The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 248 - Behavior Contagion

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: I am so excited for today's episode because it feels like a thought that started for me twenty years ago, and I can finally articulate it.

Pete: Twenty years ago? Alright.

Jen: Yes. I had hypothesized that there was a psychological phenomenon...and each time I would talk about it in my classes, I would say, "And hopefully someday, someone's going to coin a phrase or do a study and my hypothesis will prove to be true." Lo and behold, I was listening to a podcast the other day, and a psychologist talked about this phenomenon and gave it a name. And the name is...drum roll...

Pete: Drum roll, drum roll, drum roll...

Jen: Behavior contagion.

Pete: Behavior contagion. Alright. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Behavior contagion...tell me more.

Jen: Okay. First, I'm going to tell you why I hypothesized that such a thing existed. So in my world (and I used to do this a whole lot more), I sit in audition rooms or I sit in classrooms or I sit in rehearsal rooms...well, the classrooms I still do a lot. And whoever ends up getting up first and is seen by the other people, it is almost a certainty that the second person who gets up will go and stand in the exact same place that that person stood, and say their introductory phrases in the same order as the first person. And then, because the second person did it, the third person...and so on, and so on, and so on. And I had sort of hypothesized that when you are in a space and you're not exactly sure what the rules are, you assume the first person was right.

Pete: Wow. Yes.

Jen: And I see this in all sorts of other spaces. But it's very stark in the spaces I'm in. And it turns out, this phenomenon is called behavior contagion. This is the phenomenon where you do something because you saw someone else do it first. I heard this on the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and I feel victorious.

Pete: I thought this might have been like, "I've finally come up with a new word for this thing I've been thinking about for twenty years," but this is a, "Someone else has coined it." Alright. So, I...oh god, I could think of so many examples where I've seen this in action. The thing I thought of first when it comes to behavior contagion is, if I'm running a workshop for a new group of people who haven't met before...and often it might be from leaders all across a different business, they might not know each other, and so I'd want to just get them to introduce themselves. Often, I deliberately say, "I don't need your job title. Just tell me like who you are, where you are, and what's something you love to do outside of work." And it's wild how many times the first person goes, "So I'm the lead sales manager of blah, blah, blah," and they go straight into their job description, even though I said I don't want that, and then every single person does the same thing.

Jen: That's right, behavior contagion.

Pete: Alright, alright, alright, alright. Interesting. Interesting.

Jen: I'm sure that there are plenty of instances where behavior contagion is a wonderful thing. Like, if you are raising money for a cause, and the first person gives a donation, and then other people are like, "Oh, I guess that's what we do here."

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Or, you know, there have got to be good uses for this. But what I'm mostly interested on focusing on is how we lose our own individuality and sense of self and how we would actually behave in favor of how someone else would behave.

Pete: Mmm, interesting. Yeah, I went to the positive too. Like, how might we leverage this for good and model the behaviors we seek to see in others? But let's start with your thread, and we can get to mine later if you like.

Jen: Yeah, I think we should do both. Okay, so I have a client who shared with me that she was at a dance audition. She's an amazing dancer. And as soon as I tell the story, if she's listening, she'll know who she is. And this was a tap dance audition. Okay? So the choreographer lined up the dancers and said, "Let's just go down the line and everyone show me a time step." So it started at one end of the line, and the first person did what's known as a triple time step. It's a pretty standard tap move. So, of course, the second person then did a triple time step, and the third person, and the fourth, so on and so forth down the line until maybe they're, I don't know, fifteen or twenty people down the line. And then, it gets to my client's friend who steps out and does a completely intricate, complicated, only an expert could possibly execute this kind of time step. And my client (who had done her time steps earlier) was like, "Oh my gosh. Of course. He didn't say what kind of time step he wanted. He just said, 'Do a time step.' But because everyone else before me did a triple time step, I just assumed that's what I was supposed to do. And then, here's this person who interpreted the instructions in her own way, and therefore stood out as the expert she is."

Pete: Mmm, mmm, mmm. Okay, I love this. So, she interpreted the instructions differently. So my mind then goes to, "Is that a prompt for us to like listen out for the instructions we're given, and then maybe intentionally seek to respond in a way that is in alignment with it but it's like slightly different to what others are doing?" Is that what you're suggesting?

Jen: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I talk about a lot in my Shift class is this concept of, "Who wrote the rules?"

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And so, in this case, it's the rules of engagement of this particular dance audition, or the rules of engagement when making an introduction at a conference. "Who wrote the rules?" And if you don't know the answer, maybe you don't have to follow them.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. I'm catching what you're throwing, and I love it. I've been running a bunch of workshops for a bunch of very senior leaders in a very big organization here in Australia, and one of the things we've been talking about is, "As a leader, how do I not only empower my team, but also help them feel empowered to communicate and influence other parts of the business?" And it's been so much fun and so fascinating to hear everyone's different approaches to this. But one of the things that comes up time and time again, or that I try and tease out, is (and this is especially relevant in the corporate world, all across the world) that people start with a slide deck and think, "How am I going to craft my message with this slide deck?"

Jen: Right.

Pete: "Because I sit in meetings," I, being the leader in this corporate, "and I stare at slide decks all day, every day." That the behavioral contagion in a company is so often, you start with a slide, you share screen because we're all working hybrid or remote, and then you step through the thing you want to communicate. And what I've had them do and what we've been talking about is like using a lot of the things that you and I have spoken about, "Okay, let's get really clear on who the message is for, and what you're trying to do, what it's for. Also, like, have you thought about some stories you might tell that might help articulate the thing you're trying to get enrollment in or on, or the thing you're trying to influence?" And I get them to kind of play around with these ideas. And then, sort of at some point, the penny drops where someone's like, "We just worked out how to do this without a slide deck." Like, you can influence people in so many other ways or you can communicate a message in so many other ways that don't require a forty-five page slide deck. And yet, it's so funny, I've never thought of this as a behavioral contagion but there's like a macro-behavioral contagion in corporate America, corporate Australia, corporate everywhere, where, "The way we do things around here is we pull up a slide deck." But to your point, who wrote those rules? No one ever said that was the case. It's just kind of a thing that started, especially during the pandemic.

Jen: Yes. I mean, slide decks are a great tool when they're a necessary tool.

Pete: Right, right. I mean, it reminds me of...you introduced me to the idea of content dictates form, right?

Jen: Right.

Pete: Like, in this example, I feel like people start with a form. People start with a slide deck, and then try and retrofit the content into it.

Jen: Right. Oh my gosh, slide decks are the ultimate form of corporate behavior contagion.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, corporate behavior contagion...my goodness, we could go down a rabbit hole about all sorts of different ones, but we can circle back on that later.

Jen: So I'm about to embark on my summer coaching program, The Reboot, which...I love it so much. It's so fun.

Pete: We love The Reboot.

Jen: Right at the top of the program, I ask to see everybody's marketing materials. Which, for actors, the industry standard are resume, headshot, website, socials. Right? And I will question people as to what determined the format of their marketing materials. And most of the time, they don't have a good answer. They'll say something like, "Well, that's how I see other people doing it." So, another example of behavior contagion. Which, like you don't want such a disruptive resume that people don't know how to read it. But you also don't want so conformed a resume that people can't tell who you are.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. This was actually a question I had for you or like a thread I was thinking of pulling, which is, I feel like sometimes behavioral contagion can serve us because maybe it speaks to, say, genre.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Where, you know, I think Seth Godin has talked about, "The best place to put a book on marketing is next to all the other books on marketing, because that's where people go when they're looking for books on marketing." So like, you want it to fit into some sort of behavioral contagion, i.e. it needs to kind of fit into a certain series of parameters. However, you then want to, I guess staying with a Seth Godin-ism, you then want it to still have an element of like being a purple cow, being remarkable, being different within that kind of form. So I feel like there's like a tension there, between, it needs to sort of follow some parameters that are perhaps behavioral contagions, but then like be remarkable or different within those parameters.

Jen: Yes. And this is also making me want to step us both back and focus on the behavior part, not the product part. That it's the behavior that we end up adopting, that is someone else's behavior.

Pete: Yes.

Jen: As opposed to an aesthetic or a style.

Pete: Yeah, that's a great point.

Jen: So you had mentioned wanting to circle back on the positives, and I would love to hear you brain dump some ideas.

Pete: Yeah. This is me coming to this idea from obviously my bias, my perspective, which is, I do a bunch of work with very senior leaders or just leaders across organizations. And one of the things I often talk to them about is, "How are you modeling the behaviors that you're seeking to cultivate within your teams? So if you want your team to be able to solve problems independently and be creative in the way they're coming up with ideas and solutions, well, how are you modeling that for them? Are you coaching them? Are you asking them questions? Are you taking a humble approach where you're saying, 'I don't need to always be the one with the ideas. I'm really curious what you think.'" And so I'm realizing that that's perhaps me trying to help them leverage behavioral contagion for good, which is, "The way that we show up as leaders literally impacts the way that the other people in our teams or our peers or our bosses then interact with us or interact with one another, so can we be mindful of behavioral contagion from a positive perspective and model the behaviors upfront that were seeking to cultivate?" And you know, I think about...I ran an off-site for a C-Suite last year for a big health group here in Australia, and this brilliant Chief Experience Officer (we talked about it prior) wanted to do this kind of introductory exercise where he really modeled vulnerability. So it was like introducing yourself, but from a totally different approach than most people introduce themselves. It was a very vulnerable approach. And he went first and modeled vulnerability by sharing some of the struggles he's had throughout his life and his career, and that has shaped him as the person he is now. And the behavioral contagion was all of a sudden the CEO went next and did the same thing, and then the Chief Marketing Officer went next. And so, you've got this like unbelievably vulnerable conversation, which was amazing and actually ended up being many people's highlight of the day, because he molded it first. So I'm like, "Let's harness this for good."

Jen: Yes. I love this so much, because it is a human tendency. And unless we are able to contact every human on the planet and say, 'Guess what? You suffer from behavior contagion," if we know that it exists, how can we look to harness it or leverage it for good, for positivity, for community, for collaboration, for creativity, for leadership?

Pete: Exactly. Exactly, exactly. Also, if we had every single human on the planet listening to this podcast, that would be wild.

Jen: Wouldn't that be so great? Hey, if one of our listeners right now shares this episode, then another listener will follow, and another listener will follow.

Pete: It's true. Create the behavioral contagion of taking a screenshot and sharing this episode with a friend. Okay, so behavioral contagion is a phenomenon that you've discovered and been thinking about for twenty years, and we've thought about and I guess unpacked a little bit how we can be mindful of this and seek to buck it where that's relevant. But then also, if we're a leader (which, many people listening to this podcast), how do we leverage such a phenomenon so that we can model the behaviors we're seeking to create?

Jen: And I'm sorry to keep bringing you back around to the negative aspects of behavior contagion, but I want to be more mindful of and I want to help other people be more mindful of when they are making themselves small or invisible or unseen, because they are behaving like someone else rather than behaving like themselves...which I think ultimately is actually another form of, not leveraging behavior contagion for good, but leveraging your knowledge of behavior contagion for good. So, see? We spun it back around to the positive.

Pete: I appreciate that. The awareness of the contagion itself enables us to then harness it for good.

Jen: Right.

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.