[this draft is pretty rough but I’m going to post it so I have to look at it again. June 2019]
Someone is going to do a study of what happens in a client relationship. They are going to prove that interpersonal influence between people happens at an emotional level. This is hardly news, but no one yet has presented the influential, definitive study that brings it into widespread acceptance.
Finance and economics have been revolutionized by the study of how people actually make decisions. It turns out this is a messy and biased process. One model suggests we have two parallel processors, one intuitive and emotional and the other logical and deductive. The intuitive processor is more powerful and dominates our behavior.
The intuitive processor is very fast and can process many things simultaneously. It runs our body and our physical behavior. It doesn’t seem to be entirely emotional but it includes our emotional self. Our conscious awareness of it involves physical sensations, emotions and feelings. Our experience of it is mostly effortless. It holds our wants, fears, and values.
The deductive processor includes our conscious attention, our thoughts, and our language. It is Homo sapiens’ newest part. It processes (holds in awareness) a few things at a time, maybe 5 to 7 things[1].
I like to think the intuitive emotional processor actually makes all our decisions. The deductive rational processor influences it with stories, plans, and strategies to get what we want. The emotional processor acts on those. But it does all the doing
There is a lot of entertaining research by now about how we decide. We like the same wine better when we believe it’s more expensive. We can’t keep our New Year’s Resolutions. Advertisers push our buttons constantly with great success.
We routinely choose things which make us less happy, healthy, or wealthy. We make most choices, for better or worse, in the blink of an eye[2] and have dozens of emotional and cognitive biases in how we make them. And it’s not even clear that we care that we are like this.
The compelling research that is missing is into how this process works in relationships with other people. There are a few researchers who have studied romantic relationships[3].
But no one has really presented the compelling story of what makes us choose in a sales dynamic, or when influenced by a leader.
We’re going to find the same thing we did about picking wine or shoes or something off the menu. It is a biased and emotional process. In other words, it’s about our feelings.
Like many other “discoveries” of behavioral economics and finance, all of this is hardly unknown to humankind. Someone just needs to do what Kahneman and Tversky did with their groundbreaking article in the 1970s.
Sections to complete:
What alumni of the Stanford Graduate School of Business discovered about its Interpersonal Dynamics course in the years after they graduated.
How emotional connection creates influence, and how that influence is a source of power in organizations, as defined and studied by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
[1] It might only hold one thing at a time, but quickly cycle through a handful of them so that it looks like we are tracking 5 to 7.
[2] And then spend enormous amounts of time and energy making up arguments to explain why we made them when often we have little idea. Our “logic” often looks more like the arguments on one side of a court case than the deliberations of a judge or jury.
[3] Notably John Gottman. Also Sue Johnson.
Elephants and Economics 