{"id":900,"date":"2019-05-21T11:40:46","date_gmt":"2019-05-21T11:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.twentytwo.digital\/ukbodytalk\/you-can-convince-42-more-people-by-doing-this-1-simple-thing\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T18:47:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T17:47:09","slug":"you-can-convince-42-more-people-by-doing-this-1-simple-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.twentytwo.digital\/ukbodytalk\/resources\/blogs\/you-can-convince-42-more-people-by-doing-this-1-simple-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"You Can Convince 42% More People By Doing This 1 Simple Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

“…Even a 5 percent sway in your favour could be the difference between gaining…a promotion…”<\/span><\/h2>\n

You Can Convince 42% More People By Doing This 1 Simple Thing<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cIt will never work,\u201d said Professor Adrian Furnham, Head of Psychology at University College London and world-renowned expert on behaviour and influence. \u201cThe reason this study has never been done is that it cannot be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d just pitched him my first idea for a research study. After years of planning, Furnham laughed my idea out of the room. He has published over 1200 scientific papers, so he knows what works and what doesn\u2019t in the world of research.<\/p>\n

But I wasn\u2019t ready to give up.<\/p>\n

I spent six months rethinking and redesigning my theory until I finally had a version of the study that would work. I wanted to identify the most useful behaviours someone could apply when they stood up to speak, to increase their influence. If we could find evidence that certain behaviours gained a better response than others, then I knew we could teach those behaviours to help people boost their confidence along with the impact of their words and ideas.<\/p>\n

Furnham warned me that even though the new design of the study was very strong it might not yield any significant results. We went ahead regardless.<\/p>\n

And what we discovered was far beyond our expectations.<\/p>\n

The study itself was simple.<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

We filmed someone speaking for just 30 seconds.<\/p>\n

Then, we gathered more than 2,000 people from across Europe, India and North America. Each person watched the 30-second video and evaluated the speaker, rating them for how inspiring, convincing, knowledgeable and confident the person appeared to be.<\/p>\n

Each participant saw only one video, but what no one realised was we had created dozens of different versions of this video.<\/p>\n

In each version, the presenter was asked to do everything exactly the same way apart from one slight change to body language. We wanted to see whether or not that single change generated a different rating. We also needed to find out if these changes in body language would work if we changed the speaker\u2019s gender, age, skin colour or perceived attractiveness.<\/p>\n

We used four actors:<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n