00:00:01
this podcast is brought to you by knowledge of Wharton [Music] welcome to knowledge of Wharton I'm
00:00:14
Angie bassini do you remember when your sixth grade English teacher told you that it was better to write your essay
00:00:19
with active verbs well she was onto something Warden marketing Professor Jonah Berger is here with us today to
00:00:24
talk about his latest study on how verb tense can shape consumer persuasion which incidentally is the title of his
00:00:31
paper jota welcome thanks so much for having me I wanted to quote a sentence to get us
00:00:36
started from your paper and I think it's a great a great one quote while almost
00:00:40
everything consumers do involves language researchers are only starting to examine how words Shake attitudes in
00:00:47
Behavior so I wanted to pull the sentence out because I thought why did you want to
00:00:51
study something as specific as verb tests you know I don't know if you've had this
00:00:57
experience but we're all writers right I mean we may not write books or novels or
00:01:01
plays but we're writing all the time right uh you know every day we're writing emails or writing PowerPoint
00:01:06
presentations Word documents and a variety of types of content um and as an academic I also write
00:01:12
academic papers and so one thing I wanted a couple years ago is well look some academic papers are really
00:01:17
impactful others aren't uh obviously some of this is the ideas right some ideas are better and others are less
00:01:22
good but could something beyond the the quality of the idea namely how that idea
00:01:27
is presented also shape its impact right the way we write uh even some of that academic research shape shape uh its
00:01:35
impact and so a couple years ago we did a project on this we looked at thousands
00:01:38
of academic articles the number of citations they received and looked at whether writing shaped citations and we
00:01:44
found that it did and we found one thing in particular that was a little surprising to me was that tense matter
00:01:51
um and I hadn't even really thought about verb tense before so maybe I'll
00:01:54
talk a little about what tense means for for a second you know we can talk about
00:01:57
things in the past tense or the present tense so we can talk about the same thing we can say you know this book had
00:02:04
a great plot or this book has a great plot right had being the past has been present
00:02:10
um if someone um uh asks you about you know what a vacation that you took or something like
00:02:15
that you could say well France was really fun or France is really fun we often get a choice about whether we can
00:02:22
use the past or or the present tense um uh you know the the study found or the study finds uh for example um and so
00:02:30
we found there that writing uh one tense versus the other could have an impact and so we started wondering well maybe
00:02:35
would this generalize this is just something nuanced about academics and academic research or might you know in
00:02:41
in our marketing world might the way we use tests have an impact like the way we
00:02:47
write online reviews or sales pitches um or ads might whether we use the present tense or the past tense shape
00:02:54
how persuaded Our People by our a message uh when I was reading the paper I was thinking about different uh ad slogans
00:03:01
and changing them in my head to past heads and the one that popped into my head was what happens in Vegas stays in
00:03:07
Vegas which would not work nearly as well if it was what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas so yes so there's a
00:03:15
there's a the key takeaway here is that a simple shift in verb tense can make
00:03:19
your message more effective why how how does that work in the brain how is it just that one thing that makes a
00:03:25
difference yeah so let's talk about past tense for a second so so if someone said
00:03:30
um you know that book had a great plot um you know Vegas was fun um uh you know this product won an award
00:03:37
all these things it suggests that this particular person for example with the book that they like the book when they
00:03:43
read it or they enjoyed Vegas or France or whenever they what it was when they visited and because experiences are
00:03:50
naturally subjective right it also suggests that it was their experience Not only was it their experience when
00:03:56
they went in the past class but it was their personal and I experience when we say the present tense though we're doing
00:04:01
a little bit more generalizing right when we say France is fun uh it says well not only was it fun when I went
00:04:08
that particular time a few years ago not only did I find it fun but when I'm
00:04:11
willing to say well France is fun it suggests well everyone would find it fun whenever they went right it suggests
00:04:17
it's a more general idea it's in some sense it's an assertion right uh same
00:04:22
thing you know when we say um the book is great the book is interesting it suggests not as it was
00:04:27
when I read it but it is and will be uh in the future um and so when we when we use the
00:04:33
present tense people go wow you're willing to generalize beyond your own personal experience in the past to
00:04:39
generalize to people Beyond yourself and to what's more likely to happen moving
00:04:43
forward well you you must be more certain right you must be more confident if you're willing to say not just that
00:04:49
France was fun but it is fun not just this book had great plot but it has a great plot when you're going
00:04:55
generalizing beyond the past suggest you're more confident or certain about what you're saying and as a result
00:05:01
people are more likely to follow up on your opinion and be persuaded it makes the audience feel included in your
00:05:07
message a little bit and it also makes you just seem more confident right if you're
00:05:11
willing to go beyond your experience right and suggest something that others will experience as well people go well
00:05:17
it must it must be really good you must be so confident about how good it is how
00:05:21
right it is uh that that I'll be more likely to take that action how did you
00:05:25
go about studying this yeah so we started uh as I as I often like to do in research with field data so in this case
00:05:31
we looked at thousands of online reviews about books right so imagine you go to amazon.com think about all the reviews
00:05:37
there for a given book and so we downloaded over a hundred thousand different reviews and controlling for
00:05:43
all sorts of other different things which book it was for and why the people like the book or not and what topics
00:05:48
they talked about we found that hey writing that review the more sentences in that review that use present tense
00:05:55
the more useful people found it and that was interesting right we thought that was pretty powerful but we could say
00:06:00
well maybe that's just books right books are something you you know you um maybe
00:06:05
you consume in a certain way maybe it's just specific Vector books and so we
00:06:09
looked at another category we looked at music some of you might say well books are only something you read once whereas
00:06:13
music you consume more often maybe it wouldn't hold for music nope same thing
00:06:17
for music so we looked at over a hundred thousand music reviews when reviews used
00:06:21
present tense other people found it more useful and were more persuaded by it you
00:06:25
might say well that's nice but maybe it's just you know enjoyable stuff like
00:06:29
books and music maybe it wouldn't matter in other more sort of technical domains
00:06:34
but we looked at Electronics Consumer Electronics headphones keyboards other sorts of things same effect there as
00:06:40
well maybe it's just about products right maybe it wouldn't hold in Services
00:06:43
right to Yelp and looked at restaurant reviews same thing there and so across all these different domains across the
00:06:49
different categories writing in the present tense increased impact and so that was interesting but we said well
00:06:55
maybe you can't be sure it's causal maybe it's just some sort of correlation
00:06:58
so some experiments we took exactly the same thing and for some people we talked
00:07:03
about in the present tense and other people we talked about in the past tense we found that even in that situation
00:07:07
tight control present tense made it more persuasive even something like the results of a scientific study right so
00:07:15
um this has a certain Impact versus had a certain impact people think a drug is going to be more effective in the future
00:07:21
they're more interested in adopting a weight loss plan when you use things like present tense rather than past
00:07:27
so this has application just sort of across a bunch of different domains marketing advertising just writing in
00:07:33
general um it seems to me you know obviously the big message here is use present verbs uh
00:07:40
is it that simple is that the is that the trick the secret sauce is there something else you're now telling us
00:07:45
when I think about research I think the best research takes something that's big
00:07:49
and important and shows that you can have an impact on it in a meaningful way with something that's not too difficult
00:07:55
to do and so I don't mean to suggest that we can always talk about things in
00:08:00
present tense right if someone asks you did you study for the test you can't say
00:08:05
I am you know if you studied it's in the past so you can't change that because
00:08:09
that is studying happened in the past unless you are currently studying you can't talk about how you uh are
00:08:14
currently presently studying it if you're not that's it in many cases we
00:08:18
have a choice right so I'm an automobile manufacturer for example in my car I'm
00:08:23
uh was voted uh you know Car of the Year in a certain category well it was voted
00:08:29
but it also is Car of the Year currently right I have a choice I can say it was voted car there it is car of the year I
00:08:35
should probably say it is because it's going to be more persuasive you know I'm
00:08:38
a doctor talking to a patient right uh rather than saying it had a 90 success rate saying it has a 90 success rate
00:08:45
it's going to make people think it's more efficacious and make them more
00:08:48
likely to to do it and so we can't use this all the time in all cases but this
00:08:53
again is a situation where shuttle shifts in language can have a important impact on Behavior thank you so much I
00:08:59
consider you the word master so before you go I do want to mention your fourth book it's called magic words how to what
00:09:06
to say to get your way which is the power I think all of us would like to have you could download it anywhere that
00:09:10
you download books Jonah thanks for being here with me today thanks so much for having me if you enjoyed this
00:09:16
conversation you can find more just like it on our website where you can also find all our articles on the latest
00:09:20
research in business for knowledge of warden I'm Angie bassini thanks for joining us
00:09:25
for more insight from knowledge of Wharton please visit knowledge.warton.upen.edu
00:09:31
[Music] thank you [Music]