Focus Experts onto Their Feelings

Consumers feel good when being respected as experts in a field. But studies at University of Massachusetts-Boston and Northwestern University document how expertise numbs the feelings arising from consumers’ experiences in that field. 

• Movie reviewers qualified as experts on the Rotten Tomatoes website were significantly less likely to use emotion-loaded words such as “exciting,” “loved,” and “exhilarating” than were everyday consumers who posted a review on the site. 
• The researchers asked study participants to describe photos which had previously been rated as highly positive or negative in emotional arousal. Those participants who described themselves as photography experts produced less emotionally extreme descriptions. 
• As studied consumers became more experienced tasting wine or beer, the strength of emotion in their reviews dropped.

     Further inquiry identified an explanation for the numbing as the experts’ use of their knowledge to cut up the items into categories. The Boston / Northwestern researchers were able to head off experts’ numbing of emotions by asking the experts to think about any feelings the assessed items might elicit. The expressions of emotions by the experts were then no longer substantially different from the expressions from people describing themselves as lacking high expertise in the domain.
     To obtain from your expert customers more of the emotional expressions which can help you persuade, encourage them to focus on their feelings as they are evaluating alternatives. Apply that same encouragement to yourself and your colleagues who consider themselves to be experts. It could cut down on lying. Here's why I say that:
     Researchers at University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, New York University, and University of British Columbia found that product and service experts don’t stay sufficiently familiar with details of their logic. They’re accustomed to giving advice from habit rather than tracing out the details each time. If pinned down by requests for those details, experts often make up reasons for their conclusions. When they can’t recall details in their reasoning, they assume it must have slipped from mind.
     What’s worse is that the experts tend to consider the reasons as genuine. They’ll create false memories on the spot and then accept those memories as real. They don’t know they’re lying. Focusing on their feelings allows the experts to dig deeper in order to identify the true rationales, which might be the emotional reactions themselves.

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Give Experts Novel Product Categories 

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