Ask nicely

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It doesn’t take much time listening to Dale Carnegie, Robert Cialdini or or Rory Sutherland to grasp that how you say something can be be just as important as what you say. This is hardly news: How to Win Friends and Influence People was published 85 years ago.

But nor does it take much time reading modern commercial contracts to see that they proven stoutly resistant to its charms. Legal drafting is habitually fastidious, over-particularised and logical at the expense of being what Sutherland calls psycho-logical.

The Coronavirus mask example

A simple example: say you want to ensure all your customers to wear face masks in your shop. Now your objective here is not to prevent bare-faced customers coming into your shop. You could achieve that by locking the door. If no-one comes in your shop there is no point having a door, or for that matter a shop, at all. Instead what do you want is as many customers as possible to come in your shop, and for them to be as as well disposed as possible towards purchasing from you, when they do, while they all wear masks.

So how do you write your sign? Consider four means of skinning the same cat:

“Please do not enter without a face mask.”

This invites the worst possible outcome: that all customers are outright barred from entry, as a default option, which a customer must overcome by meeting certain conditions. All customers will feel unwelcome, even those who can meet the conditions, and many will accept the invitation to continue walking. Those who do enter will have felt chided and will be less favorably disposed as a result.

“Please put on a face mask before entering.”

This is bossy, and it assumes the customer is not in compliance with a minimum standard. It conveys the idea that a customer’s arrival is some kind of necessary evil, only tolerated reluctantly and under certain conditions.

“Please keep your mask on when in the store.”

This is better, as it assumes that the user is already in compliance,. It is not therefore chiding in nature. Nor does it impose an express condition on entry, but rather assumes that the customer will enter. In pressuming that the customer is already wearing a mask, it prompts the one who might have “inadvertently forgotten to” to put one on without directly instructing it so, allows a non-masked customer to make her own decision to put on a mask.

However, there is still a specific instruction to take a single course of action to the exclusion of all others. This is an order so, again, the customer is being commanded.

“Please don’t remove your mask when in the store.” This has all the advantages of of the the example above: it assumes compliance, imposes no condition on entry, and and allows the customer to make her own decision It also phrases its command as a negative, thereby not compelling the customer to take a single mandatory action, but rather ruling out just one course of action, but allowing the multitude of all other non-mutually exclusive possibilities. This way the customer feels maximally empowered, maximally welcomed into the shop and minimally commanded, whilst getting exactly the same message.