Robert Sapolsky

More “maybe” for more influence

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Right now, I’m waiting at the airport. In front of me is a little girl riding a Shaun the Sheep suitcase.

I’ve never seen one of these before. It’s got a cool design (S. the Sheep on top, Union Jack below, suitcase inside). It also has wheels and works as a push bike. That’s how the little girl is using it now.

I was so impressed by the suitcase and by how much fun the girl was having, that when she rode by the first time, I stared at her and smiled. (That’s not a weakness I normally indulge in.) The girl spotted me smiling at her and looked away, embarrassed.

She kept rolling around, going in circles.

But I had stuff to do. I started checking my phone. I then got out my laptop to write this email.

Meanwhile, the girl kept passing in front of me, making ever more elaborate attempts to retrieve my attention. I cruelly kept writing. She kept riding around, until she finally stopped in front of me flailing her arms.

I’ve read this is a fundamental truth about human behavior.

In general, if you want to instill a new behavior, negative reinforcement can work, though not terribly well.

Positive reinforcement works much better.

But what works best of all is intermittent reinforcement. As Robert Sapolsky once put it, you never get more behavior out of an organism than when you introduce a “maybe” into the outcome.

That’s something to keep in mind when you’re trying to influence, in real life or online.

But maybe writing about influencing a 5-year-old human organism sounds a little callous, even for me. So I’ll wrap up this email here, and get back to admiring this girl’s suitcase-riding skills.

One more thing:

I write a daily email newsletter about influence and marketing. It’s a cold-hearted affair but some people find it interesting. If you want to get my emails (much like what you’ve just read) in your inbox each day, you can sign up right here.

Who wins the fight: guiding people from within or nudging them from without?

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“All those chimps who get trained in American Sign Language — one of the first words they master is ‘tickle’ and one of the first sentences is ‘tickle me.” In college, I worked with one of those chimps. He’d do the ‘tickle me’ sequence correctly, and you’d tickle him like mad — chimps curl up and cover their ribs and make this fast, soundless, breathy giggle when they’re being tickled. Stop, he sits up, catches his breath, mops his brow because of how it’s all just too much. Then he gets a gleamy look in his eye and it’s, ‘Tickle me,’ all over again.”
— Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

In chapter 16 of his Zebras book, Robert Sapolsky attacks the question of why we can’t tickle ourselves. It’s not as trivial as it seems.

According to Sapolsky, pleasure requires an element of surprise and lack of control. Like the chimp story above shows, getting tickled is a kind of pleasure. But you can’t tickle yourself — because you can’t surprise yourself and you’re always in full control.

I thought of this because I’ve been beating my head against a related question lately. Let me set it up with a quote from Oren Klaff’s Flip the Script:

“Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I’m writing a book right now on this topic, which I call insight marketing. The problem is, I’m not sure it’s true. At least not all the time.

Here’s my reasoning:

If Klaff is 100% right, then what’s the purpose of coaches, hypnotists, and inspirational speakers? Those people earn their bread by standing around and planting ideas in others’ heads. For most people who hire hypnotists, coaches, and inspirational speakers, the effect wouldn’t be the same if they simply had those ideas themselves.

Another example:

When I was a kid, I would ask my grandfather to tell me a story each night. He only knew one story, Little Red Riding Hood. It didn’t matter. I loved hearing it over and over, even though I knew it by heart. Why didn’t I just play it in my own head?

Let me make it clear I don’t have good answers to these questions. In fact, I am hoping you can help me out.

My guess is that there are situations where coming to a realization yourself is more powerful… while in other situations, having an idea come from outside is better. But what determines which side of the mountain you end up on? At this point, I don’t know.

So if you have any theories about this, or if you can point me to some research on the matter, please write me and let me know. I’ll be grateful to you, and the science of insight marketing will take a step forward thanks to your contribution.

A primate’s copywriting epiphany

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Many, many Aprils ago, I read a book titled A Primate’s Memoir. The author was one Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist who studies baboons.

Based on the title, I assumed the book was going to be the made-up diary of a baboon. After reading the first 50 pages, I realized I was wrong. The book was not a made-up diary, but real, and the primate was not a baboon, but Sapolsky.

I’ve had a soft spot for Robert Sapolsky and his humor ever since, and I’ve continued to read his books. Right now, I’m also watching his excellent series of lectures on YouTube about evolution and behavior. And today, while watching these lectures, I learned something new to me:

95% of human DNA doesn’t code for any kind of protein. In other words, only 5% of DNA actually has any kind of productive output. The rest of our DNA — 95% of it — simply controls when that productive 5% of DNA gets turned on and how.

And now let me tell you a second story, this one about copywriting:

A few months back, I got hired to write an upsell VSL. There was already a control in place, which was doing ok, but the company wanted to see if I could do better.

“No problem,” I said to myself. “This control doesn’t really emphasize consistency or urgency, and it does very little to sell this particular solution.”

In short, I wrote the new VSL. And in spite of all my consistency, urgency, and selling, the new VSL did no better than the control.

But then the CEO of the company noticed a tiny detail. “We forgot to include the headline you sent us.”

Keep in mind, this was a VSL. People aren’t reading, they’re watching and listening. The headline was just a bit of copy above the video itself. I wasn’t hopeful it would make any kind of difference.

And yet, two days ago, I got an email from the CEO, letting me know that my headline + VSL are in fact beating the control by 50%. Which is definitely nice, especially since there are royalties in play here.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what I’m doing with my time. I spent two weeks working on that VSL copy… and it had no effect on its own. It was only when that headline was included that the copy actually seemed to get activated.

You can see now why this made me think of Robert Sapolsky, and the 95% of DNA that does nothing but activate or deactivate the “payload” DNA.

As copywriters, we spend so much time agonizing over structure… sales arguments… consistency, urgency, and all the other Cialdini buzzwords…

And yet, 95% of the time, all that stuff doesn’t even get activated. The offer is a bust, or we chose the wrong headline, or there’s something wrong with the design, or we sent the promotion out a week too early or too late.

I’m not sure what my point is, except to share this epiphany with you, and reassure you that if your copy underperforms, it probably had nothing to do with the copy itself. (95% certainty at least.) And also, to advise you to put yourself in a position, as soon as you can, where you can run different pieces of copy frequently — more often than every few weeks, or God forbid, every few months.