Mental Models: Social Proof

PEOPLE WILL CONFORM TO THE ACTIONS OF OTHERS UNDER THE ASSUMPTION THAT THOSE ACTIONS ARE REFLECTIVE OF THE CORRECT BEHAVIOR.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?​​

Two other things about social proof that are worth noting: It is more powerful when people are in ambiguous or uncertain circumstances; and, a person’s perceived peers exert stronger social proof.Imagine you are a new hire in your organization. You are naturally uncertain in your new work environment. You are going to look at your peers to see how to behave. If your new peers are following the company rules in a certain way, you will do the same. You won’t be able to help yourself because of the powerful social proof around you. A toxic culture is when there is a disconnect between the stated rules and the actual behaviors of the employees.

How might this apply to great products?

To put people at ease or to guide a decision, find creative ways to show social activity. This can be in the form of stats (liked-by, number-of-views, comments), positive reviews and testimonials, or visibility into the actions or outcomes of other users’ behaviors. On a larger scale, we allow others to innovate while we maintain the status quo.For example, policy makers and media understand how their policies and the report of these policies give "social proof" to legitimize or delegitimize certain ideas.

Consider

Think about how ideas or strategies are legitimized or delegitimized in your group or organization. Are you strategic in the way you on-board and place new hires? Do you consider what specific behaviors you want to emphasize when devising the composition of your work teams? Do your employees have input in the design and development of your product guidelines and procedures (hint: Google “IKEA Effect”). Fighting social proof and human nature with management cliches is not an effective strategy.

See Also

Positive Mimicry, Status Quo Bias, Competition, Shaping, Authority, Autonomy, Reputation, Status

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

 

 

Mental Models: Trigger

WE NEED SMALL NUDGES PLACED ON OUR REGULAR PATHS TO REMIND AND MOTIVATE US TO TAKE ACTION.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

Effective, encouraging nudges need to catch people where they are. There are many triggers for change in organizations:

  • Poor performance generally triggers a need for improved revenue or decreased costs

  • An acquisition or a merger triggers a need to create synergies and blend organizations

  • A change in leadership triggers a need for education and communication

  • New agreements, laws or regulations trigger a need to update compliance systems and processes.

How might this apply to your business?

Catching customers where they are might require a tweet, relevant advertising through social media, a link or other distraction; offline triggers may be used as well. Also think about triggers someone can set (SMS alerts, IM reminders) or take with them (a printed sheet) as a reminder to do something.

Consider

What triggers have you experienced today? this week? this month?

See Also

Surprise, Feedback Loops, Sequencing, Shaping, Variable Rewards, Delighters

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

 

Mental Models: Peak End Rule

WE JUDGE OUR PAST EXPERIENCES ALMOST ENTIRELY BY THEIR PEAKS (PLEASANT OR UNPLEASANT) AND HOW THEY ENDED.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

What are the peaks and endings in the employee experience in the organization you have designed? Peaks may be on boarding, promotions, personal development experiences over the course of their time in the organization. Endpoints or pause-points like termination, sabbaticals, or time off can also be anchoring experiences. Identify and improve these.

How might this apply to your business?

What are the peaks and endings in the customer experience of the product or service you have designed? Peaks may be the core value you provide or a small surprise thrown into the user journey. Endpoints can be obvious (order fulfillment from an e-commerce site) or more subtle (such as a friendly or funny registration confirmation page). Identify and improve these.

Consider

How have Peaks and Ends served as valuable learning opportunities?

See Also

Humor Effect, Surprise, Story, Gifting

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

Mental Models: Limited Choice

WE ARE MORE LIKELY TO MAKE A CHOICE WHEN THERE RAE FEWER OPTIONS.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

The most common way of confusing someone is to overload them with too many choices. They will eventually crack, and avoid deciding at all. This approach is especially effective if what you are saying is of interest and makes them think and want to respond. Overload is multiplied when what is being communicated is complex or difficult to understand. This effectively shortens the time to the point where the other person becomes overloaded and needs to stop and process the information given to them.

How might this apply to your business?

For each page or state of your site, feature in your product or level of your service, how many choices do you offer? Can this be reduced?

Also, consider the sequence of decision points people encounter—can you simplify this decision path, presenting the more pressing choices first?

Consider

There are many written and unwritten rules of conversation and interpersonal communication. People expect you to follow those rules. If you break them, they will quickly become confused.

See Also

Status Quo Bias, Scarcity, Limited Duration, Contrast, Sequencing

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

Mental Models: Story

ALL OUR DECISIONS ARE FILTERED THROUGH A STORY—REAL OR IMAGINED—THAT WE BELIEVE.

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How might this apply to great teams and cultures?We tell a lot of stories in organizations:

How might this apply to your business?Are you creating a story that includes your stakeholders? Stories can be explicit—simple, episodic narratives. Or a story can be implied, using words that suggest conflict, a hero or other narrative elements. The most powerful stories are well-crafted visions that give significance to mundane tasks.

Consider

What story did you tell yourself about the last person you just met or came into contact with?

See Also

Commitment & Consistency, Autonomy, Authority, Affect Heuristic, Conceptual Metaphor, Priming, Framing, Periodic Events, Task Significance

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

Mental Models: Achievements

WE ARE MORE LIKELY TO ENGAGE IN ACTIVITIES IN WHICH MEANINGFUL ACHIEVEMENTS ARE RECOGNIZED.

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How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

Achieving something of personal or social significance is gratifying and even motivating, but more so when recognized in some way. Achievement is signaled by things like promotion, membership, privileges, and acquisitions.

How might this apply to great products?

In gaming environments, achievement is shown through points, badges, levels and other kinds of recognition.What challenges — tied to desired behaviors — do you have in place and what are the associated achievements?

Consider

What challenges — tied to desired behaviors — do you have in place and what are the associated achievements?

See Also

Appropriate Challenges, Feedback Loops, Competition, Reputation, Status, Story

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

Mental Models: The Power of Reframing Problems Through Inversion

An approach to problem-solving that starts with imagining worst-case scenarios – and then using those scenarios as the basis for developing solutions.

 
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How might this apply to great teams and cultures?
One of the methods used in creative ideation sessions is reverse thinking. Instead of following the ‘normal, logical’ direction of a challenge, you turn it around (or an important element in the challenge) and look for opposite ideas.

How might this apply to great products?
For instance,  when designing a chair, you can list the assumptions of a chair (it needs to have legs)  and think its opposite (no legs?!) to trigger additional ideas: what if chairs were hanging from the ceiling? or be built as part of the table? or….

 
 

OVERVIEW

The concept of Inversion is often interpreted in two different ways, both are valuable to consider.

The first is the idea of considering the opposite. In particular, envision the negative things that could happen in life. The Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a “premeditation of evils.”

The second is the idea of working with the end in mind. German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was famous for some work on elliptic functions that eludes me. Jacobi often solved difficult problems by following a simple strategy: “man muss immer umkehren” (or loosely translated, “invert, always invert.”).

Both approaches look at the end result uniquely. Considering an opposite asks you to hold your ideal result loosely, and to consider the opposite of your desired result. Working with the end in mind assumes you are keeping the same goal but approaching the solution from a different direction, by backing into it.

Very few problems can be solved directly. The most wicked, intractable problems must be dealt with indirectly. As such, the Inversion model is one of the most powerful mental models in our toolkit as human beings.

If you are always inverting a problem, like the way you play with a Rubik’s cube, you experience them from multiple perspectives. Multiple vantage points challenges your certainty. It can shake your beliefs.

 
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EXAMPLES

Let’s start with the positive-negative notion. When I coach clients, I get many people at major points of transition in their lives and careers. Some are facing big promotions, others are considering leaving their jobs for a second chapter.

Often I’ll ask: what is it you want? Seems like a simple enough question, but it’s really hard to answer. Specifically, what do you really want to happen?

Many people have a very hard time imagining the life, career, or outcome we want because we’ve been conditioned for such long periods of our life (at home, in school, at work) to think a certain way or to embrace a certain idea of success.

However, when asked to consider what would guarantee our unhappiness…and few are at a lack of words.

Let’s move on to the positive-negative notion. I teach an EMBA class called Managing Innovation. Most people take the class to learn how to improve and manage innovation in their organizations.

The course is guided by the central question: What can be done to foster innovation? The answers are pretty standard: engage small teams, enable autonomy, consider the tension of deliberate and emergent strategies, etc. And, by the way, implementing any one of those things in a culture that doesn’t naturally gravitate toward those qualities is really hard. 

But if we invert the problem to: How do we avoid becoming traditional or unoriginal? we consider all the things we can do to discourage innovation: reduce feedback loops, increase top-down decision making, enable homogeneous thinking, foster resistance to risk. Generally speaking, we would want to avoid these things, right?

 
 

Application

Sounds so easy, doesn’t it? If we were to follow our own council we would have to take our own advice: “Just stop doing these things and do less of these other things instead.” Behavior change of any kind is no small thing.

Moving indirectly gains more ground than directly. 

Thinking forward/backward or negative/positive about a problem results in some action, you can also think of adding vs. subtracting.

Despite our best intentions, thinking forward increases the odds that you’ll cause harm (through unintended consequences). For example, drugs designed eradicate one disease might also have adverse effects, become harmful if overused, or cause antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Thinking backward, call it subtractive avoidance or inversion, you are less likely to cause harm. Inverting the problem won’t always solve it, but it will help you avoid trouble and thinking through some of the undesirable and unintended consequences. You can think of it as the avoiding negativity filter. It’s not sexy but it’s a very easy way to improve.

So what does this mean in practice?

Thinking about what you don’t want isn’t necessarily inspiring, but it does bring clarity and can aid decision making to a problem or question that brings nothing but overwhelm. Many of the smartest people in history have done this naturally.

Inversion helps improve understanding of the problem on which you are focused. By using this method, you are forcing yourself toward doing the work of having an opinion that considers multiple perspectives.

The key takeaway: Spend less time trying seeking the right answer and more time avoiding the wrong answer. Avoiding loss is an easier starting point than seeking gain.

Inversion is part of the network of mental models for good humaning. It contributes to creative thinking and problem solving. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves successfully in their pursuit of mastery. Learn more about the 25 Skills.

Mental Models: Scarcity

WE INFER VALUE IN SOMETHING THAT HAS LIMITED AVAILABILITY OR IS PROMPTED AS BEING SCARCE.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

​​The scarcity mindset consumes our mental energy — brainpower that would otherwise go to less pressing concerns, planning ahead and problem-solving. Ultimately, it creates a culture of erosion, where the gradual destruction or diminution of team and/or organizational culture is typically marked by an increase in abusive conduct.

How might this apply to great products?

While scarcity is typically invoked to encourage purchasing behaviors, it can also be used to increase quality by giving people limited resource—such as tokens—with which to cote up, purchase, or upload items. This introduction of a limited resource encourages people to be more judicious with the actions they take.

Consider

How has the scarcity of diversity (of women, people of color, and the different opinions they bring) impacted your group, organization, and ultimately your product?

See Also

Limited Duration, Limited Choice, Variable Rewards

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.

Mental Models: Serial Position Effect

WE HAVE MUCH BETTER RECALL OF THE FIRST AND LAST ITEMS WITHIN A LIST.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

Ever had a manager that made decisions based on the last meeting they had? We need to make data-driven decisions, but common cognitive biases can skew how the information is interpreted. Letting the numbers speak for themselves is an alluring aspect of analytics, but the reality is that human bias can creep into the process if practitioners aren't vigilant.

How might this apply to your business?

E-commerce websites position products on a product page carefully as well, showing the products that they would most like to sell near the beginning. In online marketing, links presented at the top of email newsletters or on a search engine results page receive many more clicks.

Similarly, links at the beginning and end of a navigation menu on a website will also receive more clicks. Off-line marketing also employs the same principles: Restaurant menus are carefully designed with the serial position effect in mind, and when watching television, consumers are more likely to remember the first and last commercials seen during a commercial break.

Consider

This doesn't just happen with business strategy, e-commerce, or marketing metrics. Think of the impact of giving performance reviews, for example. Do people really remember ALL the data they heard or the first or last thing they were told?

See Also

Peak-End Rule, Chunking

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.