Messengers
8 ways to get heard by Stephen Martin & Joseph Marks
“The messenger is the message” is the mantra of the authors, behavioural scientists from Colombia University and UCL. They examine the qualities that not only make people make us listen to some people and not others, but also form a large part of whether we accept the message itself.
They divide these qualities into hard and soft.
Hard: socio-economic position, dominance, competence and attractiveness
Soft: warmth, vulnerability, trustworthiness and charisma
Even after reading the book, I’m not absolutely clear why attractiveness is a hard quality and charisma a soft one, but it’s certainly an interesting book, complete with some thought-provoking experimental data that backs up their arguments. For example, when you introduce a colleague as an expert and give a few brief reasons, it can have a significant impact on how that colleague is perceived even though the other person knows you have a vested interest in describing them that way.
Of course few, if any, people have all eight qualities. They don’t go into this but I found it fun to consider the strengths and weaknesses of certain politicians e.g. Trump, Corbyn, Johnson, Starmer, Merkel.
The same guys feature in this eatsleepworkrepeat podcast.