You may have had the pleasure of attending one of our workshops where we’ve played the ‘World’s Leading Expert’ game. It’s an activity designed to help people take on the physiology and mind-set of an expert and often gives very surprising results in releasing the hidden expert inside us all – whatever the subject!
While still believing the positive impact of heightening confidence some very interesting research from Zakary Tormala from Stanford Graduate Business School highlights the influence of unsure experts. They discovered that an expert who allows space to disagree, or admits there may be other factors at work, actually has more influence than those who come across completely confident. One experiment involved people being given restaurant reviews and then asked how likely they were to eat there. Some reviews were highly confident in tone while others were more tentative, although both reviews had the same positive content. Surprisingly people were willing to spend 56% more at the restaurant recommended by a tentative expert (“I’ll give it 4 stars though I’ve only eaten there once”) rather than the confident expert (“I confidently award this establishment 4 stars”).
Maybe this is partly explained by Professor Robert Cialdini’s principle of ‘liking’ – that we’re more likely to trust the opinion of someone whom we like and who is like us. It seems possible that we might like a tentative person more and that most of us identify more with someone more approachable and less dogmatic.
I suspect we have a lot to learn from this research – though won’t it be interesting to see how things change as they continue to learn more about it all!
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hi Justin
Great article; I’m really intriuged about this priciple of liking and will certainly research it some more. I have had the great pleasure of attending some Kaizen workshops, however have never had the pleasure of playing ‘world’s leading expert’; it would be great if you could give me a quick run down of the activity as it sounds like something that I’d love to try with groups in our organisation.
many thanks & best regards
stu