Giving Professional Presentations in the Behavioral Sciences and Related Fields

A Practical Guide for Novice, the Nervous and the Nonchalant

Michael J. Platow

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135844394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Gives concrete advice about designing, delivering, and defending presentations, and is written specifically for students and professionals who have little or no experience of giving presentations.

Chapter1

Design

Preparing your presentation

Planning your presentation

Know your goals for your presentation

The most important thing you need to know when you write a professional presentation is why you are giving the presentation in the first place. This may sound a bit silly, as we often take the reason as self-evident. But on reflection, part of the anxiety people often feel about giving a professional presentation stems in part from not knowing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. And for this reason, they often try to put a little bit of everything into the presentation, resulting only in a muddled mess.

The wrong goals

Let's first consider two of the most common—yet wrong—goals of professional presentations: (1) demonstrating encyclopedia skills, and (2) demonstrating statistical and methodological skills.

One reason for anxiety about professional presentations is that people are often concerned that they will appear as if they do not know what they are talking about; they're worried that they will look unprepared and unprofessional. The biggest fear is that an audience member will ask the dreaded question along the lines of, “Didn't Finkelstein and Berkowitz show just the opposite 10 years ago?” So, to overcome this, people work hard in their preparation, gather all of the relevant information that they can so that no one dare ask the question. Gathering the information is essential; you must know your topic area inside and out before you speak to a professional audience. However, telling your audience all of this information is both nonessential and, frankly, boring. No one wants to know your encyclopedia skills. A professional audience is willing to believe you too are professional, and it is often necessary for you to present only a few key papers or facts from your relevant topic area. Of course, you still may get the dreaded question, but because you did do your thorough literature search prior to your presentation, you can deal with it. But there is no need for you to go through every single previously known fact about your topic area so as to preempt this question. You'll confuse and bore your audience, and you'll run out of time to talk about your own work.

There is another question that is dreaded by professionals who present research data. This one comes in the form of, “Did you test your data for homoscedasticity?” How many of us have only a cursory knowledge of statistics and don't want to get caught out as novices? So, in hopes of fending off the question, we dazzle the audience with numbers—so many that they don't have time to determine whether we've conducted our analyses appropriately or not. But again, like demonstrating encyclopedia skills, this will only confuse and bore the audience. Of course, under all circumstances, it is essential that you understand fully your data analyses, the assumptions of these analyses, why you did one set of analyses and not another, and so on. If you have trouble with these things, get help before conducting your analyses in the first place. However, it is not essential to tell the audience all of this information. Again, professional audiences are willing to believe you have behaved in a professional manner, including conducting the appropriate analyses. The dreaded statistics question may still come, but the preemptive strike is unnecessary; the people who ask these questions will ask them no matter what. So be prepared. Have all of the statistical analyses written out in your notes; have additional overheads packed full of numbers to be shown only in response to the dreaded question; have a thorough understanding of what you did. But, in the first instance, present only the information that is needed to make your primary point (unless your primary point is about statistics, of course!).

The right goals

So what are the right goals in giving a professional presentation? The first and foremost goal is to communicate to your audience your contribution as a professional. What did you discover in your research? What new clinical findings have you uncovered? What insights have you developed, and what are the new directions they will take both you and the profession? It is the answers to these and similar questions that you should be presenting to your audience. Surprising as it may be to you, the audience has come to see and hear you; they believe you have something to tell them that they do not yet know, and they are willing to listen and learn. So give them what they've come for: your discoveries and insights, not your encyclopedia or statistical skills, just the hard facts that you are there to convey. This is what it is all about. Don't be shy—both you and your audience are there for a reason. If you have been invited to give your presentation, then someone obviously wants to hear you. If you are presenting at a professional seminar or conference, the mere presence of the audience confirms their interest.

Of course, I would be foolish and misleading to tell you that audiences are simply passive recipients of your information. They will attend to and think about what you say, and evaluate it (see “Thinking and nonthinking audiences” in chapter 4). And, like it or not, they will attend to how you say it, and evaluate that too. So, the second goal you should have when giving professional presentations is that of communicating the impression of yourself and your work that you want your audience to have; this second goal is that of correct impression management. Like it or not, enough intuition and social-psychological research tells us that we will be evaluated by our audiences. I learned this lesson early in my career, when, the day after I made my presentation at a professional conference, a stranger came up to me to tell me how much he enjoyed my presentation. This complete stranger thought I was great, despite his admission that he did not understand what I said! Now, this second part was a bit frustrating (and I hope that what I say in this book will help overcome audience confusion), but it made this man's admiration for me even more astounding. I realized then that you may be the most brilliant person, but if you come across to your audience as boring, aloof, nervous, or incompetent, not only will they not pay attention to you now, but they won't pay attention to you in the future. And if you come across well, your audience will want more. This is all the more important if your audience is comprised of people who can control your future (e.g., hiring you, promoting you, giving you money).

As shallow as it may appear, you have to come across to your audience in a professional and interesting manner. It may be nice in principle to say that people should like us just the way we are and that they should find what we have to say intrinsically interesting, but in reality, only our mothers think this. For everyone else, we have to work at giving clear and interesting presentations. In this book, I will outline some of the basic lessons.

SUMMARY TABLE 1.1 Know your goals of your presentation

Wrong goals

• Demonstrating encyclopedia skills

• Demonstrating statistical and methodological skills

Right goals

• Communicating your contributions as a professional

• Communicating the impression you want to your audience

Writing your presentation

Writing a professional presentation involves more craft than people often think. In fact, by not recognizing this, people often encounter at least two common pitfalls. The first is when people recognize their own expertise and then assume they can speak extemporaneously, or “wing it.” The second is when people write their presentations in the same structure and detail as they do for their professional articles and other written papers. These are both important “nos."

Writing pitfall 1: Extemporaneous presentations

Speaking extemporaneously is one of the worst things you can do. You will skip important information, backtrack to fill in information you missed earlier, stutter and stumble, lead the audience off onto tangents as you remember one thing or another, go over your time limit or end embarrassingly early, and generally fail to get even your most simple points across in a clear manner. This is the same even for those great orators who appear to be speaking off the top of their heads. Don't be fooled; what they're saying has previously been written and rehearsed, and you need to do the same too. Again, I learned this lesson early in my career when, during my first presentation at my first job I thought I could “wing it.” It was a disaster, as I made almost every error I listed above, plus some! It is essential that you prepare what you are going to say in detail before you say it. If you can memorize your whole talk so that you appear to be speaking extemporaneously, then more power to you. In whatever manner you do it, however, your presentation must be extemporaneous in appearance only.

Writing pitfall 2: Presentations as written papers

As students, we often learn to write papers in a specific style that allows for the clearest exposition of ideas. If it is research that we're writing about, then we know to start with an introduction, move to the methods, then to results, and end with a discussion.¹ Following these guidelines when writing papers is fine, and even good. The basic outline is logical, clear, and generally expected from your audience. However, there is a lot of information that is typically included in written papers that should be kept out of professional presentations. In written text, it is easy for your audience to contemplate all of this information, because they can move through your ideas at their own pace, and go back to previous pages if necessary to understand fully what you are saying. But when presenting this information in verbal form, it is very difficult to attend to everything and follow what you are saying. So some things need to be cut.

Telling you exactly what to cut, as a general rule, is very difficult because it will always depend on the content of your topic and the nature of your audience. In principle, however, you should keep out the excruciating details. These can include (surprisingly) a thorough literature review, the number of participants and why they participated, the exact number of questions on your questionnaire, every previous study that used your questionnaire, all conceivable statistics about your questionnaire and its results, and all possible flaws in your study. You should not misunderstand what I'm saying. Each one of these things is very important, and in your written report you must include them all. Moreover, there are times when you should say them in your professional presentation too, such as when your topic and results are particularly controversial, your methods novel, and your participants sampled from a special population. However, in most circumstances, these kinds of details often detract from the content of your presentation. Remember that your goal is to present your contribution to your profession, and not to present your encyclopedia or statistical skills. Not only should you not substitute form for substance, you should not detract from substance with form. And “wowing them with statistics,” for example, as a ploy to fend off the hard questions about content, is destined only to backfire when the statistics expert in the audience raises her hand to query what you've done!

What you should do: Tell a story

Unlike extemporaneous or written-paper-like presentations, probably one of the most important things you can do when giving a professional presentation is tell a story. You can not assume that your audience will automatically be interested in the specific topic you will be talking about (see “Your similarity to your audience” in chapter 4). Although this comes as a surprise to some people, it's definitely true. So, like a good storyteller, you have to attract the attention of your audience and engage them in the unfolding of your ideas. This may sound like I'm considering audiences to be fickle, but maintaining the attention of your audience is an art in itself (especially if your presentation is over 30 minutes long). And reviewing a long list of facts, no matter how important you think they are, will fail to interest your audience.

First of all, when giving your presentation, you have to tell your audience why they should be interested in what you have to say. It's not enough to assume that the audience will find interesting and exciting the same things you do; a simple reflection on watching other people's holiday slide shows is enough to confirm this! Broad categories like “helping people” or “theoretically interesting” or “empirically interesting” are not enough. The manner in which help is provided to people—and, indeed, what constitutes help—is always value bound, and your audience may not share your values. And, of course, what is and is not “interesting” remains, too, a matter of the audience's values and general preferences. All this means that you should know a bit about your audience before giving your presentation, and this means a bit of homework. If you can introduce your work with reference to the kinds of things your audience is likely to value (even if you did not consider these thing in the first place), then you will find that you have a much more attentive and interested audience. Of course, it is not always possible to tie your work into the direct interests of your audience (if only because it will seem forced and, hence, insincere). In such instances, you may want to begin your presentation with an anecdote of some kind as if you are just chatting with the audience. Anecdotes can include recent news items, your own personal experiences, and even some observations you have made about your profession. Note, however, that it is essential that the anecdote transparently correspond to what you will ultimately say in the rest of your presentation. Opening with jokes in attempts to get laughs will only make you look foolish and annoy your audience if the jokes have no connection to any other feature of what you will say (see “Humor” in chapter 4). But well-told anecdotes can actually foreshadow many of the topics you will consider in your presentation.

Consider the following two ways of starting off presentations about the same topic in social psychology. The first is actual text I have used to describe my own research in written form; remember, in written form, text can be relatively complex. The second is the way I have started professional presentations in the past of the exact same material as described in the first text.

In my ongoing research, I have examined people's responses to others’ use and non-use of prescriptive fairness rules across different social situations. Prescriptive fairness rules, in this research, derived from formal interpersonal distributive justice theories. One rule, for example, is equality (each person receives equal amounts), and another is equity (each person receives proportionally to his or her contribution). When varying the use of these rules across different social situations, an apparent paradox appeared. In one instance, people responded favorably to prescriptive fairness in intragroup situations; these situations are ones in which the people involve...