As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind.
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Behavioral scientists have conducted hundreds of studies about the differences between powerful and powerless words and phrases. We are especially smitten with research led by Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania and by our Stanford colleague Jennifer Aaker. We draw mostly on their work to generate five tips about the kind of talk that provokes people to act, persist, and develop imaginative solutions.
Before: Interrogative Self-Talk âŚ
Tell yourself you can do it. Declaring an unshakable belief in your inherent awesomeness inflates a sturdy raft that can keep you bobbing in an ocean of rejection.
Alas, the social science shows something different and more nuancedâŚ
Yes, positive self-talk is generally more effective than negative self-talk. But the most effective self-talk of all doesnât merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questionsâŚ
On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming groupâŚ
The reasons are twofold. First, the interrogative, by its very form, elicits answersâand within those answers are strategies for actually carrying out the taskâŚ
The second reason is related. Interrogative self-talk, the researchers say, âmay inspire thoughts about autonomous or intrinsically motivated reasons to pursue a goal.â...
During: Positivity Ratios âŚ
Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina is the leading researcher on positivityâher catchall term for a basket of emotions including amusement, appreciation, joy, interest, gratitude, and inspiration. Negative emotions, she says, evolved to narrow peopleâs vision and propel their behavior toward survival in the moment (Iâm frightened, so Iâll flee. Iâm angry, so Iâll fight). By contrast, âPositive emotions do the opposite: They broaden peopleâs ideas about possible actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and . . . making us more receptive and more creative,â she writes.
The broadening effect of positive emotions has important consequences for moving others. Consider both sides of a typical transaction. For the seller, positive emotions can widen her view of her counterpart and his situation. Where negative emotions help us see trees, positive ones reveal forests. And that, in turn, can aid in devising unexpected solutions to the buyerâs problem. Other studies show that positive emotions can expand our behavioral repertoires and heighten intuition and creativity, all of which enhance our effectivenessâŚ
Fredrickson and Losada round up to 3. Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1âthat is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassmentâpeople generally flourished. Those below that ratio usually did not. But Fredrickson and Losada also found that positivity had an upper limit. Too much can be as unproductive as too little. Once the ratio hit about 11 to 1, positive emotions began doing more harm than good. Beyond that balance of positive-to-negative, life becomes a festival of Panglossian cluelessness, where self-delusion suffocates self-improvement. Some negativityâwhat Fredrickson and Losada call âappropriate negativityââis essential. Without it, âbehavior patterns calcify.â Negative emotions offer us feedback on our performance, information on whatâs working and whatâs not, and hints about how to do better.
The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and curiosity.
People opened useful messages for extrinsic reasons; they had something to gain or lose. They opened the other messages for intrinsic reasons; they were just curious.
Questions, whose potency weâve seen in both interrogative self-talk and in pitching effectively, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. The conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match. Thatâs something that Fuller Brush founder Alfred Fuller intuited years before improv was ever invented. âNever argue,â he wrote. âTo win an argument is to lose a sale.