Interview with author Jomah Berger - Nir And Far

Welcome to the near and Far podcast. This is Nir Eyal and with me today. I'm so excited. Jonah Berger is here today. He is the author of many books that I'm sure many of you have already read. And he's out with a brand new book. His previous books, you might remember. Contagious, the Catalyst, Invisible Influence. And today he's going to tell us about his latest book that just came out last week, right, Jonah?

It did, yeah.

Just came out. Magic Words is the new book. And Jonah, of course, is a professor at Wharton. And so, Jonah, welcome to the near and Far podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

Well, let's dive in. So tell us about Magic Words. What inspired you to write this book?

Yeah, you know, almost everything we do in one way or another involves language. Language is how we pitch ideas. Language is how we put together PowerPoint presentations. We send emails, we make phone calls, we talk to colleagues, spouses, kids. Even our own private thoughts rely on language. But while we spend a lot of time thinking about what we want to say, so that that idea we want to get across in an email, the topics of the presentation that we want to put, we think a lot less about the specific words we use when conveying those ideas. And unfortunately, that's a mistake because as research shows, subtle shifts in language can have a huge impact on our own effectiveness. Adding an extra word to a request, for example, can lead to about a 50% increase in people's likelihood of saying yes. Rather than saying, I like something, saying I recommend it makes people about a third more likely to take your advice. And in everything from the emails we send to colleagues at work to the language you might use in a loan application, provides insight into who we are and how we're likely to behave in the future. And so what are these magic words and how can we take advantage of their power? And that's what the book is all about.

Fantastic. So I remember the first chapter was about agency, right? How to use language that empowers people. And I know it cites one of my favorite studies. Can you tell us about the study around using verbs versus nouns?

Sure, yeah. And so just to back up a second, there are six key sort of types of language I talk about in the book. I put them in a bit of a framework because I do like frameworks to help people remember things.

Who doesn't?

And that's the Speak framework. Who doesn't? Right. And the S is for the language of similarity. The P is for the language of posing questions. The E is for the Language of emotion. A is for the language of agency and identity. Then there are two Cs. I know speak is spelled with a K. It's hard to find a K. As someone pointed out in Scrabble, it's the most difficult letter. So I have two Cs instead. And one stands for concreteness and one stands for confidence. And those are sort of the six key types of language that I talk about in the book. But to pick out agency and identity, as you highlighted, all of us want to get other people to do things. We might need help, for example, and so we ask somebody for help. Or we might be a nonprofit whose job is to get people to turn out to vote. And so we ask them to vote. Often we ask people to do things. Often they say no. What can we do to make them more likely to say yes? Well, there was a great study that was done at Stanford University many years ago where they asked for help cleaning up a classroom. So they're four and five year old kids. The classroom was a mess, blocks everywhere, crayons and so on. And they asked the kids for help cleaning up. For some of the kids they said, hey, can you help clean up as we often might. And for other kids they slight difference. They said, hey, can you be a helper? Now the difference between helper, er and help is just two letters, the er. Yet it led to a 30% increase in the percentage of people who helped. And it's not just kids in classrooms. More recent work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at this in voting. They said, hey, can we use this to get people to turn out to vote? Some people asked, hey, can you please vote? And other people said, hey, can you please be a voter? Now again, the difference between voter and vote is only one letter adding an R at the end. But that led to about a 15% increase in the portion of people that voted. And so one question is why? Why did such small shifts in language, just a couple letters here and there, have such an impact?

And sorry to interrupt, 15% doesn't sound like a lot, but that's actually huge in, in terms of all other, how it compares to other efforts to get people to vote. That is really significant.

It's very big. I mean, all of us think about how likely we are to vote and we all know we should, but we don't. So this is the big impact. And so as you're kind of pushing on, why, right? Why did this work? And so if you look, it's the difference between actions and Identities. Right. People often ask us to take actions, to help, to vote, to do a variety of other things. We're busy. We don't always have time, but we care a lot about how we look, both to ourselves and others. We want to seem smart and knowledgeable and competent and efficacious and all these different things. And so actions are fine, but when actions become opportunities, opportunities to claim desired identities, well, now we're much more likely to take those actions. So helping, sure, I know that's something I should do. But when helping is an opportunity to be a helper, now I'm much more likely to do it. Similarly, voting. I know I should vote, but I don't always have time. Well, being a voter, it's a desirable identity I want to hold, and so I'm more likely to vote to hold those identities. So by turning actions into identities, we can make people more likely to take those actions.

Love it. And you mentioned that you can use this language not only with others, but also with yourself. How does that work?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say a couple things there. So first, it works on the opposite side as well. If we want people to avoid negative things rather than saying, nobody likes losing. Being a loser, though, is even worse. Cheating on a test is bad. Being a cheater is even worse. And so when cheating would mean we're a cheater, people are less likely to do it. Right, because they don't want to hold those negative identities. But as you said, we can even use this to motivate ourselves. Imagine I have two friends, one who runs runs, and one who is a runner. If you had to guess which one of them do you think runs more often?

The runner.

The runner. Right, because it seems like it's a part of who they are. And indeed, nouns. Right. Being a runner rather than running, being a coffee lover rather than loving coffee, suggest these are more stable parts of our identity. And so by using nouns rather than just actions, verbs, or adjectives, it seems more stable. Rather than saying, hey, I'm hard working, saying I'm a hard worker seems like a more stable part of who I am. Rather than describe myself as creative or creating content, say I'm a creator. Seems like a more stable part of who I am. And so it's not just motivating others to take a particular type of action. This can be useful in changing how we see ourselves and changing how other people are seen by others as well.

I love it. So I'm not the kind of person who doesn't get distracted. I am indistractable Sorry for the plug.

I like it a lot.

Right.

That's exactly who you are.

Exactly. It is who you are as part of your identity. Tell us more about similarity. Super curious about that. How do you use that?

Yeah, so similarity is an interesting one. And I think I start the book with some really sort of basic block and tackling approaches. So you can change this word into this word and have a lot of impact. You can use this type of language rather than this other type of language. Similarity is more towards the end of the book and it's a little more difficult to apply. But equally important, a number of years ago, some folks did a really great study looking at how similar our language is to our colleagues. So imagine you join a new workplace, you use language all the time, maybe to write emails to your colleagues, and they looked at how similar your language is to your colleagues language at that office, and what they find is really interesting. So at the beginning, when you haven't worked there before, your language is pretty different from your colleagues. But over time your language tends to become more similar. At least it is if you're a good employee. For folks that don't become as similar, those folks tend to get fired. They tend not to fit into the company or organization. Their, their lack of linguistic similarity or enculturation suggests they haven't changed to fit into the group and they're less likely to stick around. But what's neat is that once people have enculturated, they've sort of met their colleagues and speak a little bit more simile. It's interesting to see what happens next. Right, because these individuals clearly can enculturate to the company. They can become more similar, but they don't always stay similar. And that's actually a good prediction of whether they're going to stick around. These folks could stick around. They can become similar to their colleagues, but the folks that actually become different again, they're more likely to leave not because they were fired, but because they choose to find better employment elsewhere. And so the language we use, even in something like our email, can provide insight into who we are and how likely we are to take certain actions in the future.

And so are examples of this like industry jargon or what would be an example of similar language in the workplace?

Yeah, what's super neat about this categories. It's not even industry jargon per se. It's even the subtle types of things that we use in between the words we use all the time. So we often think a lot about the content that we talk about. You asked me about the language of similarity. I'm thinking about, okay, what would be a good research study to talk about and how people could use these ideas. But there's a bunch of words in between content words talking about similarity and the company and being fired and promoted and all those things. Words like the. Of pronouns like I and we or you. All of these things, prepositions, articles, pronouns, all these are called function words. They're not about the content. They're really more about the style of language that we use. But by looking at the style of language we use and the style of language other people use, we can predict a lot about them. On a first date, for example, people's linguistic style is more likely to match, are actually more likely to go on a second date. Similarly, people more likely become friends with one another if their linguistic style matches. And once they become friends, their style becomes even more similar as a result. And so it's not just that obvious content language you use, it's even the more subtle features that we use as well.

So would you suggest then, if you want to be more amicable to folks, that we should kind of mirror their tone, their language choice in a way? Is that a good thing?

Yeah, I certainly think so. When we think about mirroring, we think about really doing exactly what someone else did. Right. One of my older books, Invisible Influence, I talk about the language of mimicry. And you know how mimicking, if you're a waiter or waitress, for example, mimicking a customer's language can lead you to get a higher tip. And this relates to that. And certainly one way to be similar is to mirror the exact language. Another way is to just mirror more generally the linguistic pattern. Right. What are the types or styles of ways that people communicate and communicating in similar ways as well? Somebody mentioned when writing emails, for example, they look at the hi or hello or hey that someone might use at the beginning of a note and do something similar when. When writing back. Similarly, they might mimic the salutation at the bottom, regards or sincerely or best, that someone might use. And so those are just some of the ways that we can mirror or mimic linguistic style.

But you say that there's a, a time and a place to drive difference. When. When would you not want to be similar?

Yeah, I mean, difference is also quite important. We did some interesting research on Songs for Ex, trying to look at why songs become popular. And as a side note, I think is what's so interesting to me about this space is the ability to study things at scale by extracting language. Language is all around us, but only more recently have been able to capture it. There are thousands of songs that you can find there lyrics. We leave traces of our attitudes and opinions online through social media posts. Language can be captured through email or through conversations just like this one. And so now there are tools to mine this data for insight. We looked at thousands of songs over multiple years and looked at what made songs popular. And we found, interestingly enough, that songs that use different language from their genre are more likely to be successful. So songs often sing about topics like love or dancing or other other types of things. Songs that are more different from their genre, use different types of themes in their language, are more likely to be. To be popular. I, I write about the old example of Lil Nas X's song Old Town Road, which is obviously a big popular song, which sort of broke the Billboard charts. It was one of the most popular songs ever. It wasn't really a country song, it wasn't really a hip hop song. It was kind of both with some other things mixed in. And that difference is one reason that drove its success, because it's novel, it's more stimulating, more interesting, people are more likely to like it. And it made the song more successful.

Yeah, interesting. Great. Now everyone has that earworm for the rest of the day after they hear this podcast episode. But it reminds me, actually, I wrote an article a few years ago called the California Roll Rule, which was all about how people want the same thing done different, which was all about how when sushi first came to America, it was seen as, as an ethnic food. It was something that only Japanese people ate before. I think it was the 1970s, early 70s, nobody ate sushi other than people who had immigrated from Japan. And then one day somebody invented, nobody knows who invented the California Roll, which was rice, which Americans knew, it was avocado, which Americans knew, crab, which was familiar, and then one little piece of nori seaweed around it. And so that was the one thing that was different, but everything else was similar. And so that California roll, which is not Japanese, it's American, opened the door because it was same, same, but different. Right? And so that's why you see, you know, every few years there's a new fad of ice cream, right? It's, it's the same thing you've always had, but a little bit different or why, okay, now there's a new hamburger chain. It's hamburgers, but it's a little bit different. So maybe that adding that little bit of change is, is works in Language as well.

I love the way you frame that. And. And I think, you know, psychologists talk about this. You have optimal distinctiveness, a little bit similar and a little bit different, but not too much of one. And as you said very nicely, you know, similarity gives us that feeling of familiarity. It's not scary, right? It's not completely different from what I know. Distinctness makes it new and exciting. And so it's familiar enough to feel safe, but novel enough to feel exciting. I think the same thing happened with Greek yogurt in the United States. Chobani wasn't the first company to do Greek yogurt. Right. There had been fire, had been in the United States for years before, but it hadn't really caught on because it was in large containers. It was Greek yogurt, which was different, and it was plain flesh flavor, which most Americans weren't used to. But Chobani comes out with those little containers that are in flavors that Americans are useful. And there's only one detail that's different, which is it's Greek yogurt. And people are much more comfortable adopting that new thing when it's. When it's surrounded by some similarity.

Yeah.

Love it.

I love it. Were there examples of people who were masters of these magic words? Or is there anybody that people might know, celebrities or politicians who are really good at utilizing these tactics?

You know, I don't want to get into politics, but I'll talk for a minute about a politician in the United States who's somewhat divisive, which is. Which is Donald Trump. And whether you like Donald Trump or you hate Donald Trump, you can't deny that he's been very successful in selling his ideas, right? If you like those ideas, you're happy that he's been successful doing it. If you hate those ideas, you're angry that he has. But you can't deny that something he's done worked. And so what is it? And so if you look at his language, it's sort of peculiar, right? If you look at his speech he made when he was announcing his presidential run, his initial one a number of years ago, he said something like, oh, you know, if I'm elected, I'm going to build a great wall, and I'm going to build it very inexpensively. And, you know, America, we don't have. We don't win anymore. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't. And I have victories all the time. I can China. I beat China all the time in trade deals. And if elected I would, I would beat them all the time. Right. And some people listen to this and they said, that's. I don't know what you're saying. That's a little bit of bluster. Yet a year later, he was elected president. And so what is he doing? Right. If you look at what he does, he actually does the same thing that a lot of startup founders do, a lot of very successful salespeople do, a lot of quote unquote gurus do, which is that trunk speaks with a great deal of certainty. And what do I mean by that? Well, things aren't just going to happen. They're definitely going to happen. This is certainly the right course of action. Everyone agrees this is absolutely true. You know, this is perfect all the time. All of these are words that one might describe as definites. Right. They suggest that certain some things are definitely going to occur. That's very different than how most of us speak. Right. I don't know about you. I tend to hedge a lot. What does that mean? Well, you know, if I'm working with a consulting client and someone says, is this a good strategy? I might say something, well, yeah, I think it's a good strategy. Or that might work. Or, you know, this could be a good course of action. I'm using words I could or might or I think to hedge my language. I'm saying I'm not sure that something's going to be true. And the challenge is when someone's listening and they're going, well, if you're not sure that something's going to be true, how should I be sure that I should follow what you're suggesting? And so we find in our, in our research, looking at tens of thousands of online reviews and other types of contents, that the more we hedge, the less persuasive we are, in part because we seem less certain. People sitting there going, if you're not even clear that this is the right answer, why would I, Why would I go ahead and do it?

Yeah, exactly. People are saying that this is an excellent podcast episode. Right? That's my favorite technique of his. That's just so obviously crazy, but very effective in using social proof. Like, who are these people that all say this thing that you're claiming? But it's, it's a form of confidence.

Yeah, but, but I think, you know, some people, when I, when I say that, they, they push back. So wait, are you saying everybody should be certain? Right? Isn't. Isn't part of the problem with folks like Trump as they seem so certain even when they're not. And I want to be a little careful, right. I'm not saying that we want to be certain all the time, right? We want to think about when we want to communicate certain. It's like a toolkit, right. If we want to be persuasive, we need to signal at least some level of certainty. But we can also own uncertainty, right? Because there are situations where there is uncertainty. Rather than saying, I don't know if this strategy will work. For example, you know, you can say something. I think this is a great strategy. And to make sure it works, though, we need to make sure we do these three things. Now I sound really confident, right? I'm saying I like the strategy and there's these three things we need to do. But I am expressing some uncertainty. If we don't do these things, the strategy is not going to work. But I'm making it clear where the uncertainty is. It's not about me or my uncertainty about whether the strategy is a good idea. It's uncertainty about whether we can do those things. And so calling it out can both make it clear that we need to overcome some things. But I'm also pretty confident in my. In my opinions.

I love that. So we're expressing doubt by saying, this is what we're confident in. But these following things are the contingencies that need to happen in order to make this come true.

That's.

That's really, really actionable. Tell us more about emotion. How do we utilize emotion in our words?

You know, emotion is an interesting one. And a lot of folks talk about telling stories and the effectiveness of telling stories and emotion is a great way to tell a better story. You know, if you look online these days, most posts are positive. Look at me, look at this amazing thing that happened. And so our online lives are sort of greatest hits of what's happening to us. This great thing happened. This great thing happened. And while it's good in some ways. Right. It suggests that great things happen to us. It's not that great of a story. Right. It's not that engaging. And also, as listeners, it's hard to empathize, Right. If this person's life is so perfect and wonderful, I'm sitting there going, well, my life isn't perfect and wonderful. You know, maybe I'm never going to be able to be like this person, or maybe I can't really connect with this person. And so we've done some research looking at movies. We've analyzed tens of thousands of movie scripts to look at the language that makes Movies successful. And we found something quite interesting. Great movies don't look like sort of a greatest hits list. They look more like a roller coaster with big ups and big downs and big ups and big downs. And the reason why is that the lows make the highs so much more impactful. Right? Exciting moment where something succeeds is great, right? A positive moment is wonderful, but it's so much more positive if someone got there from the depths of despair because you didn't think it was possible. Right? You know, someone fails, someone fails, and then they succeed. Well, wow, that success is so much more. More meaningful, right? The downs make the up so much more impactful. There's a podcast I like to listen to when I run called How I Built this by a guy named Guy Raz. And he does a great job of. Even when. When talking to these startup founders that have been hugely successful about focusing on the failures. And sometimes, you know, if you're a founder, you say, well, why do you want to focus on my failures? I don't want to talk about all the successes that I've had. But those failures, those negative moments can make those positive moments even more. Even more powerful. And so as a boss, as a leader, or even at talking about ourselves online, those negative moments can be a great way to help people connect with us and what's going on in our lives and also make that story so much more engaging.

Why do you think we gravitate towards that? It sounds like you're advocating for vulnerability, essentially, but why do we like that?

Why do we. I mean, it makes it seem like the person's more like us, right? I mean, maybe your life is only greatest hits, but my life is good, but also difficult. Right. I have a couple young kids. They're both wonderful and extremely challenging. There are wonderful moments of the two of them talk to one another in a wonderful way. And I'm like, this is great. And there are other moments when they're yelling at each other, running around the house. And so those ups and downs, I think it really says, wow, I can see this person is like me. I did a project a number of years ago that never got published. But looking at these stories, Chicken Soup for the Soul, which are no longer as popular, but a number of years ago were very popular. And you look at great Chicken Soup for the Soul stories, the ones that go viral and get all the attention, it's these moments of sort of lows that people overcome that make you go, wow, I can do that. If this person can overcome this thing in their own lives, I can overcome whatever's going on in mine.

Yeah, there's almost like a weird line that's not very clear. It's this gray area of where too much vulnerability. Or maybe, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me like there's a point where actually you want to be careful in what you share that you don't want to be too. Like, where is that line? How do you know if you've crossed it?

And I think a couple of things are true. So. So one, if it feels like you're being vulnerable to get attention, there's some pushback there. Right. We've all seen posts online where someone's doing something like, you know, the only reason you're doing this is to get attention. Doesn't feel real and authentic. I think also we still need to feel that the person is competent. Right. So there's some great, very old research, you know, probably over 50 years old at this point, where people interact with someone else who seems like they're either perfect or not. And that person either spills coffee on themselves or they don't. And you might say, oh, well, you know, people either like someone or they don't, and spilling coffee is either good or bad, but the two interact. Right. When someone seems like they're perfect and they spill coffee on themselves, they have a sort of prat fall, a mistake that they made. What humanizes them now? They're more like us and we like them more. Same time, if someone wasn't perfect and they spill coffee on themselves, they're already quite flawed. We don't like them as much because they don't seem quite competent. So we want to seem competent enough, but once we seem competent enough, they are. A moment of failure, of vulnerability can be valuable.

Interesting. Okay, Very good advice. What other insights do you have that maybe surprised you while writing this book? Anything that you thought would turn out one way and then the research showed something else?

Yeah. You know, there's one piece of research I. Well, many pieces of research I like a lot, but one I've applied a bit in my own personal life, and that is the power of questions. And the more I've worked in this space, the more I've learned about questions. They're so powerful. Right. We think about questions as a way to gain information, and questions certainly do that, but they also shape how we're perceived. They act as a spotlight or sort of focusing attention on a particular thing. They guide conversations. They do a lot of really interesting work. And there's one study I think about a lot in my personal life, which is about asking for advice. And I think many of us think that asking for advice is not a great idea, right? We're working on a tough project. We're stuff on a tough problem. We think about somebody, we could ask for advice, but we don't want to ask them why, because we're worried we're going to bother them. We're worried they're not going to know the answer. And even if they do, maybe they'll think less of us, right? They'll think that we don't know what we're doing, that we're not very competent or knowledgeable, and so they will see us less positively. And so some researchers from Harvard and Wharton actually looked at this question. So they had a bunch of people have different interactions and some of the people asked for advice and others didn't. And what they found is that asking for advice didn't actually hurt how people were perceived. So it didn't have a detrimental effect. It didn't have no effect. It actually had a beneficial effect. People who asked for advice were seen as more competent, more knowledgeable, and basically liked more as a result. And so you might say, well, why? Why would asking for advice make someone seem better? And the answer is actually quite subtle but quite interesting. All of us like thinking like we give good advice, right? We're egocentric. We think our advice is pretty good. And so when someone comes along and asks us for our opinion, we go, wow, that person must be really smart because they're smart enough to ask me for advice. Of all the people they could ask, they asked me. And because they asked me, they must be pretty smart. And so asking for advice makes us look better because it takes advantage of the fact that other people are egocentric, right? It takes advantage of the fact that they like others asking for their advice. And so by doing it, not only do we gain that rich information, but we help ourselves be perceived more positively as well.

Love it. Fantastic. The name of the book again is Magic Words. And Jonah, is there anywhere people can go to learn more about you and follow your work?

Yeah, sure. So, information about the book. There's a bunch of resources, a one pager guide for applying these ideas. All that is available on my website which is just jonahberger.com book is available wherever books are sold and you can find me at J1Berger on either Twitter or LinkedIn.

Fantastic. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.