case, he asked subjects to watch the therapist handle a snake in order to see what happened.

Bandura asked subjects to watch from the doorway of the room—or if that was still too difficult, to watch through glass—as the therapist walked into the room containing the snake, took a look at it, opened the terrarium, petted the snake, and finally removed the boa and placed it on his or her lap. After the subjects watched someone else handle the snake, Dr. Bandura then asked them to follow similar steps. First they had to simply walk into the room.

But this wasn’t enough to put everyone at ease. Some of the subjects asked for protective gear—hockey goalie gloves, a baseball catcher chest protector and mask, and so on. Now, dressed like a samurai warrior, subjects entered the room and stood next to the enclosed tank. Gradually, after several tries they worked up to removing the terrarium cover and then quickly retreated from the room. No harm done. After a bit more experience, they finally touched the snake. Later still they touched the snake without gloves and so forth. Eventually subjects sat in the room by themselves with the six-foot constrictor draped across their lap.

And now for the real miracle: The entire process took only three hours! People who had been debilitated most of their lives by a paralyzing fear were completely “cured” in a single morning. And the results lasted a lifetime. Once the phobics had a personal and positive interaction with the snake, they never regressed, and it improved their lives forever.

In Dr. Bandura’s own words, “It was surprising to see how liberating it was for the subjects to be freed from the phobia. Their whole life seemed to open up before them now that they didn’t have to worry about snakes. In addition, they gained confidence about their ability to make personal changes. Since they had been able to conquer their fear of snakes, perhaps now they could overcome other problems.”

WHAT DO WE LEARN FROM THIS?

Let’s see what Bandura’s work teaches us about human behavior. His theory of learning provides the underpinnings for virtually all the influence geniuses we’ve studied. Equally important, it helps us discover what we’re trying to extract from this chapter—how to get people to change their minds.

People choose their behaviors based on what they think will happen to them as a result. First and foremost, humans are thinking creatures who can and do learn in a variety of ways. The thoughts that most profoundly affect behavior are composed of mini maps of cause and effect. For instance: “If I touch the snake, then it will wrap around my arm, drop me to the floor, crush me, and eat me like a large human Twinkie. Therefore, I’ll stay away from the snake.” At work an employee might believe that if she comes in late, nobody will care, leading to an erratic start time. Your daughter may believe that if she experiments with a party drug, it will be fun and that she’ll only do it this once. So she gives it a try.

If you want to change behavior, any behavior, you have to change maps of cause and effect.

Many thoughts are incomplete or inaccurate, leading people to the disastrous, unhealthy, and inconvenient behaviors that are causing some of the problems they currently experience. It’s important to note that people’s interpretations of events trump the facts of any situation. And once again, not all interpretations are anchored in reality. Humans routinely create myths, fairy tales, silly misunderstandings, and phobias.

The factors influencing whether people choose to enact a vital behavior are based on two essential expectations. When trying to influence people into changing their behavior—by encouraging them to think differently—you don’t have to unseat all their thoughts. For instance, believing that Sydney is the capital of Australia, while inaccurate, probably isn’t going to be anyone’s undoing.

When it comes to altering behavior, you need to help others answer only two questions. First: Is it worth it? (If not, why waste the effort?) And second: Can they do this thing? (If not, why try?) Consequently, when trying to change behaviors, think of the only two questions that matter. Is it worth it? (Will I be safe and become cured, or will the snake hurt me?) Can I do it? (Can I touch the snake, or will I hyperventilate and pass out when I enter the room?) If you want to change behavior, change one or both of these expectations.

The most common tool we use to change others’ expectations is the use of verbal persuasion. We employ verbal persuasion as our first influence tool because not only is it enormously convenient (we carry our mouths with us everywhere), but it also serves us well because it works a great deal of the time. When people trust both our knowledge and our motives, they generally comply with our requests.

When it comes to resistant problems, verbal persuasion rarely works. Verbal persuasion often comes across as an attack. It can feel like nagging or manipulation. If people routinely enact behaviors that are difficult to change, you can bet that they’ve heard more than one soliloquy on what’s wrong with them—and to no effect.

If the behavior you’re attempting to get the other person to change is personally rewarding (as is the case with, say, most addictions) or linked to a deeply held belief system (as is the case with most traditions and credos), others will be particularly creative in coming up with arguments that support their existing view. People aren’t about to give up what gives them intense pleasure or what constitutes an important window into their view of self simply because of a well-turned phrase.

Consequently, whenever you use forceful and overt verbal persuasion to try to convince others to see things your way, they’re probably not listening to what you say. Instead, they’re looking for every error in your logic and mistake in your facts, all the while constructing counterarguments. Worse still, they don’t merely believe you’re wrong; they need you to be wrong in order to protect the status quo. And since the final judge exists in their own head, you lose every time.

The great persuader is personal experience. With persistent problems, it’s best to give verbal persuasion a rest and try to help people experience the world as you experience it. Personal experience is the mother of all cognitive map changers. For instance, even after watching others touch the snake, Bandura’s phobics didn’t completely change their views. After all, the stranger messing with the snake could easily have been a professional snake handler. Only after the subjects had handled the boa themselves to no ill effect did they change their minds.

Let’s take a moment to consider the most profound and obvious implications of what we’ve just learned. When trying to encourage others to change their long-established views, we should fight our inclination to persuade them through the clever use of verbal gymnastic and debate tricks. Instead, we should opt for a field trip—or several of them. Nothing changes a mind like the cold, hard world hitting it with actual real-life data.

For example, a large U.S. manufacturing firm the authors once worked with was struggling to keep up with its Japanese competitors. The competitors produced more finished product per employee because their employees often worked faster and always worked more consistently. As a result, during an eight-hour shift, the Japanese workers completed around 40 percent more finished product than the American workers.

When the big bosses gathered the American employees in a large tent and told them that they had to work harder and faster if they wanted to keep their jobs, the speech almost caused a riot. Not only didn’t employees believe the argument, but they turned on the bosses. “We’re on to your tricks! You want to work us to death so you can earn your big fat bonuses!” was the common complaint.

After several more influence attempts that used snappy charts, multimedia effects, and well-rehearsed speeches, the employees still didn’t believe that their competitors were 40 percent more productive. Realizing that words were cheap and that the hourly troops simply didn’t trust the messengers anyway, the plant leaders arranged for a team of 10 hourly employees to get unprecedented access to a Japanese manufacturing plant. It was time for a field trip.

The leaders hoped that once the employees watched their hard-working Japanese competitors in action, they could see and hear for themselves just how serious the threat was. As you might guess, the hourly employees had their own agenda for the trip. They climbed into the jumbo jet for the sole purpose of exposing the bald-faced lie. There was no way that the Japanese employees worked harder than they did!

Ten minutes into the Japanese plant tour, the fact-finding team decided that it was all a sham. People were working hard, no question, but they were laboring at a pace that was far faster than normal because they were being watched. From that point on, nothing could convince the visitors that they were observing a normal day at work.

Later that night the team hatched a plot to uncover the lie. Team members quietly entered the plant unannounced and watched the Japanese night shift at work. Instead of catching their competitors plodding along and messing around (as they themselves often did back in the United States), the night-shift employees appeared to work, if anything, faster than the day-shift employees.

Now the visitors believed the threat. They didn’t like it, but they believed it. Consequently, the born-again team members returned home with the mission of convincing their teammates that if they didn’t find a way to work harder, one day they would all lose their jobs. But how could they convince their peers with anything other than a heartfelt trip report (read verbal persuasion on steroids)?

Create a surrogate for actual experience. Create a vicarious experience. The only way Bandura was able to convince phobics to do anything with a snake was through a surrogate. By watching what happened to other people, subjects were able to experience the outcomes almost as if they were their own. Nobody said a word to the phobics, and they were required to do nothing themselves, but when they watched others in action, they discovered that if a person touches a boa, nothing bad happens.

This is what the manufacturing fact-finding team would eventually have to do with their colleagues. They’d have to drop verbal persuasion as their primary influence tool and create a vicarious experience that worked with their peers.

CREATE PROFOUND VICARIOUS EXPERIENCES

Bandura and his team had discovered something profound. First, if you want people to change their persistent and resistant view of the world, drop verbal persuasion and come up with innovative ways to create personal experiences. Second, when you can’t take everyone on the field trip, create vicarious experiences. This not only helped Bandura’s team cure phobics in a matter of hours, but within a couple of years it became the primary technique for driving large-scale change efforts. In fact, over the past few decades, when aimed at social change, the effective use of vicarious models has saved millions of lives and improved the quality of life for tens of millions more.

And now the good news. Since most of you won’t be leading a worldwide change effort any time soon, it’s important to note that vicarious modeling is also one of the most accessible influence tools a parent, coach, community leader, or executive can employ.

Earlier we alluded to the work of Miguel Sabido and others who had clogged the streets of Mexico City with people in hot pursuit of adult literacy pamphlets. Previously, every attempt to encourage people to improve their lives by learning how to read and write had failed to produce more than a handful of interested people. Sabido changed that in a matter of weeks by creating a TV show that used protagonists to teach viewers important social lessons—not through speeches, but by living out their lives in front of everyone.

As you will recall, Sabido (a fervent student of Bandura) created a five-day-a-week soap opera called Ven Conmigo (“Come with Me”). At one point, a protagonist struggled over daily problems that largely stemmed from his inability to read and write. Eventually several of the characters decided to visit the country’s adult education headquarters where they’d receive free adult literacy materials. To everyone’s surprise, the next day over a quarter of a million people poured into the streets of Mexico City trying to get their own literacy booklets.

How did something as artificial as a TV soap opera yield such profound results? It created that all-important vicarious experience. When programs are presented as realistic stories dealing with real-life issues, viewers lower their defenses and allow the program to work on their thoughts in much the same way as they might experience the world for themselves. But this still left an important question unanswered. Was the vicarious modeling actually causing the changes?

To test the impact of vicarious models on human behavior, change advocate David Poindexter worked with Martha Swai, the program manager for Radio Tanzania, to transport serial dramas to Tanzania. There a local version of a radio play (not enough TVs in the area) was aired to certain parts of the population, but not others. By dividing the populace into experimental and control groups, researchers would be able to test the actual impact on such modeled behaviors as spousal abuse, family planning, and safe sex.

In 1993 when the show Twende na Wakati (“Let’s Go with the Times”) first aired, Swai and the producers chose to address HIV/AIDS transmission. This wasn’t going to be easy because many of the locals held completely inaccurate beliefs about AIDS. For instance, some thought that you could be cured of AIDS by having sex with a virgin. To demonstrate the cause and effect of AIDS, writers created a flamboyant, macho, and highly controversial truck driver named Mkwaju. He abused his wife, wanted only male children, drank excessively, engaged in unprotected sex with prostitutes along his route, and bragged about his escapades. His wife, Tutu (a model for female independence), eventually leaves him and succeeds in her own small business.

The philandering Mkwaju (who eventually dies of AIDS) became so real to the listening audience that when the actor playing him went to a local vegetable market, villagers recognized his voice and women actually threw stones at him!

To see the emotional and behavioral impact firsthand, we (the authors) interviewed several listening groups just outside Tanzania’s capital city. One family group consisting of a father, mother, grandmother, aunt, and five grown children had religiously tuned in to the wild antics of Mkwaju and had been enormously affected. When we asked them exactly how the program had influenced them, the father explained that at first he had admired Mkwaju, but with time he concluded that the truck driver’s reckless behaviors were causing pain to his wife, Tutu, and their children.

After tuning in to the show for several weeks, the father had come to sympathize with all the characters, and one day when sweet Tutu was hurt by her alcoholic husband, a light went on—his own wife was also suffering from similar treatment. Although this avid listener wasn’t a truck-driving philanderer, he had abused alcohol. A part of him was Mkwaju. From that moment on he stopped abusing both alcohol and his family members. It seemed strange that this self-discovery would come through a contrived radio show, but as the transformed father finished his story, everyone in his family nodded in energetic agreement. He had truly changed.

This touching account, along with similar interviews, provided anecdotal evidence that vicarious modeling appeared to be having an effect. But is there more than just anecdotal support for the power of this influence strategy? The answer is yes, and we know with a certainty because Twende na Wakati was the first controlled national field experiment in the history of the world. Since the Dodoma region of Tanzania was excluded from the evening radio broadcasts, researchers could explore the effect of the vicarious models offered over the radio. From 1993 to 1995 all regions experienced a variety of HIV/AIDS interventions, but only half were exposed to the radio drama.

In their award-winning book, Combating AIDS: Communication Strategies in Action, Everett Rogers and Arvind Singhal report that one-fourth of the population in the broadcast area had modified its behavior in critical ways to avoid HIV—and attributed the change in behavior to the influence of the program. The impact was so remarkable that the controlled experiment had to be stopped after two years in order to make the intervention available to everyone. Within a year, similar results were seen in Dodoma.

Rogers and Singhal proved with rare scientific certainty that exposing experimental subjects to believable models affected not only their thoughts and emotions but also their behavior. People who tuned in to Twende na Wakati were more likely to seek marital counseling, make better use of family planning, remain faithful to their spouses, and use protection than were their neighbors who didn’t listen to the serial drama.

Change agents don’t merely aim vicarious models at audiences in the developing world. Readers may not be aware of how effectively the same methods have been deployed in the United States. Before David Poindexter and others exported serial dramas to Africa, Poindexter met with Norman Lear—producer of popular TV sitcoms such as All in the Family and Maude. As part of their agenda to reduce worldwide population growth, Poindexter, Lear, and others routinely injected family planning messages into their programming.

It was no coincidence that in 1972, with 41 percent of those watching TV in America tuned in to his show, Lear created an episode (“Maude’s Dilemma”) in which the star—a middle-aged woman—announced that she was considering an abortion. This was the first time this topic was inserted into a primetime plot line, and it wasn’t included by accident. Love it or hate it, it was part of a systematic plan of using vicarious models to influence social change. And according to public opinion surveys, it did just that, as have dozens of other programs that have since made use of vicarious modeling.

USE STORIES TO HELP CHANGE MINDS

The implications of this discovery should be obvious. Entertainment education helps people change how they view the world through the telling of vibrant and credible stories. Told well, these vicariously created events approximate the gold standard of change—real experiences. And we all have our stories. That means we don’t have to be a TV producer or serial-drama writer to exert influence. We merely need to be a good storyteller. We can use words to persuade others to come around to our way of thinking by telling a story rather than firing off a lecture. Stories can create touching moments that help people view the world in new ways. We can tell stories at work, we can share them with our children, and we can use them whenever and wherever we choose.

But not every story helps change minds. We’ve all been cornered by a coworker or relative who couldn’t spin a tale to save his or her life. We’ve all attempted to tell a clever story only to have it come across as a verbal attack. What is it that makes certain stories powerful tools of influence, while mere verbal persuasion can cause resistance or be quickly dismissed and forgotten?

Understanding

Every time you try to convince others through verbal persuasion, you suffer from your inability to select and share language in a way that reproduces in the mind of the listener exactly the same thoughts you are having. You say your words, but others hear their words, which in turn stimulate their images, their past histories, and their overall meaning—all of which may be very different from what you intended.

For example, you excitedly tell a group of employees that you have good news. Your company is going to merge with your number-one competitor. When you say the word “merge,” you’re thinking of new synergies, increased economies of scale, and higher profits. It’ll be lovely. When the people you’re talking to hear the word “merge,” they think of expanding their back-breaking workload, working with semihostile strangers, and layoffs. It’ll be hell. Making matters worse, the inaccurate images being conjured up by the employees you’re chatting with are far more believable and vivid than the lifeless words you used to stimulate their thinking in the first place.

Words fail in other ways. For example, we (the authors) met with Dr. Arvind Singhal, a distinguished professor of communication and social change at the University of Texas, El Paso. One of his doctoral students, Elizabeth Rattine-Flaherty, shared how verbal persuasion suffers from an even simpler translation problem. Sometimes others simply can’t comprehend your words—even when you think your verbiage is crystal clear. While working with locals in the Amazon basin, Rattine-Flaherty learned that in the past, health-care volunteers had explained to the locals that if they wanted to reduce diseases, they needed to boil their water for 15 minutes. None of the villagers complied despite the fact that the contaminated water was obviously harming their health. Why? Because as volunteers learned later, the locals didn’t know what the volunteers wanted them to do; they had no word in their language for “boil” or any way of thinking about and measuring time in minutes.

Verbal persuasion suffers in still another way. Instruction methods almost always employ terse, shorthand statements that strip much of the detail from what the messenger is actually thinking. Unfortunately, when we’re trying to bring people around to our view of the world, intellectual brevity rarely works. In an effort to cut to the chase, we strip our own thoughts of their rich and emotional detail—leaving behind lifeless, cold, and sparse abstractions that don’t share the most important elements of our thinking.

Effective stories and other vicarious experiences overcome this flaw. A well-told narrative provides concrete and vivid detail rather than terse summaries and unclear conclusions. It changes people’s view of how the world works because it presents a plausible, touching, and memorable flow of cause and effect that can alter people’s view of the consequences of various actions or beliefs.

Believing

Very often, people become far less willing to believe what you have to say the moment they realize that your goal is to convince them of something—which, quite naturally, is precisely what you’re trying to achieve through verbal persuasion.

This natural resistance always stems from the same two reasons—both are based on trust. First, others might not have confidence in your expertise. Why would anyone listen to a moron? Parents experience this form of mistrust when their children roll their eyes at their outdated and irrelevant guardian who can’t figure out something as simple as how to store a phone number in a cell phone. Since dad is incompetent in all things technical, why should anyone trust his dating advice or his constant warning about running up too much credit-card debt?

Second, even when others find you to be perfectly competent, they may mistrust you in the traditional sense of the word—they may doubt your motive. You offer up a sincere explanation, but others figure that you’re trying to manipulate them into doing something that will harm them and benefit you. For instance, in Tanzania many of the locals believed that when Western social workers encouraged them to use condoms, it was a trick to actually pass HIV/AIDS to anyone who was naive enough to believe the propaganda. They hadn’t originally believed that condoms caused AIDS, but now that the recommendation was coming from suspicious outsiders with questionable motives, perhaps they did indeed cause the disease.

Stories mitigate both forms of mistrust. Told well, a detailed narration of an event helps listeners drop their doubts as to the credibility of the solution or the change being proposed. When they can picture the issue in a real-world scenario, it helps them see how the results make sense.

Stories take advantage of a common error of logic. We’ve all heard people make lame arguments such as: “Wait a minute. My uncle smoked cigars, and he lived to be a hundred!” When we know for certain that a real person stands as evidence against a factual argument, we tend to discount the hard data—even when the data are based on far more information than a single case.

To test the memorability and credibility of stories, one of the authors, along with Dr. Ray Price and Dr. Joanne Martin, provided three different groups of MBA students with exactly the same information. In one case, the students were given a verbal description that contained facts and figures. Another group was given the same information—only it was presented through charts and tables. The final group was provided the very same details presented as the story of a little old wine maker.

To the researchers’ surprise, when tested several weeks later, not only did those who had heard the story recall more detail than the other two groups (that was predicted), but they also found the story more credible. MBA students gave more credence to a story than to cold hard facts.

But why? Why do even the most educated of people tend to set aside their well-honed cynicism and critical nature when listening to a story? Because stories help individuals transport themselves away from the role of a listener who is rigorously applying rules of logic, analysis, and criticism and into the story itself. According to creative writing expert Lajos Egri, here’s how to transport the listener into a story.

 

The first step is to make your reader or viewer identify your character as someone he knows. Step two—if the author can make the audience imagine that what is happening can happen to him, the situation will be permeated with aroused emotion and the viewer will experience a sensation so great that he will feel not as a spectator but as the participant of an exciting drama before him.

Concrete and vivid stories exert extraordinary influence because they transport people out of the role of critic and into the role of participant. The more poignant, vibrant, and relevant the story, the more the listener moves from thinking about the inherent arguments to experiencing every element of the tale itself. Stories don’t merely trump verbal persuasion by disproving counterarguments; stories keep the listener from offering counterarguments in the first place.

Motivating

And now for the final dimension that sets stories ahead of plain verbal persuasion: human emotions. Finding a way to encourage others to both understand and believe in a new point of view may not be enough to propel them into action. Individuals must actually care about what they believe if their belief is going to get them, say, off the comfortable couch and into a gym. At some point, if emotions don’t kick in, people don’t act.

As Lajos Egri suggested, not only do vibrant stories transport the listener into the plot line, but when they’re told well, stories stimulate genuine emotions. When they’re transported into a story, people don’t merely sympathize with the characters—having an intellectual appreciation for others’ plight—they empathize with the characters. They actually generate emotions as if they themselves were acting out the behaviors illuminated in the story.

To understand how this transportation mechanism might work, let’s examine, of all things, monkey brains. In an effort to understand how actions affect localized brain neurons, Italian researchers Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese placed electrodes into the inferior frontal cortex of a macaque monkey. As the researchers carefully mapped neurons to actions, serendipity stepped in.

Rizzolatti explains: “I think it was Fogassi, standing next to a bowl of fruit and he reached for a banana, when some of the neurons reacted.” The monkey hadn’t reached, but the monkey’s neurons associated with reaching fired anyway. These weren’t the neurons that reflect thinking about someone else reaching; these were the neurons that supposedly fire only when the subject reaches.

The “mirror neurons,” as Rizzolatti labeled them, were first identified as relatively primitive systems in monkeys. It was then discovered that such systems in humans were sophisticated and “allow us to grasp the minds of others not through traditional conceptual reasoning, but through direct stimulation—by feeling, not by thinking.”

It’s little wonder that the group of Tanzanian women who had listened to Twende na Wakati threw stones at the main actor when saw into him in person. They didn’t run up to him and ask for his autograph or chat with him about the villainous character he portrayed. Since the listeners had experienced, right along with the faithful and devoted wife Tutu, the actual emotions connected to her husband Mkwaju’s abusive philandering (mirror neurons firing away), they did what a lot of victims might have done under the circumstance—they tried to get even with the lout who had wronged them.

This empathic reaction also explains why thousands of television viewers and radio listeners around the world routinely write letters to the characters in serial dramas and soap operas thanking the characters for giving them hope or for teaching them valuable lessons. In very real ways, these vivid stories create vicarious experiences that become both intellectual and emotional parts of the viewers’ lives.

MAKE STORIES WORK FOR YOU

Let’s review what we’re trying to achieve. To emulate the work of influence masters worldwide, we’re trying to create changes in behavior by helping people alter their mental maps of cause and effect. When we find a way to change how individuals think, they’re well on the way to changing their behavior. Equally important, we’ve learned to limit our change targets by aiming at two important maps that help people answer the questions: “Will it be worth it?” and “Can I do it?” Change one or both of these maps, and people change their behavior.

To help people come to a more accurate view of cause and effect, we’ve argued that it’s best to set aside one’s preference for verbal persuasion and to use methods that are far more understandable, believable, and compelling than your standard lecture or pep talk. This calls for the judicious use of actual and vicarious experience. Finally, since most of us aren’t going to be in the phobic-curing or radio-drama business any time soon, we should become experts in the use of the most portable and readily available map-changing tool around—the poignant story.

Become a Master Storyteller

We start by returning to the manufacturing task force whose members came racing back from Japan because they wanted in the worst way to tell their coworkers that if they didn’t work harder, they’d all be out of a job. And that’s exactly what they did: They told them in the worst way! They gathered a group of their peers together and announced their finding—their competitors actually did produce 40 percent more per employee by working faster and more consistently. At the end of this rather terse and unpopular announcement, the members of the task force were booed off the stage by their own union brothers and sisters.

Undaunted, the world travelers brought another group together and told them the shortened version of what had happened. More boos. Finally, the team leader selected the best storyteller and set him loose on the next assembly of employees. He didn’t ruin the message by quickly cutting to the chase—“Workers unite or we’re dead!” Instead, this gifted storyteller took a full 10 minutes to narrate in vivid detail what had taken place.

The members of the task force had arrived in Japan, and to a person they were absolutely certain the foreigners they would soon observe would put on a show. Sure enough, they did (jeers). But the task force wasn’t fooled (cheers). Next, the storyteller related how they had sneaked into the plant after hours and spied on the enemy (more cheers). But wait a second; the employees were working even faster (silence). This was depressing. If the Japanese workers continued to outperform the American workers, the Japanese companies could keep their costs down and dominate the market. American companies would downsize, and American workers would lose their jobs.

After they spied on the Japanese workers, the members of the task force returned to their hotel and tried to figure out how to beat their competitors at their own game. Then it hit them. Why not work on the Japanese line and see if they could handle the jobs? For the next couple of days they stepped into a variety of the jobs on the Japanese production line and performed them quite readily. It was work, but nothing they couldn’t handle (more cheers). And finally the punch line: “If we take the right steps, we can take our fate back into our own hands and save our jobs” (raucous applause).

Now employees were ready to listen to the improvement plan that called for them to work harder. By sharing what had happened in narrative form, the narrator was able to communicate that, first, they could do what was required (hadn’t the task force proven that by working the line?), and second, it would be worth it (by articulating the consequences of not working harder, the storyteller helped the audience see that it would be worth it). By telling a vivid story, he was able to share these two all-important messages in a way that was understandable, credible, and motivating.

Tell the Whole Story

Note that the task force members first tried to influence their colleagues by short-cutting the story—stripping it of its compelling narrative and leaving out much of the meaning and all of the emotion. Unaware of the limitations of verbal persuasion, the eager employees offered up what amounted to a verbal attack. As human beings, we do this all the time. Even the well-intended designers of national social programs fail to make the best use of stories. Not on purpose, of course, but when change agents attempt to tell a compelling story and inadvertently leave out key elements of the narrative, they render it impotent.

Consider what happened with the much vaunted program Scared Straight. As part of this “American success story,” lawbreaking teens were transported to prisons where hardened criminals shared horror stories about the evils of life in the big house. As the title of the program suggests, the young people were supposed to be completely horrified by the stories and thus scared straight.

Only it didn’t work that way. When researchers took a closer look at the program, they learned that teenagers who had been given the scare tactics had no fewer encounters with the law than their counterparts who stayed home. Why? Because the Scared Straight program left out an important part of the story. By the end of the inmate show-and-tell, it was clear that prison was bad. The delinquents were convinced. They never wanted to go to prison.

What the inmates didn’t make clear was that if the teenagers continued doing what they were doing, they would eventually be caught and sent to prison. And since most teenagers harbor an illusion of personal invulnerability, they didn’t connect the dots on their own. They didn’t create the full cognitive map: “If I keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll get caught, and, if I get caught, I’ll then go to prison. Therefore, I’ll straighten out my life now.” Instead, they believed that they would continue committing crimes and never get caught, so the whole prison ordeal was irrelevant.

Provide Hope

The takeaway here is that you don’t want to merely share poignant and repulsive negative outcomes. Make sure that your story also offers up an equally credible and vivid solution.

For instance, consider what happened to a team of Stanford researchers who told only the negative part of a story to their subjects. The researchers showed subjects disgusting pictures of rotting gums as a means of compelling them to floss their teeth. That should keep them brushing and flossing, right? It turns out though that viewing the pictures had no long-term effect on the subjects. The researchers didn’t offer any corrective steps—subjects were not given the solution to the problem. In the short run subjects made minor adjustments, but fear itself didn’t lead to lasting change.

The same is very likely to be true for a current spate of TV ads that show shocking scenes of people in body bags or vivid pictures of lungs that have been destroyed by smoking. These poignant commercials, no matter how many video awards they may garner, are also unlikely to change long-term habits if they don’t offer viewers an option for the next steps to take to avoid these terrible ends. Although the pictures are vibrant, they fail to tell the whole story. They don’t tell people how to solve the problem, and when you leave out the solution, people typically block out the message.

So, when trying to help people view the world in a more complete and accurate way, couple your stories of the harsh realities you’re facing with equally concrete and vivid plans that offer hope. Tell the whole story. Provide hope.

Combine Stories and Experiences

We’ve focused a lot here on the power of stories to change minds. However, frequently the story may be enough to help people open their minds, but may not entirely change their minds. In these cases, master influencers use stories as a first step to inviting others into sharing personal experiences. Personal experiences are far less efficient at creating change since they often take substantial resources to orchestrate. But as we saw with the cynical manufacturing team, you can combine the direct experience of a few with the stories they can then tell to others to magnify a modest influence investment.

Vicarious narratives can be used in combination with actual experience to great advantage. In fact, stories are often told for the sole purpose of propelling people into their own personal experience. Consider the work of Dr. Don Berwick, clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy at Harvard Medical School, and head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). In a recent interview, Berwick shared an alarming statistic: The National Academy of Science reported that 44,000 to 98,000 people are killed by their health care every year, placing medical injury as the eighth largest public health hazard in America.

In December 2004, Dr. Berwick stood in front of a group of thousands of health-care professionals and issued an audacious challenge: “I think we should save 100,000 lives. I think we should do that by June 14, 2006.” Pause. “By 9 a.m.” The success of the 100,000 lives campaign is now in the record books. At the time of the writing of this book, IHI upped the ante with a 5 million lives worldwide campaign.

One of Berwick’s greatest challenges is to help caring professionals recognize that their own health-care systems might be causing harm—prolonging hospital stays and even killing patients.

As you might imagine, telling physicians that they may be inadvertently putting patients in harm’s way isn’t an easy message to share. These are folks whose purpose in life (to which they take a sacred oath) is to provide assistance, to cure, and if nothing else, to do no harm. These are highly skilled professionals who often fail to recognize how their individual actions play out in a large, complex human system. So how can Berwick engage energy and curiosity without provoking defensiveness?

He tells stories. For example, the story of Josie King is one for which Berwick and his colleagues have a deep reverence.

MEET JOSIE KING

Josie King was a little girl who loved to dance. She was 18 months old, had brown eyes and light brown hair, and she had just learned to say, “I love you.” In January of 2001 Josie stepped into a hot bath and burned herself badly. Her parents rushed her to Johns Hopkins Hospital where she was admitted into the pediatric intensive care unit. Much to her parents’ relief, Josie recovered quickly. She was transferred to the intermediate-care floor and was expected to be released within days.

But Josie’s mom noticed that something was wrong. “Every time she saw a drink, she would scream for it, and I thought this was strange. I was told not to let her drink. While a nurse and I gave her a bath, she sucked furiously on a washcloth.” Josie’s mom told the nurse Josie was thirsty, and asked her to call a doctor. The nurse assured her that everything was okay. She asked another nurse to check on Josie, but this nurse confirmed that everything was fine.

Josie’s mom called back twice during the night and was at her daughter’s bedside by 5:30 the next morning. By then Josie was in crisis. In her mother’s words, “Josie’s heart stopped as I was rubbing her feet. Her eyes were fixed, and I screamed for help. I stood helpless as a crowd of doctors and nurses came running into her room. I was ushered into a small room with a chaplain.” Two days before her scheduled release, Josie had died of thirst. Despite her mother’s repeated pleas for help, this sweet little girl died of misused narcotics and dehydration.

This story makes dedicated physicians and other health-care professionals cry out, “How could this happen?!” In fact, this story is so powerful that it fills doctors, nurses, and administrators with outrage. But it often falls short of generating enough reflection. While everyone concludes, “How could they let this happen?” too few take the next logical step and ask, “Are we letting this happen?”

When Berwick hears “I’m certainly glad it doesn’t happen here,” he wisely steers clear of accusation or judgment—something he is adamant would be wrong. “The problem is not bad people; it’s bad systems.” So he invites the system’s constituents to form a story into an experience.

At this point Dr. Berwick asks, “Are you sure? Could we check that out? Let’s count back the last 50 deaths in your hospital and answer the following questions: How did the patients die? Were they expected to die? What could have been done to prevent the deaths?” Finally, Dr. Berwick asks leaders to do their own detective work (they can’t assign someone else the task) and return to tell the stories they’ve uncovered.

Many from the audience bring back their own Josie King stories. Berwick describes a group of senior executives (each led entire health-care systems) reporting back their results at a Harvard round table. One after another, they told their stories and broke down in tears. They described their personal experience as “life changing.” For the next decade some of these executives became leaders in the effort to improve safety within hospitals.

CHANGING MINDS WORLDWIDE

As a way of pulling together everything we’ve discussed, let’s return to The Carter Center’s Guinea worm eradication program and watch how use is made of both stories and experiences as a way of changing minds at a global level—one village at a time.

Consider what the team did in Nigeria. To begin with, former President Jimmy Carter recruited General Gowon to join the Nigerian team. Former President-General Gowon is beloved by Nigerians for bringing stability and democracy to their country, so the day the general visits a village is one of the most important in its history. After dances, songs, and a tour, General Gowon explains that he brings great news! He asks how many in the village suffer from the “fiery serpent.” He then explains that he has come to teach them how to rid themselves of the serpent forever.

The general then asks the villagers to bring him water from the pond. They bring him a clay jug full of water. He pours water into a clear quart bottle for all to see. This is a new experience for most villagers who carry their water in buckets or pots. Now they’re examining their murky water for the first time. The general shows them a magnifying glass, and asks them to use it to look at the water and tell him what they see.

Someone describes the many tiny fleas swimming and darting around. Everyone gets a look, and most are disgusted. As they watch, the general covers another glass bottle with a cloth filter, pours the pond water from the same pot through the filter into the second bottle, and invites everyone to take a look. Not only are all the insects gone, but the water has changed from a cloudy yellow color to a clear liquid.

The beloved general then asks the villagers which they would rather drink. Everyone points to the clear water. He hands it to the chief who drinks the filtered water and reports that it is good.

While holding everyone’s absolute attention, the general now tells them about a village not too far away. It too suffered horribly from the Guinea worm. Many of these neighboring villagers could not work. Their crops rotted in the field. Many died. Then the general taught them how to destroy the worm by filtering the water. The nearby villagers followed everything the general instructed them to do for two full years. After one year, no one in the village had the serpent. After the second year, they knew for sure it would never come back.

“You can do what they did and be free of the fiery serpent forever,” the general promises them.

The villagers nod thoughtfully. They are not entirely convinced. But the compelling experience and convincing story have brought them to at least suspend their disbelief. General Gowon has begun to change their minds. This is the first step in helping them change their behavior.

SUMMARY: CHANGING MINDS

People will attempt to change their behavior if (1) they believe it will be worth it, and (2) they can do what is required. Instill these two views, and individuals will at least try to enact a new behavior or perhaps stop an old one. To change one or both of these views, most people rely on verbal persuasion. Talk is easy, and it works a great deal of the time. However, with persistent and resistant problems, talk has very likely failed in the past, and it’s time to help individuals experience for themselves the benefits of the proposed behavior. It’s time for a field trip.

When it’s impossible to create an actual experience, it’s best to create a vicarious experience. For most of us, that means we’ll make use of a well-told story.

Stories provide every person, no matter how limited his or her resources, with an influence tool that is both immediately accessible and enormously powerful. Poignant narratives help listeners transport themselves away from the content of what is being spoken and into the experience itself. Because they create vivid images and provide concrete detail, stories are more understandable than terse lectures. Because they focus on the simple reality of an actual event, stories are often more credible than simple statements of fact. Finally, as listeners dive into the narrative and suspend disbelief, stories create an empathic reaction that feels just as real as enacting the behavior themselves.

Tell the whole story. Make sure that the narrative you’re employing contains a clear link between the current behaviors and existing (or possibly future) negative results. Also make sure that the story includes positive replacement behaviors that yield new and better results. Remember, stories need to deal with both “Will it be worth it?” and “Can I do it?” When it comes to changing behavior, nothing else matters.