PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTS INCLINED BODY-LANGUAGE

PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTS INCLINED BODY-LANGUAGE

PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTS INCLINED BODY-LANGUAGE

The key to figuring out what isn't working in your life is understanding some basic psychological facts about yourself — like why we can't resist paying attention to sex and danger, or that people see what they want to see.

We've published 100 Mind-Blowing Psychological Facts you should know about yourself, courtesy of Dr. Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral scientist.?

Now we're highlighting our favorites from the list.

1. There's a reason why you can't resist paying attention to food, sex, or danger.

1. True or False: Your nose gets warmer when you lie.

This is incredible: Research has found a real-life Pinocchio effect. People’s noses get warmer when people lie, which can cause a tingling sensation and lead them to touch or scratch their noses. For Cues, I covered the research of Bill Clinton’s testimony during the Monica Lewinsky trial. Researchers found that when Clinton lied, he touched his nose twenty-six times! Far more than his truthful answers. Sometimes he even sat in a prayer-like gesture.

Takeaway: First, notice if YOU touch your nose when you lie. Second, pay attention to someone else’s sudden nose touches. Not every nose touch means guilt, but it is an important cue to be aware of. If you want to learn when people are lying to you, read Chapter 6 in Cues: How to Spot a Bad Guy…and Not Be One Yourself.

2. If you had to pick a winning poker player, but could only watch a video of them playing, which view would you choose?

Head only: You can see the players’ heads but nothing below.

Arms only: You can’t see the players’ faces, heads, or lower bodies, but you can see how their arms and hands move as they handle the chips and cards.

Full body: You can see the players’ entire bodies.

Most people would choose 3, full-body—the more the better, right?

Wrong: Researchers conducted this exact experiment and found that when they showed subjects full body clips of poker players, the subjects’ guesses as to how good someone’s hand was were no better than chance.

The next most popular guess would be 1, head only. Facial expressions are telling, right?

Nope. This answer is also surprisingly wrong.

Skilled poker players are very adept at hiding telling facial emotions and head movements.

Your best bet is 2, arms only! Do the hands leak some secret tell? Yes!

Takeaway: If you play poker … or want to read people’s tells you MUST read Chapter 5: How to Look Powerful in Cues.

3. People who are better at decoding nonverbal cues…

Make more money in their jobs

Have better relationships

Are more popular

All of the above

I was so thrilled to read the research that found improving your ability to read nonverbal cues really pays off–in almost every area. Making all of the above correct. One study found that people with strong nonverbal cue recognition even earn more money in their jobs.

Takeaway: There are 96 cues you need to know. Every one you master helps you be a more masterful communicator.

4. If you are feeling overwhelmed, try:

Rubbing your ears, Clenching your fists, Clicking your heels together, Leaning back

One of my favorite aspects of cues is that they not only change others' perceptions of us, they also change our perceptions of ourselves. The correct answer here is “Leaning back.” Researchers have found that your brain is able to literally get mental distance from a stressor. When we back away from an object, person, or idea, it gives us physical as well as emotional distance.

Takeaway: Ever blanked out in a presentation? Did felt overwhelm in a meeting? Take a step back or scoot back to give yourself a second to regroup. This will help your brain calm down. Want more about how to feel confident in presentations? Read Chapter 3: The Body Language of Leaders in Cues.

5. True or False: When a speaker shows one of the six nervous tells on stage, the audience feels more stressed.

I always thought that negative nonverbal cues impact people’s feelings about you. But I was shocked to know it ALSO changes people’s feelings themselves. Making the above statement true! One study found that when a speaker exhibited one of the 6 nervous nonverbals on stage, the audience members’ stress levels rose.

Takeaway: Building your confidence is essential for your success AND your audience’s success. I would love to help! I truly believe that control is the path to confidence. The more you can control your cues, the more confident you feel.

Bonus: I just recorded the Audiobook of Cues in the same recording studio as…

Willie Nelson

Sublime

Ray Charles

All of the above

Have you ever wondered why traffic always slows when people are driving in an accident? Do you moan about the fact that people are attracted by the gruesome, and yet find that you glance over too as you drive by? Well, it’s not really your fault; you (and everybody else) can’t resist looking at scenes of danger. It’s your “old brain” telling you to PAY ATTENTION.

You have 3 brains — In my book, Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? I talk about the idea that you really don’t have one brain, you have three. The “new brain” is the conscious, reasoning, logical brain that you think you know best; the midbrain” is the part of the brain that processes emotions, and the “old brain” is the part of the brain that is most interested in your survival.

From reptiles to people — If you look at brains from an evolutionary perspective, the “old brain” developed first (hence the name “old brain”!). In fact, that part of our brain is very similar to the brain of a reptile, which is why some people call it the “reptilian” brain. “Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? Will it kill me?” – The job of your old brain is to constantly scan the environment and answer the questions: “Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? Will it kill me?” That’s really all the old brain cares about, is food sex and danger. When you think about it, this is important. Without food you’ll die, without sex the species won’t continue, and if you are killed the other two questions don’t matter. So animal brains developed early on to care intensely about these three topics. As animals evolved they developed other capacities (emotions, logical thought), but they retained a part of their brain to always be scanning what is going on for these three critical questions.

You can't resist — what this means is that you just can’t resist noticing food, sex, or danger. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to not notice these 3 things in your surroundings, you will always notice them. It’s the old brain working. You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you notice, for example, you don’t have to eat the chocolate cake when you see it, you don’t have to flirt with the attractive person who walked into the room, and you don’t have to run away from the large scary guy that walked in the room with the good looking woman. But you WILL notice all of those things whether you want to or not.

Cake, pretty woman, and a crash on the home page — I get emails from people who have read about the old brain in my book. They will write to me wanting advice about how they should fit a picture of the cake, a woman in a bikini, and an industrial accident all at the home page of their corporate website. (I do get some interesting emails!). I’m not advocating that you do that! I am pointing out that if you want to get someone’s attention at a website, then any images or headlines that include or imply food, sex, or danger will definitely get attention. But you will have to decide what is appropriate!

Have you seen any good examples of websites that use these ideas effectively (besides just sex sites — don’t send me URLs for those)?

2. Bite-sized chunks of info are best.

I am about to head to Portugal for a week, and I was interested in exploring different possible destinations in Portugal. I may not have much time for touring (I’m going to speak at the UXLX conference there), but if I did have time, where should I go? I have to admit to pretty much total ignorance about Portugal, the different regions, landscapes, and parts of the country, so I went to the official tourism website for the country.

Give me a little bit at a time — The Portugal tourism site did an OK job of?what is called progressive disclosure. This is a fancy term that is used in the field of psychology to refer to providing information in increasing chunks of size and complexity.

We can only handle so much — Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time (consciously that is… the estimate is that we handle 40,000,000 pieces of information every second, but only 40 of those make it to our conscious brains). One mistake that websites make is to give too much information all at once, like this website from the Canadian government.

There is no chunking here, there is no progressive disclosure. It’s just all the information thrown on the page all at once. The result? You don’t read it, you just leave. Feeding bits of information – The Portugal site was just OK when it came to progressive disclosure. New Zealand does a much better job. The New Zealand tourism site has multiple levels of disclosure, feeding you the information bit by bit. Here’s the first page on the regions of New Zealand.

It’s not the clicks that count (pun intended) – One thing I’d like to point out is that progressive disclosure requires multiple clicks. Sometimes you will hear people say that websites should minimize the number of clicks that people have to make to get to the detailed information. The number of clicks is not an important criterion. People are very willing to make multiple clicks, in fact, they won’t even notice they are making the clicks if they are getting the right amount of information at each click to keep them going down the path.

Think progressive disclosure, don’t count clicks.

Should I let the website design influence whether I book a ticket? Not this time at least. This time I’m headed for Portugal, where I plan to use the Portugal tourism site as a case study in my workshop!

3. You know how to do things you've never done before.

Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPod, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPod, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPod will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do those— things like turning a page or using a bookmark. You have a “mental model” of reading a book on the iPod, even if you’ve never done it before.

If you’ve used an iPod before, your mental model of reading a book on an iPad will be different from that of someone who has never used one, or doesn’t even know what an iPad is. If you’ve been using a Kindle for the past year, then your mental model will be different from someone who has never read a book electronically. And once you get the iPad and read a couple of books on it, whichever mental model you had in your head before will start to change and adjust to reflect your experience.

What is a mental model? –The term mental model has been around for at least the last 25 years. One of my favorite definitions is from Susan Carey’s 1986 journal article, “Cognitive science and science education”, which says: “A mental model represents a person’s thought process for how something works (i.e., a person’s understanding of the surrounding world). Mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experiences, and even intuitive perceptions. They help shape actions and behavior, influence what people pay attention to in complicated situations, and define how people approach and solve problems.”

Users create mental models very quickly — often before they even use a website or a product. Users’ mental models come from their prior experience with similar sites or products, assumptions they have, things they’ve heard others say, and also from their direct experience with the product or device. Mental models are subject to change. Mental models vs. conceptual models –In order to understand why mental models are so important to design, you have to also understand what a conceptual model is and how it is different from a mental model. A mental model is a representation that a person has in their minds about the object they are interacting with. A conceptual model is an actual model that is given to the person through the design and interface of the actual product. Going back to the iPod eBook example, you have a mental model about what reading a book will be like in the iPod, how it will work, what you can do with it. But when you sit down with the iPod, the “system” (the iPod) will display what the conceptual model of the book app actually is. There will be screens, buttons, and things that happen. The actual interface is the conceptual model. Someone designed an interface and that interface is communicating to you the conceptual model of the product. Why care about this mental model/conceptual model idea? –Here’s why you should care: If there is a mismatch, between the person’s mental model and the product’s conceptual model, then the product or website will be hard to learn, hard to use, or not accepted.

How do mismatches occur? Here are some examples:? The designers thought they knew who would be using the interface and how much experience they had with interfaces like this, and they designed according to those assumptions without testing them, and it turns out their assumptions were wrong.

? The audience or the product or website is varied. The designers designed for one “persona” or type of audience, and the mental model and conceptual model match for that group, but not for others.

? There are no real designers. The conceptual model wasn’t really designed at all, It’s just a reflection of the underlying hardware or software or database. So the only people whose mental model it fits are the programmers. If the audience is not the programmers then you are in trouble.

What if the mental models the users have won’t work? — What if it’s a brand new concept and you don’t want to match the current mental model? – What about the idea that people who have only read real, physical books will not have an accurate mental model of reading books on the iPod? In this case, you know that people will not have an accurate mental model that fits. You will need to change their mental model. The best way to change a mental model is through training. You can use a short training video to change the mental model before the iPod even arrives at their door. In fact, one of the best purposes of training on a new product is to adjust the audiences’ mental model to fit the conceptual model of the product. Different use of the term – By the way, the way I’m using the term mental model is, I believe, the most common definition, but it does not fit with at least one of the new definitions I’ve been reading and hearing about lately. Indi Young has written a book called Mental Models, and she’s using the term in a different way. She diagrams the behavior of a particular audience doing a series of tasks, including their goals and motivations. Then underneath that, she describes what the “system” or product will do, or be like, in order to match the task. This entire structure she calls a “mental model.” Her methodology and its output look useful, but it doesn’t match the definition of mental models that I’m using here.

The Best Designers –a) understand the mental models of the intended audience (with task analysis, observations, interviews, etc), and b) design a conceptual model to fit the audience’s mental model, or a design a new one and know how to get us to switch from old to new.

Take Always:

? People always have a mental model, and it often doesn’t match the conceptual model that someone designed (or forgot to design!).

? The secret to designing an intuitive and delightful product experience is making sure that the conceptual model of the product matches, as much as possible, the mental models of your audience.

? If you have a brand new product that you know will not match anyone’s mental model then you will have to provide training to prepare the person to create a new mental model.

? If you are struggling to learn how to use a new website, software, or device, it might be because you are holding on to an old mental model that doesn’t work anymore. Try letting it go and looking at the product without so many assumptions about how it works.

What do you think? What products have you had a hard time with because your mental model didn’t match the conceptual model? If you are a designer, what do you do to try and get a better match?

You are given a frequent buyer card for your local coffee shop. Each time you buy a cup of coffee you get a stamp on your card. When the card is filled you get a free cup of coffee. Here are two different scenarios:

Card A: The card has 10 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card all the boxes are blank.

Card B: The card has 12 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card the first two boxes are already stamped.

Question: How long will it take you to get the card filled up? Will it take longer or shorter for scenario A vs. scenario B? After all, you have to buy 10 cups of coffee in both scenarios in order to get the free coffee. So does it make a difference which card you use?

The answer apparently is yes. You will fill up the card faster with Card B than with Card A. And the reason is called the “goal-gradient” effect.

The goal-gradient effect was first studied in 1934 by Hull with rats. He found that rats that were running a maze to get food at the end would run faster as they got to the end of the maze.

The goal-gradient effect says that you will accelerate your behavior as you progress closer to your goal. The scenarios I describe above were part of a research study by Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng (full reference is below).?They decided to see if humans would behave like rats. And the answer is, yes they do.

Here are some important things to keep in mind about the goal-gradient effect:

? The shorter the distance to the goal the more motivated people will be to reach it.

? You can get this extra motivation even with the illusion of progress, as in Scenario B above. There really isn’t any progress (you still have to buy 10 coffees), but it seems like there is some progress so it has the same effect

? People enjoy being part of the reward program. When compared to customers who were not part of the program, the customers with the reward cards smiled more, chatted longer with café employees, said “thank you” more often, and left a tip more often (all statistically significant for your research buffs out there).

? In a related experiment the same researchers showed that people would visit a website more frequently and rate more songs during each visit as they got closer to a reward goal at the site. So this goal-gradient effect appears to be generalizable across many situations.

? Motivation and purchases plummet right after the goal is reached. This is called a “post-reward resetting phenomenon”.?If you have a 2nd reward level people will initially not be very motivated to reach that 2nd reward. Right after a reward is reached is when you are most at risk of losing your customer.

5. People see what they expect to see.

One day, many years ago, when I was early in my career, I found myself in front of a classroom full of people who did not want to be there. Their boss had told them they had to attend the class I was giving. I knew that many, even most, of them thought the class was a waste of their time, and knowing that was making me nervous. I decided to be brave and forge ahead. Certainly, my great content would grab their attention, right?

I took a deep breath, smiled, and with a strong voice, I started the session with a big “Hello everyone. I’m certainly glad to be here.” More than half the class wasn’t even looking at me. They were reading their emails and writing out to-do lists. One guy had the morning newspaper open and was reading that. It was one of those moments where seconds seem like hours. I thought to myself in panic, what am I going to do?

Then I had an idea. “Let me tell you a story," I said. At the word, “story” everyone’s head jerked up and all eyes were on me. I knew I only had a few seconds to start a story that would hold their attention. “It was 1988 and a team of Navy officers on the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf were staring at a computer screen.?Something had just appeared on the radar in protected air space. They had orders to shoot down any hostile aircraft. Was this a hostile aircraft? Was it a military plane? Was it a commercial airliner? They had 2 minutes to decide what to do.”

I had them! Everyone was interested and riveted. I finished the story, which nicely made my point about why it’s important to design using computer interfaces, and we were off to a great start. The rest of the day flew by, everyone was interested and engaged, and I got some of my best teacher evaluations ever. Now I make sure to use that magic phrase, “Let me tell you a story” at least once in every talk I give or class I teach.

Stories are very powerful — they grab and hold attention. But they do more than that. They also help people process information and they imply causation.

Tried and true story formats — Aristotle identified the basic structure of stories, and many people have expounded on his ideas since. One model is the basic three-act structure: Beginning, Middle, and the End. This may not sound very unusual, but when Aristotle came up with it over 2000 years ago it was probably pretty radical.?

In the beginning, you introduce your audience to the setting, the characters, and the situation or conflict. In the story above I introduced you to the setting (I had to give a class), the characters (me and students), and the conflict (the students don’t want to be there.

My story was very short, so the middle part was short too. In the middle part of a story, there are typically obstacles and conflicts that the main character has to triumph over. These are usually somewhat resolved, but not completely resolved. In my story above the main character tried her usual opening and it failed Then she started to panic. At the end of the story, the obstacles come to a peak and then are resolved. In my story above I thought of what to do (tell a story to the class), which I did, and which succeeded.

This is just a basic outline. There are many variations and plots that can be added and woven in. Classic stories — There are many stories that appear over and over in literature and in movies. Here are some of the popular themes that have been identified:

The Great Journey, Coming of Age, The Sacrifice, The Epic Battle, The Fall from Grace, Love, Fate, Revenge, The Trick and Mystery.

Stories can be used to imply causation — Stories imply causation. Because stories usually involve some form of chronological narrative (first this happens, next this happens), they can imply causation even if it is not there. People are quick to assign causality. The human brain is always looking for causation. Stories make it even easier to make this causal leap. (Chablis and Simon, 2010)Stories are important in all communications – Sometimes I hear people say, “Stories are fine for some communications, but not the one I’m working on now. I’m designing the website for the Annual Report of the company. Stories aren’t appropriate there; it’s just financial information.” Not true. There are always appropriate stories you can use any time you are trying to communicate.