Ideas are also like kids, in that we always love our own more than any other

But the key point here is if you are in a relationship that’s one to one, whether it’s your significant other, whether it’s your boss or manager for every one nice moment, you have one negative moment, that is not a balanced experience

And it’s the notion that we are most effectively and profoundly influenced, not by ideas and data and evidence that people give to us or force

upon us, but rather by ideas and evidence we generate on our own. Shankar Vedantam: It’s a remarkable study because in this case, the messages actually did come from someone else. They were not self-generated, but merely the act of reading the message, as opposed to listening to the very same message changed the ownership that people felt relative to the idea. Loran Nordgren: Yes. The intuitive role of the innovator is to have the idea and to push for change. A master of influence and innovation is going to understand that through some process of co-design through co-ownership, we want people to commit themselves to these ideas.

Good relationships are a very loose rule of thumb

Shankar Vedantam: Now, this is easier said than done. If you want to bring about change, what Loran is saying is you want the people you are trying to change to feel like they are the authors of that change. Loran Nordgren: So how do you go about creating the conditions for self-persuasion? One fundamental feature is we need to begin at positions of alignment. What I mean by that, is very often we begin conversations at the point of conflict. You and I might both recognize that we need to change practices, but what we disagree upon is how to solve this particular problem. So we begin the conversation there. That’s starting at the place of misalignment. Self-persuasion begins by understanding what is our space of alignment and establishing that baseline of agreement.

The second feature of self-persuasion, we need to stop telling people what to think, and instead we need to ask. An executive gave this great example. His rule of thumb is, when you are in a meeting and you disagree with someone’s position or the direction the team is taking, never give your counter arguments until you first get people to tell you they’re open to what you have to say. And the way you do that is, you listen very closely and then ask the question. Are you open to a different point of view? I see the merits of your position, but I have some concerns. Are you open to a different perspective? That is what we would call a yes question. Because when you ask that question to people, the vast majority of people will say yes, and simply getting people to say yes, I want to hear what you have to say, in fact, makes them more open to your point of view.

Shankar Vedantam: One place to see how fuel and friction produce very different outcomes is in the context of interpersonal relationships like ple, that adding fuel to a relationship is a great idea. Say and do nice things, offer compliments, but it’s even more important to reduce friction. Removing the negatives in a relationship is often far more important than increasing the positives. Loran Nordgren: It is one expression of the negativity bias. The idea that negative experience carries greater weight, psychologically, emotionally than positive experience. For relationships, it’s something like five to one. They can afford the occasional negative experience.