Predictably Irrational by Mike O’Donnell
Posted on April 7th, 2013 in Psychology, Self Improvement, Speaking, Toastmasters | No Comments »
This was my 5th speech in the competent communicator manual for toastmasters and the speech objective was “Your Body Speaks.” My two big improvement goals for this speech were to incorporate more hand gestures and to work on being a more dynamic speaker. Normally I memorize my speeches almost word for word. This is great because I can deliver an 800 word speech exactly how I wrote it without missing anything. The problem however is that if I stumble over 1 word, it completely throws me off. This is exactly what happened to me in my Enshrined in History speech. Instead of memorizing word for word this time, I focused on memorizing the structure of my speech and the transitions. That way I could free flow through each paragraph as I went along.
Another thing that I did differently this time was that I wrote in hand gestures into my script. This way I could practice linking pre thought out hand gestures with the different parts of the speech. Of course this is the opposite of being dynamic, but I think it really helped because it made me focus on how I am connecting with the audience.
Feedback and things to work on:
- Body movement: I tended to pivot and shift my weight from side to side. I need to either take a strong stance up by the podium or walk around and engage the audience.
- Gestures: Even though I specifically worked on incorporating hand gestures, my feedback was that they seemed to be too repetitive and I could have been more animated and dramatic with them.
Predictably Irrational by Mike O’Donnell
According to some researchers, we make well over a thousand decisions every day. Well, since you’re making so many decisions each day, has any of you ever stopped to wonder why you make the decisions you make? When asked, most people would say “because it was the best decision to make.” In other words, they considered their options and then made the most rational decision. (raise each hand and choose winner) However, as Dan Ariely points out in his book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” many of the decisions we make are actually irrational. To put this in simpler terms, Mr. Ariely believes that he can predict when you will make a decision that completely flies in the face of common sense! (hand waves across face dramatically)
Now, when I read this for the first time, I was thinking to myself, “Pretty bold claim there Dan, but I’m not buying it” (shake head and wave hand). Just as many of you are probably thinking, “He may be able to predict the ‘Average’ person’s decisions, but let’s get real here, we’re way smarter than the ‘Average’ person. I mean, we’re Toastmasters, right?” (Quotes | hands apart and thumbs out) Well, it turns out that Mr. Ariely has backed up his argument with a ton of interesting research and I’d like to share one of his experiments with you tonight.
In this experiment, Mr. Ariely set up a table with a sign that read, “One chocolate per customer.” (make the number 1 with your finger) When potential customers stepped closer to the table, they noticed that he was selling two types of chocolates. The first was a high quality truffle from Lindt priced at only 15 cents (raise left hand) while the second was your every day Hershey’s Kiss priced at 1 cent. (raise right hand). After a little while, Mr. Ariely looked at the sales statistics and was not surprised to learn that most of the customers acted with a good deal of rationality. About 73% chose the high quality truffle while only 27% chose the Hershey’s Kiss. (left hand goes higher)
In his next experiment, Mr. Ariely lowered the price of each chocolate by a mere 1 penny (squeeze fingers) making the price of the truffle 14 cents and the Hershey Kiss Free. Now according to all rational logic, everything should have stayed the same. The truffle was still the higher quality chocolate and since nothing changed in relative terms, the response to the price reduction should have been the same. However, when they looked at the sales statistics, they noticed that the Hershey Kiss became the favorite of 69% of customers (raise right hand) while the truffle was only chosen by 31% of people. (lower left hand) The presence of Free actually led people to make an irrational decision.
So, what is it about Free that’s so enticing? Why do we have an irrational urge to jump for a Free item, even when it’s not what we really want? The best analogy I can give for this is like when we go to a career fair. Every table we go to has something free to give us to add to our goody bag and the next thing we know, we have this big bag (illustrate big bag) of free pens and flash drives and all this stuff that we’re most likely just going to throw out when we get home. If these companies charged just 1 cent for each pen and flash drive, how many do you think you would come home with? After repeating multiple variations of his experiment, Mr. Ariely started asking himself the same questions. And the conclusion that he came to was that every transaction has an upside and a downside. And when something is Free, it completely removes our fear of loss. This gives us such an emotional charge (clench both fists) that we perceive the item to be much more valuable than it really is.
So like I said in the beginning of this speech, we make over 1,000 decisions every day. Now that you’re aware that the fear of loss has a strong influence over your decision making, how will you react? Will you go on making the same decisions that you always made or will you use this information to become a rational human being?