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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR IDEA Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Steve J Martin, co-author with Noah Goldstein and Robert Chaldini

of the small big

small changes that spark big influence.

Steve thanks so much for talking with us today.

It's lovely to be with you Sarah thank you.

So I'd like to start actually with some of the ineffective ways we usually try to influence others.

What are some of the common tactics that we sort of turn to out of instinct that end up not actually being very effective?

Yes, that's a good question.

I think there are two.

The first is to simply apply an incentive

to try and affect some change or influence someone else.

You know, if we pay people a little bit more money, they'll work a little harder.

If we dangle that carrot, they'll be perhaps more infused to fulfill or reach that goal that we actually set them. Now I'm not going to say

that incentives don't work, any economists will tell you that people do respond to

incentives, but our response to incentives are shaped by psychological mechanisms and sometimes they don't always work the way we actually plan for them to work.

Oftentimes they might crowd out an intrinsic motivation to want to behave or fulfill a goal anyway

and so in that instance they can backfire on us.

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