When it comes to persuasive leadership, it’s often said that it’s better to lead by deed than by words.  Set a fine example and people will follow.  At least so goes the theory.

A recent paper from researchers at Chicago’s Booth School however suggests that the opposite might actually be the case.

What you like, not what you do

The study suggests that conventional wisdom needs to be flipped on its head, with leaders stressing what they like rather than what they do to try and persuade their team to follow them.

The researchers conducted six experiments involving a range of normal, every day activities, including grocery shopping and watching YouTube videos.

“The tendency to conform is pervasive and rooted in human psychology,” the authors say. “When people conform, they conform to what others like and to others’ attitudes. But in terms of what they do, they want to be different. So if you want to persuade people, you should talk about liking, not about having.”

Why we conform

The researchers discovered that we tend to conform to the preferences of other people in large part because we adopt the judgements of others as our own.

For instance, the study found that when we mentally share an action, such as watching a colleague perform a task, we often feel as though we too have performed that task.  We then look to enrich this experience by doing something different.

When we mentally share that colleagues preferences however, such as a love for innovation, we are much more likely to adopt that preference as our own.

It’s not all about social pressure

The issue of why we conform was explored in a second study, which I looked at recently, which looked at the issue through the prism of social pressure.  It revealed that our desire to copy what others are doing is not all about social pressure.  Indeed, social pressure may not even be the main reason.

Instead, they suggest that our decisions are largely a case of forming a kind of ‘mental average’ of both our own past actions together with those of others.

In other words, we figure out how to behave in a situation by remembering how other people behaved in a similar situation, with our brain then confusingly recalling those behaviors as our own.

Even when information about others’ preferences and actions are available at the same time–such as an online shopping site that lists both its bestselling products and its most liked products–people are more likely to follow what others like, rather than what others buy.