Familiar Illusions
At any point in time, there are multiple variables running through our brain… Are things going well? Is there a threat? Do I need to redirect my attention? What am I forgetting?
Our mind is either in a state of cognitive ease, cognitive strain, or somewhere teetering on either side.
Cognitive Ease vs Strain
Ease: your thoughts when things are going well - no threats, no major news, no need to redirect attention from what you’re doing
Strain: affected by both the current level of effort and the presence of unmet demands.
Example: hearing a public speaker when you’re in a good mood will induce cognitive ease. (customized) Hearing one when you have 10 proposals due by the end of the day will induce cognitive strain.
In this stress-filled world that is filled with unmet demands, it’s becoming more difficult to get into a state of ease. So what factors go into causing cognitive ease and what are the resulting consequences?
Primary Causes of Cognitive Ease
Repeated Experience / Clear Display / Primed Idea / Good Mood
Subsequent Effects
Feels familiar / Feels true / Feels good / Feels effortless
So, your goal as a salesperson is to structure your approach in a way that’s makes your audience feel the above. We will go through specific ways on how to do that for various sales interactions, but just have those four things at top of mind when preparing your pitch. Ask yourself…
Does it feel… familiar/true/good/effortless?
Familiarity is a key component of influencing decisions, but an important understanding is how being more familiar with something can also cause illusions of the mind…
Going back to the two systems in our brain… The impression of familiarity is produced by the automatic system 1 and system 2 relies on that impression for true/false judgement. This can lead to two types of illusions…
Illusions of Remembering: the experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience. This quality of pastness is an illusion.
Your mind gets into a state of cognitive ease when perceiving a word you have seen earlier and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity.
Illusions of Truth: anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.
*Since we know our brain is lazy and wants to use the least amount of effort, it tries to keep our mind at ease whenever possible. So, if something feels familiar, we just assume it’s true and don’t feel the need to access the reflective part of our brain.
When it comes to memory, however, we remember events from hindsight, rather than past experience.
Our minds don’t remember experiences in a straightforward way. We have two different apparatuses, called memory shelves, both of which remember situations differently…
Experiencing Shelf: How we feel in the present moment (how does it feel right now?)
Remembering Shelf: Records how the entire event unfolded after the fact (how was it overall?)
*The experiencing shelf gives a more accurate account of what occurred, because our feelings during an experience are always the most accurate. BUT the remembering shelf, which is less accurate because it registers memories after the situation occurred, dominates our memories.
A famous experiment was conducted in the early 90’s where they studied pain tolerance of colonoscopies. (joke) Do I have any volunteers?
During that time, colonoscopies were routinely conducted without anesthetic drugs (ouch). The patients were prompted every 60 seconds to indicate the level of pain they were experiencing. Patients rated pain on a scale of zero to 10, in which zero was no pain and 10 was intolerable pain.
A total of 154 patients participated in the experiment; the shortest procedure lasted 4 minutes, and the longest was 69 minutes.
As shown in the graphs below, you can see the experience of two different patients. As you can see, the experience of the respective patient varied considerably during the procedure. Patient A had a procedure which lasted 8 minutes and patient B lasted 24 minutes.
Based on these graphs, assuming that both patients used the scale of pain similarly, who actually experienced more pain?
Most of us would assume that Patient B suffered significantly more than Patient A. Let’s find out…
After the procedure, patients were asked to rate the “total amount of pain” they had experienced during the procedure. Surprisingly, Patient A retained a much worse memory of the experience then Patient B — in fact it was twice as bad.
**The duration of pain doesn’t correlate with the perceived intensity.
What emerged from this was two interesting patterns of the human brain…
Duration Neglect: where we ignore the total duration of the event in favor of a particular memory from it.
Peak-End Rule: where we overemphasize what occurs at the end of the event.
From business standpoint, this is why it’s very difficult to ‘right the ship’, when shit hits the fan.
Rather than thinking of the smooth implementation and years of no issues, having one thing go wrong can do a lot of damage to a relationship.
On the flip side, we’ve all heard the objection, “I’m happy with what I have currently.”
This can be because their experience shelf, how they are currently feeling at that moment, isn’t thinking about some of the challenges they’ve faced.
If brought up in a subtle way, you can get them to access that remembering shelf, which will then take precedent of their memory about that particular event.
*Something to remember is that, the last impression can, and often does, leave a lasting impression.
In the next section, I will teach you how this can be done with a combination of priming and leading questions. But we still have some more to learn first so I’m going to keep it rolling.
Now let’s take a look at how our past experiences and familiarity, shape our expectations and our actions.
There was a time when Coke and Pepsi both claimed that consumers preferred their cola over the other.
A major blind taste test was conducted and it turned out that people actually preferred Pepsi to Coke.
But in a separate test where the brands were visible, people preferred Coke to Pepsi by a wide margin.
Why? Our expectations and previous experiences. Here are two examples…
When we see a movie that has positive reviews, we are likely to enjoy it more than one that received negative.
When you see a known/funny stand-up comedian vs someone on open mic. When you see a famous comedian, virtually anything that comes out of their mouth can induce a laugh. The open mic guy needs to work a little harder.
A different mental shortcut that also shapes our expectations, is called the Availability Heuristic…
The Availability Heuristic: when you overestimate the probability of something you hear often or find easy to remember.
It operates under the principle of, “if you can think of it, it must be important.”
Things that come to mind more easily are believed to be far more common and more accurate reflections of the real world.
This is one of the first and most famous findings by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and you see it referenced in A LOT of work from others in this field.
Taking it a step further, the human mind also assess the likelihood of risks by asking how readily examples come to mind.
If people can easily think of relevant examples, they are far more likely to be frightened and concerned than if they cannot.
Think of making an investment. If you have made a bad investment in the past where you lost a bunch of money, you are less likely to make another investment, regardless of any other components of the new investment.
Similarly, if a customer has had a bad experience with something related to what you’re selling, say implementation, they are less likely to switch because they don’t want to go through that again.
This led me to think of three questions to ask yourself prior to engaging with a client:
What’s at the top of their mind currently? What should be at the top of their mind? How can I get them there?
One way you can get them there is by simply bringing up the components that you’re trying to highlight as much as you can. This can be shown from another psychological phenomenon called the mere-exposure effect.
Mere-exposure effect: people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.
So if they aren’t familiar with what you’re pitching, it’s your job to get them familiar. Let’s keep building on this…
Bad News:
The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
Emotionally loaded words quickly attract attention and bad/negative words attract attention faster than happy words.
John Gottman, is a well-known expert in marital relations. He observed that the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive. Married guys and girls, would you agree?
Think about politicians during a campaign. They almost always focus on the negative about the other candidate vs touting the positives they will bring. It’s because they know negatives stick in peoples mind over positives.
While I was going down the rabbit hole, I found a correlation with something that is known as Denominator neglect…
Denominator Neglect: occurs when we ignore plain statistics in favor of vivid mental images that influence our decisions.
Examples: someone dying of a stroke happens significantly more often than an accidental death, but a study showed that 80% of the respondents considered AD a more likely fate.
This is because we hear more about accidental deaths in the media and they make a bigger impression on us; we remember horrific accidents more readily than death from strokes and so we may react inappropriately towards these dangers.
Biased assessments of risk can irrationally influence how we prepare for and respond to crises, business choices, and the political process.
Whether people buy insurance for natural disasters is greatly affected by recent experiences or what they heard on the news.
RECAP: There was a lot of information in that section, so let’s recap the 4 main areas we covered…
Our mind is either in a state of cognitive ease or cognitive strain.
Ease = normal – not necessarily “happy place” but just normal.
Strain = stressed/anxious. The presence of unmet demands.
We as humans want to stay in cognitive ease, so we try to bring to light things we are familiar with. Because were familiar and our brain wants to use the least amount of effort as possible, we assume it’s true and move on.
While it might be impossible for us as salespeople, try to get the buyer to a point where they are in a state of cognitive ease.
Put yourself in their shoes and ask… familiar/true/good/effortless?
When it comes to memory, we ignore the total duration of the event in favor of a particular memory from it. We also overemphasize what occurs at the end of the event.
Our past experiences and familiarity shape our expectations. Within this, we…
Overestimate the probability of something we hear often or find easy to remember.
We give priority to bad news
We ignore statistics in favor of vivid mental images
I told you that in order to be more persuasive, you want to get the customer in a state of ease, but I also said that our minds give priority to bad news. So what gives and how can we use this knowledge to influence decisions? Does anyone have an idea and want to take a stab at it?
There are many ways you can use this but here is what my advice would be…
Start w. Ease/Fear the Strain
You want to invoke cognitive ease right off the bat. They key is to ‘get them on your side’…
Be relatable - Did you notice I started the presentation with a joke? I do this every time and I have been for years. I want my audience to loosen up and view me more as a peer, rather than someone they are forced to hear speak.
Jokes tend to put our minds at ease, so doing it at the beginning can help alleviate any strain that people of the audience may be experiencing.
Same goes when selling 1x1. Talk about what they want to hear, act genuinely interested by asking more questions aimed at keeping them talking… “that sounds interesting, tell me more about that.”
Once they are in a state of cognitive ease and “on your side” you can now get them to fear the possibility of something that might cause them strain. How?
Use COMMON examples that have BIG impact
A good way to increase people’s fear of a bad outcome is to remind them of a related incident in which things went wrong;
a good way to increase people’s confidence is to remind them of a similar situation in which everything worked out for the best.
From a sales stand point, the former will be more impactful. Highlighting a ‘pain’ from another client is a good way to help influence a decision in your favor, as they don’t want to end up with the same negative outcome.
We overestimate something we hear often or find easy to remember, we give priority to bad news, and we ignore statistics for mental images. Maybe move up
Here’s an example of how I positioned my sales pitch around this…
When presenting an insurance benefit called critical illness, which pays a sum of money if diagnosed with a serious disease, I started the presentation by asking, “show of hands - how many people know someone who has had a heart attack, stroke, or cancer.” (usually everyone)
This gives the audience a mental image of a bad outcome everyone has experienced in some capacity and gives a perfect segue into highlighting the fact that the product is specifically designed for helping pay the out of pocket expenses associated with those illnesses.
You can use this in multiple ways to make your message more persuasive…
What potential ramifications may occur if the customer doesn’t go with you solution?
What pain did the customer go through with a pervious or current solution?
Remember, use common examples that are easy to remember and have a big impact. When positioning as a loss, an effective but subtle strategy is to get them to think of their own situation rather than doing it for them…
Claims – “We recently had a client who was in a ski accident and couldn’t work.” Take it from there…
“The company didn’t have these policies, so that employee lost out on thousands of dollars of potential benefit. We hope you’ll never have to use this policy but unfortunately accidents can happen, so it’s important to be protected in case it does.”
Being in Colorado, skiing is an example everyone can relate to and also something where most people know of someone who has had an injury.
Because of loss aversion, this way is more impactful than if I said, “the company did have the policy so the employee was covered and received a few thousand dollars.”
The thought of gaining money after an injury sounds nice, but the thought of losing money after an injury sounds much worse.
Conclusion
When you’re selling, determine the main area(s) you’re trying to position and consciously think of these three things…
Familiarity: put your point in terms of something the person you’re talking to is more familiar with.
High Impact: Whether you’re positioning a positive or negative outcome, do it in a way that will leave an impression.
Repetitiveness: Mention the main point you’re trying to get across as many times as possible. The more we hear it, the more familiar we are (or at least think we are).
The findings in this section fits well within the findings from the last section and one conclusion for both should have been made clear… over-simplify.
I really try to make a diligent effort to do this throughout every sales interaction. This presentation is a good example. My goal is always to simplify a message in a way my audience better understands. How am I doing so far?
Transition: As I mentioned, there are nearly 200 recognized biases and heuristics so there are still A LOT that I haven’t covered. The next section includes all of them that I thought were interesting or have a “sales take-away” from, but don’t have a “home” for.
It's time for bias rapid fire!