International Law

What Not to Wear

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On this blog, I have spent a great deal of time talking about confirmation bias, anchoring, and cognitive dissonance and how they relate to franchise due diligence.

Experiments, horror stories, and academic papers have all been cited in an attempt  to explain what to do.

But Brian Clark at Copyblogger, despite being an ex-attorney, has a wonderful way idea..

"The key is to focus on mistakes, or what not to do, instead of focusing only on what to do.

So, if you're writing a "how to" post that will do well in social media, your examples should focus on what not to do in order to best illustrate the right thing to do.

Don't believe me? Well, there's actual psychological research that backs this up.

Wendy Joung performed behavioral training research on firefighters in 2006, and the results are published in Applied Psychology.

She and her colleagues found that firefighters trained with case studies that focused on others who had made poor decisions and suffered adverse consequences ultimately showed better judgment and better adaptive thinking than a control group provided with case studies that focused on positive results.

Bottom line--mistakes teach better than successes. You might already know this from your own life."

Get ready to hear about more mistakes.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on October 06, 2008 (boomark / email).