Remind Seniors How You Informed Them

With advancing age come increasing tendencies for consumers to forget where they learned helpful information as well as to forget how helpful the information was. To maintain in the minds of seniors your continuing value as a persuasion agent, correct for the fleeting of these memories. On follow-up contacts, ask your elderly clients the reasons why they made the decisions they did. Listen for answers claiming, “Oh, I knew that already,” when the accurate answers would indicate, “You told me something I didn’t already know.” In the same way, spot answers claiming, “I knew that was going to happen,” when the accurate answer would indicate, “You got it right when you predicted the consequences.”
     Researchers at Trinity College, College of Charleston, and University of Toronto, all in Canada, confirmed findings about forgetting the source when it comes to factual information. For instance, one statement in the study was, “About four hours are required to boil an ostrich egg.” Older adults could remember the fact as well as younger adults but were inferior in recalling which of two individuals—either a man or a woman in the study—had read the statement to them. This was true even though the recall test was administered less than half an hour after the reading of the statements and the researchers conducted the study during what was thought best for memory skills in each age group. Participants aged 19 to 25 years old were assessed during a 12:00 to 5:00 PM block. For the participants aged 61 to 75 years old, an 8:00 to 11:00 AM block was used.
     This source forgetting effect has importance beyond selling in the store or office. It applies to media persuasion as well. Who told it to us? Did we read it in a political flier or in an editorial from a newspaper we trust? Maybe it was on TV, but did it come in the TV program itself or in one of the flashy commercials?
     Researchers at University of Düsseldorf and Max Planck Institute for Human Development documented that hindsight bias is greater in older than in younger consumers. Hindsight bias occurs when consumers overestimate the extent to which they believe, after having had an experience, that they’d been able to predict the experience. Hindsight bias leads seniors to devalue the advice they’d been given since the seniors believe they could have figured it out themselves.

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Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me
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