Using Biases to Win

Whether you're preparing for a meeting, changing your organization, or attempting to corral unruly employees/campers, you will be much more successful if you make use of people's cognitive biases. People like to feel street smart. They like to feel important. They like to believe that they have understood what is going on and have made an informed, intelligent choice based on that comprehension.

If you set things up cleverly, you can take advantage of this and are more likely to get people to choose whatever results you want. In addition to getting the result you desire, you are also giving people a feeling of agency, which enhances their buy-in and perseverance.

For a few marketing examples of decoys, check out this blog post. For a comprehensive and easy to read list of cognitive biases, read this.

I have often found that you can blend together a bunch of biases to get things going your way. Before you jump to some kind of "wow that's manipulative" conclusion - check yourself - this is how we do things all the time, I'm just talking about being more deliberate and increasing your effectiveness. If you genuinely care about people and want the best for you/them/the institution, then you're not being manipulative, you're being effective. Here are a few examples I've found useful over the years:

• I take really good notes for each staff member's exit interview each fall/winter. This helps people feel like they are important and that they have a say in how things go.
• Once I have a library of notes, I make sure to quote people to each other as often as possible. This means frequently re-reading the notes and is a time commitment, but people can imagine you quoting things they've said to others, which ensures people feel like they have agency and importance. It also makes people want to be mentioned in the future by you so they will focus more and try harder to impress you or be memorable.
• If I had an idea of a change I wanted to happen, I would ask a bunch of people what they thought about it. After the first person, I would be able to use the quote method mentioned above too! When I instituted the change later on, no one would question it, as most of them had already had a chance to express their opinion - and their opinion was tempered and massaged by the fact that I chose to quote peers whom they respected who agreed with the change or peers whom they didn't respect who disagreed with the change.
• People prefer to be happy - if you emphasize positive aspects of something in a way that expresses how long it will make them happy, they will be more likely to believe you. Since we start and emphasize that "Camp is for the Camper", I will also often mention how what you do with kids this week will stay with them for the rest of their lives. If your extra little bit of effort today results in lifelong positive changes for a kid, you are likely to put in that extra little bit of effort.
• People will take risks to avoid negative outcomes. If a counselor is worried about their cabin  not getting along or meshing, they are much more susceptible to suggestions that involve creative solutions. This doesn't work for positive outcomes, if a counselor is optimistic about being able to get their cabin back on track, suggest things that involve less risk. This logic works exactly the same when dealing with a camper - if they are afraid of not making friends they are willing to take more risks to get friends, if they expect to make friends, they will be more likely to respond to suggestions that don't involve as much social risk.
• Say it in a new and inventive way and people will remember it. Say it with a pun or a rhyme or an unusual physical flourish and it will be embedded in people's memories.

I think I'll have to do a series of posts moving forward digging deeper into how we use cognitive biases in a variety of ways and settings. Most social interactions are filled with overlapping biases, and people who are aware of and make use of the biases in themselves and others are powerful and effective.

Personal Kryptonite and First Impressions

One of the most successful millennials I know explained to a group of us that her professional kryptonite is incompetence. She further defined that to include people who don't try, saying that when someone is trying hard, she can work with them to improve. Getting people to try is the hardest and most important aspect of management.

While she was being a big sarcastic and bombastic, it got me thinking a little bit more about how our personal preferences influence the way we get our staff to be intrinsically motivated to perform at their best. First impressions are key, both for the employer and the employee, and it is important that we stay true to ourselves in how we present in those key moments, otherwise we will create unsustainable personas that people will soon see through.

If you, like my friend, truly value competence, make sure that is communicated through your attire, body language, and opening words with new employees. You can do this for any value you have. You should also make use of your physical surroundings.


Assuming you have succeeded in engendering your intended values with an intentional first impression, you still have to actively create an environment that continues that value and regularly use implicit and explicit methods of keeping that value around.

One of the most important values to me is working hard and working efficiently. One way I like to show to my staff at camp that I value those two things is that I will try to identify whatever task in a given situation or project will be the hardest or most complicated or involved and publicly work on that task whilst teaching staff (and campers since I know the campers will one day be staff so it's never too early to get them competent). Since a large portion of jobs at camp are dirty or gross, this often means doing my best Mike Rowe imitation and getting dirty.

You don't always have to get dirty, and you don't always have to do the hardest task publicly, but showing your staff that what they are doing matters and is not beneath anyone is a powerful method of motivating them, since it validates their effort and allows them to picture themselves transitioning from their entry level job into a manager or executive. The new CEO of JC Penny, Marvin Ellison, is a paragon of this executive virtue, and it's paying off.

Feedback and Criticism

For our middle of the summer professional development (every summer we send the kids home for 24 hours right in the middle of the season so we can clean everything thoroughly and have a little in-service training) one thing we did was hand around a general feedback sheet for each person. As a group, we all passed our sheets around and filled out a few comments for each other person in the list.

There were a few interesting psychological observations I had during the process - first it was interesting that as a few comments accumulated for each person, I found (and others agreed about this pressure when we discussed it later) that I wanted to learn what others had said about that person before formulating my own opinion. Since we were giving only 40-60 seconds to write a few lines of feedback for each person, I found that it was mentally draining to try to formulate a full picture of the person and then write a comment, and instead I would read quickly over the list and add one or two comments to sections that seemed like they were under-filled, or I felt were too one-sided. Interestingly I didn't feel the need to balance ones that were one-sided if I felt like the person really needed the feedback in that direction, though if I disagreed with most of the comments in a one-sided area, I would definitely comment to try to balance it out. There was also an interesting curiosity and lopsidedness to the information that everyone had. Since you were commenting and passing around all 35 other people's sheets, you got to see what was accumulating for their comments gradually and feel the tone of the whole group's comments develop even though you had no idea what people were saying about you. I found that odd assortment of information/blankness to be stressful.

Afterwards, we collected all of the sheets, photocopied them, and then returned the originals to people the next day. For the most part people seemed to take the criticism and praise well, and really only the most emotionally immature people were outwardly upset that they received negative feedback. While there were a few mean-spirited comments, it was overall a very productive and considerate process, and even the people whose reviews were the harshest were filled with positive comments. It seemed like the people who got upset were having trouble more with the fact that they had negative comments at all than with the actual content of the negative reviews. I think this is an interesting potential negative externality of the "participation" awards and removal of grading from many elementary schools / academics. Some of the people who responded poorly seem like people who have likely had a family/educational environment that stressed inclusion and feelings over collectivism and results, so while they are caring individuals, they lack the grit to hear something negative. Also interestingly enough, several of the people who responded the most poorly to negative feedback are people who I would most strongly identify with having a fixed mindset and not a growth mindset.

I will have to check back with my Assistant Director sometime next week to hear how all of the counselors have responded in their check ins with him as he has worked through those lists with people and helped them turn constructive criticism and praise into goals for the final weeks of the summer.