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I have a friend who attributes half of his success in a long and lucrative career to the phrase ‘I wonder if you can help me?’

Think about this for a moment. If you need a colleague to do something for you, there are many phrases that might come to mind: ‘Could you do me a favour?’; ‘Sorry to spring this on you, but I really need…’; ‘I wonder if you can do something for me’; ‘I need you to help me out’; perhaps, even, ‘If you do this, I will pay you some money’.

These sentences are similar in meaning, but arouse different emotional reactions in the listener.

Mention money and you have stigmatised the action in question as something no person would perform without compensation. Apologise, and you have framed the task as something that is negative – a necessary evil; the same goes for any mention of ‘a favour’. Talk of ‘what I need you to do’ is demeaning, because it suggests your colleagues can make no contribution to whatever it is you wish to achieve and will be given no autonomy in completing it.

But ‘I wonder if you can help me’ is different. It flatters the hearer, hints that they have been chosen for their unique attributes or talents, and promises enhanced status in the event of an initial ‘yes’. The implication is that you are asking them to do the job because it is one for which they are uniquely qualified, not because it’s something you can’t be bothered to do yourself.

From the speaker’s point of view, a wide variety of sentences may seem equally good and semantically interchangeable. From the standpoint of the listener, however, none is as persuasive as ‘I wonder if you can help me?’

The psychologist Robert Cialdini believes that, for the purposes of persuasion, it is far better to ask someone for their ‘advice’ than their ‘opinion’. Strangely, in my online and offline exposure to market research, few if any survey designers seem to have adopted this simple trick.

In his book Pre-suasion, Cialdini cites a 2011 study that looked at what happens when you solicit someone’s advice, opinion or expectations respectively. In one experiment, researchers asked respondents to read about a new, fictional restaurant concept and then proffer their ‘advice’, ‘opinion’, or ‘expectations’ about the eateries. When researchers asked participants how likely they were to try one of the restaurants, the ‘advice givers’ were most inclined to eat there. 

Asking for ‘advice’ might sound very similar to canvassing ‘opinion’, but it primes you in a very different way. Wanting advice makes it sound as though you might act upon individual suggestions and flatters the respondent into thinking they have been chosen for their unique insightfulness. By contrast, ‘opinion’ implies that you are going to aggregate views from a large number of random people.

Cialdini says the same effect plays out between managers and their employees. In an interview with Business Insider, he explained: “When you ask for someone’s opinion, psychologically they take a half step back from you. They go into themselves to find an answer. I recommend that you say instead: ‘can you give me your advice on this?’ Asking for advice causes them to take a half step towards you, psychologically, to put themselves in a cooperative state of mind. And the research shows they then become more supportive of your plan or idea before they experience it.”

Cialdini later distilled this into a single sentence: when you ask for your boss’s advice, you get an “accomplice” as opposed to an evaluator. You might, rightly, argue that it is the job of a researcher to find opinions – you want evaluators, not collaborators. But I would be interested to see how the change in wording might affect the answers of respondents. In some instances, their answers might be similar: that would be reassuring. In others, there might be a large discrepancy between responses. Any discrepancy might be revealing.  

I suspect that asking for advice will also generate more creative answers than seeking opinions. A request for advice is an injunction to be helpful, while seeking opinions implies you are looking for criticism. One undervalued role of good research is as a mine of crowdsourced new ideas. A little experimentation with phrasing might make this more common. 

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman, Ogilvy & Mather, UK