Make your Presentation Materials more "Doable"

It's amazing what research will reveal to those who seek it out to improve themselves or the things they do.  An article in Scientific American shared a study by researchers at the University of Michigan that showed that simple unadorned fonts influenced subjects to complete assigned tasks and improved the subjects attitude, making them more positive during the process.

What does this mean to you?  If you do presentations, skip the fancy, hard to read fonts.  They're pretty, but slow the brain down to the point that the subject's brain is tired from trying to read the directions that doing the directions seem harder.  In short, the brain interprets the ease of reading the directions as an indicator of how easy the tasks will be to complete.

Solid research yields the same results time after time, so if one duplicates a study's process and factors, one can expect the same results.  Get your participants engaged by adjusting your handouts and other materials.

Increase Receptiveness of Ideas by Using a Listener's Right Ear

Wired Science presents an article on research by psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy.  In this study, done in dance clubs in Italy (Who says research can't be fun?), 172 subjects were approached by a researcher and asked for a cigarette.  Out of the 88 people who were asked in their left ear, only 17 gave her a cigarette.  Of the 88 people who were asked the same request in their right ear, 34 granted the request.  In addition, researchers observed even more people interacting, noted similar requests, and observed the success or failure of the request.  This large difference in the results led the psychologists to conclude that the result differences were due to which ear received the requests and not just chance.

When hypothesizing why the right ear yielded substantially more positive results it was noted,

"What’s surprising about the study is that ear choice had such a decided impact on the behavior of participants in a natural, or as the researchers put it, ecological, setting. Why would people feel more generous when their right ears are addressed?

Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain."

The take-away from this is that those in positions where persuasion is paramount in getting a desired action (i.e., sales people, teachers, politicians, etc.), the right ear should be favored.  In private conferences, put yourself to the right of the person with whom you are talking.  On the salesfloor, stand to the customer's right.  Teachers should put more difficult students on right side of the room and when they give individual feedback, talk in the student's right ear.

Granted that the results, before counted as fact, need to be reproduced and verified, but, it does give us something to think about and act on to see if it's true in our circumstances.

--via Wired Science: Requests to the Right Ear Are More Successful Than Those to the Left

Seek and Act on Research Based Ideas

I'm a big fan of data and analytics.  Using data to make day-to-day decisions gives me sound footing supporting what I do.  Harry Wong, the noted educator, has said that what you do is not important, that knowing why you do what you do is the important thing. Whether you agree with him or not, it's always intrigued me to understand why some people get results and some do not.  Why do some sales people make that big sale and others let it slip through their fingers?  Why is one presentation killer while another elicits nothing but yawns?  Why will students perform for one teacher, but resist another?

Sometimes, successful people do not even know why what they do works.  It just does.  But there are those of us who have the curiosity to try to figure out the "why" of success