Identify When to Use Self-Identity Appeals

“Thanks for participating in this online experiment. Please find a coin, flip it ten times, and then type in how many heads and how many tails you obtain. To make this experiment more interesting for you, we’ll send you $1.00 for each toss that turns out heads.”
     Those are roughly the instructions given to study participants by researchers at University of California-San Diego, London Business School, and Stanford University.
     This project was assessing honesty, but also something more: Does it make a difference if we caution the participants, “Please don’t cheat,” or say instead, “Please don’t be a cheater”? One group of study participants were given the “cheat” caution, and the rest were given the “cheater” caution.
     It did make enough of a difference to be of interest. The average was 5.49 heads reported by those given the “cheat” instructions. This was statistically higher than the five heads we’d expect by chance, indicating that people cheated. For those given the “cheater” instructions, the average number of heads reported was 4.88, which is not statistically different from five heads.
     The San Diego/London/Stanford researchers conclude that it would be more effective to tell people, “Please don’t be a litterbug,” than “Please don’t litter.” In the realm of retail sales, I’ll add that a consumer interested in safety should be more motivated to purchase if told, “With this car, you can be a safe driver,” than “With this car, you can drive safely.”
     The explanation for the difference concerns self-identity. People are less threatened by the idea that they are cheating or littering than that they are a cheater or a litterbug. The language of specific people is more powerful than the language of abstract concepts.
     There are times we don’t want to use a self-identity appeal: Assume that one of your staff has cheated a customer by not telling the customer a discount on an item was available for the asking. In discussing the incident with the employee, you’d want to describe what happened and point out a possible consequence is that the customer would find out later about the overcharge and have ill will toward the store. In doing this, it would be better for you to say, “Whether you realized it or not, you cheated the customer,” than, “Whether you realize it or not, you’re a cheater.” In these situations, talk about behaviors and consequences, not self-identity labels.

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