Friday, May 12, 2017

The Power of a Nudge: Persuading People to Take the Job

Knowledge@Wharton profiles some interesting new research regarding how to persuade people to commit to a new endeavor such as a job. Clayton Featherstone and Judd Kessler have written a paper titled, “Can Social Information Affect What Job You Choose and Keep?"   They studied Teach for America, and they conducted an experiment to see if they could convince more young people to sign up for the program.   Featherstone explains the research:    

Teach for America tries to place teachers in schools. If you’re admitted to the program, you get an email that says something like, “Congratulations, you’ve been admitted to Teach for America. You’ve been assigned to wherever. We hope you’ll join us.” That email is how they communicate that you should join Teach for America. The sentence we added to the email was, “Last year, 84% of people in your position chose to join Teach for America. We hope you will as well.” We found that one sentence was actually pretty powerful in inducing extra people to join. That sentence is a canonical example of social information. Basically, when I’m thinking about doing something, I might be interested in what others in my situation have chosen to do in the same way.

Now you might wonder if these people were convinced to join, but later dropped out as teachers in the program.  In fact, the scholars found that these people stayed on in their positions.  The small inducement via social information had long term positive consequences.  You can begin to see the implications for other situations, not simply letters to candidates who have been offered a job.   Of course, the power of social information has to be used with care.  You would not want to persuade someone to do something which is not ultimately good for them or the organization.  One wonders too whether the effect is pronounced here due to the age of the people in the study.  We are all shaped and affected by social information, but might the effect be larger for younger people?  

1 comment:

Janet R. Mack said...

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