The latest from Work Matters
| The power of potential to pique imagination |
| The March issue of the Harvard Business Review has an interesting interview with Zakary Tormala entitled "Defend Your Research: Experts Are More Persuasive When They're Less Certain." His work deals with how certainty affects our perceptions. Here is one experiment he ran: Present people with letters of recommendation for a job, describing one candidate as "high potential" and the other as "high achieving." People find the letter describing someone as high potential more interesting and possibly more persuasive. Why? Here is Tormala: "Proven achievement is very certain. It's less surprising and less interesting to think about. Potential is uncertain and kind of exciting. You can imagine many outcomes." That's true in dating and true in sports. He cites one study using pro athletes. Given identical stats for a veteran player's first five years of performance and a rookie's predicted five year performance, study subjects elected to compensate the rookie almost $1 million more in year six. I think this research also teaches that people like to make up their own minds. It's something to think about when the next opening statement and closing argument comes around. |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
0 comments:
Post a Comment