Gini Nelson’s Engaging Conflicts

This is part of on ongoing series reviewing Robert Cialdini’s new book, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. I write more about the series on the page called “Ways to Be Persuasive”. The book lists 50 strategies, and I will be reviewing each from time to time. Of course I’m not the first or only mediation blogger to write about this book! Nancy Hudgins, a San Francisco attorney-mediator and blogger posted about the book here.

Way to Be Persuasive #1.
How can inconveniencing your audience increase your persuasiveness?

This is my shorthand note to myself for this chapter: Bandwagon and social proof. Join countless others in doing this; if operators are busy, please call again. Inconvenience demonstrates social proof of “others are doing this.”

People’s ability to understand what affects their behavior is surprisingly poor. When they are not sure what to do, they tend to look around to see what other people like themselves are doing to guide their own decisions and actions. Concerning call centers, the thought process can go like this: If you get through immediately, are too few others calling in? If you have to wait [note: but not too much], doesn’t that mean lots of other people think it’s a good idea to call? Another example: hotel guests asked to help the environment by recycling their towels did increase towel recycling, but hotel guests told that the majority of other guests recycled their towels increased towel recycling even more.

I love this Jane Brody Personal Health review Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions published today at the online New York Times. As I have said before, I embraced coffee as my drug of choice when I started law school, having survived graduate school’s all nighters with it. But for a VERY brief flirtation with green tea (which I NEVER liked — an authority had stated that if you only cut out coffee, you would lose 10 pounds over the course of a year and I HAD to try that — I only lasted about 1 month, if I recall — it wasn’t going to be worth it even if true), I remain committed to coffee. Here’s an excerpt from Jane’s article:

[A]s with any product used to excess, consumers often wonder about the health consequences. And researchers readily oblige. Hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers.

Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes. Coffee and tea, after all, are complex mixtures of chemicals, several of which may independently affect health.

Here are some stats provided with the article to keep in mind:

Here are links to my earlier posts about coffee art, and about super coffee.

Image from http://www.pachd.com/free-images/food-images.html

Vickie Pynchon is the most prolific ADR blogger I know, and she writes LOTS more than her main ADR blog, Settle It Now Negotiation Blog. This week, she is hosting Blawg Review #179 at her Intellectual Property ADR Blog.

Here’s her opener:

If intellectual property had a theme song it would have to be “Like a Virgin.”

Why?

Because IP is all about “the very first time,” the “aha” moment, the creative spark that gives rise to previously undreamed imaginings.The restrictions of “how we’ve always done things” fall away and the numbing repetition of days become vibrant. The rest, of course, is work. Trial and error. Success. Failure. Rearranging the disaligned. Completion.

Then the suits arrive. That’s us, the lawyers.

In honor of the moment of creation at the root of every intellectual property dispute, this week’s Blawg Review No. 171 gives you the great virgins of history.

To kick off the “virgin” IP ADR Blawg Review, we’re linking you to Kate Monro’s brilliant and (in)famous blog The Virginity Project and giving you a tantilizing excerpt:

Here’s the link for more ….

It’s enormously challenging to write a Blawg Review. Bravo, Vickie!