Yes” might just be the most beautiful word in the English language when we’re trying to persuade others to take a particular course of action. But oftentimes getting someone to simply say yes to our requests won’t be enough to get the job done. This is especially the case when there is a delay between someone agreeing to take action and the point at which the action is actually carried out. Many of us will be able to recall times when a colleague or coworker readily agreed to help us—“Sure I’ll bring up your proposal in the meeting next week,” or “Of course I’ll send that report over to you,” or “Leave it to me. I’ll happily connect you with the new VP”—only to subsequently fail to deliver on the promise. It’s probably not the case that people are paying lip service to your requests (or at least one hopes they are not). It’s just that so many other things are vying for their attention that between agreeing to your request and carrying out that task, their initial commitment to you can get crowded out.
Fortunately, persuasion science points the way to a small but often ignored strategy to encourage people to follow through with their initial commitments: Have them form a specific plan for where, when, and how they will go about accomplishing the task to which they have committed. Behavioral scientists call these specific plans implementation intentions.
A good illustration of the big differences that can be gained by making a small additional change to help facilitate implementation intention comes from a series of studies conducted by researchers David Nickerson and Todd Rogers. They wanted to know whether asking potential voters to form a specific plan for how they would get to the polls on Election Day would actually influence whether these voters would follow through on their intention to vote. To answer this question, they conducted an experiment in which a large sample of individuals eligible to vote in the 2008 presidential primary were called at home using one of several different scripts.
The first script was the “Standard Script,” which sought to encourage people to vote by reminding them about the election and informing them that voting is an important responsibility. The second script, the “Self-Prediction Script,” was essentially the same as the Standard Script with the addition of a question that simply asked whether the person intended to vote. This Self-Prediction Script was based on previous research suggesting that asking people to predict whether they will perform a socially desirable behavior increases the likelihood that they’ll do so by encouraging them to say yes, which then leads them to feel committed to that course of action.
The third script, however—the “Voting Plan Script”—was identical to the Self-Prediction Script but included three follow-up questions designed to encourage those individuals who signaled their intention to vote to create a voting plan on the spot. These questions were, “What time will you vote?” “Where will you be coming from?” and “What will you be doing beforehand?” The central idea was that by answering these specific questions, individuals would more easily generate a concrete plan that would take into consideration all of their other obligations that day and that it would be easier for them to follow through come Election Day. Finally, there was a control condition that did not involve any contact with the potential voters whatsoever.
Realizing that asking people to report whether or not they voted after the election could produce a whole host of biases and inaccurate data, the researchers instead examined the official voter turnout records to see who did and did not end up actually voting in the election. The results clearly showed that the most effective script was the Voting Plan Script, which increased turnout by more than 4 percentage points compared to control. What’s more, the researchers found that this script had the most impact among households in which there was only a single eligible voter, increasing their turnout by 9.1 percentage points.
Although there are several possible explanations, the evidence appears consistent with the possibility that multiple-eligible-voter households are much more likely to spontaneously generate concrete voting plans than single-eligible-voter households because they have more schedules to juggle. That suggests that the single-eligible-voter households have more of an opportunity to benefit from being asked to generate a plan by an outside party than do multiple-eligible-voter households.
It’s clearly evident from this research that simply hearing “yes” from another person is often the starting point, rather than the ending point, for persuasion. To optimize the likelihood that people will follow through with their intentions, it is necessary to consider asking a couple of extra and specific questions about how they plan to go about accomplishing the goal they’ve promised to pursue.
This doesn’t need to be done in a micromanaging or demanding way. In fact, the questions could simply relate to small details or specific aspects of the task. For example, the leader of a weight loss club could, at the end of each session, gently inquire about how her members will be getting to the next session, what time they will leave work, and if they have made arrangements to have their children looked after. She might even share these implementation intention plans with other members, with two additional benefits. The implementation plans are made public to others (nicely aligning to the commitment and consistency principle), and members might uncover information about each other that cements future commitments—for example, two members realizing that they live close by each other and therefore could travel together to future sessions.
In a slightly different vein, staff members might improve their effectiveness in persuading colleagues from other departments to attend a regular weekly meeting by making a small change to the standard question “Are you able to attend the meeting at 4 p.m. this Wednesday?” and ask instead, “What are your plans just before this Wednesday’s 4 p.m. meeting?”
The remarkable impact made by a small change to a question asked has also been demonstrated in a study designed to help people get back to work. Recognizing that claimants who visited job centers would typically be asked what job-seeking activities they had conducted in the two previous weeks, the question was changed to direct their attention to a future implementation intention: “What activities will you undertake in the next fortnight that could help you to secure a job?” The study, conducted by the UK government’s Behavioural Insight Team, provides an excellent example of a small change resulting in a big difference. In a three-month trial period, jobseekers who were asked to form implementation intention plans were up to 20 percent more likely to be off unemployment benefits after 13 weeks than jobseekers in a control group that was asked the standard question.
This persuasion strategy has been used to promote another really important behavior: immunization. Behavioral scientist Katherine Milkman and her colleagues conducted a study at a large company offering free flu vaccinations to its employees. In this experiment, all eligible employees received a mailing reminding them to get a flu vaccination at one of the company’s on-site clinics, and that reminder included dates and locations of those clinics. There were two additional conditions to this study. In the first condition the reminder card prompted employees to write down the date that they were planning to get the flu shot. The second condition was similar to the first condition but took the implementation intentions one step further: In this condition, the reminder card not only asked for the date but also the time that the employee was planning to get the flu shot. The researchers found that the reminder card that prompted employees to write down just the date boosted flu vaccinations by 1.5 percentage points relative to the standard control message. But the card that prompted the more specific information—both the date and the time—resulted in a boost of flu vaccinations by 4.2 percentage points.
Although these percentage increases may seem small, consider the big difference they could make in a large multinational company: The vaccinations could prevent these employees not only from having to endure the flu, but also from passing it around the office, infecting others. What’s more, this study is especially interesting in that, unlike the other implementation intention studies we described above, the employees were asked to state (or in this case, to write down) their intentions in private rather than in public. While the studies we have previously discussed typically advocate commitments that are made publicly, this study suggests that even commitments made privately can be effective, demonstrating the versatility of this persuasion strategy.