Are You Talking to the Right Part of your Prospect's Brain?

Emotions and the Science of Decision-Making

With the dizzying array of sensory inputs and data that flash before us on a daily basis, it would be impossible for our brains to process more than five percent of it with what we would normally recognise as rational, logical, thought.

Our unconscious brains do all the heavy lifting in our day-to-day lives.

Zaltman (2016) showed that 95% of cognition takes place in our unconscious ‘emotional’ brains.

The instinctive, emotional part of our brains makes all of our decisions, serves up cues for our ‘higher’ brain functions to pay attention to, and guides our behaviours.

According to Lipton (2015) the unconscious mind processes information 500,000 times faster than conscious mind. This means that emotional information -impressions, feelings, sensations- are fundamental to any decisions we make (including buying decisions).

Emotions are part of a continual cognitive appraisal and feedback process; a loop that we recognise in our day-to-day lives as our ‘gut’ telling us something (when we are aware of it at all).

David Sandler, the father of the Sandler Selling System, said, “People buy emotionally and then justify the decision intellectually”.

Modern psychology and neuroscience supports what he said and take it further – not just buying decisions but all decisions have a strong emotional component, and almost all decisions are made emotionally.

This idea that emotions play an important role in decision-making, and all of our logic and rationality, is not a new one.

David Hume wrote as long ago as 1738, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”.

More recently, Herbert Simon (1983) wrote “In order to have anything like a complete theory of human rationality, we have to understand the role emotion plays in it”.

The bad news for anyone who likes to think of himself or herself as a rational being; Mr Spock is not in charge.

(By the way, if you react to this news with a flash of anger, disagreeing with me vehemently, take a step back and analyse your reaction. It’s emotional. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the irony, and then move on).

One of the obvious things you should take away from this, if you are in business, is that any of your marketing literature, sales scripts, or commercials that simply talk about your product and service in intellectual terms (such as ‘it does this’, ‘we have such and such’, ‘it’s this fast’, ‘it’s this big’, or whatever) is speaking to the wrong part of the prospective customer’s brain.

You may well be making your own emotional brain happy –there is a real pleasure in seeing a list of all the reasons why your product or service is amazing– but such self-pleasuring is unlikely to result in someone buying something from you.

If somebody is interested in what it is you've got to say then you've managed to engage his or her intellect.?

Their intellect is, of course, not where their emotions live, which means that, whilst they may well have some academic interest in what it is that you've got to say, that doesn't necessarily lead to an actual buying decision.

What you've got to do is listen out for the point at which they start to get emotionally invested in this whole process, emotionally invested in the problems that they've got, and emotionally invested in the solution that you can potentially present to them.

When thinking about emotional reactions and decision making it can be helpful to think about absence.

In this case, the absence of necessities or absence of objects of desire.

These absences cause an emotional reaction, which you can imagine as existing somewhere on a continuum.

On the extreme left hand side of that continuum you have ‘wishes and dreams’; future pleasures that may or may not be fulfilled. Somewhere to the right of this you will see ‘immediate gratification’ - things that make you happy right now and in the moment. Further still to the right you will see ‘fear’ – this is an imagined future problem or threat. Finally, at the extreme right hand side you will see ‘pain’ – this is something that is causing immediate hurt (physically, financially, psychologically or whatever).

The further to the right on this continuum someone is, the more likely they are to act. The ‘clear and present danger’ represented by immediate pain is 500% more likely to prompt action than an idea of future pleasure.

That pleasure, or gain, in the future is really something that you dream about, that you hope for, that you may work towards but it’s idealised rather than tangible. Maybe it’s a holiday or retirement something that you're looking forward to.

These are the things that we need to listen out for in business, in sales, and in management; these are powerful motivating forces on all human beings.

We all have needs-driven states.

We might be driven by a need for security, for our family and ourselves. This is underpinned on some level by a fear of death.

We might be driven by a need for community, which is really underpinned by a fear of outsiders - a fear of strangers. Going way back into our evolutionary history, our communities were built of no more than 150 people, so that fear of the outsider is baked into us.

We might be driven by a need for clarity, and a need for structure. This is really underpinned by a fear of the future or a fear of the unknown. From shaman through to accountants and economists, human societies all venerate people who claim to be able to give clarity to the future.

We might be driven by a need for authority and societal structure. This is underpinned by a fear of chaos or a fear of change.

It could be a need for respect or recognition, which is underpinned by a fear of insignificance.

In fact, if you think about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (the pyramid with Physiological Needs and Safety Needs as the two base levels, and then Social Belonging, Self-Esteem, and Self-Actualisation as the tiers above), you can quickly discern the key emotional drivers for decision-making.

Look at this quadrant diagram.

The vertical axis is ‘Necessity’ and the horizontal axis is ‘Desire’. I have overlaid Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and given a sense of some of the needs-driven states to further illustrate the point.?

Emotional Language

As Marcus Aurelius, the stoic philosopher said,?“Our lives are what our thoughts make them”.

Here's a very short story just to illustrate one of my central points.

When we were growing up, my sister, Sarah, and I were encouraged to read.

When I say ‘encouraged’ I mean in the same way that we were ‘encouraged’ to eat, wear clothes, and to chew with our mouths closed.

It was just … the way things were done. It was expected.

We would no more go to sleep at night without reading from a book than we would walk down the high street naked. It is, therefore, wholly unsurprising that my sister became a successful author, both of fiction and non-fiction, and my own life has led me inexorably into training and coaching where, I have found, having a certain facility with words is extremely helpful.

My mother and father valued wit – the ability to form unusual connections with words and language, to surprise and delight the listener, shine new light on concepts, and illuminate observations.

The story takes place the first time I can remember my mother using negative reverse psychology on me.

This would have been in 1983 (or possibly early ’84) when, at the age of nine, I asked whether I would be allowed to see a new science fiction film that was reputedly coming out ‘soon’; a film called Dune.

As it happens, the movie didn’t get released until the end of ‘84. I had only heard about the film when I did because I had seen the director, David Lynch, talking on our little black and white TV.

Lynch had caused a stir when he turned down the lucrative opportunity to oversee the third instalment in the Star Wars trilogy so that he could make Dune instead.

I was a sci fi nut. I was a nerdy little kid who was never happier than when he had a head full of laser beams and weird ideas.

I had already devoured the works of Nicholas Fisk, John Wyndham and Philip K. Dick. Star Trek was staple viewing for me, and my Dad had taken me to see Star Wars around the time of my fourth birthday; I thought that the galaxy far, far away was just about the most wonderful thing that had ever existed.

Surely, if Lynch had turned down the opportunity to make The Return of the Jedi, this Dune thing must be even better?

But my mother said, “You can’t see the film without having read the book first. Those are the rules. The film is never as good as the book. The only problem is – the book is a bit too grown up for you”.

Of course, as she knew I would, I had to read it just to prove her wrong.

That Saturday I took out a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune from our local library, inserting it halfway down the pile of books so my mother wouldn’t see it (a subterfuge that she dutifully pretended had been successful).

I eagerly opened the book that very evening.

The very first chapter contained the word ‘prescience’ - a word that, at age nine, I had never come across before. I hopped out of bed and trotted downstairs in my bare feet and confessed to my mother that I was reading the forbidden Dune. I swear I saw a little smirk appear briefly on her face.

I asked her what the word meant.

Her answer was to correct my pronunciation (I was saying it the way I had read it, as ‘pre science’ rather than ‘preh-see-ense’) and to point me towards the dictionary.

When I protested, “But Mum! Why can’t you just tell me what it means?” her answer was absolutely brilliant, although its brilliance was something I did not appreciate until years later.

She said, “If you’re old enough to read things that you’re not ready for, then you’re old enough to find out for yourself what words mean. Finding out for yourself means that the knowledge will stick”. Then she said, “Every word of which you are ignorant is an idea of which you are ignorant.”

It turns out she was absolutely right on both counts:

1.????The stuff you find out for yourself tends to stick;

2.????The better your vocabulary, the more ways you have of describing the world (both the external world, and your internal mental and emotional world).

This second point is very relevant to what we have been discussing around emotions.

In her excellent book How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains the theory of constructed emotion. I am not going to explain the full theory here – I recommend you read her book instead – suffice to say that emotions are not universal experiences that you can accurately name.

Emotions are not discrete, separate, ‘things’; they are collections of diverse instances that we interpret as though viewing through a lens that is comprised of context, heredity, cultural norms, socialisation, and past experience. Even our current physical state -wellness, tiredness, hormones- plays a part in our interpretation and experience of emotion.

The old idea that you can interpret someone’s emotional state purely from a ‘facial fingerprint’ (the expression on someone’s face) is totally specious. You need a multiplicity of interrelated situational cues to build a predictive concept of an emotional state (your own or someone else’s), and even then the predictive model is often inaccurate. Your unconscious brain measures these predictive concepts against empirical evidence, and then it corrects the models if necessary.

If this sounds complex, I apologise. Your brain does all this cool stuff without you ever having to be aware of it. This is the way your brain works all the time – remember we mentioned previously that your unconscious brain is working 500,000 times faster than your conscious brain?

It has a lot of heavy lifting to do!

This predictive modelling is happening millions of times a minute, but you are not ‘aware’ of it in your conscious mind.

This is where my mother’s point comes into play – the richer your lexicon, the more granular your understanding and description of emotional concepts.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you have a very small vocabulary of only a few dozen words.

You only have four concepts to describe emotional states.

For the sake of this thought experiment, these four concepts are:

1.????Pleasant;

2.????Unpleasant;

3.????High arousal;

4.????Low arousal.

Concepts three and four can be added to concepts one and two in order to allow a rudimentary amount of nuance to your descriptions of emotions, so you might describe emotions in the sense of being:

1.????Unpleasant and low arousal (if we had the language for it, which we do not in this thought experiment, we might acquaint this with lethargy, depression, sadness and so forth);

2.????Unpleasant and high arousal (again, if we had the language, we might describe this in terms of pain, anger, frustration, anxiety);

3.????Pleasant and low arousal (this would include sensations we might normally describe as calm, relaxed, chilled out, bliss); and,

4.????Pleasant and high arousal (this would include sensations we, with our better vocabularies, might describe as joy, excitement, happiness, exultation).

You can see that the four concepts I have described can provide a very basic ‘emotional language’, but it is a language that is so lacking in nuance and granularity that it is almost useless.

In order to make it more useful, I had to resort to using other language – words like lethargy, depression, pain, anger, calmness, relaxation, joy, excitement and the rest.

Why is this important?

Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence said, “For star performance in all jobs, in every field, emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities”.

As we navigate our way through the choppy waters of day-to-day life, normal business, and even more especially crisis situations, having a rich and varied understanding of emotions (both your own and other people’s) is vitally important.

If you want to understand behaviour, and how decisions get made, you must make an effort to understand human emotions, and increase your own emotional lexicon.

Let’s start from the basic principle that, assuming you are a native speaker of the English language, your brain is capable of understanding a greater array of granular and nuanced emotional concepts than your current vocabulary is probably capable of describing.

There are, for example, a number of emotions that have no English description. We must adopt words from other languages to articulate the concepts that underpin them. Words like the German schadenfreude (a pleasure one feels at someone else’s misfortune) and the French frisson (a sudden thrill of excitement) have entered our language already, but there are dozens of other concepts that we still have no word for in English.

Tim Lomas, of the University of East London, published findings from the Positive Lexicography Project in 2017. Some of the words included:

·??????Dadirri?(Australian aboriginal) a deep act of reflective and respectful listening that is spiritual and transcendent;

·??????Desbundar?(Portuguese) – the feeling of shedding inhibitions in having fun;

·??????Gigil?(Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished;

·??????Iktsuarpok?(Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived;

·??????Natsukashii?(Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, accompanied by a happiness for the fond memory coupled with sadness that it is no longer;

·??????Orenda?(Huron) – the determination of human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces;

·??????Saudade?(Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist;

·??????Sehnsucht?(German) – ‘life-longings’, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable;

·??????Shinrin-yoku?(Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally;

·??????Sukha?(Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances;

·??????Tarab?(Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment;

·??????Wabi-sabi?(Japanese) – a sensation of the desolate but sublime, centred on transience and imperfection in beauty; and,

·??????Yuan bei?(Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment.

In each case the English definition is only an approximation of the ‘true’ meaning, but all of the concepts resonate with feelings and experiences that most of us have had at one time or another and which, if we were pressed to do so, we would have been forced to describe in more rudimentary terms.

The more detailed our vocabulary becomes, and the more aware we are of the granular nature of emotional concepts, the more we can develop our own emotional intelligence. As we observe others, we must be aware that they –like us- have a limited emotional vocabulary. They may not even be able to fully articulate (or understand) what they are feeling.

They may also be misattributing emotional concepts to physical sensations.

When we see a toddler who thinks that he or she is ‘upset’ when really they are just ‘tired’, we have no problem identifying a case of misdiagnosis and misattribution. But we are mistaken if we think that we ever grow out of making the same mistake. Our inner toddler is still there, and still misattributing sensations to emotional concepts.

Whether it is ascribing feelings of tiredness and being overwhelmed to ‘depression’ or it’s attributing sensations of stomach upset to ‘love’, or any of the other myriad array of daily attribution errors we make, it’s fair to say that human beings are pretty rubbish at understanding themselves.

The great news is that this ‘attribution error’ thing can work the other way around.

That is to say that, by naming a sensation, you can change your predictive concept of it and thereby influence your experience and your own behaviour.

The first time I came across this concept, I was about to go on stage and talk to a crowd of people. It was one of the first times I had ever been forced into doing some public speaking, and I was very nervous.

The sensation that I was feeling was one that I could have called ‘nervousness’ (actually, that’s not what I called it; what I actually said at the time was that I was shitting myself).

A guy I worked with had a background in NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and he gave me some advice, that maybe I could try telling myself that I was ‘excited’ instead. He also encouraged me to repeat this to myself.

It sounded like a hokum idea, but I had nothing to lose. So I did it.

“I’m excited”, I said to myself over and over again, “I’m really buzzing. I am totally up for this!”

Ten minutes later I virtually bounced onto the stage, and totally owned it. I have never looked back. I am now one of those perversely strange people that actually enjoy public speaking!

Giving the sensation a more useful name does not change the sensation. It doesn’t get rid of the butterflies in your stomach; it simply makes the butterflies fly in formation.

The physical sensations of ‘anxiety’ and ‘excitement’ are identical to one another. It is only the predictive concept and the verbal model that we use as a description that are different.

The advice of my colleague, to repeat the more useful emotional concept, was also important. The brain does not, on one level, know the difference between fantasy and reality. If we rehearse an idea over and over again, we create new neural pathways. Rehearsal gives your brain more instances to create predictive models with, so you might as well rehearse ideas that are useful.

This neural plasticity is something we should all be aware of when it comes to the way in which we talk to ourselves:

·??????If you continually tell yourself negative things, then your brain will have no choice but to believe them.

·??????If you continually tell yourself positive things, then your brain will have no choice but to believe them.

It’s fairly obvious which of these two options is healthier (and more fun).

Remember the two halves of this phrase: ask smart, listen hard.

Ask insightful and penetrating questions and then listen carefully to the answer. Pay attention not only to what is being said, but also to the tone, cadence, pitch, and intensity of the delivery.

Can you form a credible hypothesis about the other person’s emotional state?

When you are talking to people, look for indicators in their language that show how they are feeling. As already noted, negative emotions like discomfort and pain are significantly greater motivators for behaviour than positive emotions, although positive emotions do also prompt actions.

Building on the thought experiment from earlier in the chapter, where you only had four terms to describe all emotional states, we can build a model of the likelihood of action (or inaction) based on the type of emotional state that people are experiencing.

The ‘pleasantness’ or ‘unpleasantness’ of an emotion is what psychologists call valence. The other continuum (from low arousal to high arousal) is a key factor in determining the likelihood that someone is going to take action (such as making a decision).

The rules are:

1.????Fat and happy never moves (low arousal, positive valence remains inactive);

2.????Sad and resigned only moves if someone prods it (low arousal negative valence needs to have its arousal stimulated or it, too, will remain inactive);

3.????Excited and upbeat will do stuff but may be unpredictable (high arousal positive valence will take action, but it could be for instant gratification rather than long-term objectives);

4.????Pissed off and in pain will do stuff but it may be knee jerk (high arousal negative valence will take action, but it could be a short-term ‘fix’ rather than a long-term solution).

Have a look at the diagram above. Listen out for words like these when you are speaking to someone, and notice their body language, tone of voice and the volume, pitch, rapidity and rhythm of their speech.

How likely are they to take action?

How likely is it that, without you asking them careful questions to get them to self-discover what’s really going on, that they might even take action that has unintended harmful consequences?

If you are a manager, a friend, or a trusted advisor, or if you are seeking to become a trusted advisor for a prospective client then it’s your job to manage your own emotions and be very aware of the emotions of those around you (and the impact those emotions will have on their decision making).