What items in the office will help to become influential?

The answer to the above question may be at arm's length. What will it be? Paper clips? Pens? Pencils? Blotters? Protractor? Diaries? Paperweight? A printer? Your office drawers are full of different items. So which ones will strengthen your influence?

Sociologist Randy Garner wondered if stickers with a handwritten request - the most famous are POST IT stickers - may have the ability to increase another person's pliability. Carrying out his curious research, he sent people a questionnaire asking him to fill it out.

The questionnaire was accompanied by a sticker glued to the cover letter with a handwritten request to fill out, either a similar, also handwritten request on a cover letter, or a cover letter without a handwritten request.

The small yellow box gave a rather convincing impetus: among those who received the questionnaire with a sticker and a handwritten request, more than 75 percent completed and returned the questionnaire, in the second group, 48 percent did, and 36 percent out of the third. But why did it work? Maybe the stickers just attract attention with a bright color?

Garner asked himself the same question. To check, he sent a new batch of questionnaires. This time a third of the questionnaires was sent with a POST IT sticker with a handwritten note, a third with a blank sticker, and another third without a sticker at all. If the effect of using the sticker arises due to the neon-yellow color that attracts the eye to the paper, then the frequency of answers in two groups using the sticker should be equally high. But it turned out that this is not so. Stickers with a handwritten note surpassed competitors, the response rate in this group was 69 percent compared with 43 percent in the group that received the blank sticker, and 34 in the group of questionnaires without a sticker

How to explain this? Since usually no one bothers to find a sticker, stick it on a cover letter and write a note on it, Garner suggested: people, seeing the extra effort and personal touch of the request, feel the need to reciprocate and agree to fulfill the request.

In the end, reciprocity is a social glue that helps to bring and hold people together in a cooperative relationship. You can bet that the glue is more reliable than the one that the sticker was glued to.

In fact, the evidence is even more eloquent. Garner found that sticking personalized stickers to the questionnaire did more than convince more people to respond. Those who received questionnaires with stickers with handwritten notes quickly returned the completed task and gave more detailed and accurate answers. And when the researcher made the message even more personal, adding his initials and “Thank you!” To the handwritten note, the frequency of answers increased even more.

Generally speaking, this study provides valuable information about people's behavior: the more personalized your request, the more likely you will find someone who agrees to fulfill it.

More specifically, this study shows that in the office, community, and even at home, a sticker with a personalized note can emphasize the importance of your message or information. He will not become the notorious needle in the stack of other requests, reports, letters and emails that fight for attention. Moreover, timeliness and quality of execution are likely to improve at the same time.

requests.

What is the result? If you use personalized messages for persuasion, the sticker company is not the only one to benefit from this.

More persuasion strategies in Robert Cialdini's book Psychology of Persuasion.

Robert Cialdini "Psychology of Persuasion"