What you say is more impactful than what you do, claims study

If you want to persuade someone, the best way would be talk about it rather than actually doing it, suggests a new study.

University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Ayelet Fishbach and former Chicago Booth PhD student Yanping Tu, designed a series of six experiments involving everyday activities such as choosing a type of chewing gum, shopping for groceries, picking a favorite mug design and watching a pet video on YouTube.

The researchers found that people conform to others' preferences at last partially because they adopt others' judgments as their own. They further found that when people behave as if they are not conforming, their motivation could be to coordinate or complement their actions with others' actions.

The research has implications for online shopping, social media marketing and political campaigns. Marketers, for example, could collect "likes" from Facebook users, rather than collecting information on what users buy, eat or own. Likewise, they could present products as "everyone likes it," rather than "everyone buys it."

The study is due to be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.