The more they warned, the more they smoked

Top line. Gruesome cigarette warnings backfired—driving smoking rates up instead of down. The reason? Hidden mental frictions like the reactance bias, which blocks persuasion when freedom feels threatened. This article unpacks five subconscious stumbling blocks, drawn from Jonah Berger’s The Catalyst, and offers tactics to help shift stubborn mindsets.

Gruesome images and grim stats didn’t cut cigarette consumption. In fact, ramping up the warnings only drove smoking rates higher. Why? The reactance bias—a subconscious pushback when the mind feels its freedom is under threat—blocked the brain’s ability to absorb the message and shift behaviour. Change only began when people felt they were choosing for themselves.

That’s just one of the hidden frictions Wharton professor Jonah Berger explores in The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. Read on to uncover five key mental stumbling blocks—and the tactics that help minds move.

Stumbling block 1. The reactance bias.

The most common tactic used to change the human mind is the push one. But the push approach typically fails. Worse, it often backfires to produce an opposite effect. Because the subconscious mind is preconditioned to push back.

For survival reasons, the human mind has evolved a powerful innate anti persuasion system. Called the reactance bias, it intuitively triggers suspicion when persuasion is in the air. Or autonomy is under threat. The bias causes the mind to automatically retrieve counter arguments. But often, it fires up to take the mind in exactly the opposite direction.

The reactance bias was behind the surge in teenagers consuming washing machine pods after TV warnings urged them to stop a deadly online challenge—proof that instructive messages trigger the opposite effect through subconscious resistance.

Strategies to overcome the reactance bias involve avoiding the push or influence tactics that alert the mind to trigger the bias and the automated defenses it fires up. Asking questions (rather than telling) is an effective way to bypass the reactance bias. The questioning method gets the mind to self-frame, self-interrogate, and arrive at its own conclusions – ensuring that the mind’s high need for control, autonomy and agency aren’t usurped.  And that conclusions are seemingly self-created. Another way to temper the reaction bias is to offer options which satisfies the mind’s keen need to preserve agency and choice. 

Stumbling block 2. The endowment bias.

The human mind is biased to prefer the status quo over change. There are a few key reasons for this. Firstly, the brain is reluctant to waste the energy already invested in achieving an understanding of the current situation and the familiarised rules of play associated with it. Secondly, the unfamiliar requires the very energy-conscious brain to reluctantly allocate scarce spare mental fuel to evaluate new rules and uncertain consequences that a shift demands. But mostly, it’s because the brain has evolved a bias to avoid loss and risk that it has learned to associate with change. (The brain fears loss about 2.8 times more than it values gain.)

Strategies to limit endowment bias friction involve surfacing the costs and consequences of maintaining the status quo. And framing the loss that inactions cause.  (Helping the mind to easily see the difference in consequences between what they’re doing now and what they could be doing.)

Stumbling block 3. Distance

Research shows that every mind has a centre point for every value and belief it holds. It’s also clear that the mind has an inbuilt restriction on the distance it will allow itself to move from the centre point, depending on how strongly it holds the belief or value. at point. Strongly held beliefs and values won’t shift much from the centre. Weakly held beliefs may shift much and easily. Efforts to move a mind too far from its centre usually result in a mental shut-off.

The standard approach to shifting a mindset usually involves the supply of rational argument supported by facts, logic, and figures. But behavioral scientists now know that it doesn’t work. Firstly, science shows that the brain makes 95% of its decisions in the subconscious areas of the mind where emotion rules and facts and figures can’t be processed. Secondly, and thanks to a confirmation bias, the mind is hard-wired to intuitively select and reference data that supports its concretised mindsets – and actively resists investing the energy needed to consider information that conflicts with it. (So, the subliminal mind literally blinds itself to facts and figures that don’t support its memorised beliefs and values.)

Mental momentum only happens by prompting a mindset to move a short, acceptable distance from the centre at a time. This tactic helps the mind to establish a new middle point – allowing the mind to acclimatise to the shift. A new middle point opens the mind to new in-range data. The pace of shifting the brain’s middle on any issue is also governed by the how strong a belief or value is held, and the shift tolerances of a mind.  Too fast on the fortress of strong beliefs or values and the blocks come up.

A useful tactic to shift the middle of a strongly held belief by a meaningful distance starts with finding unsticking positions (a common point), and then pivoting to shift the field of reference a short distance to a new middle point. (Small, incremental shifts at a time allow the mind to gradually widen its change scope – and absorb the evidence that supports change.)

Stumbling block 4. Uncertainty

Change of any kind creates levels of uncertainty. And because uncertainty attracts risk and loss, the mind has evolved to fear and avoid it. Research shows that the degree of uncertainty shapes the mind’s momentum and decisions significantly. In the face of too much uncertainty, the mind typically defaults to do nothing.

Successful strategies to overcome the uncertainty bias help the mind to sample change before committing to it – or provide the evidence that helps the mind to anticipate the consequences of change reliably. The more predictable, easy to understand and less risky the change appears to the brain; the more momentum is likely. Making it easy to trial the proposed change is a very effective way of paring down uncertainty.  Being clear about what the proposed change means is also an effective tactic. Removing lock-in terms and conditions help to reduce the uncertainty barriers that block decisions to consider new options.

 Stumbling block 5. Corroborating evidence. (Social reinforcement.)

People have a range of strong or weak attitudes to things.  The strength of attitudes gets formed and reinforced over time to concretise in the brains memory system, together with automated behavior templates associated with each memory that fire up on cue.

When attitudes are weak, beliefs and behaviours tend to be more easily shifted. But when they’re granite strong, huge inertia is needed to change them. (For example, how often and easily have you shifted your core political beliefs or base views on climate change if you have strong views on them?)

The conventional approach to shifting strong attitudes is the frequency one; make the same point the same way repeatedly. Perhaps vary the channel and message to avoid tune outs from over familiarity. Reach and frequency tactics tend to work adequately when attitudes are weak. But get blocked when beliefs and values are very strong. (Because the brain is biased to discount information that doesn’t fit with reinforced beliefs – and it reacts negatively to persuasion, more especially when iron-clad attitudes are assailed.)

The most effective strategies to shift strongly held attitudes leverage the human bias for social proof – or the referencing of the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of others. The weightier an issue and the more vague or ambiguous the situational clues, the more the mind will seek the influence of others.

The degrees of connection to others, similarity of others, the number of others, the concentration of others and the timing and context of the corroborating evidence flowing from others, play the biggest role in the efficacy of a social proof strategy.

The bottom line. If your message keeps hitting walls, it’s likely triggering hidden mental defences. Apply these tactics, and you’ll remove the subconscious frictions that stall change—so your influence strategies land, shift behaviour, and pay back. Ignore them, and you’ll keep wasting effort pushing minds that won’t move.

About. Jonathan Hall is the CEO of ThinkWorks, a behavioural science consultancy that helps organisations move more minds with influence and narrative science. ThinkWorks blends the disciplines of business and brand strategy, behavioural science, and storytelling art to produce messaging tactics that persuade effectively.

Jonathan is a graduate of Wits Business School, has trained in strategic modelling at Aix-Marseille University in France, and is certified in behavioural economics, brand, and narrative science.

He is the author of the e-books The Power of Brand Story and BrainSell. His work has earned several accolades, including the IMM Marketing Company of the Year award, a Deloitte Best Company to Work For award, and a PSA Innovator of the Year award.

To find out if ThinkWorks can help your organisation influence the minds you target, contact ThinkWorks for a no-obligation exploration.

jonh@thinkworks.co.za | +27 83 251 0716

If you think this post will help others, please share.