Times are hard and you need every edge to compete in the job market.  The Interview is a crucial step in earning that new job and persuasion principles will help.  Here’s how to use persuasion during the interview.

First and always during the interview:  It’s about the Other Guy. The Other Guy is the job interviewer sitting across from you.  You don’t care what you want, you care what the Other Guy wants and you want the Other Guy to want you.  That means: get inside the Other Guy’s head.  It doesn’t matter how you think, feel, or behave.  It matters how the Other Guy thinks, feels, and behaves.  Got that?  A persuader constantly monitors the Other Guy and adjusts performance accordingly.  Get that.

Second, learn to use SOLER.  SOLER is an acronym for a set of nonverbal behaviors that indicate the cognitive and evaluative responding of the Other Guy.  Squarely face, Open posture, Lean in, Eye contact, and Relaxed body.  As people turn away, close up, lean out, look away, or tighten up, they are distracted and cold.  As they square up to you, open up, lean in, look at you, and relax, they are attentive and warm.  Observe the Other Guy’s SOLER to understand if they are listening to you and if they are liking what you are saying and doing.

Third, use your words to control three crucial persuasion functions:  WATTage, arguments, and cues.  WATTage means the Other Guy’s Willingness and Ability To Think.  Arguments means information of crucial importance for the job interview.  Finally, Cues means words that influence without requiring serious thinking.

WATTage is the key function you want to assess and adjust.  If the Other Guy is high WATT, then they will want job Arguments, the crucial elements for the hire:  references, credential, experience, motivation, appearance, social skill.  If the Other Guy is low WATT, they lack the cognitive willingness and ability to think effortfully and instead will seek out Cues like attractiveness, friendliness, fluency, glibness, stereotype fitness, or any other element that makes it easy and fast to make a judgment. WATTage varies over time, but during an interview you want as much high WATT time as possible.

Monitor WATTage with SOLER again and with question asking.  When the Other Guy is paying attention, you’ll see them lean in with good eye contact while squarely facing you with a relaxed body.  They’re getting it.  They’re tuned in.  That likely indicates high WATT processing.  They really want to understand you and are looking for key information about your fit for the job.  Follow up by asking questions of them to confirm that they have been listening.  Ask them if the qualifications you bring are what they are looking for.  You want to determine whether they are really tuned in as much as what they say.

Now, if the Other Guy is high WATT you’d better bring your best Arguments.  The Other Guy is SOLER, answering your questions, and clearly shows that persuasion frame of mind that is looking for your best shot.  Now, pitch the Arguments that support your hire.  Remember, it’s about the Other Guy, so a Strong Argument is not strong from your point of view, but from the Other Guy’s point of view.  You might be very impressed with your academic record (hey, the Dean’s List, hubba-hubba), but is the Other Guy impressed?  If you hit the Other Guy with your Strong Argument and they don’t look at you or turn away or if they respond with, “Gee, the Dean’s List is great, but we want someone with three years of experience” then you know you gave a Weak Argument.  Work harder and offer more Arguments that get SOLER and positive evaluations.

If the other Guy is low WATT, you have two options.  First and foremost, figure out why they’ve tuned you out and do something to flip the switch and make them high WATT.  Ask specific detail questions of the Other Guy.  Make them think and respond.  You’ve got to get that high WATT switch on so that you can play your Arguments.  Strong Arguments delivered to high WATT Other Guys get job offers.  Second, WATT can and will vary during an interview, especially one that lasts more than ten minutes.  Learn to ride the ebb and flow of WATTage and rather than fight the tide, throw out persuasion Cues during some low WATT moments.  Point out superficial, but relevant points like clothing and style, prestige experiences, fun and funny moments.

Your persuasion goal is to get the Other Guy high WATT, then deliver Strong Arguments to them that make them go SOLER.

Key points for using persuasion on an interview.

1.  It’s about the other Guy, not you.
2.  SOLER shows the other guy’s attention and liking.
3.  Monitor and manipulate WATTage, arguments and cues.
4.  Provide Strong Arguments from the Other Guy’s perspective.
5.  Use SOLER to assess both WATTage and evaluative reactions.

P.S. You might like this related job interviewing post.

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Below are several descriptions of how you may communicate in general.  Please use the scale below to rate the degree to which each statement applies to your communication.

1. Strongly Disagree  2. Disagree  3. Neutral  4. Agree  5. Strongly Agree

___1. I regularly tell jokes and funny stories when in a group.

___2. People usually laugh when I tell jokes or funny stories.

___3. I have no memory for jokes or funny stories.

___4. I can be funny without having to rehearse a joke.

___5. Being funny is a natural communication style with me.

___6. I cannot tell a joke well.

___7. People seldom ask me to tell stories.

___8. My friends would say I am a funny person.

___9. People don’t seem to pay close attention when I tell a joke.

___10. Even funny jokes seem flat when I tell them.

___11. I can easily remember jokes and stories.

___12. People often ask me to tell jokes or stories.

___13. My friends would not say that I am a funny person.

___14. I don’t tell jokes or stories even when asked to.

___15. I tell stories and jokes very well.

___16. Of all the people I know, I am one of the funniest.

___17. I use humor to communicate in a variety of situations.

Scoring: After administering, recode (reverse score) items 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14; then sum.

Reference:  Booth-Butterfield, S. & Booth-Butterfield, M. (1991). The communication of humor in everyday life: Individual differences in the use of humorous messages. Southern Communication Journal, 56, 205-218.
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Melanie and I developed and tested the Humor Orientation scale in the late 1980s and published our research and the original 17 item scale in the Southern Speech Journal, 1991.  This journal can be difficult to access, so I’m posting the scale here for public use.  While Melanie and I hold the copyright to the scale, you may use it for any noncommercial purpose.  It would be nice if you referenced our authorship.  Or Melanie will plant a Whoopee Cushion on you at a professional conference (as here in Providence, RI at the 2007 ECA meeting).

A good source that reviews the research with HO can be found in Elizabeth Graham’s chapter in the sourcebook, “Communication Research Measures II.”  Here’s a source for that book.

A couple of personal observations about HO . . .

1.  It does not measure a person’s sense of humor (Ha-ha, gee, that’s funny!).  It measures a person’s ability to produce humor and make other people go “Ha-ha, gee, that’s funny!”  Some folks miss this source versus receiver distinction and that’s a big error.  HO is a skill and if you’ve got it, you can whip it out anytime.

2.  The scale is riddled with errors, oversights, and general foolishness that other researchers like to correct by changing a few words here and there, dropping this item, and adding a new one.  May I suggest that if you feel the need to improve this scale, do the damn work needed to publish your own scale rather than mess with this one.  If you keep changing the thermometer, we’ll never agree on the temperature, okay?  Use this thermometer the way it was tested and validated.  You might consider using the original scale in your research AND then adding your smarter changes in a separate scale.

3.  People are High HO, Mo HO, Low HO, No HO, or Faux HO.  Some are just HOs, but that’s really a different concept.

4.  I think that Humor Orientation is a huge individual difference variable for cognitive function.  People often think that humor is a rather low form of human communication, when humor production is truly a complex cognitive skill.  Funny people have different brains, I think.  You could do some truly baroque experimental studies with HO.  Select Hi HOs and Lo HOs (or better still No HOs), then have each group do a variety of intricate cognitive tasks.  Hi HOs will perform very differently.  I suspect that “magneticians” who like playing with fMRIs would find Humor Orientation a productive variable.

5.  Both Melanie and I learned to be situational Hi HOs when we do presentations, whether in teaching or briefings or pitches.  Mo HOs can learn to pick their spots and act funnier than they really are.

6. My favorite joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed.

The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls emergency services. He gasps ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’

The operator says: ‘Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’

There is a silence, then a shot is heard.  Back on the phone, the guy says ‘OK, now what?’

Begin obviously: Sex sells!

Yet, within the obvious, eternal, and ubiquitous, “Sex Sells!”, lurks nuance: Unless It Offends Women, Then It Doesn’t.

We’ve all seen those ads that feature voluptuous, ripe, shimmering sex wrapped sensuously around . . . a knife or a broken mirror or the slobbering toothy bite of a Doberman Pincher. Lean, long, curvy, hard, gorgeous boys and girls slithering, writhing, entwining; sliding through honey, sweat, wine, oils in frankincense; all inveigling: Take me now . . . and buy this, too.

For men, it’s all good. And make it raw, explicit, and vulgar – all the better. For women, it is often gratuitous, pandering, absurd. Sure, everyone is pretty and the picture is great, but, ewwww.

So, how do you use explicit sex in advertising and make the sale to women? Advertisers want to answer this question because sex is such a powerful means for attracting attention, but if getting attention then offends half the viewers, we’ve got a problem, Houston. In a Journal of Consumer Research article, researchers Darren Dahl, Jaideep Sengupta, and Kathleen Vohs offer an interesting solution: Relationship commitment.

Dahl et. al. (that’s kind of funny if you say it right and with no offense to Sengupta, Vohs, or Dahl!) manipulated high quality print ads that featured explicit sexuality by either including or excluding “relationship commitment” in or with the picture. The notion here is to frame the hot sex with a context – relational commitment – that many women find compelling. But, will that work? Does making hot sex into hot “committed” sex solve the problem?

Now, I’d like to show you the ads, but I can’t. First, as a man, it’s a bit dicey for me to be flashing nudie pictures in public – it’s bound to offend somebody, including my wife! And, second, the researchers employed a set of proprietary images in the research and they cannot release them. So, we’ll just have to use our imagination. And, isn’t that better anyway?

Close your eyes and think about a high quality fashion photo of a man and a woman who fit your ideal of hot, bare, and sexual that is right on the edge of dirty, vulgar, and XXX. They like each other and they are both on top which means that they are consenting without dominance. Got that image?

Half of the people in the studies saw that standard image of a highly sexualized scene (but no dominance issues with snarling dogs, crawling females, or lurking shadows). It’s the kind of image almost all men like, but that tends to annoy or offend most women – simultaneously magnetic and repellent.

The other half of people saw that same image, but now added to it is a beautiful expensive watch wrapped in a red bow with the caption: “This watch is positioned as a gift from a man to the special woman in his life.”

Women seeing the explicit ad WITH the gift, reported a mean attitude score of 4.67 compared to 3.83 for woman seeing the same ad, but WITHOUT the gift. Now, these mean scores are almost impossible to understand unless you know statistical methods, but we can translate it into the Windowpane effect size. If you do the math that score difference between 4.67 versus 3.83 translates into a d effect size of .45, a “moderate” difference, or a Windowpane of 35/65. Moderate effects tend to be obvious to a trained eye and can be spotted without a lot of statistical whiz-bangery. In our Windowpane standard example of moderate effects, that 35/65 difference means almost twice as many people in the treatment group showed the effect compared to the control group. That’s practical, functional, and realistic.

Thus, an advertiser can make a vulgar, explicit, sexual ad considerably more appealing to women in a simple way: Add to the sex a sign of relationship commitment. Make the commitment obvious, right there in the ad. And, women will like the ad more than if there was no commitment in the ad.

If you’re thinking carefully about this, it might occur to you to ask whether the “watch-as-gift” is not a sign of commitment but rather a sign of “pay for play.” He gives you an expensive watch and you give him guy-sex where you pretend to prefer words and deeds you do not prefer.

Being good persuasion scientists this research team also wanted to demonstrate the “commitment” effect another way to address such concerns. They used priming. Priming is a strategy of presenting information to make it more active in memory to affect how later information is received. For example, I could make you look more attractive by first showing pictures of unattractive people, then letting the viewers see or meet you. Alternatively, I could make you look less attractive by first showing pictures of highly attractive people, then letting the viewers see or meet you. Those first pictures “prime” or stimulate a particular pattern of thoughts and images that make later information seem different.

This persuasion team used priming in text to manipulate how women then perceived the sexy ads shown later. Women in the experiment were randomly assigned to read different stories about a man and a woman in a relationship. Here are two examples.

Prime Example 1: John and his girlfriend, Mary, have been together for two years. They are a young couple, with a lot going for them, including financial stability and great jobs. Furthermore, their friends all notice how completely devoted John is to Mary. John used to lead a bachelor lifestyle before he met Mary; but that has all changed now. Even when other women find him attractive and flirt with him, he has eyes only for his girlfriend. On weekends as well, he usually prefers to spend a large part of his time with her, rather than hanging out with his buddies. Also, Mary finds John to be very spontaneous and passionate. One of the attractive things about John is his uninhibited enjoyment of all life has to offer. John and Mary have enjoyed many good times together during their relationship. And when either of them is going through a rough time, they are always there for each other.

Now, the second story.

Prime Example 2: John and his girlfriend, Mary, have been together for two years. They are a young couple, with a lot going for them, including financial stability and great jobs. However, their friends all notice that John is not completely devoted to Mary. John used to lead a bachelor lifestyle before he met Mary; that has not totally changed. Even now, when other women find him attractive and flirt with him, he is inclined to stray. On weekends as well, he usually prefers to spend a large part of his time hanging out with his buddies, rather than with his girlfriend. However Mary finds John to be very spontaneous and passionate. One of the attractive things about John is his uninhibited enjoyment of all life has to offer. John and Mary have enjoyed many good times together during their relationship. But John isn’t always there for Mary when she is going through a rough time.

Focus here. Women read just one of these stories, not both. The first clearly demonstrates a committed relationship between John and Mary, the second just as clearly demonstrates a much more fluid, fragmented, and fleeting relationship. Thus, some women are primed to think about relationships between men and women as “committed,” while others are primed to think about relationships as “uncommitted.”

All women were then exposed to the same explicitly sexual ad WITHOUT the gift and asked to express their attitude toward it. According to priming theory, women who read the “committed” prime for John and Mary should see the ad with a more favorable mindset, that men love women and are committed, faithful, and reliable relationship partners. Thus, these primed women should see the ad as, yeah, kinda vulgar, but within the loving bonds of a committed relationship. They should like the ad. By contrast, the women reading the “uncommitted” prime should have a negative mindset, that men are unfaithful, untrustworthy relationship rats and respond to the ad accordingly.

And, that’s what the researchers found. Women primed with the “committed” story rated their attitude toward the ad at 3.72 compared to 2.44 for women who read the “uncommitted” story. Dahl, et. al., also had a control group of women who just saw the ad without reading any priming story and their score was 3.17. Once again we’re dealing with abstract numbers of 3.72, 3.17, and 2.44 and that’s hard to interpret, so we’ll convert them into that Windowpane effect again. Compared to the control group, the “commitment” prime produced a d effect of .89 which is positive and large while the “uncommitted” prime produced a d of -.62 which is negative and moderate. And, if you compare between the positive and negative primes (+.89 versus -.62) you get a huge difference in responding.

Let’s add it all up. Think of those vulgar ads you see all the time, the ones that both attract your attention (hot naked bodies) but repel your judgment (who’d do THAT?). If the context of viewing that image also includes a clear sense of “relationship commitment” you will change. You will show a positive response to the ad that under other conditions would annoy you.

And, who says persuasion research isn’t interesting?

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There’s more to the story than I reported here.  If you want to read more about it, check the source.  It’s an excellent piece of persuasion science.

Sex in Advertising: Gender Differences and the Role of Relationship Commitment by Darren W. Dahl, Jaideep Sengupta, and Kathleen D. Vohs, the Journal of Consumer Research, 2009.

Faith, war, and social norms as arguments are not usual fare for persuasion, but today we consider how these unusual elements can be practical persuasion tactics in a news story from Afghanistan.  The story describes the relationship between Captain James Hill, a Christian Army officer fighting in Afghanistan, and his Afghan counterpart, Colonel Abdul Haq, a Muslim mullah, as they work to persuade Afghan soldiers and citizens to shun the Taliban.

A key part of the persuasion battle revolves around religion.  The Taliban visit villages and give speeches attacking the Godless Americans and their invasion of Afghanistan and their goal to remove Islam from the people.  Captain Hill aims at counter-arguing.  Hill employs some fairly standard tactics.  Consider this.

To that end, the captain supplies the army with prayer rugs to give out in villages.

But he also uses what I think is a classic example of Central Route persuasion.

He requisitioned loudspeakers for 30 bases and checkpoints so locals can hear soldiers being called to prayer. And he spends long hours encouraging Afghan soldiers, particularly Lt. Col. Haq, to make a greater display of their faith.

In other words Hill is providing strong arguments (the faith and action of Muslim soldiers fighting alongside Americans) to Afghan civilians for them to consider and compare against arguments from Taliban insurgents who claim that Americans are trying to drive Islam out of Afghanistan and bring back Communism.

Typically when a persuader uses the actions of people to influence others, it is a social norm tactic (when others are doing it, you should too) delivered to low WATT processors ambling along the peripheral route.  But, in this case, the social behavior of the soldiers is instead an argument – crucial information that bears on the central merits of the attitude.  Hey, the Taliban claim that Americans are Godless and trying to drive Islam out of Afghanistan, so why are the Americans handing out prayer rugs and broadcasting the daily prayers of Afghan soldiers?

This is also apparently not just a one-man mission for Captain Hill alone, but rather is a systematic campaign on his part.  He aims at all the villages he can reach in conflict areas and is not just a kind hearted GI handing out chocolate bars to the kids.

What I find interesting about this action is the unusual application of persuasion theory.  Normally war is about power, not persuasion, but in this war, power is trumped by religion and faith.  That requires a more rational approach, in other words, persuasion.  Further, the “social norm” or Comparison cue is usually understood and applied as a low WATT tactic, but here it is clearly an argument proving once again that persuasion variables must always be understood by how they function, not how they appear.

It’s also fun, as always, to read comments to the story.  As of this writing many of them focus on God versus Evolution; or It’s the “war on terror” versus No, Its The War on Terror; and Can’t You Read, You Fool?  A small minority focus on the content of the story and what’s actually reported.  Commentors clearly come to news with bias and have trouble taking a slightly more objective approach to it.

Persuasion theory is alive!!!

I eat to live, but I also live to eat and have enjoyed many of the best times of my life over white linen or chipped formica.  If you click on the “Travel” category you can find extended blogs posts on specific events.  In this post, you’ll find a potpourri of food memories.

Let’s start with the greatest cheeseburger in the United States.  The honor goes to Joan Murphy’s Drive In located in Marshall, Missouri home for many of my mother’s people.  My grandmother, Nell, took me here as a boy in the early 1950s and I’ve been coming back, often with my brother Rick and now with him and his sons, Brett and Evan.

We’ll be back in Marshall later this year for my mom’s retirement dinner and I plan to enjoy the only thing that tastes better than a Joan Murphy’s cheeseburger:  a Joan Murphy’s cheeseburger paid for by Evan!

Now, to Savannah, Georgia and one of our favorites places, Elizabeth’s.  Elizabeths is in a large family home located in a lovely Southern neighborhood a couple of miles from the riverfront.  They serve a fabulous mix of old South dishes with nouvelle twists.  And, the service is great.  The decor is goregous.  Simply one of the best dining experiences ever.

Finally, some shots from Montreal, Canada, perhaps the best eating town in the Americas.  We’ll start with Europea where I had the tasting menu that night.

Anything happens to Melanie, I’m marrying the chef!

But, then we went to Au Pied Du Cuchon (the Pig’s Foot) in an older Montreal neighborhood.  Anything happens to Melanie and I’m marrying everyone affiliated with this restaurant.  Here’s the exterior with Melanie.

And, now me anticipating a seafood platter for two that barely survived one.

We were having so much fun after the appetizers that we forgot to take more pictures.