If you believe that our mindset directly influences our lives and our relationships and that a few carefully chosen words have the power to change our mindset, then you’ll want to listen to this episode of The Knowledge Project with Greg Walton, who is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.
The podcast touches on what Walton calls interventions—small daily interactions that have the capacity to reshape how people make sense of themselves, the world around them, and society at large. Walton has identified four types: direct labeling, prompting, active reflection, and increasing commitment.
The cold open of the episode illustrates the power of direct labeling—telling people what something is or what a situation is:
Greg: We have two kids who are six and four, and when the kids are bicycling and they say that they’re tired, we always say to them, “It’s when you’re tired that your muscles are getting stronger.” The idea is to reframe for them what it means to be tired. It’s not necessarily a reason to stop, but this is your opportunity to have that growth experience. It’s when things are difficult that you are learning.
Consider teachers who experience a prompting and active reflection form of intervention:
Greg: Jason Okonofua, who examined how teachers interact with kids who are misbehaving in school, gave experienced teachers stories about other teachers who listened, who took an empathic approach to their students who were misbehaving. First, instead of just punishing the student, they took time to listen to the student, understand the perspective that the student had on whatever the incident was. Second, they prioritize maintaining a positive relationship with the student rather than just dismissing the student.
Then he asked these teachers, “How do you do this in your classroom? We want to learn from you as an experienced teacher because we want to give these stories to future teachers in training programs, so that they too can really understand how to interact with misbehaving kids in class.” That exercise reduced the suspension rate among students whose teachers got that message by 50 percent over the school year.
On increasing commitment with action:
Greg: People are really motivated to see their behaviors and attitudes as consistent. For example, [if] you get people to articulate and advocate for an idea, then they become more persuaded by that idea.
This is sometimes called the seeing-is-believing procedure, where you give people new information, you give them new facts, and then you ask them to describe that new information or those new facts to some third party. When they do that, they come to be committed to those ideas, more so than if you had just given them that information in the first place. It’s enlisting people as active co-creators of an intervention message for other people.
There are many more examples in that conversation, and it’s a podcast episode that is both good and scary. It’s good because you realize just how powerful interventions are, and you can be a better manager, parent, or friend by being deliberate about what you say and how you say it. But it’s also scary because we can do a lot of damage just by being careless with our words. Even worse, the same techniques can be used by someone manipulative to achieve destructive ends. It’s really worth a listen, and the episode page has additional highlights if you prefer to skim.
