How to Eliminate Biases in Conversations?
Principles of Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, Part-6
1.1. How to eliminate biases?
Individuals surveyed by phone reported themselves 20 percent more satisfied with their existence—as a whole—when asked on sunny days compared with rainy days. Sunny days don’t just inflate how we feel about what we own and the people we meet; they do the same for how we feel about our lives.
Fortunately, there’s an optimistic side to the findings: the label’s fit differed dramatically when respondents were reminded of the weather before the survey began. If the interviewer asked first, “By the way, how’s the weather over there?” the sunny-versus-rainy-day effect didn’t materialize at all. Simply being focused on the weather for a moment, reminded the survey participants of its potentially biasing influence and allowed them to correct their thinking accordingly. Besides the comforting evidence that we are not so slavishly subject to the pulls of primal processes, there is another implication of this particular result that’s worth consideration: it took only a simple, short question to eliminate the bias.
1.2. The Positivity Paradox: The elderly feel happier than they did when younger, stronger, and healthier
The question of why this paradox exists has intrigued camps of lifespan researchers for decades. After considering several possibilities, one set of investigators, led by the psychologist Laura Carstensen, hit upon a surprising answer: when it comes to dealing with all the negativity in their lives, seniors have decided that they just don’t have time for it, literally.
They take deliberate steps to achieve this emotional contentment. The elderly go more frequently and fully to the locations inside and outside themselves populated by mood-lifting personal experiences. To a greater extent than younger individuals, seniors recall positive memories, entertain pleasant thoughts, seek out and retain favorable information, search for and gaze at happy faces, and focus on the upsides of their consumer products. They focus their attentions on those spots. Indeed, the seniors with the best “attention management” skills (those good at orienting to and staying fixed on positive material) show the greatest mood enhancement. Those with poor such skills, however, can’t use strong attentional control to extricate themselves from their tribulations.
Prof Carstensen interviewed a pair of sisters living in a senior home and asking them how they dealt with various negative events—for example, the sickness and death they witnessed regularly all around them. They replied in unison, “Oh, we don’t have time for worrying about that.”
She also found that younger individuals have different primary life goals that include learning, developing, and striving for achievement. Accomplishing those objectives requires a special openness to discomforting elements: demanding tasks, contrary points of view, unfamiliar people, and owning mistakes or failures. Any other approach would be maladaptive. We need to be receptive to the real presence of negatives in order to learn from and deal with them. The problem arises when we allow ourselves to become mired in the emotions they generate; when we let them lock us into an ever-cycling loop of negativity.
Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky studied happiness and investigated a key question more systematically than anyone else. She pondered on procedural question, “Which specific activities can we perform to increase our happiness?”
“You can make yourself happier just like you can make yourself lose weight,” Dr. Lyubomirsky says. “But like eating differently and going to the gym faithfully, you have to put in the effort every day. You have to stay with it.” Which specific activities can we perform to increase our happiness?
Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down.
Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities.
Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.
Reference:
Based on Book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Image adopted from @visualizevalue