LeadingMinds Tip 150: Where's the Action? Right ear, of course!

This week's LeadingMinds Tip comes to you from Haider Imam of Kaizen Training.

Of course, you know that most people have a dominant hand?  You may also know that most people have a dominant eye?  You may even be jumping ahead and thinking that people obviously prefer to put a telephone to either their right or left ear.. but the results and implications of ear dominance research in the context of influence and reaching agreement is very interesting indeed...

Breaking research from Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University "Gabriele d'Annunzio" in Chieti, Italy shows astonishing consistencies around ear preference in communication between humans - at least for Italians!

Their research claims that we have a natural side bias, depending on hemispheric asymmetry, meaning that most people prefer to be addressed in their right ear.  Not only that, their experiments show that we are more likely to perform a task when the request hits our right ear rather than the left.

Where were the experiments done?  In nightclubs!  Here are three experiments below, with their results:

Experiment 1:  286 nightclub-goers are observed talking over loud music.  72 percent of interactions occur on the listener's right side.

Experiment 2:  160 researchers make a muffled, unintellligible spoke noise in front of the nightclub-goers and wait for them to offer either their left or right ears to hear properly.  The researchers then ask the nightclub-goers for a cigarette.
58 per cent give their right ear, 42 per cent their left.  Women showed a marked right-ear preference.  Interestingly, no link is established between the number of cigarettes obtained and the ear offered.

Experiment 3:  Cigarettes are requested from 176 nightclub-goers in either their right or their left ear.  Significantly more cigarettes are obtained when the request is made into their right ear.

According to Tommasi and Marzoli, this confirms a "right ear/left hemisphere advantage for verbal communication and distinctive specialisation of the two halves of the brain for approach and avoidance behaviour".

This week's call to action:

• think of an important request you need to make.  What strategies can you come up with to 'get on the right side' of the other person (funny how the answers are already in the language we use, eh?)
• think of how you can use this in a training, influencing or coaching context to power up your results.. if you send us a suggestion we love, we'll send you a tip sheet right back with some more practical applications for this research!

Take a small step (to the right) and enjoy the learning