Chapter 13

• Jurisdiction: United States

Chapter 13

How to Appeal to Riders and Elephants

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

—Robert Ebert, film critic

Overview

There were times during my jury trials when jurors heard my opponent’s witness admit to a critical fact, yet the jurors dismissed the admission because it didn’t fit with the belief they had formed about the case. My typical reaction was to conclude that the jurors weren’t smart enough to understand the admission’s significance or weren’t paying close enough attention. Here’s the reality: they had understood it and they were paying attention. They just chose not to believe it.

This situation highlights the interactions between the two parts of our brains: the Rider brain and the Elephant brain. The Rider brain is the part of our brain involved with logic and analysis. You’d think that, posed with some decision-making task, this part of our brain would take charge and direct the outcome. But it is actually the Elephant brain, the part involved with emotion, that is primarily responsible for making most of our important decisions. If the Elephant brain decides not to believe something that the Rider brain understands, the Rider brain is powerless to overrule the Elephant brain’s decision. When people reject a logical argument or some empirical evidence that appeals exclusively to the Rider brain, it is not because they don’t understand. It is because they have chosen not to believe because their Elephant brains haven’t been motivated to believe.

The problem with many presentations of complex cases is there is too much appeal to the Rider brains and too little appeal to the Elephant brains. For the story of your complex case to solidify or change beliefs, you must direct your audience’s Rider brains and motivate their Elephant brains to decide in your favor. This chapter instructs on how to do that. I rely on the general premises outlined in an excellent book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath.³²

The Elephant and Rider Brains

Switch asserts that any effort to influence another person’s decision must appeal to both the Rider and Elephant brains. The Rider brain, the analytical brain, is the source of our planning and direction (our strength), but it often overthinks a problem, resulting in wheel-spinning (our weakness). In contrast, the Elephant brain, the emotional brain, is the source of our courage, creativity, love, loyalty, passion, sympathy, etc. (our strength). But the Elephant brain also yearns for instant gratification and quick fixes (our weakness). Both the Rider and Elephant brains are involved in every important decision we make. And the two brains constantly communicate with each other, conferring about every choice we face.

Research conducted by Stanford University professor James March shows that the communication traffic between the Rider and Elephant brains concerns considerations of the logical consequences (the Rider brain’s analysis) and personal-identity consequences (the Elephant brain’s analysis).

The consideration of logical consequences involves weighing the costs and benefits of the choice presented. This is the rational, analytical thinking that the Rider brain is well suited to handle.

The consideration of personal-identity consequences doesn’t involve a calculation of costs and benefits, but instead an assessment of how the decision defines the person. (What should someone like me choose in this situation?) Any decision that violates one’s identity is doomed, which explains why financial incentives often fail to motivate employees to change behavior and why a Silicon Valley millionaire would vote against an income tax cut.

Despite the power of the Elephant brain, we can’t function unless both brains are active participants in decision-making. Studies conducted on people who suffered injuries to the Elephant part of the brain (meaning only their Rider brains were functioning) showed they had trouble making even the most routine decisions. “[R]esearchers have found that patients with injuries to parts of the limbic system, an ancient group of brain structures important in generating emotions, . . . struggle with making decisions.”³³ Without the Elephant brain operating, the wheels just spin.

What happens when there is a conflict between what the Elephant brain wants to decide and what the Rider brain wants to decide? In Switch, the authors give us the answer:

Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.³⁴

The $10 Negotiation Game

What occurs in a simple negotiation game illustrates this mental tug-of-war between the two brains and the ultimate power of the Elephant brain. There are two players in the game. The first player is given $10 and told he or she can offer the other player any amount up to $10. The other player, the recipient, is told that the offer can be accepted or rejected. But here’s the catch: if the offer is rejected, neither player keeps anything.

A win-win right? All the second player must do is accept whatever is offered, and that player gets free money while the first player loses nothing. Under the logical-consequences consideration, the second player should conduct the analysis and accept whatever amount is offered—free money with no strings attached.

The negotiation breaks down when the second player is offered just a few dollars. In those instances, many players turned down the offer and the free couple of bucks. Why? Asked to explain their decision, the players said they were ticked off by the stingy partner. The player rejected the offer based on an emotional response. (My Greek grandmother used to say, “You don’t like me once, I don’t like you ten times!” That’s how this game plays out: You can take your measly two bucks and. . .) The personal-identity consideration kicks in, causing the player to reject the offer.

Brain scans taken of participants’ brains while they played the negotiation game showed an activity increase in the anterior insula, the Elephant portion of the brain responsible for negative emotion, including anger and disgust. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, the Rider portion of the brain involved in goal orientation (like making money), was also busy assessing the choice. Both parts of the brain were firing away, processing during the analysis phase.

The results of this study, conducted by Dr. Alan Sanfey, a cognitive neurologist at the University of Arizona, were reported in an article published in the Harvard Business Review:

By tracking the activity of these two regions, Sanfey mapped what appeared to be a struggle between emotion and reason as each sought to influence the players’ decisions. Punish the bastard? Or take the money, even though the deal stinks? When the disgusted anterior insula was more active than the rational goal-oriented prefrontal...