What type of accountability system would work for you?

Specifically, the effects of presentation order depend on (a) the amount of time between the end of the first message and the start of the second message and (b) the amount of time between the end of the second message and the moment when the audience finally makes up its mind (see FIGURE 8. Getting Time on Your Side When making a persuasive appeal, it is better to go first if the audience will be making its decision after hearing both arguments and then taking a break. But it is better to go last if the audience will make their decision immediately after hearing your presentation. An illustration represents the effectiveness of response with respect to time. The illustration is divided into two parts- timing (left) and which argument is most effective? The timing bar shows two messages- the upper part shows message hash tag 1 conveyed by a man on September 3, followed by a rightward arrow to show message hash tag 2 conveyed by a lady on September 3, which is further followed by a rightward arrow marked time delay to show audience on September 7 (comprising of 4 people), which reads text Audience make up its mind; If there is no delay separating the two messages, and if there is a considerable delay between the end of the second message and the audience's response, then the first message will be more persuasive than the second (other things being equal, of course). It is in sight and hurtling toward us. I often give public talks and no matter where I am in the world, I begin by inviting people to share how they are feeling about the environment with the person sitting beside them, and then, if they are willing, to call out some of the words that capture these feelings. I have done this hundreds of times, and every time, the answers shock me. When I look out at these audiences, I see bright, healthy, relaxed-looking people who have somehow found the time to come to a public lecture. Yet their answers convey an unnerving level of grief and despair: Scared, Hopeless, Depressed, Numb, Apathetic, Overwhelmed, Guilty, Paralyzed, Helpless, Angry, call out the voices. Whether the room is filled with adults, university students, or kids as young as grade three, whenever I ask, the words remain the same. Not long ago, I found an almost identical collection of words. It's a list published in a research journal by Johana Kotisova. The words describe the emotions that crisis reporters feel when they are covering horrific events such as the Haitian earthquake, the Brussels or Paris attacks, the war in Ukraine, the war in Liberia, refugee camps, 9/11, famines in Central African countries, or the aftermath of the Greek debt crisis. The same words. What this might look like is first imagining yourself standing in front of your peers at work. Just imagining.

If the thought of that is enough to cause you anxiety, then you are starting in the right place. So here you are sitting in your yoga pants at home imagining this workplace situation and you start sweating your ass off and hyperventilating. You're at home, nothing bad is going to happen to you. Try some of those deep breathing exercises while you stay in that situation and then just wait it out. I promise you the discomfort won't last forever. Move through, not away. Then you do it again and again until you got that scenario on lock. No problem. This is called the primacy effect. What accounts for this effect? When little time elapses between the two messages, the first message is still fresh in audience members' minds when they receive the second message. As a result, they have more difficulty learning the arguments in the second message. As we discussed earlier, arguments that are difficult to comprehend are less persuasive. Primacy effect An effect that occurs when initially encountered information primarily influences attitudes (eg, the first speaker in a policy debate influences the audience's policy approval). In contrast, if there is a time delay separating the two messages, and if the audience makes up its mind immediately after the second message, then the second message will be more persuasive than the first. This is called the recency effect. Under these conditions, the first message does not interfere so much with the audience's ability to learn the second argument. What I am saying is that ordinary kids and adults regularly describe their everyday feelings about the environment using the same words that journalists use to describe what it feels like to report on the worst imaginable crises. The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.

This crucial idea drives this article. My agenda is absolutely to spread hope. I believe the way to do that is to collectively challenge the tired narrative of environmental doom and gloom that reproduces a hopeless status quo, and replace it with an evidence-based argument for hope that improves our capacity to engage with the real and overwhelming issues we face. The power of hope and beliefs When everyone around you is shouting doom and gloom, actively choosing to be hopeful--and to do the hard work of seeking out and amplifying solutions--is difficult. But it's also essential, because hope really matters. It matters to your individual health and well-being. Many studies underscore the value of feeling hopeful in all sorts of situations. Now it's time to kick it up a notch. Keep imagining that situation and this time actually practicing giving the presentation. Probably a little more stressful? Weather the storm, work through it, then kick it up a notch again. Go to the actual room that you will be giving the presentation in and let that freak you out for a bit. No biggie, though. Weather it, work through it, kick it up a notch. When you get to the day of the presentation, you're going to think, Shit, shit, shit! That asshole Robert didn't give me a way to practice the actual real thing! Well you're right and you're wrong. More importantly, the second argument is fresher in the audience's memory when it makes a decision. Recency effect

An effect that occurs when recently encountered information primarily influences attitudes (eg, a commercial viewed just before shopping influences a shopper's choices). So the answer to which of the interview positions will have the advantage in the hiring decision is, It depends. If the applicants are to interview back to back with no delay (ie, before the holiday break), and if the employers are going to take some time after the second interview to think over the arguments before deciding (ie, after the holidays), then the primacy effect will be dominant, and the first interview will be the more persuasive. But if there is to be a long break between the two interviews (ie, one before the holiday and one after), and the employers are going to make their decision immediately after the second interview, then the recency effect will be dominant, and the second interview will be the more persuasive. Emotional Responses to Persuasive Messages Persuading people involves changing their thoughts, but it also involves changing how they feel about something at a deeper, gut level. Persuasive messages are more effective if they get the audience to associate a position or a product with positive feelings and the avoidance of negative feelings. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. If you have hope, you're better able to tolerate pain. You're more likely to follow through with physiotherapy or other recuperative treatments following an injury or illness. Feeling hopeful leads to better recovery from anxiety disorders and cardiovascular disease. Being hopeful also matters to how we collectively influence what happens on the planet. That's because thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs are so powerful, they actually shape objective outcomes. The placebo effect I had the opportunity to think more about the power of expectations when I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2018. A researcher named Parker Goyer at the Mind & Body Lab generously talked me through the breakthrough work the lab's founder, Alia Crum, and her team were doing. You're probably familiar with the placebo effect. Though not named as such at the time, the concept dates back almost five hundred years. You probably can't practice the actual thing exactly how it will occur in real life, but what you have practiced now is the secret that I have been blabbing about this whole time. You have been practicing feeling anxious and kicking ass anyway.

So far I have been fairly non-specific regarding the anxiety symptoms that I have described. That's for good reason. I want you to understand the beast in general before taking a look into its more hardcore forms. In this article I am going to describe the anxiety disorders to you. These are psychological disorders that are clinical in nature. I need to stress to you that you should not and really cannot diagnose yourself. Leave that to the professionals. I know it's difficult because you are a hypochondriac and can just look up the symptoms, but trust me on this one. Generally, this below-the-cortex approach to persuasion takes the peripheral route. Conscious deliberation about the message is not needed and might even interfere with the effectiveness of these strategies. Repetition and Familiarity One of the most basic ways that persuasive messages get the audience to feel positive about a position or brand is through repetition. If you have ever watched the same TV channel for more than an hour, you have probably noticed that the same commercials are repeated over and over. One advantage of repeating messages is it can help the audience comprehend messages that might be complex. Second, even if the message is not difficult to comprehend, seeing or hearing a message over and over again increases the accessibility of a product or position in the audience's memory. Think, for example, of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 (see FIGURE 8. In our everyday experience, if we have been told our whole lives that Brawny brand paper towels are the quicker picker-upper, then that information is going to pop up instantly when we're at the store trying to decide among 10 brands of paper towels. The Ministry of Truth, the governing body of the dystopian world George Orwell sets up in his article 1984, saturates its citizens with intense propaganda campaigns to indoctrinate them with officially acceptable attitudes. There are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative, wrote the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne in 1572,5 referring to situations in which a person experiences relief from pain, anxiety, or other symptoms because they believe they have taken medicine or received treatment, when in reality, they have not. The placebo effect demonstrates the power of our minds to produce physical changes in our bodies.