Understanding Behaviour

Dec 10 2011

Why we love buying but hate being sold to

Did you know that making a decision yourself is more important than making a good decision?

You would think that people want to make the best choice. Turns out that’s not true. We don’t want to make the best choice, we want to make OUR choice.

Why we love buying but hate to be sold to

We love to buy. We love to feel the rush of power and the rush of satisfaction as you get the next big item that’s supposed to fix your life and make things better. After all, that’s why we buy stuff, right? We only buy something if we believe that it can make our lives easier or improve it in some way.

We buy when we believe that the things we buy can add value to our lives, whether it be a laptop or pillow or chair (yes, i’m naming random things that are around me right now). It’s supposed to make your problem go away, whether that problem is smelling bad, or thinning hair or not being able to speak in public. We buy to make ourselves feel better.

So we love to buy.

But we hate being sold to.

The moment you sense a salesperson is selling to you just because he wants to make a sale, you immediately back off. You start saying NO. It’s because when you feel “sold to”, it feels like he “won” and you “lost”. It feels like the salesperson manipulated you and tricked you into buying something that you didn’t want or need.

It feels icky. It feels like you can’t trust the person. Now, if you can’t trust the person, how can you trust the product he’s selling?

We often and we always associate things. We look at an object and feel like it’s important to us, not because it actually has value, but because it has an emotion that we associated with it.

It’s like in The Little Prince when he says that his rose is special, not because it is special in itself, but because caring for it all these years and being close to it has made it special. When you attach emotion to your teddy bear, it becomes valuable to you, but only because you gave it value.

“You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on.

“One couldn’t die for you. Of course an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than you altogether, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except for two or three for butterflies). Since’s she the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”

– “The Little Prince” By Antoine De Saint-Exupe’ry

So these products you buy from Mr. Person-you-can’t-trust will also just leave you hanging because you attach the idea of distrust to his products. You don’t trust his product to solve your problems either.

So here’s the thing; even if that product actually was the best product to solve your needs, you still might not buy it anyway.

We hate being sold to.

But there are other examples of when we’ll make bad decisions just because we don’t want to follow someone’s orders.

Why we’ll stop when someone tells us to do what we’re already doing

Has this ever happened to you? You were just about to do something when someone suddenly told you to do exactly what you were about to do anyway. Don’t you feel a sudden urge to just stop? It’s just like being a teenager all over again when your parent told you to do something and you’d go against them just because you didn’t want to do what they said.

It’s honestly a little ridiculous. You were about to do it anyway. You were going to do it for your own reasons to benefit yourself. But then they told you to do it and now you JUST… CANT… DO IT!

You can’t show them that they own you and that you’ll do what they say. It’s worse when it’s someone you hate. Then you’ll just start doing the exact opposite of whatever it is they say.

Sometimes, you’ll even go out of your way and do something that’s bad for yourself just to prove them wrong. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Unfortunately, it’s normal. It’s the basis behind the whole idea of reverse psychology.

The story goes that Winston Churchill would convince others that an idea he had given them had actually been an idea they had come up with in the first place, in order to make sure that it was implemented.

A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.

– Father Strickland, 1863

Would you prefer to make people believe that it was your idea at the risk of not having people implement such a great idea? Or would you rather go Churchill’s route and make people believe it was their own decision so that they would freely implement it? The truly great ideas need to be spread out so that people buy into the idea and make it their own. One of the greatest winning movements of this generation is the environmental movement.

People have joined this movement not because it was someone else’s good idea, but because they felt it was their own idea to go out and help save the world. But we still might stop if someone told us to do what we wanted to do anyway.

So the question that pops up is why do we stop?

We stop because when we make a choice… we want to be sincere.

Let’s deal with the idea of sincerity later on. Before that, let’s look at teenagers.

Why teenagers rebel

When we’re children, we’re at a stage where we fully trust our parents and trust them to make all our decisions. In fact, we usually feel so strongly attached to our mom or dad that we define ourselves through them. We don’t really have a strong self-identity yet.

But as we grow, parents, peers and society tell us and teach us that we need to make our own decisions and that we need to be responsible for our own life. So we tentatively try it out. We try to make our own decisions.

However, we’re still young at the time, and still not fully able to make decisions properly, so our parents always try to guide us and tell us what to do. At that point, a choice appears; do you follow the decision of your parents or do you make your own decision? Also, what happens when you both decide the same thing? Unfortunately, there’s no option there that says you can both come to the same decision because the very definition of it being your parents’ choice means that it’s not yours.

So we rebel.

Oh, not always, but we rebel. Whenever our parents tell us to do something, we feel like it limits our ability to grow into adults and make our own choices. The only way to feel like we are living our own lives instead of someone else’s is to rebel against our parents’ decisions.

So we have a dilemma. People tell us that teenagers should start to “grow up” and be more responsible. The meaning of responsible means that we should be responsible for our own decisions. And how can that happen when adults keep telling teenagers what to do?

Teenagers rebel because they don’t know their own identity. Yet.

Identity is the reason

Identity is the reason for all these things we do. Or, more accurately, the idea that we want to have a solid understanding of who we are and what our choices are.

When you make a choice, something happens. You start believing that you own that choice. That it’s part of you. That it’s part of your identity.

Yes, our minds are pretty easy to trick. In fact, we deceive ourselves all the time. In this particular case, because we’ve made the choice ourselves, we cling to it as part of us. If somebody tries telling you that you shouldn’t buy something that you want, or that something you bought isn’t good, you’ll feel at least a little bit insulted. WHY?

You feel like they insulted your choice and taste in products. You’ve actually attached your emotions onto this choice. In fact, you’ve attached yourself to that choice. That choice now defines part of who you are. And so, you want to make that choice yourself, because you want to define your identity by yourself.

What happens when you do what someone tells you? It’s as if someone is choosing your identity for you. Someone is deciding who you are for you. And that’s just wrong. Or at least, that’s how you feel.

So when you’re still at the stage where your self-image is fuzzy, like most of us are, you can’t take any chances with your identity. When you haven’t figured out who you are, you don’t want someone else to decide for you. When you haven’t found yourself or chosen who to be, you can’t let someone else decide for you.

Let’s get back to the teenagers we were talking about before.

When teenagers are entering their teenage years, they’re still testing the waters of their own identity. They’re still figuring out how to make a decision and whether they will actually like that decision; that is, whether that decision fits in with who they want to be. And normally, they won’t know if they like it until after they make the decision.

But what happens when your parents tell you what to do (even if it’s the best decision), is that even if you like it, it’s still not your own decision, so it’s not really part of you yet. Because of that, the only way to make sure that it’s your own personal decision is to do the exact opposite of what your parents tell you to do.

I know, it’s weird and twisted. But us humans are built that way.

Let’s move on to the idea of sincerity.

It’s also about Sincerity

As humans with relationships, we really really feel that sincerity is important. We always want to be ourselves. And when our self-image is fuzzy, it’s always best to remove all doubt. It’s that moment when you want to do something for a noble reason like love or gratitude, then one second later, your doubt kicks in and you start wondering whether you’re doing this because YOU want to or because someone ELSE told you to.

To remove that doubt, we immediately say no.

Imagine a country that was still in a time of war, where its borders were fluid and changed every day, to the point where even the leaders of the country are fuzzy about where the line is on the map. That country is you and the border is the border between your own self-image of your own choices and the influence of other people in your life.

When your border is fuzzy, the moment an influence (invasion) comes anywhere near your borders, you HAVE to push it back. You can’t accept anything nearby because you don’t know where your border is either. To be on the safe side, and to make sure that the influence didn’t cross your borders and get into your mind, it’s easier to reject all possible action that might come of it.

But what if the country were at peace? What if the border was clearly defined on a map? Then, wouldn’t you be able to place a proper immigration control at the borders? Any time an influence came near the borders, it would be fine. You could watch it from your side of the fence as it came closer. And closer and closer.

When it reaches your border fence, you can calmly allow it entrance to your country, but only under your conditions.

When you know exactly what entered your mind from outside, then you know exactly which thoughts are yours and which are from others. That way, you can always be sure that you are sincere when it’s your own thoughts that lead you to a decision.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

– Aristotle

This is when you can take peoples’ influence, advice, peer pressure, social hype, etc, and stop it at the borders of your mind, extracting from it only the information that you find useful.

Did you know that right now I’m influencing you too? I’m trying to get you to see my perspective. If you can allow my words into your mind, and still feel calm and assured that YOU are still in control, then congrats; that’s exactly the feeling I’m trying to explain. It’s the same feeling I want you to have every time you feel pressured to do something. You are in control and you can reject or accept my words however you like.

Now, this might be easier to do in a low-pressure situation where I’m not actively or rudely pushing myself on you. The question is, could you cultivate yourself so that even if somebody is rudely or aggressively trying to convince or pressure you into something; you could still calmly choose with your own mind instead of automatically pushing back (or giving in)?

You can.

But it means you have to define the borders of your self first. You have to define who you are. This is slightly different from finding yourself or finding your life purpose. You often can’t do that until you stumble upon that one thing you can do that really makes you passionate. Defining yourself is more of defining the ground rules for what you feel are important in life and what you would most regret.

Don’t give yourself reasons to regret.

(I’ll deal with avoiding regret later in a post called [The mistake you can learn from and the mistake you can't] which I’ll post by the end of next week. This post seems to be long enough.)

Conclusion

The idea here, is that you want to be able to accept ideas from others and integrate them into yourself without feeling that you compromised your borders. We hate being sold to, and that includes selling us ideas, but that only makes sense if you forget that ultimately you have the power to decide to buy.

Remember that you always have the power to buy into any idea that comes your way no matter how much someone tries to sell you on it.

Nowadays, every time someone advises me or tells me what to do, I take it as just that; advice. If I follow it, it’s because I chose to do so.

If you can always choose to buy (or not buy) no matter how much pressure is pushed on you, then you will always make your own decision. And I hope that at that time, you can also freely make the best decision.

Make the best decision for yourself, no matter if it comes from you… or from someone else.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Understanding Behaviour • 4 • Tags: , , , , ,

Dec 5 2011

You control your future?

Mindset by Carol Dweck is a book that says we sometimes develop a fixed-ability mindset. A mindset where who we are can’t change. This mindset says that our level of ability and skills are determined from birth and are constant, and since most of us define ourselves by our skills and what we do, it means that we ourselves can’t change.

This happens when we start believing that the reason we are good at something is because of natural talent. Unfortunately, I had that mindset for years and years throughout school. When people tell you you’re smart, you start believing it. You also start shying away from areas where you’re not smart. I carefully and methodically avoided languages, history and woodwork because it didn’t come to me easily and because I had a “bad memory”.

If I wasn’t smart at it, it wasn’t worth putting effort into especially when I might fail. At least if I failed without trying, I had an excuse that I hadn’t given it my all.

But having a hobby, an obsession, a martial art, an anything really; it gives you an example of how your skills can change and can grow. For me, in Form 4 (something like grade 10) I started playing basketball.

Basketball taught me that I can grow

Before this, I’d always defined myself as the smart kid. Why? Because I didn’t really have anything else. It sounds a bit nerdy now, but it really was true at the time. I’m not saying this for pity, that part of my life is done and over with now and I have very little, if any, regret about it. I embrace it as part of my past.

My parents are awesome. They never said they wanted results. Rather, they continually stressed that they wanted effort. “If you work hard and do badly, it’s fine. It’s not about the result, it’s about the effort. Remember that.”, my mom repeated again and again. But I just never really got it, not least because other people kept piling on the “praise”.

So in Form 4, the apartments that I stayed in built a basketball court. Afterwards, it was only natural for all the kids in the area to go down and test out the court. We had no experience mind you. None of us knew anything about basketball. My dribbling (bouncing the ball to move it around), my shots, my knowledge of basketball rules, they were all zero. I vaguely knew who Michael Jordan was but had never watched even a single NBA game.

But we learned. It was just a bunch of kids playing around without much skill involved, but I stuck to it. 6 pm, the kids would usually come down. I was usually there every day from 5pm to 7pm. I’d practice throwing shots in, over and over again. Then somebody told me something that hurt. He said that I should just stay near the ring and wait for the ball, because my shooting was alright but my dribbling was horrible. I was hurt, but it made me think that I wanted to show him up. I did. And my dribbling improved. (P.S. It was stupid of me to feel hurt because he told the truth, but there you go)

An odd thing about basketball was that there were no real metrics for me to keep track of. It wasn’t as if my goal was to be able to dribble the ball 80 times a minute and if I was below that count then I had failed. No, it was much more subjective, and that subjectivity meant that I could feel myself improving, but without the existence of numbers that would distract me from the game itself. I couldn’t fail.

This was completely different from my normal “intelligence” and being “smart”. We had tests and exams, and every time there was a grade that went along with it. When I did well, it was just because of my “natural (and fixed)” intelligence, while low grades just proved that I wasn’t “naturally talented” at that subject. I was fixated on those grades.

I would look at them and keep looking at them to reassure myself that I was “smart”. I wasn’t proud of my effort. I was proud of skills that I had never had to work on. It’s like being proud to be a guy. Or proud to have fingers. Yes, they were (and still are) integral parts of me, but the pride I had in them was extreme and distracted me from the skills I was weak in and needed to work on.

I’ll be honest, I played basketball because I wanted to play with friends. But then I got good at it. I don’t mean tournament-worthy good, but good enough that I wasn’t embarrassed to play any more.

After 2 years of this, I finally realized that I’d slowly adopted a growth mindset.

The growth mindset

I suddenly noticed that I believed I could change. It wasn’t on a conscious level mind you. I just suddenly wanted to do things to break out of my shell. After 2 years of basketball, I graduated from high school and went to pre-university. Matriculation, they call it here. And crazy me, I volunteered when they asked for names to be the student representative.

Here’s why it’s so crazy. I was a guy who was timid. No, that doesn’t even begin to describe me. Timidity, shyness, social anxiety; I had those in bucket loads and more. I barely knew all the people in my classroom and I couldn’t begin to even look at girls or talk in front of  a room of people. My voice was so low that you couldn’t hear me if you were 3 feet away. And the worst part here is that I’m not exaggerating… not even a little.

And the job of the student representative was to stand in front of nearly a thousand students (if my memory serves me) and recite the student oath loudly for them to repeat. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part. (The person who did get it though, Aiman,  is an awesome person who ended up being my classmate and a good friend.)

But playing basketball, having that hobby; it drilled into me that I can change, that I can improve, and that natural talent isn’t the only thing I have.

I made it into a goal for myself to be able to speak, and speak well dammit!

I changed myself and I’m pretty proud of it

4 years later, I found myself in the ESL championships of the World Universities Debate Tournament, speaking in front of around 2 thousand people from all corners of the world, while being recorded.

And guess what? I was fine with it. I was worrying more over whether our case would win than I was over the huge number of people watching us. Unfortunately, me and Danial didn’t manage to take the prize. But it still goes to show,

People don’t DO change

We can change. The only downside is that not enough people have the growth mindset, and so they treat you through that filter and treat you as if you can’t change either.

Believing the world is constant

I believe that most people who feel like they are “failing” at one thing or another are operating out of a fixed mindset. We start believing that our skills are constant because that’s what we’re born with, or maybe even because we believe that it’s wrong to change who we are.

Change is the only constant

I’m sure you’ve heard this many times, but I don’t know if you’ve ever really thought about it and internalized it.

If you have, then not only does it start applying to you, it also starts changing your worldview. You’ll now start viewing other people as having the ability to change too.

In a fixed mindset, people won’t believe that you can change and in fact they’ll want you to stay the same. Imagine you were about to make a huge change in your life now. How many of your friends do you think would tell you:

Don’t change, just be yourself

or if you’ve already made a change, how many would say:

I don’t know you any more. You’ve changed.

And they say it as if it’s an insult.

Here’s the thing. To them, it is an insult. You’ve insulted their entire reality and worldview. You’ve just told them to their faces that what they believe in is not true, that people DO change and that their talents and skills are not fixed.

There’s a crazy consequence to this as well. If your talents and skills can be changed by your effort, then your failures are your responsibility. And most of us just can’t handle that fact.

I need to clarify something here very quickly. I didn’t say that your failures are your “fault”. I said that your failures are your “responsibility”. I honestly didn’t notice the language I used until I noticed how it could be misunderstood. This is a great example of how your beliefs determine the word choice you use. Anyway, what I mean by your failures being your responsibility is that even when your failures are caused by something or someone else, it is still your responsibility to make sure that you fix it and get it back on track.

After all, when you have a growth mindset, it also means that you are in control and that even when it’s his fault, you can still do something about it.

So yes, you’ve just insulted your friend because you’re saying that you’re changing to become better, so if your friend isn’t changing, he must be bad and at fault for his life problems.

On a deep subconscious level, I believe this is why we don’t want to change. By having a fixed mindset, we can easily pass off our problems as not being our fault. After all, even if you tried really hard and did your best, your limits are already set. So it’s not your fault if you can’t succeed at life or whatever project you have, because it was just too much for you.

A growth mindset, however, would make you try really hard and when you failed, you’d just try again. Like they say:

It’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get back up

Without a growth mindset, you’ll just never get back up. After all, if you’ve failed once, that’s already showed you your limits right?

Conclusion

Ok. So that fixed mindset you have might not completely destroy your life, but it will keep you from changing it. In fact, it won’t just keep you from succeeding at changing; on a deeper level, it will tell you that change is bad.

Planning to make a change in your life but you’re not sure if you should change or be yourself? Here’s a question (and I want you to think deeply about the answer to this): Why is that change bad? When you get your answer, using a growth mindset, figure out a way around that problem, even if it’s not your fault.

A growth mindset means that you believe you have control over your future, and also that you are just a little bit responsible.

Guess what? I don’t believe I have a “bad memory” any more.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Understanding Behaviour • 3 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Jul 5 2011

Good Defaults

The human mind is lazy. Most times we will simply go with the default option presented to us.

This won’t be true if you’re a geek about that topic (like me and phones, or my dad and cars). But most of the time, we just have too much to think about that we don’t bother doing proper research before buying “the best pen I can get for 2 bucks”. I mean, who DOES that?

We shy away from financial mumbo jumbo

But what happens when it’s a bigger issue? Like what kind of medical insurance to take? Or how to pay off your study loan? People will spend ages deciding which university to study in. And that’s how it should be. But we’ll spend virtually zero time deciding on a good insurance on ourselves and our future health.

I think it’s because most of us don’t understand the language of having good criteria to make a decision. Therefore, most of us make decisions based on how “pretty that laptop is” (most girls I know) or “if that car can be shown off to my friends” (most guys I know).

Buying a car? Or a house? These are decisions that will affect your life for years to come. It will affect your life because most people will

  • spend a huge chunk of their money on it, sacrificing other luxuries.
  • buy them on a bank loan, which will mess with their monthly finances.
  • keep this purchase for a long time. They’re not easy things to change.

Knowing this, the large purchases in life should therefore be based on well-reasoned criteria.

Criteria and how it affects decision-making

It’s a bit obvious that having criteria will affect the decisions you make. But what you need to be sure of before hand is that you have GOOD criteria that is relevant to what you’re spending on. The criteria for buying clothes might be how good it looks, but the criteria for a laptop should be whether it overheats, how long the battery lasts and how light the laptop is.

To know the criteria you need, you just need to spend a little time to think. To know which product has your criteria, you’ll have to spend time and do your research.

And herein lies the problem. We can’t be bothered to spend that much time on each and every decision in our lives. Especially when it’s such an abhorrent (hateful) topic as losing your money. So the best way is to provide “good defaults“.

Good defaults

This term is taken from website design (which I’m sure took it from somewhere else too). In site design, it comes out when people are asked to fill in a form. I’m pretty sure all of us hate filling in forms right? It’s one of those things that we evolved as a species, the gene that hates forms.

To make sure that people weren’t turned off by it and wouldn’t leave their websites, designers had to do something that reduced the pain of typing in each and every one of their forms, clicking over and over again to make a choice. So they used good defaults.

90% of people would choose “the free account” and “that they wouldn’t want promotion emails”. Leaving those options as default means giving the user a “good default”. (*understanding dawns on the readers* Ahhhhh! Now the title makes sense!)

Why government (and anyone in authority) should use good defaults too

You’ll often have to have your people make decisions. How many percent of your wages to put into EPF? How to pay back your student loan? Whether to have car insurance? You’ll want to ensure that your people make the best choice. You also don’t want to be an evil dictator. What to do?

Solution: Give good defaults. 11% of your wages, the maximum, into EPF. Pay back teh student loan RM100 per month starting 1 year after graduation. Take car insurance. BUT! But give them the option to change their minds. Most people can’t be bothered (or are too dumb) to change their minds about every little thing to come along. The ones who do care will take the time to research and change their minds if they don’t like it.

This is why I really believe setting up organ donation as a default would really work. Nowadays the default is that we as citizens DON’T donate our organs. That default could be changed. And if that were the default, 90% of us would leave it as it is. Some of us would change from the default, opt-out and say no (although I have no idea why). That’s fine. That choice would be there.

Pushing people to make the right choices

Let’s be honest. Us humans make the wrong decision all the time. Sometimes, we make those choices despite knowing it’s the wrong one. And most of the time it’s because we’re too lazy to make the right decision. I want to donate my organs but can’t be bothered to find a day to go and test myself and fill the forms up (I hate forms!!!) and wait in line at some unknown location that I haven’t even looked up yet. Don’t bother inviting me either. I would still probably give excuses (I really hate forms).

But making it a default would be good and would push most of us to make the right choice.

Tadaa! And that’s what is meant by “good defaults”.

By Lutfi Torla • Understanding Behaviour • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

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