The Optimal Posture of the Questions in Persuasion
A new research conducted by Zak Tarmala, to study the effect on Persuasion when a diagnostic question is being asked before the insight is delivered, and then to compare the results when the insight is firstly delivered and then popping up the diagnostic question, the study included 305 persons who were told that the purpose of the study is to raise the awareness about health issues, specifically about vitamin D intake. So the purpose of the message was to motivate a behavior change regarding vitamin D importance for one’s health. They split the individuals to three groups, the first group received an insight based message first about vitamin D and then to be asked the diagnostic questions as follow;
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Compared to other people, how well do you think you are doing getting your recommended amount of vitamin D each day? This question was accompanied by a scale ranging from 0 (“far below average”) to 10 (“far above average”), with the midpoint of 5 labeled “about average.”
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In more absolute terms, how well do you think you are doing getting your recommended amount of vitamin D each day?This question was accompanied by a scale ranging from 0 (“not well at all”) to 10 (“very well”). The second group received the diagnostic questions first and then the insight message, while the third group who acted as (the control group) received just the insight message. The results are shown in the next graph, the first group of the insight-then-question believed they had a bad behavior regarding their vitamin D more than the other two groups by 7.2%.
And finally they measured the message impact for the three groups, and they found that the first group was much persuaded than the other two groups.
What we conclude from this experiment, that according to the persuasion scheme that is being presented in our book “The way of innovation to the art of persuasion” as shown below, we notice the following;
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Questions are mainly aiming to target the focus of the recipient by triggering (system 2) of the brain, the system that is responsible for scrutinizing and deeply analyzing the information, so when the questions are being raised prior to the message insight, what happens is that the brain is already alerted and its more focusing on analyzing, criticizing and doubting the effectiveness of the incoming message, so the probability of the rejection of the message is higher, while beginning with the message insight before raising the questions takes the advantage of the default state of the mind (system 1) which doesn’t go through the ideas with much analysis as (system 2) does, so the result would be a higher probability of accepting the message, and this what was shown clearly in that study. So, by harnessing and generalizing the technique of delivering a message insight and then asking any kind of questions, whether they are diagnostic of motivational questions seem to be a very effective approach to persuasion.
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