If I ask you a question will it change your behavior?
How answering questions influences our choices.
Daniel R. Hawes asks, Will You Read This Post? It’s not a rhetorical question. Or, well, it is. But it's also his opening example:Asking questions changes behavior. In the psychology literature, this phenomenon is often referred to as "mere measurement effect". Vikki Morrison, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern, demonstrated the effect in 1993, when she showed that simply asking questions about people's intentions to buy a car, or a personal computer led to increased purchasing rates for these items. . . .Hawes mentions the research implications of the mere measurement effect, and discusses a few nagging questions about the interpretation of the results. Still, I immediately saw applications in more mundane realms.
[I]n 2008 a study conducted among Canadian blood donors, investigated whether the mere measurement effect could be exploited as a cheap and efficient intervention to increase blood donations. The study recruited a sample of 4672 registered blood donors, aged 18 to 70, and asked 2900 of these donors to anonymously respond to a questionnaire regarding (amongst a number of additional control measures) their intentions of giving blood within the next 6 months. Six months after the survey assignment, and another six months after that, the researchers assessed whether the survey had an effect on the groups' blood donation behavior. It did.
Comparing both groups, the cohort that had answered the questionnaire showed a higher registration rate as well as an increased share of successful donations. After 6 months the surveyed group showed 8.6% higher registration, and after 12 months registration was still 6.4% increased.
While writing a descriptive subject line is E-mail 101, framing a descriptive subject line as a question may be even better for enticing recipients to read, respond, and/or act. Some examples:
- Replace “Report Update,” with “Will you send me the report by
Thursday?” - Rather than “Dinner Sunday” ask “Will you have dinner with us on Sunday?”
- Instead of sending “Training Opportunity” to a list, ask recipients “Will you take charge of your future today?”
Task Reminders
If you use a reminder tool--a day planner, a program such as Outlook, or a tickler file--chances are that you sometimes pay insufficient attention to the reminders. If your system is going stale, consider writing some reminders as questions. Examples redux:
- In my day planner, I write “DUE: [description of deliverable]” on the page for any given due date. If these aren’t catching my attention early enough, I could replace “DUE: Cable Bill,” with, “Did you pay the cable bill?”
- If a report is due on a certain date, and you use a digital tool to track tasks, try naming the reminder “Did you finish the XYZ Report?” rather than just “XYZ Report.” Reminders in Outlook are one of the most numbed-out parts of my productive life, so even the change of format would probably help.
Some Limitations
I suspect that awareness of the technique mediates its effectiveness. If you know I am attempting to manipulate you to read and answer my e-mail by posing a question in the subject line, you will be on guard. This is another reason not to write all reminders in the form of a question; rather, do so with a few key ones to mix things up. Reminders of more distant due dates (that therefore will not resurface for a while) might make good candidates.
In his original post, Hawes also points out (in the case of the blood donor survey), the mere asking of the question didn’t create the rise in donor rates; answering it did. So someone will have to answer the question (at least to him-, her-, or yourself). Still, the mere asking of the question may be enough to incite engagement with the message or task and lead to that answering. As Chip and Dan Heath point out in Made to Stick, leading a message with a question or a mystery entices the recipient to attention. And in today’s information-overloaded world, attention may be all your request needs.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
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