Wharton School of Business professor Jonah Berger shares his tips for getting your peers and target audiences to "yes."

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A number of years ago, some researchers were interested in what gets people to say yes. Yes! Yes! Yes, Bill Sagan! Whether we're salespeople, whether we're bosses, or even in our own personal lives, we're trying to get other people to do something. And so, how can we be more effective at doing that? If you understand the science of language, you can communicate much more effectively. I'm Jonah Berger. I'm a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Magic Words. The most fascinating thing I've found from the work that we and others have done is that subtle shifts can have such a big impact. Adding a couple letters to the end of a word can increase the likelihood that other people do what you ask them. So, some researchers a couple years ago went to a local preschool and they asked four or five-year-old kids to clean up a messy classroom. The floor was covered in crayons and toys and books, and they asked the kids for help cleaning up. For some of the kids, they used a normal approach we might use. They said, hey, can you help clean up? But for the second half of the kids, they tried a slightly different strategy. They asked them, would you mind being a helper and cleaning up the classroom? Now, the difference between asking for help and asking for someone to be a helper is infinitesimally small. It's adding two letters at the end of the word help, yet those two letters led to about a 50% increase in people's likelihood of helping. Again, the difference between vote and voter is infinitesimally small, just one letter in this case, yet that one letter led to about a 15% increase in people's likelihood of turning out at the polls. What's the difference between help and helper and vote and voter? Why might one be more effective than the other? It turns out it comes down to the difference between actions and identities. We all want to see ourselves as smart and competent and intelligent in a variety of different things. So rather than describing someone as hardworking, describing them as a hard worker will make that trait seem more persistent and more likely to last. Rather than asking people to lead more, tell them, can you be a leader? Rather than ask them to innovate, can you be an innovator? By turning actions into identities, we can make people much more likely to engage in those desired actions.