To begin, let’s look at the concept of a possession and what affects how much we value it. I’m sure that if I were to hand you a brand new mug in your favorite color, you would appreciate it a little. However, this mug would probably not replace the one you made at a pottery class, the off-color one with numerous imperfections, a re-glued handle and webbed cracks in the lacquer, as your preferred. Indeed, if someone were to visit you and you two were to share a pot of coffee, you’d give the new mug to your guest and you wouldn’t bat an eye if they accidentally dropped it. The journey of creation (and maintenance) that you shared with your shoddy mug will ensure it a special place in your heart forever.
I’ve stated in previous entries that we treat our own ideas as if they were possessions. Your personal philosophy and that crappy mug of yours have a lot in common. They were both created (or at least adapted) by you and they probably have a ton of flaws, but that won’t prevent you from valuing them over other things that are sleeker, stronger and just plain better.
Now imagine yourself at a job that pays you a decent amount of money to create reports that upper management never read. Your financial needs are covered, but the work is neither stimulating nor fulfilling. You spend 8 hours every weekday doing a task that, at the end of the day, made no difference in the world or even your office. Though within traditional economics, a dollar is a dollar, I am willing to bet that most people would take a pay cut to be doing something that they actually enjoy, that challenges them, that makes an impact. It is important to us to be motivated, to enjoy our work. We want to feel that the money we take home is well earned.
Even animals would rather work for their “pay.” A rat would rather press a button to receive a piece of food than to eat it out of an open dish. Same with parrots, fish, gerbils, and monkeys. We’re no different. It makes sense that the possessions and ideas that we worked for mean much more to us than the things that were just placed in our lap. Therein lies the key to planting an idea in someone’s head that they will appreciate as if it were their own: work.
Whether you consider it a separate phenomenon or not, while we favor ideas that we came up with, we also have negative feelings about ideas that are not ours. If you’re American, you can surely appreciate the utter disgust with which alternatives to Democracy are viewed by the general public. As an employee of a company, you may have a few examples of times when superior technologies or methodologies were not adopted simply because a competitor also used them. More personally, you’ve probably dismissed someone’s perfectly good suggestion before simply because you wanted to do something your way. What I mean to say by all of this is that we have defenses at every level of our psyche to prevent foreign ideas from affecting us. Luckily, these defenses are easily fooled.
To illustrate this, I want to describe a study featured in Dan Ariely’s new book, The Upside of Irrationality
. Participants of this study were asked to read various questions such as, “How can communities reduce the amount of water they use without imposing tough restrictions?” The answers to these questions were either suggested or the participants were asked to make up their own. Then, the participants were asked to rate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. As you might expect, people rated their own suggestions much higher than the suggestions that were provided. The findings of this first study were merely the beginning, though. The follow-up study revealed even more...This time, while all participants were given the questions in the same manner, the solutions were delivered differently. Just like the first study, some people were asked to rate pre-proposed solutions, some were asked to propose their own solution, but now another group was asked to create a solution by forming a sentence from a pool of about 50 given words. The catch was that those 50 words were just synonyms of the words used in the given solutions condition. That is to say that no matter how the person rearranged the words, they would come to essentially the same conclusion as the pre-proposed solution. The results showed that the participants who constructed their solutions from the pool of 50 words rated their ideas just as high as those composing them from their free thought. This shows that the value we assign to thoughts has less to do with their quality and more to do with their origin.
We’re not done, though. A third study pushed the concept further. If you’ve been paying attention up to now, we’ve established that people will accept an idea and favor it as their own as long as they have a little creative sway in putting it together, but we’ll soon see that people don’t even need that much. In the new condition created by the third study, users only had to rearrange the scrambled words of the pre-proposed solution. In the end, the simple act of unscrambling the words of a sentence elevated its rating to that of an idea borne completely from one’s imagination.
So what does it take for someone to accept an idea as if it were their own? Just a little work. The trick is merely to motivate people to do that small amount of work, whatever it is. Hitting someone in the face with an idea is satisfying, but ineffective. If you’re looking for a real inception, let someone find the answer for themselves. The trick is to make sure that the answer you want them to get is within their reach when they grasp for it. It’s not exactly good for the plot of a blockbuster film, but it gets results.
4 nibbles: