Soft Tactics for Likability
TACTIC: SPEAK TO THE ELEPHANT, NOT THE RIDER In The Happiness Hypothesis, social psychologist and professor of ethics Jonathan Haidt (2006) uses the image of a rider on an elephant to describe how little awareness and control we have over our subconscious: The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him. (p. 4)
In Haidt’s (2006) analogy, the rider represents conscious reasoning, the things we are aware of as we analyze and size up the various options and the potential consequences of our choices. Everything else going on is the elephant—the automatic, unconscious processes, the things going on in your subconscious mind that you are totally unaware of. Haidt (2006) argues that most people spend their time and energy trying to persuade other people’s riders by using arguments based on logic, facts, and reasoning. Teachers do this often. It is an arena in which most teachers are quite comfortable. The notion of appealing to reason rather than emotion in order to persuade others has been around for centuries. The 17th century French philosopher René
Descartes (1637) is well-known for this famous quote, “I think, therefore I am.” Over two centuries later, however, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2005) argues in Descartes’ Error: Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better. The strategies of human reason probably did not develop, in either evolution or any single individual, without the guiding force of the mechanisms of biological regulation, of which emotion and feeling are notable expressions. Moreover, even after reasoning strategies become established in the formative years, their effective deployment probably depends, to a considerable extent, on a continued ability to experience feelings. (p. xvi)
Damasio worked at the University of Iowa and studied people who had damage to the part of the brain where emotions are formed. He examined the famous case of Phineas Gage, who was a Vermont railway worker (Damasio, 2005). In 1848, Gage, who was twenty-five years old at the time, had a metal tamping rod thrust completely through his skull as the result of an explosion. Gage survived and even went back to work but lost virtually all ability to make judgments relating to socially appropriate behavior. In examining the medical records of Gage and in working with his own patients, Damasio (2005) finds they all had one thing in common: when the part of the brain that generates emotions was damaged, the patients could no longer make decisions. They could describe in logical terms what they thought they should do, but they couldn’t actually do it. They could not make even the simplest choices. This led Damasio (2005) to hypothesize that contrary to the common belief that people make most of their decisions based on reason and logic, in fact, what really occurs is that most of us may use reason to move us toward various options in our decision-making
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orders by repeating the order back using the exact words of the customers. The other group of servers responded to the customers’ orders using phrases like “OK” or “Coming right up” to indicate they had heard the order. Mirroring increased the number of customers who chose to leave a tip by 26 percent compared to the nonmirroring servers, and the amount of the tips doubled. Mirroring speaks to the subconscious, an area that we have little awareness of and even less control over— but an aspect of our personalities that silently and most assuredly drives many of our feelings and behaviors.
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