Information dilution effect
Information dilution effect
Let’s talk about a particularly practical persuasive technique in this talk. You’ll definitely use it, and you’ll definitely need to pay special attention to it because most people lack the awareness.
Let’s say that your department in your company is competing with another department for a project. You are proposing option A, and your rival is going to work on option B. The company executives are indecisive. The company executives are indecisive, so they ask each of you to prepare materials and make a presentation at the board meeting.
Your staff, working together with high morale, work overtime to give you a PowerPoint presentation, which you see is really a lot of effort, colleagues not only argued in detail the advantages of option A and the shortcomings of option B, but also on the other side of the possible attacks also prepared in advance to respond to: some of the suspected weaknesses of the option A, in fact, there is a reason and does not get in the way.
The content of this PowerPoint can be summarized basically as: “Ten reasons to choose option A”.
What should you do, please?
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You should cut at least seven reasons. Better yet, cut eight. In fact, it’s best to have only one or two reasons on your PPT in order to convince the board.
Here’s insight from Niro Sivanathan, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School [1].
Once before, Sivanathan wanted to recruit a PhD student. That student was a top-notch researcher, but he wasn’t doing so well academically, so Sivanathan had to do his best to help him out in front of the admissions committee. Facing the committee, Sivanathan said two reasons why this student should be recruited.
his research skills were exceptional and I needed him;
the reason his regular grades are not so good is because he takes harder classes, which I don’t see as a weakness but a strength.
As a result, the admissions committee didn’t admit that student.
Why? Sivanathan’s insight is that the second reason dilutes the effect of his entire argument. If Sivanathan had stated only one reason - “This student’s research skills are exceptional, there’s no one better in this group, I want him” - the committee would have been able to admit the student.
To illustrate this point, let’s look at an experiment.
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This is an example used by Sivanathan in a TED talk [2]. The researcher first showed a group of subjects a beautiful set of dinnerware with 8 plates, 8 bowls, and 8 saucers, 24 pieces in total, and asked the subjects how much they would be willing to pay for the set. The average bid from the subjects was £390.
For another group of subjects, the researcher also showed the set and added some additional teacups and saucers, only those didn’t look very good, making the set a total of 40 pieces. The resulting average bid from the subjects was only £192.
This doesn’t seem quite right. The second set of cutlery included the first set and gave an extra 16 pieces, so how come the bid was instead only half the price of the first set?
The answer is that those not-so-good-looking teacups and saucers are pulling down the entire set.
That’s why Sivanathan’s defense of that student’s reasoning that he got low grades because he took a hard class got that student not accepted instead: this second reason downgraded his entire argument.
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Sivanathan argues that the human brain has a cognitive flaw. *When we assess the persuasiveness of a number of reasons, we’re not counting the total, we’re averaging. *
Let’s say you want to convince someone that French player Mbappe is the best soccer player in the world. You list four reasons -
Mbappe scores a lot of goals;
Mbappe is efficient at scoring goals;
Mbappe plays for the best club in France;
Mbappe has a very lucrative professional contract.
Your first two reasons are hard indicators and very convincing, so they are worth 90 points each. The last two reasons are a bit less convincing. After all, playing for the best club in France with a good salary is not quite the same as being “the best in the world”, so they are worth 60 points each.
When we list our reasons, we intuitively think that the more reasons we have, the better. We assume that the listener will add up all the reasons to a total of 300 points. But that’s not how the listener thinks.
It’s one thing to hear them, it’s another to actually listen to them. The human brain is very bad at calculating, much less internalizing, this total. The listener doesn’t really care how many reasons you actually said. But when we hear a lot of reasons, I’m actually looking for an average impression of those reasons.
You say one strong reason and another not-so-strong reason, and the listener’s brain automatically averages them into an impression that’s relatively strong and not particularly strong.
Sivanathan says that closer to the truth is that the impression your four reasons leave on the listener is their average score, which is 300/4 = 75.
You see, you might as well give just the first two reasons an average of 90 points, which the listener would consider more powerful.
You think that four reasons are better than two, just as by definition 40 pieces of cutlery should be better than 24 pieces of cutlery, but that’s not how the brain’s perceptual perception works. Those extra two not-so-strong reasons and the extra 16 pieces of dinnerware that are inferior compared to the pints significantly lower the overall average impression, and it’s better to have them than not to have them at all.
Sivanathan calls this phenomenon ‘The Dilution Effect’, and to avoid confusion with dilution effects in other fields - such as ecology - we’ll call it *’The Information Dilution Effect’ here. Insufficiently forceful information dilutes the overall forcefulness. *
This is very simple, just like gift-giving: instead of giving someone two bottles of good wine and two cans of Coke, you should give them only two bottles of good wine.
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As the receiver of information, you easily understand the dilution effect. But as the giver of information, you sometimes can’t help but lay out what you know and tell people, thinking that the more you say, the better.
There’s a study that goes like this. Suppose there is a serious violent crime and the prosecutor gets two eyewitnesses. The first witness saw the crime very clearly and was able to identify the suspect 100% of the time. The second witness was also at the scene, but didn’t see very well and just had a feeling that it should be this person. So, please, should you put both witnesses on the stand?
Studies have shown that convictions are much more effective if you only have the first witness testify. Evidence that is not strong enough only has a diluting effect.
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The information dilution effect can also work in reverse. Sivanathan once stumbled across a TV commercial for some drug that helps you sleep. According to FDA requirements, the last few seconds of a drug commercial must tell the viewer the side effects of the drug. The commercial honestly listed all the side effects: heart attack, stroke, etc., etc., and the last item was “may cause itchy feet”.
Sivanathan immediately realized that there was dilution. Imagine if the ad had listed only two side effects - heart attack and stroke - would you have bought the drug? You probably wouldn’t. Are you kidding me, I just have insomnia, a heart attack would not be worth it. But the advertisement lists many side effects, including “itchy feet”. Then you’d think, “Well, it’s actually pretty safe, and it’s just being careful to list all the possible side effects, which are generally not serious.
Sivanathan organized a comparative study for his students. Sure enough, those who saw only two side effects, “heart attack and stroke,” were less likely to buy the drug, while those who saw all the side effects, including “itchy feet,” were significantly more likely to buy it.
The more side effects you list, the safer it is for others.
Sivanathan came up with another idea. He put the two side effects “heart attack and stroke” in red in the advertisement, while the other side effects were still in unusual characters, deliberately highlighting these two major side effects - the result was that the willingness to buy did decrease a little, but the dilution effect of the other side effects was still there, just that the other side effects were still there, just that the dilution effect of the other side effects was still there, just that the other side effects were still there, just that the dilution effect was still there. However, the dilution effect of the other side effects was still there, just weakened.
The FDA’s requirement to list side effects is objectively likely to make people take side effects even less seriously.
Thus, it seems that, * From an influence perspective, we must focus when we talk about the pros, but when we talk about the cons, the more we talk about them, the better. *
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Back in the day, when relativity was just becoming popular in popular culture, a lot of people were against it. Someone made a point of publishing a book called 100 Writers Against Einstein! Einstein was delighted: if the theory of relativity is really wrong, one writer against it is enough.
Don’t say “15 ways we’re going to disrupt the fintech industry” or “10 ways this service outperforms the competition”, it just dilutes your core argument.
So you’re saying, “Well, we’ve just got 10 great things about this service, so how do I know which ones to cut out and which ones to keep? Sivanathan’s advice [3] is that you can discuss it with your colleagues, you can get people to test it. Put all the arguments on the table and ruthlessly cut out at least 7 of them.
There’s a consideration that maybe the argument is weak to the average person, but it’s so important to some people in the audience that you still want to keep it - Sivanathan sees this kind of thinking as not seeing the forest for the trees. You overestimate the preferences of the minority and underestimate the effect of strong arguments. The reality is that powerful arguments can influence everyone in the room.
My additional suggestion is that you can keep the arguments that are of secondary importance in your mind until someone asks them during the audience question session. If no one asks then you don’t have to say it …… And you’ll often find that no one asks about the minutiae at all.
Our column used to talk about the Heath Brothers’ book “Powerful Moments” when we said a behavioral design principle called “Mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable”, in fact, this is also the meaning. *The point here is that impressions need to be managed. *
Hopefully this talk will make your next presentation more powerful.
Annotation
[1] https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/less-is-more/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkFCu6K8Ghw
[3] https://smith.queensu.ca/insight/content/The-Simple-Way-to-Be-More-Persuasive.php
[4] Elite Day Classes Season 2, Experiential Design Studies
Getting to the point
- When we assess the persuasiveness of a number of reasons, we are not counting the total, but averaging. The information that is not strong enough dilutes the overall strength, this is the “information dilution effect”.
- From the perspective of influence, when we talk about the advantages, we must emphasize them, but when we talk about the disadvantages, the more we talk about them, the better.
- Impressions need to be managed.