Word your invitations carefully

A simple study was carried out whereby they brought people into a university laboratory and they split prospects randomly into two different groups.

In the first group, they said “today you’re going to play the ‘Community game’ and they played kind of a ‘prisoners dilemma’ type of game.

The second group came into the same room and the same researcher said “good morning today you’re going to play the ‘Wall Street game’ “.

The scenario was however, that the games were exactly the same. There was no difference in the way the two games were played.

What they discovered, was everyone who was told they were playing the ‘Wall Street game’ shared an average of 1/3 of their profits, whereas everyone who was told they were playing the ‘Community game’ shared an average of two thirds of their profits.

This means that use of the one word ‘Community’ in the invitation made people think and feel more about community and accordingly they acted in a more collaborative manner.

This means that the words were using in our conversations, promotions and subjects in our emails, texts and in our profile headlines are queuing people for how they should react to and treat us.

One really simple way to think about this is an entry in your calendar invite: a “one on one call video interview” invitation means I am being queued for ‘nothing’. Those words are so overused they’re sterile.

If you add cues that prime people to feel or think a certain way, then you’re actually setting them up for success, so “2026 wins collaborative session strategy meeting”, “goal setting meeting” or “teamwork collaboration session” are actually queuing that person’s brain every single time they open their calendar.

When we read a word like ‘collaborate’, we are literally more likely to be collaborative, so the words that we use, even one single word, can actually change the way people approach the event.