"Predictably Irrational" on the topic of communicating expectations

What does your inner dialogue tell you to expect in a given situation? If we can control the messages we send ourselves, are we more likely to be successful?

Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is full of unique insights on how we really decide and act as opposed to how we think we decide and act.

(Incidentally, Ariely's personal story is extremely inspirational. He suffered third degree burns over 70% of his body as a teen. Today he's a successful professor at MIT and a best-selling author.)

My favorite chapter focuses on the effect of our expectations. As we communicate, we need to be aware of how creating a mindset can have a big impact on real-world results, and thus the effectiveness of our message.

Ariely describes one experiment in which Asian-American women were given a math exam. In this test, two stereotypes sat in direct conflict in setting the expectations for the participants' results. The first sterotype is that women are weak in mathematics. The second is that Asian-Americans are gifted in math. The researchers put the two stereotypes to work to see how the creation of a mindset would affect the results of the test.

Women in the first group were asked gender-related questions before the test (opinions on co-ed dorms). Women in the second group were asked questions related to race. Not surprisingly, the group which had its mindset primed around ethnicity did best. They answered 54% of the questions correctly, as opposed to 43% for the more gender-aware group. (More on this study is available here.)

As marketers, we understand the importance of creating a mindset around a message. But when I read about this experiment, I thought about the impact of our inner dialogue on our real-world results. If a set of simple questions could have such a dramatic effect on test results, what effect does our inner dialouge, have on what we can accomplish?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the messages I send to others. I don't spend much time thinking about the messages I send myself. Ulitmately, those may be some of the most important. t what we can accomplish with other people?