Professor Ellen Langer the godmother of mindfulness conducted an experiment in 1970s. She was trying to do an experiment to understand how mindful or mindless people are. She wanted to check how difficult it would be to get people to allow someone else to skip the line to jump the queue. But this experiment while it was about mindfulness, I think has a great lesson for us in communication. Professor Langer looked around the campus and found a place which had a photocopying machine where there was usually a line. Those were the days where the only big way of sharing was photocopying, no internet, no computers. She went to this place where they usually a line for people to photocopy and she got some volunteers. She divided them into three parts and said for each of them she would give them a line to say and five pages. They would go with those five pages and use that line to seek for permission to skip the line. The first set of volunteers were told to go and ask, “I have five pages to photocopy may I skip the line, may I jump the queue?” About 60% of time they were allowed to jump the queue the second set of people were told to give a reason and so their statement was “I have five pages to photocopy I’m in a rush may I jump the queue?” 93% of people allowed the person to jump the queue and the third option was “I have five pages may I jump the queue because I have some photocopying to do,” as if the rest of the people were lined up for something else. Even now because of lack of mindfulness 94% of people allowed the person to jump the queue now let’s go back to the first two questions one where no reason was given and 60% allowed and one where there was a reason given and 93% allowed people to jump the queue. What a powerful experiment! Business Points ( Tags ) #storytelling #business #bestseller #stories #reasoning #PowerofBecause #mindfulness
