How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Bring to life what’s great about your request—for them.
Spark their
reward system by sharing a concrete example of how your ask will be
beneficial for them, as well as you. If possible, find a way to demonstrate it to
them, to make it feel as real as possible.
Proactively address any potential “threats.”
Put yourself in their shoes—or
ask them explicitly—and consider the concerns they might have. Do any
potential threats arise from your request, for example to their sense of
autonomy or competence, that might put them into defensive mode? Can you
do anything tangible to allay those concerns?
USE SOCIAL PROOF
“To really change anything at my school, it’s not just one person you have to
shift, it’s the whole weight of the staff room,” Emma told me. But if she spent
time trying to persuade every single teacher individually, it would take forever.
And she couldn’t invite them 
all
to observe her classes. Her teenage students
would consider it, like, a total bummer to have crowds of teachers sitting at the
back of the room.
So Emma decided to focus her initial efforts on a smaller group of colleagues,
a committee that included one respected teacher from each department:

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mathematics, science, history, and so on. These were the people she invited to
her demonstration classes to turn them into early advocates. Emma had sway
within her own English faculty, but she was realistic about the fact that she
wouldn’t be the most credible advocate for teachers in other departments. By
getting one person from each faculty on board, she knew that every teacher in
the school would have one close colleague who was visibly enthusiastic about
her new teaching approaches.
This allowed Emma to harness the power of something called 
social proof
.
We already know that our brains rely on shortcuts to decide whether something
is a good idea or not, and one shortcut comes from the social signals we get from
our in-group. In other words, if people similar to us are demonstrably in favor of
something, we’ll tend to support it, too. For example, Australian researchers
found that people laughed more at a TV comedy when they thought the canned
laughter track was a recording of people like them.
8
And when researchers from
Harvard and Yale spoke to fifteen hundred adults about the arguments for and
against HPV vaccination, they found the participants were much more willing to
agree with medics who subtly signaled that they held similar political views.
9
The upshot: when we’re seeking to persuade someone of something, it helps to
emphasize that others in their “tribe” already think our ideas are fabulous.
To use social proof when making requests, try these approaches: