Book excerpt.
Subject: The book identifies what savvy communicators do before delivering a message to get it accepted. Communicators can elevate their success by knowing what to say or do just before an appeal.
I. Pre-suasion: The Frontloading of Attention
The highest achievers spent more time crafting what they did and said before making a request. They set about their mission as skilled gardeners who know that even the finest seeds will not take root in stony soil or bear fruit in poorly prepared ground. They spent much of their time toiling in the fields of influence thinking about and engaging in cultivation – in ensuring that the situations they were facing has been pre-treated and readied for growth.
The central assertion of this book: the truly influential things we say and do first act to pre-suade our audience, which they accomplish by altering audience associations with what we do or say next.
But unlike less effective colleagues, they didn’t rely on legitimate merits of an offer to get it accepted; they recognized that the psychological frame in which an appeal in first placed can carry equal and greater weight.
Besides they were frequently in no position to tinker with the merits of what they had to offer; someone else in the organisation had created the product, program, or plan they were recommending often in fixed form. Their responsibility was to present it most productively.
Before introducing their message, they arranged to make their audience sympathetic to it. It is important here to note that no persuasive practice is going to work for sure whenever it is applied, however, can increase the likelihood of assent. The proposals power is greatest (privileged moment) following a pre-suasive opener for a time-limited period over which he enjoys a special, elevated status.
Example: For years, when bidding on a big project, it wasn’t unusual to get price resistance from the client, who might propose a reduction. After his standard presentation and just before declaring his fee, he joked, “As you can tell, I’m not going to be able to charge a million dollars for this”. This tactic of mentioning an admittedly unrealistic price tag for a job doesn’t always win the business – too many other factors are involved for that – but it almost always eliminates challenges to the charges. Merely launching a large number into the air has remarkable effect into the minds of others.
Example: Company made fire alarm systems for home and its top sales person before beginning his sales effort, he established an aura of trust with the family. Trust is one of those qualities that leads to compliance with requests, provided that it has been planted before the request is made. Sales sequence taught to all company reps was fairly standard to the industry.
After making small talk to build rapport, the prospects were given a times ten-minute written test of fire safety knowledge designed how to reveal how little they knew about actual dangers of a home fire. Then, at the completion of the test, reps began the active sales pitch by demonstrating the system and walking through a book of material documenting the systems superiority to all others.
He would wait until the test was underway, when he’d slap his forehead and say. ‘Oh, I forgot some really important information in the car, and I need to get it. I don’t want to interrupt the test; so, would you mind if I let myself out and back into your home?” The answer was always some form of “Sure, go ahead.” Often times it required giving him a door key. “Who do you let walk in and out of your house on their own? Only somebody you trust, right? I want to be associated with trust in those families’ mind.” He just arranged to be treated in way characteristic of trusted individuals of this sort.
There are a number of first steps, besides establishing trust, persuaders can take that will make audiences more receptive to the case they intend to present. The steps can take multiple forms, and, accordingly, they’ve been given multiple labels by behavioural scientists. They can be called frames or anchors or primes or mind-sets or first impressions. The author refers to them as openers – because they open up things for influence.
Six psychological principles that appeared to be deployed routinely in long-prospering influence businesses – reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity and consistency – represent certain psychological universals of persuasion.
II. Privileged Moments
Palmists or astrologers or phrenologists (head bump readers) describe characteristics so widespread – stubbornness and flexibility, for example – that almost everyone can identify with them.
Example: Suppose at a party I bent back your thumb slightly and, on the basis of its resistance and curvature, proclaimed you “quite stubborn individual, someone who resists being pressured in a direction you don’t want to go”. I will have focused you on the trait of stubbornness, sending you down a single psychological chute constructed unfairly to confirm my judgement. Here’s how it would work: to test if I were right, you’d automatically begin searching your memory for times when you’d acted stubbornly – only for those times – and you’d almost certainly come upon a ready instance, as mulishness under pressure is a frequent personal failing.
There’s a very human reason for why you’d be prone to fall for the trick. Its obtuse scientific name is ‘positive test strategy.’ In deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look for hits rather than misses; for confirmations of the idea rather than for disconfirmations. It is easier to register the presence of something than its absence.
Example: If a pollster wants to know whether you are dissatisfied with something. Single-chute questions of this sort can get you both to mistake and misstate your position. “Are you happy or unhappy with the mayor’s performance in office?” This kind of inquiry invite you to consult your feelings even-handedly. Cult recruiters often begin the process of seducing new prospects by asking if they are unhappy (rather than happy). This question is more than a screening device. It’s also a recruiting device that stacks the deck by focusing people, unduly, on their dissatisfactions. In the unfairly engineered instant after such an admission, the cult’s moment maker is trained to strike: “Well, if you’re unhappy, you’d want to change that, right?”
Example: When a clipboard-carrying researcher stops us in a shopping mall and asks for a few minutes of our time. Only a small % agree to participate, to boost compliance, the request began with a pre-suasive opener: “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Following brief reflection, nearly everyone answered yes. In that privileged moment – after subjects had confirmed privately and affirmed publicly their helpful natures – the researchers pounced, requesting help with the survey.
The major thesis of this book: frequently the factor most likely to determine a person’s choice in a situation is not the one that counsels most wisely there; it is the one that has been elevated in attention (and, thereby, privilege) at the time of the decision. This recognition allows us to think entirely differently than before about the influence process.
The dominant scientific model advised as follows: if you wish to change another’s behaviour, you must first change some existing feature of that person that it fits with the behaviour. If you want to convince people to purchase something unfamiliar – let’s say a new soft drink – you should act to transform their beliefs or attitudes or experiences in ways that make them want to buy the product. You might attempt to change their beliefs about the soft drink by reporting that its fastest growing new beverage on the market; or top change attitude by connecting it to a well-liked celebrity; or to change their experiences with it by offering free samples. Although, an abundance of evidence shows that this approach works, it is now clear that there is an alternate model of social influence that provides a different route to persuasive success.
According to this non-traditional – channelled attention – approach, to get desired action it’s not necessary to alter a person’s beliefs or attitudes or experiences. It’s not necessary to alter anything at all except what’s prominent in that person’s mind at the moment of decision.
Example: Bolkan & Andersen research demonstrating that a marketer could greatly increase the chance of finding survey participants by begging with a particular pre-suasive opener: asking people if they considered them helpful. In a companion study, the two found that it was similarly possible to increase willingness to try an unfamiliar consumer product by beginning with a comparable but differently customised pre-suasive opener – asking people if they considered themselves adventurous and likes to try new things. First, of the subjects who were asked if they counted themselves adventurous, 97% responded affirmatively.
When asked the single-chute question of whether they fit in this category, people nominate themselves almost invariably. Such is the power of positive-test strategy and the blinkered perspective it creates.
For a persuasive privileged moment, it renders these individuals highly vulnerable to aligned requests. This confirms this book’s contention that the guiding factor in a decision is often not the one that counsels most wisely; it’s one that has recently been brought to mind.
Research on cognitive functioning tells us that: when attention is paid to something, the price is attention lost to something else. The human mind appears able to hold only one thing in conscious awareness at a time, the toll is a momentary loss of focused attention to everything else.
Have you noticed how difficult it is to experience – genuinely experience – two things at once? For example, if I start looking for a highway exit while listening to a CD in my car, I’ll stop hearing the music. The best we can do to handle multiple channels of information is to switch back and forth among them, opening and closing the door of mindfulness to each.
This allows for multitasking, although it seems we are concentration on more than one thing simultaneously, that’s an illusion. However, just as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it: for about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an attentional blink, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously.
Example: It’s for this reason that I am so annoyed when I’m interacting with an individual who is trying to do something else at the same time. It shows me that my conversation partner is willing to lose contact with the information I’m providing to make contact with some other information. It always feels like a demotion. It advises me that my input is considered relatively unimportant. It also notifies my conversational partner of the same thing, excuse people rightly believe that what they choose to attend (to or away from) reflects what they value at that time.
Here’s the point for the influence process: whatever we can do to focus people on something – an idea, a person, an object – makes that thing seem more important to them than before.
III. The Importance of Attention…Is Importance
Anything that draws focused attention to itself can lead observers to overestimate its importance. Numerous researchers have documented that basic human inclination to assign undue weight to whatever happens to be salient at that time.
‘Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it’ – the focusing illusion.Daniel Kahneman
For the practice of pre-suasion, a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message pre-loads it with importance.
The central tenet of agenda-setting theory is that the media rarely produce change directly, by presenting compelling evidence that sweeps an audience to new positions: they are much more likely to persuade indirectly, by giving selected issues and facts better coverage than other issues and facts. It’s this coverage that leads audience members – by virtue of the greater attention they devote to certain topics – to decide that these are the most important to be taken into consideration when adopting a position.
The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.Bernard Cohen, a political scientist
According to this view, in an election, whichever political party is seen by voters to have the superior stance on the issue highest on the media’s agenda at the moment will likely win.
That outcome shouldn’t seem troubling provided the media have highlighted the issue (or set of issues) most critical to the society at the time of the vote. Regrettably, other factors often contribute to coverage choices, such as whether a matter is simple or complicated, gripping or boring, familiar or unfamiliar to newsroom staffers, inexpensive or expensive to examine, and even friendly or not to the news directors political leanings.
Example: As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, 9/11 related stories peaked immediately surrounding the anniversary date and then dropped off rapidly in the weeks thereafter. Surveys conducted asked citizens to nominate two ‘especially important’ events from the past 70 years. Two weeks prior to the anniversary, before the media blitz began in earnest, about 30% of respondents named 9/11. As the anniversary drew closer, and the media treatment intensified, survey respondents started identifying 9/11 in increasing numbers – to a high of 65%. Two weeks later, once again only 30% placed it among their two especially important events of the past 70 years. Clearly, the amount of news coverage can make a big difference in the perceived significance of an issue among observers as they are exposed to the coverage.
Why do we typically assume that whatever we are focusing on in the moment is especially important?
One reason is that whatever we are focusing on typically is especially important in the moment. It’s only reasonable to give heightened attention to those factors that have the most significance and utility for us in a particular situation: a stage noise in the dark, the smell of smoke in a theatre, a CEO standing to speak.
This sensible system of focusing our limited attentional resources on what does indeed possess special importance has an imperfection, though: we can be brought to the mistaken belief that something is important merely because we have been led by some irrelevant factor to give it our narrowed attention.
All too often, people believe that if they have paid attention to an idea or event or group, it must be important enough to warrant the consideration. That’s not true.
Example:It is often said that the fate celebrities’ fear most is to be ignored, forgotten, or otherwise dropped from the cultural consciousness. Powerful publicity of any sort spares them that worst of all fates because it brings them attention; and raw attention anoints them with presumed importance. Especially in the arts, where one’s worth is almost entirely subjective, an elevated public presence contributes to that worth. Accordingly, people will pay to see high profile celebrities (within their performances, productions and appearances) because they, as individuals, seem to matter.
Attention shifting techniques, so slight as to go unrecognized as agents of change:
Managing the Background – It is clear background information can both guide and distract focus of attention; anyone seeking to influence optimally must manage that information thoughtfully.
Example: In an article largely overlooked since published in 2002, Mandel and Johnson described how they are able to draw website visitors’ attention to the goal of comfort merely by placing fluffy clouds on the background wallpaper. That manoeuvre led those visitors attention to assign elevated levels of importance to comfort when asked what they were looking for in a sofa. Additional research found similarly sly effects for online banner ads. Recognition/recall, a widely used index of success for all other forms of ads, might underestimate the effectiveness of banner ads. In the new studies, frequently interjected banners were positively rated and were uncommonly resistant to standard wear-out effects, yet they were neither recognised nor recalled.
Inviting favourable evaluation – Some impressive research demonstrates that merely engaging in a single-chute evaluation of one of several established hotel and restaurant chains, consumer products, and even charity can automatically cause people to value the focused-upon entity more and become more willing to support it financially.
Example: One applicable tactic being employed with increasing frequency by various organisations is to request evaluation of their products and services – only theirs. Focused attention to their most favorable facets of especially high ranked ones, with no comparable attention to the most favorable facets of their ablest rivals.
In an ideal world one would work and wait until the optimal solution emerged, in the real world of mental overload, limited resources, and deadlines, satisficing is the norm. Satisficing – to serve as blend of the words satisfy and suffice. The combination reflects two simultaneous goals of a chooser while facing a decision – to make good and to make it gone, usually making it good enough.
Shifting the task at hand –
Example: In 2003, G W Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. Saddam’s cache of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – was debunked (the weapons never materialized) and was revised regularly to incorporate such new purposes as eliminating Saddam’s humanitarian abuses, terminating Iraq’s support for Al Qaeda, safeguarding the world’s oil supply, and establishing a bulwark for democracy in the Middle East. The administration deflected attention from these questionable and shifting reasons through an ingenious media program.
The ‘embedded reporter program’ of the war in Iraq was the product of a joint decision by US officials and major media bureau chiefs to place reporters directly within combat units – to eat, sleep, and travel with them – during the course of military operations. Between 600-700 media representatives had the kind of access to the hostilities that had been denied them by US decision makers in 1991 Gulf War and prior military operations in Afghanistan.
To US officials, the advantages of the program was compelling, First, under the wings of armed protectors, risks to the various media personnel in Iraq could be reduced significantly. About 40% of embedded slots went to non-US news agencies provided an invaluable risk protection to the military. Secondly, embedded reporters would be in direct position to undercut the credibility of untruths about the war coming from Saddam’s government. Thirdly, because media chiefs were so attracted to this concept of coverage, they made concessions that slanted the coverage more favourable to the military, which was allowed to play a role in training, selection and dismissal of reporters as well as review reports prior to publication.
Research analysing the stories coming out of Iraq at the time detected a more positive tilt towards the military those written by embedded reporters. They focused almost entirely on the troops, their daily activities, food, clothing, and supplies, how they prepared for battles, the tactics and the bravery they showed in battle.
Something crucial was lost, in this deepened but narrowed coverage: they were not reporting in any meaningful way on the broader political issues involved such as the justifications for the war (as an example, weapons of mass destruction was mentioned only in 2% of stories) or the operations impact on US standing and power abroad.
The eager superiors assigned them to cover what one analysis termed “the minutiae of the conflict’, which absorbed all their time, energy and consideration. Thus, with the vast majority of front-page war stories never addressing the whys of the fight but instead its whos and hows, the predominant media message to the public was evident: the thing you should be paying attention to here is the conduct of the war, not the wisdom of it.
Some of the same research demonstrates that if people fail to direct their attention to a topic, they presume that it must be of relatively little importance. That content dominated public attention and thereby defined for the public which factors to consider more and less important about the invasion, such as those related to individual actions and battlefield outcomes versus those related to initial justifications and geopolitical ends.
IV. What’s focal is casual
We assign elevated importance to factors that have our attention. We also assign them causality.
Example: HBS economist, Felix Oberholzer-Gee approached waiting in line at several different venues and offered them money to let him cut in. He recognised that a purely economics based model would predict that the more cash he offered, the more people would agree to the exchange. And almost no one took the money. Although, bigger cash incentives upped compliance, they didn’t increase acceptance of the payment; richer deals increasingly caused people to sacrifice their place in line but without taking the greater compensation.
He now instead of focusing on salient economic factors and towards a hidden factor: an obligation people feel to help those in need which behavioural scientists sometimes call the norm for social responsibility. Several decades of research shows that, in general, the more someone needs our help, the more obligated we feel to provide it, the more guilty we feel if we don’t provide it, and more likely we are to provide it. A payment offers simulated compliance because they alerted recipients to the amount of need present in the situation. More money signalled a stronger need.
It would be naïve to assume that fiscal factors are less than potent determinants of human action. Still, I’d argue that merely because they are so visible (and, therefore, prominent in attention), they are often less determining than they seem.
Conversely, there are many other factors – social obligations, personal values, moral standards – that, merely because they are not readily observable, are often more determining than they seem.
Example: Leaders, for example, are accorded a much larger casual position than they typically deserve in the success or failure of the teams, groups, and organisations they head. This tendency is often termed as ‘the romance of leadership’ and have demonstrated that other factors (such as workforce quality, existing internal business systems, and market conditions) have a greater impact on corporate profits than CEO actions do; yet the leader is assigned outsize responsibility for company results. In the US, the average employee is a large corporation is paid 0.5-1% of what the CEO is paid. If that discrepancy seems hard to account for on grounds of economic or social fairness, perhaps we can account for it on other grounds: the person at the top is visually prominent, psychologically salient, and, hence, assigned an unduly causal role in the course of events.
In sum, because what’s salient is deemed important and what’s focal is deemed causal, a communicator who ushers audience members’ attention to selected facets of a message reaps a significant persuasive advantage: recipient’s receptivity to considering those facets prior to actually considering them.
In a real sense, then, channelled attention can make recipients more open to a message pre-suasively, before they process it.
Very often the biggest challenge for a communicator is not providing a meritorious case but in convincing recipients to devote their limited time and energy to consider its merits.
V. Commanders of Attention 1 – The Attractors
Are there any features of information that don’t even require communicator’s special efforts to draw attention to them?
Certain cues seize our attention vigorously. Those that do so most powerfully are linked to our survival. Sexual and violent stimuli are prime examples because of their connections to our fundamental motivations to reproduce on the one hand and to avoid harm on the other – life and death, literally.
The Sexual: Using sex to sell a product works only for items that people frequently buy for sexually related purposes. Cosmetics (lipstick, hair color), body scents (perfume, cologne), and form-fitting clothing (jeans, swimwear) fall into this category.
The Threatening: Violence, with its associated threat to safety, has always been able to draw human attention. Proof is available in everything from automobile accidents, sales of gruesome video games and violent films.
Example: A Dutch team redirected the behaviours of individuals, after undergoing tests, were informed of their especially high vulnerability to hypoglycaemia and of its sometimes severe consequences such as organ failure, convulsions, and depression. Paired with this alarming news, the recipients got information about a workshop to improve their diets.
Most of them sought further information and, compared with similar health status individuals who received a less fear-inducing message, were four times more likely to sign up for the workshop then and there. This approach, is how public health communicators can best deploy truthful yet frightening facts: by waiting to convey those facts until information about accessible assistance systems – programs, workshops, websites and helplines – can be incorporated into their communications.
There are two contrary motivations, to fit in and to stand out, map perfectly onto a pair of long-time favourite commercial appeals. One, of the “Don’t be left out” sort, urges us to join the many. The other, of the “Be one of the few” sort, urges us to step away from the many.
So, which would an advertiser be better advised to launch into? Popularity based message would be the right one in any situation where the audience has been exposed to frightening stimuli – perhaps in the middle of watching a violent film on TV – because threat focused people want to join the crows. But sending the same message in an ad to an audience watching a romantic film on TV would be a mistake, because amorously focused people want to step away from the crowd.
The core claim of this book: the effectiveness of persuasive messages – in this case, carrying two influence themes that have been commonly used for centuries – will be drastically affected by the type of opener experienced immediately in advance. Put people in a wary state of mind via that opener, and, driven by a desire to safety, a popularity-based appeal will soar, whereas a distinctiveness-based appeal will sink. But use it to put people in an amorous state of mind, and, driven by a consequent desire to stand out, the reverse will occur.
Example: Ivan Pavolv’s theory of ‘classical conditioning’. He got the dogs to salivate to the presence of something – the sound of the bell, for instance – that had no business extracting the reaction. To accomplish the trick, he just rang the bell immediately prior to introducing food to them on repeated occasions. Before long, the dogs were drooling at the sound of the bell, even in the absence of food.
However, all too often, the dog wouldn’t respond when there were visitors and the dog moved to a new room. Both the room and the visitors became novel stimuli that hijacked the dog’s attention, diverting it from the bell and food while directing it to the changed circumstances.
Pavlov labelled this ‘investigatory reflex’. He understood that in order to survive, any animal needs to be acutely aware of immediate changes to its environment, investigating and evaluating these differences for the dangers or opportunities they might present. So forceful is this reflex that it supersedes all other operations.
The potent effect of a rapid change in environmental circumstances on human concentration can be seen in a mundane occurrence that afflicts us all. You walk from one room to another to do something specific, but, once there, you forget why you made the trip. Walking through the doorways causes you to forget because the abrupt change in you physical surroundings redirects your attention to the new setting – and consequently from your purpose, which disrupts your memory of it.
Example: In the motion picture industry, you use cuts to get people to swing attention to the parts of the message you really want them to focus on. Cuts are crucial to persuasive success because they can be manipulated to bring into focus the feature of a message the persuaders believes to be most convincing – by shifting the scene to that feature. The cut will instigate an orienting response to the winning feature. That cut will instigate an orienting response to the winning feature in audience member’s brains before they even experience it. Advertisers or film producers have learned to employ this insight, systematically, as moment makers. TV advertisers often make a mistake and instead of using cuts judiciously to direct attention solely to the important facets of the material, they have chosen to instead to increase indiscriminately and dramatically the overall frequency of scene shifts within their ads. Predictably, viewers end up confused as to the point of the ad and are irritated by having their focus whipped around so often and so haphazardly.
Even though cut-heavy TV commercials draws more attention, they produce significantly less memory for the ad’s persuasive claims and significantly less persuasion.
Other communication channels, present persuasive information in finalised, unchanging form – newspaper, mags, books, handbills, billboards, and so on – and consequently cannot use cuts to capture and direct audience attention strategically. Persuaders when employing these vehicles insert novelty into the appeal – something designed to appear distinctive (original, unfamiliar or surprising) which also works well to attract attention. Almost anything he can do to set an item apart from competitors has this effect. As long as the spotlighted item has worth, its allure can leapfrog over that of equally worth or even more worth rivals. Distinctiveness swings attention to the distinguishing factor.
VI. Commanders of Attention 2 – The Magnetisers
Besides the persuasive advantage of drawing attention to a particular stimulus, there is considerable benefit to holding it there. Certain kinds of information do, in fact, combine initial pulling power with staying power.
Information about oneself, for example, packs that potent one-two punch. Information about the self is exceedingly powerful magnet of attention.
Example: Take a group shot with a digital camera and pass it around – they will look first, longest, and last at themselves. In the province of personal health, when recipients get a message that is self-relevant because it has been tailored specifically for them (for example, by referencing the recipient’s age, sex or health history), they are more likely to lend it attention, find it interesting, take it seriously, remember it, and save it for future reference.
When you have a good case to make, you can employ – as openers – simple self-relevant cues (such as the word you) to predispose your audience towards a full concentration of that strong case before they see or hear it.
There’s another type of setting in which the attention-gripping quality of self-relevant cues can affect persuasive success: meetings or gatherings where individual are expected to deliver their views in a public forum along with others doing the same.
The next-in-line effect – I was so focused on myself and my upcoming speech, with all of its associated phrasings and transitions and pauses and points on emphasis that I missed the entire discussion. I have since figured out how to avoid it.
Example: Alex, a manager who reliably wields the most influence at the meetings and determines the problem solving path the group eventually takes. Deciding on your strategy for the upcoming meeting is easy. If you secure a seat next to Alex (before or after), he will have a tough time processing and will likely miss the specifics due the next in line effect. If it is immediately prior, he’ll be mentally rehearsing what he plans to say. If it comes immediately following him, he’ll likely miss those specifics because he’ll be internally rehashing what he just said. Taking a spot across Alex accounts for both the next-in-line effect and what’s focal is presumed casual effect. At a spot across the table from Alex, where (1) hell be sufficiently distant from his own presentation to hear yours fully, and (2), because of your visual prominence, he’ll see you as fully responsible for the insights within your fine recommendation for resolving the problem. If you haven’t come up with a creditable reasoned solution, you might want to grab a chair next to his so that his self-focus-induced bubble, he won’t likely register the fact.
Although self-relevance might justly be considered the superglue of attention, another kind of information also has this binding effect, but to a less recognised degree. Unfinished tasks hoard attention so they can be performed and dispatched successfully. Once completed, attentional resources are diverted from the undertaking to other pursuits; but while the initial activity is under way, a heightened level of cognitive focus must be reserved for it.
Example: Zeigarnik effect – On a task that we feel committed to performing, we will remember all sorts of elements of it better if we have not yet had a chance to finish, because our attention will remain drawn to it. If we are engaged in such a task and are interrupted or pulled away, we’ll feel a discomforting, gnawing desire to get back to it. That desire – which also pushes us to return to incomplete narratives, unresolved problems, unanswered questions, and unachieved goals- reflects a craving for cognitive closure. As per a study, the greatest recall occurred for details of ads that the researchers stopped five to six seconds before their natural endings. A problem that afflicts most writers is procrastination. A writer can effectively counter it by never finish a writing session at the end of the paragraph or even a thought until the next time. By keep the final feature of every writing session near-finished, one can use the motivating force of the drive for closure to get back to it quickly, impatient to write.
Mystery stories are excellent communication devices for engaging and holding any audience interest and are instructionally superior to the other, more common forms of teaching. Mystery stories edge us along due to our craving for closure.
In contests of persuasion, counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments. This superiority emerges especially when a counterclaim does more than refute a rival’s claim by showing it to be mistaken or misdirected in the particular instance, but does so instead by showing the rival to be an untrustworthy source of information. Issuing a counterargument demonstrates that an opponent’s argument is not to be believed because its maker is misinformed on the topic will usually succeed on that singular issue. But a counterargument that undermines an opponent’s argument by showing him or her dishonest in the matter will normally win that battle plus future battles with the opponent. Mona Lisa’s unresolved mystery accounts for a significant portion of the attention.
Example: In 1967, the US FCC had ruled that its ‘fairness doctrine’ applied to the issue of tobacco advertising. The fairness doctrine required that equal advertising time be granted on radio and TV to all sides of important and controversial topics. If one side purchased broadcast time, the opposing side must be given free time to counter argue. The decision had an immediate impact, for the first time anti-tobacco forces such as American Cancer Society could afford to air counterarguments to the tobacco company messages. They did so via counter ads that disputed the truthfulness of the images displayed in tobacco company commercials. If a tobacco ad featured healthy, attractive independent characters, the opposing ads would counter argue with ads, tobacco use led to diseased health, damaged attractive and slavish dependence. During the three years they ran, those anti-tobacco ads slashed tobacco consumption in the US by nearly 10%. At first, tobacco cos responded predictably, increasing their ad budgets. But, by the rules of the fairness doctrine, an equal time is provided for a counter-ad. When the logic of the situation hit them, the tobacco companies worked politically to ban their own ads, but solely on air where the fairness doctrine applied – thereby ensuring that the anti-tobacco forces would no longer get free airtime to make their counter argument. In the following year, tobacco cos witness a significant jump in sales along with a reduction in ad expenses. One of the best ways to enhance audience acceptance of one’s message is to reduce the availability of strong counterarguments to it – because they are typically more powerful than arguments.
VII. The Primacy of Associations: I Link, Therefore I Think
The brain’s operations arise fundamentally and inescapably from raw associations, associations can be called the building blocks of thought. No longer should we think of language as primarily a mechanism of conveyance; instead, we should think of language as primarily a mechanism of influence.
Multiple studies have shown that subtly exposing individuals to words that connote achievement (win, attain, succeed, master) increases their performance on an assigned task and more than doubles their willingness to keep working on it. Posters in offices carrying such words and related images are designed to spur employees towards greater achievements.
Communicators have been advised to use metaphors to get their points across. The main function of language is not to express or describe but to influence – something it does by channelizing receipts to sectors of reality pre-loaded with a set of mental associations favourable to the communicator’s view. Metaphors direct people to think of one thing in terms of their association to a selected other thing possesses great potential as a linguistic device.
Example: A political party which is known for its tough stance on crime, favors policies designed to capture and incarcerate lawbreakers. The party wants counsel on what they could do to make voters believe that their approach to the problem is correct. With an understanding of the working of metaphoric persuasion, your advice as a political consultant your advice – in any public pronouncements on the topic, they should portray crime surge as a wild beast rampaging through the city that must be stopped. Why? Because to bring a wild beats under control, its necessary to catch and cage it.
Another party which has a different approach to the problem: one that seeks to halt the growth of crime by treating its societal causes such as joblessness, lack of education, and poverty. Your advice – in all public pronouncements on the topic, the candidate should portray crime surge as a spreading virus infecting the city that must be stopped. Why? Because to bring a virus under control, it’s necessary to remove the unhealthily conditions that allow it to breed and spread.
Example: Ben Feldman became the greatest life insurance salesman of his time (1970s/80s). According to chroniclers of is success, he never pressured reluctant prospects into a sale. Instead, he used a light touch that led them smoothly towards a purchase. He as a master of metaphor. In his portrayal of life’s end, for instance, people didn’t die, they ‘walked out’ of life – a characterisation that benefitted from associations to a breach in ones’ family responsibilities that would need to be filed. He was quick to depict life insurance as the solution: “when you walk out”, he would say, “your insurance money walks in “when exposed to this metaphoric lesson in the moral responsibility of buying life insurance, many a customer straightened up and walked right.
Example: In English and many other languages. The concept of weight–lessness – is linked metaphorically to the concepts of seriousness, importance, and effort. For that reason, reading a job candidates qualifications attached to a heavy (versus light) clipboard come to see the applicant as a more serious contender for the job. Comparable findings have appeared in studies of another arena of human judgement: personal warmth, where individuals who have held a warm object briefly – a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee – immediately feel warmer towards, closer to, and more trusting of those around them.
Example: Used car salespersons are taught not to describe their cars as ‘used’ – which links to notions of wear and tear- but to say ‘preowned’, which bridges to thoughts of possession and ownership. Similarly IT providers are counselled against telling customers the ‘cost’ or ‘price’ of their offerings, which are terms associated with the loss of resources; rather, they are to speak of the ‘purchase’ or ‘investment’ amount involved – terms that make contact with the concept of gain.
Example: In pilot and flight attendant training – ‘your final destination’ is to be trimmed to ‘your destination’ and terminal is to be replaced with ‘gate’ wherever possible. It goes without saying that savvy marketers not only want to avoid coupling their products and services to elements with negative associations; they want to play both defence and offense by eliminating connections to factors that carry the most favourable connotations while maximising connections to those with the most favourable ones.
The concept pre-loaded with associations most damaging to immediate assessments and future dealings is untrustworthiness, along with is concomitants, such as lying and cheating.
The factor with most favourable impact is the realm of human evaluation is the self. Not only does it draw our attention with electromagnetic strength, thereby enhancing perceived importance; it also brings that attention to an entity that the great majority of us shower with positive associations.
Therefore, anything that is self-connected (or can be made to seem self-connected) gets an immediate lift in our eyes. Sometimes the connections can be trivial but still serve as spring broad to persuasive success. People who learn that they have a common birthday, first name leads to heightened cooperativeness and helpfulness towards each other.
Example: Coca Cola replaced its own package branding with one or another 150 of the most common first names in many countries, significantly boosting sales. In US, it produced the first increase in Coke sales in decade.
The overvalued self isn’t always the personal self. It can also be the social self – the one framed not be characteristics of the individual but by the characteristics of that individuals group. When we grasp something fluently – that is, we can picture or process it quickly and effortlessly – we not only like that thing more but also think it is more valid and worthwhile.
Within the domain of general attraction – observers have a greater liking for those facial features are easy to recognise and whose name easy to pronounce.
When people can process something with cognitive ease, they experience increased neuronal activity in the muscles of their faces that produce a smile. On the flip side, if it’s difficult to process something, observers tend to dislike that experience and accordingly that thing.
Example: Research has revealed that food detailed in restaurants in difficult to process descriptions is seen as less tempting.
VIII. Persuasive Geographies – All the Right Places, All the Right Traces
Many of us arrange our (external or internal) environment pre-suasively to send us down selected associative pathways (chutes) towards desired ends.
Consultancy firms develop for corporate clients works place designed to stimulate employees to work effectively.
Sitting at a particular desk before beginning to write made me write better, adorning a conference room with selected photos led to higher quality work.
Performers of all sorts – stage actors, etc. – hate the sound of even one cough: it can become contagious for no apparent reason.
Example: About 70-80% of all medical students are afflicted by this disorder, in which they experience the symptoms of whatever disease they happen to be learning about at that time and become convinced that they have contracted it. Warnings by professors to anticipate the phenomenon doesn’t seem to make a difference; students nonetheless perceive their symptoms alarmingly real.
Lying in low-level wait within each of us are units of experience that can be given sudden standing and force if we just divert our attention to them. There are the constituents of a cough and we can activate it by concentrating on the upper half of the lungs, where cough starts. The same applies to the constituents of dizziness, nausea, or headache, which we can activate by focusing on a spot in the middle of the brain or at the top of the stomach or just above the eyes, respectively.
But those units of experience waiting within also include advantageous attitudes, productive traits, and useful capacities that we can energize by merely channellizing attention to them instead.
Happiness doesn’t just flow from favorable life circumstances, it also creates them – including higher levels of physical health, psychological well-being, and even general success.
Example: Positivity paradox – the elderly feel happier than they did when younger, stronger and healthier. Research findings say that when dealing with all the negativity in their lives, seniors have decided that they just don’t have the time for it. They have come to desire a time of emotional contentment for their remaining years, and they take deliberate steps to improve it by mastering the geography of self-influence. They go more frequently and fully to the locations inside and outside themselves populated by mood lifting personal experiences. To a greater extent than younger individuals, recall positive memories, entertain pleasant thoughts, seek out and retain favourable information, search for gaze at happy faces, and focus on the upsides of their consumer products. They effectively manoeuvre their attention on those spots. Those with best attention management skills show the greatest mood enhancement.
You can make yourself happier just like you can make yourself lose weight. Set of manageable activities that reliably increase personal happiness:
- Count your blessings and gratitude at the start of the day – give your self-concentrated time with them by writing them down
- Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities
- Negate the negative by deliberating limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others
Elderly have decided to prioritise emotional contentment as a main life goal and, therefore, to turn their attentions systematically towards the positive.
Younger individuals have different primary life goals that include learning, developing and striving for achievement. Accomplishing those requires a special openness to discomforting laments: demanding tasks, contrary points of view, unfamiliar people, and owning mistakes or failures.
It makes sense, then, that in early and middle age, it can be so hard to turn our minds away from tribulations. To serve our principal aim at those times, we need to be receptive to the real presence of negatives in order to learn from and deal with them.
The problem arises when we allow ourselves to become mired in the emotions they generate, when we let them lock us into an ever cycling loop of negativity. The field of happiness studies has shown that relatively simple attention-based tactics can help manage or emotional state.
Example: In an experiment, some Asian American women students were asked to record their gender; other were asked to record their ethnicity. Compared with a sample of Asian American women students who weren’t asked to either record either, those who were reminded of their gender scored worse, while those reminded of their ethnicity scored better.
IX. The Mechanics of Pre-Suasion – Causes, Constraints, and Correctives
The basic idea of pre-suasion is that by guiding preliminary attention statically, it’s possible for a communicator to more receipts into agreement with a message before they experience it. The key is to focus them initially on concepts that are aligned associatively with the yet-to-be-encountered information.
After we attend to a specific concept, those concepts closely linked to it enjoy a privileged moment within our minds, acquiring influence that no linked concepts simply can’t match. That is so for a pair of reasons.
First, once an opener concept (German music, weight) receives our attention, closely associated secondary concepts (German wine, substance) becomes more accessible in consciousness, which greatly improves the chance that we attend and respond to the linked concepts. This newly enhanced standing in consciousness elevates their capacity to colour our perceptions, orient our thinking, affect our motivations, and thereby change our relevant behaviour.
Second, at the same time, concepts not linked to the opener are suppressed in consciousness’s, making them less likely than before to receive our attention and gain influence. Rather than being readied for action, they get decommissioned temporarily.
There is an important limit to pre-suasive effects. Attention to the first concept readies the second for influence in proportion to the degree of association between the two.
There is another approach that doesn’t require any existing connection at all. Rather, it involves creating a connection from scratch.
Advertisers, present something that attracts their target audience – a beautiful, good looking model, a popular celebrity – and then link it to the product through nothing more than a simultaneous presence inside the ad. The hope is that viewer’s attraction to the celebrity will transfer to the product by virtue of the now-extant connection.
Connection can be constructed like Pavlov’s dogs. We can be susceptible to such strategically fashioned pairings and just as clueless about our susceptibility. Imposing a brand of beer five times on pictures of pleasant activities such as sailing, water-skiing, and cuddling increased viewers positive feelings towards the beer.
For in product ad placements – respondents were least likely to select the products that had been inserted most prominently. The conspicuousness of the placements cued viewers to the advertiser’s sly attempt to sway their preferences and caused a correction against the potential distortion.
Compared with those natural psychological responses (to select familiar, attractively presented, easily accessed options), extensive analysis requires more time, energy, and motivation. As a consequence, its impact on our decisions is limited by the rigor it requires. If we don’t have the wherewithal (time, capacity, will) to think hard about a choice, were unlikely to deliberate deeply.
When any of these requirements isn’t met, we typically resort to decision making shortcuts. Place ads in late hour slots charge lower broadcast fees however the ads perform better at night. At the tail of a long day, viewers don’t have the mental energy to resist the ads emotional triggers (likable hosts, enthusiastic studio audiences, dwindling supplies, etc.).
Similarly, in criminal interrogations, even innocent suspects often can’t resist pressure for them to confess after hours of mentally exhausting questioning. Besides fatigue, other factors which impede accurate decision making when a person is rushed, overloaded, preoccupied, indifferent, stressed, distracted, etc. In addition to time challenged character, other aspects of modern life undermine or ability or motivation to think in a full reasoned way about even important decisions.
The sheer amount of information today can be overwhelming – its complexity befuddling, its relentlessness depleting, its range distracting, and its prospects agitating. Coupled with concentration disrupting alerts from devices nearly everyone carries.
X. Six Main Roads to Change – Broad Boulevards as Smart Shortcuts
It’s possible to move others in our direction by saying or doing just the right thing immediately before we want them to respond:
- If we want them to buy expensive chocolates, we can first arrange them to write down a number that’s much larger than the price
- If we want them to choose French wine, we can expose them to French music in the background
- If we want them to agree to try an untested product, we want first inquire if they are adventurous
- If we want them to feel warmly towards us, we can hand them a hot drink
- If we want them to be more achievement oriented, we can provide them an image of a runner winning a race
Whatever is the just the right thing to say or do in a situation changes depending on what we want of others there.
This specifically with the way that successful openers operate for a communicator. They pre-suasively channel recipient’s attention only to those concepts that are associated favourably with the communicator’s particular goal. Any persuasive communicator wants to spur the audience towards “Yes”. There are six concepts that empower the major principles of human social influence and are highly effective general generators of acceptance because they typically counsel people correctly regarding when to say yes to influence attempts.
Directing attention (before and during a message) to the following concepts can influence recipients towards assent.
- Reciprocation –
People say yes to people they owe. Human culture teach the rule from childhood and assign socially punishing names – freeloader, user, taker, parasite – to those which don’t give back after receiving.
Sales figures get a big lift from free samples distributed. In US companies makes sizable campaign contributions to lawmakers who sit on tax policy making committee see significant reduction in their tax rates.
Requesters who hope to commission this force of reciprocation, have to do something that appears daring: they have to take a chance and give first. They must begin an interaction by providing gifts, favours, advantages, or concessions without a formal guarantee of compensation.
Requesters of various sorts can elevate the likelihood that they will receive high levels of benefit from others if they first deliver the benefits viewed by the others as meaningful and unexpected. In addition, when a first favour is customised to the needs and preferences, or current circumstances of the recipient, it gains leverage.
2. Liking
The No 1 rule for salespeople is to show that the customer that you genuinely like them. They are instructed to highlight similarities and provide compliments to get customers to like them. They cause people to feel that you like them, and once they come to recognise that you like them, they’ll want to do business with you. That’s because people trust that those who like them will try to steer them correctly. The affinity can be activated by seemingly trivial similarities that might nonetheless generate big effects.
Salespersons who mimicked the language styles and nonverbal gestures/postures of customers sold more of the electronic equipment they recommended. Compliments nourish and sustain us emotionally. They also cause us to like and benefit those who provide them; and this is true whether the praise is for our appearance, taste, personality, work habits, or intelligence.
A pre-printed flyer from a clothing store – Were contacting you because you are fashionable and stylish developed positive attitudes towards the store and were more likely to want to shop there.
3. Social Proof
The principle asserts that people think it is appropriate for them to believe, feel, or do something to the extent that others, especially comparable others, are believing, feeling or doing it.
After receiving information that multiple, comparable others have responded in a particular way, that response seems more valid, more right to us, both morally and practically. When we see evidence of the increased frequency of an action, it elevates our judgement of the act’s moral correctness. Not every time, but the crowd is usually correct about the wisdom of actions, making the popularity of an activity a stand-in for soundness. As a result, we typically follow the lead of those around us who are like us.
Restaurant managers label dishes ‘most popular’ to increase demand for those particular dishes. Those initially rate the environmental performance of polluting firms within the industry and then publicize the ratings, so that all companies in that industry can see where they stand relative to their peers.
A great strength of social proof information is that it destroys the problem of uncertain achievability. If people learn that many others like them are conserving energy, there is little doubt to its feasibility. It comes to seem realistic and therefore implementable.
4. Authority
When a legitimate expert on a topic speaks, people are usually persuaded. Indeed, sometimes information becomes persuasive only because an authority is its source. This is especially true when the recipient is uncertain of what to do. A credible authority possesses the combination of two highly persuasive qualities: expertise and trustworthiness.
In a persuasion focused interaction, we want to trust that a communicator is presenting information in an honest and impartial fashion – attempting to depict reality accurately rather than to serve self-interest. It is possible to acquire instant trustworthiness by employing a clever strategy. Rather than succumbing to the tendency to describe all the most favourable features of an offer or idea up front and reserving mention of any drawbacks until the end of the presentation (or never), a communicator who references a weakness early on is immediately seen as most honest.
The advantage of this sequence is that, with perceived truthfulness already in place, when the major strengths of the case are advanced, the audience is more likely to believe them.
In, political campaigns, where a candidate who begins with something positive to say about an opponent gains trustworthiness and voting intentions. The tactic is particularly successful when the audience is already aware of the weakness; thus, little additional damage is done.
5. Scarcity
When access to a desired item is restricted in some way, people have been known to go a little crazy for it. After the chain of pastry shops Crumbs announced in 2014 that it would be closing all its locations, its signature cupcakes, which had been priced at around $4, began commanding up to $250 a piece online. Although there are several reasons
That scarcity drives desire, our aversion to losing something of value is a key factor.
“If you wake a multi-millionaire client at 5am and say, ‘if you act now, you will gain $20,000, he’ll scream at you and slam down the phone. But if you say, ‘if you don’t act now, you will lose $20,000, he’ll thank you.
But the scarcity of an item does more than raise the possibility of loss; it also raises the judged value of the item. When auto manufacturers limit production of a new model, its value goes up among potential buyers.
6. Consistency
Normally, we want to be (and to be seen) as consistent with our existing commitments – such as previous statements we’ve made, stands we’ve taken, and actions we’ve performed. Therefore communicators who can get us to take a pre-suasive step, even a small one, in the direction of a particular idea or entity will increase our willingness to take a much larger, congruent step when asked. The desire for consistency will prompt it. Brands can deepen the loyalty of customers by getting them to recommend the brand to a friend.
Core motives model of social influence
At the first stage, the main goal involves cultivating a positive association, as people are more favourable to a communication if they are favourable to the communicator.
Two principles of influence, reciprocity and liking, seem particularly appropriate to the task. Giving first (in a meaningful, unexpected, and customised fashion), highlighting genuine commonalities, and offering true compliments establish mutual rapport that facilitates future dealings.
At the second stage, reducing uncertainty becomes a priority. A positive relationship doesn’t ensure persuasive success. Before people are likely to change, they want to see any decision as wise. Under these circumstances, the principles of social proof and authority offer the best match. Pointing to evidence that a choice is well regarded by peers, experts significantly increases confidence in its wisdom.
At the third stage, motivating action is the main objective. That is, a well-liked friend might show me sufficient proof that experts recommend (and almost all peers believe) that daily exercise is a good thing, but that might not be enough to get me to do it. The friend would do well to include in his appeal the principles of consistency and scarcity by reminding me of what I’ve said publically in the last about the importance of my health and the unique enjoyments I would miss if I lost it. That’s the message that would most likely get me up in the morning and off to the gym.
XI. Unity 1- Being Together
Separate from the other six principles of influence. Relationships not only intensify willingness to help but also cause it.
What kind of existing or perceived relationships maximize the favourable treatment of fellow members?
I might have many more tastes and preferences in common with a colleague at work than with a sibling, but there is no question which of the two I would consider of me and which I would consider merely like me – and which, consequently, I would more likely help in time of need.
The experience of unity is not about simple similarities, it about shared identities – race, ethnicity, nationality, family, political, place and religious affiliations. A key characteristic of these categories is that their member tend to feel at one with, merged with, the others.
Individuals do not so much attempt to ensure their own survival as the survival of their copies of their genes. People are particularly willing to help genetically close relatives, especially in survival related decisions such as whether to donate a kidney.
Collectives that create a sense of we-ness among their members are characterized by the use of familial images and labels – brothers, sisterhood, forefathers, motherland, heritage – which lead to an increasing willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the welfare of the group.
Because humans evolved as a species from small but stable groupings of genetically related individuals, we have also evolved a tendency to favor the people who, outside the home, exist in close proximity to us. Around the globe, sports team stimulate feelings of personal pride in residents of the team’s surrounding zones – as if the residents had won.
Example: Throughout WWII, the Japanese did not succumb to Nazi pressure to treat Jews harshly. One reason might have been the assertion of one of the two rabbis that included his people in Japanese officials’ sense of “we” (as Asians) and excluded the Nazis. It shifted the Japanese officers reigning in-group identity from one based in temporary wartime alliance to one based in a regional, genetically related mutuality. It did so by implicating the Nazi’s own racial claim that the ‘superior’ Aryan master race was innately different from the people of Asia.
XII. Unity 2 – Acting Together
There is another kind of unitizing effect available to those seeking elevated influence. It comes not from being together in the same genealogy or geography but from acting together synchronously or collaboratively.
All human societies have developed ways to respond together, in unison or synchrony, inside songs, matches, rituals, chants, prayers and dances. Human societies, even ancient ones, seem to have discovered group bonding ‘technologies’ involving coordinated responding.
The effects are similar to those of kinship: feelings of we-ness, merger, and the confusion of self and other. Id acting together – in motoric, vocal, or sensory ways – can serve as a surrogate for being together in a kinship unit, we ought to see similar consequences from both forms of togetherness.
When people act in unison, they not only see themselves as more alike, they elevate one another more positively afterward. There elevated likeness turns into elevated liking. It appears, that groups can promote unity, liking, and subsequent supportive behaviour in a variety of situations by first arranging for synchronous responding.
Music poses rare synchronizing power. Listeners can easily become aligned with one another along motoric, sensory, vocal, and emotional dimensions – a state of affairs that leads to familiar markers of unity such as self-other merging, social cohesion, and supportive conduct.
Daniel Kahneman’s treatment of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. The first is fast, associative, intuitive, and often emotional, whereas the second is slower, deliberative, analytical, and rational.
Support for the separateness of the two approaches comes from evidence that activating one inhibits the other. Just as it is difficult to think hard about an occurrence while experiencing it emotionally, fully experiencing the occurrence is difficult while parsing it logically. There’s an implication for influence: persuaders would be wise to match System 1 versus 2 orientation of any appeal to the corresponding orientation of the recipient.
Example: If you are considering a car purchase primarily from the standpoint of its emotionally relevant features (attractive looks and exhilarating acceleration), a salesperson would be well advised to convince you by using feeling-related arguments. Research suggests that even merely saying “I feel this is the one for you” will be more successful. But if you are considering the purchase primarily on rational grounds (fuel economy and trade-in value), “I Think this is the one for you” would be more likely to close the sale.
Young women who are at a peak age for interest in both romance and music, have a weakness for musicians. Powerful links between the two types of experiences make musicians hard to resist. The probability of a successful relationship with most musicians are notoriously low; those are rational probabilities. And it doesn’t matter that the current and future economic prospects of most musicians are equally low; those are economic reasons. Music isn’t about such practicalities. It’s about harmonies – melodic ones that lead to emotional and relational ones.
The critical takeaway should not merely be that music is allied with System 1 responding. The larger lesson involves the importance of System 1 versus 2 character of a persuasive communication with the System versus 2 mind-set of the it’s intended audience.
Recipients with hedonistic goals should be matched with messages containing no rational elements such as musical accompaniments, whereas those with rational elements such as facts.
Example: J. Scott in his book, Persuasive Advertising: Evidence based principles, reported that in a 2008 analysis of 30 second TV commercials, 87% incorporate music. Armstrong viewed this flawed and concluded that music should be used only to advertise familiar, feelings-based products (snack foods, body scents) in an emotional context – that is, when thinking is unlikely. For products that have high personal consequences and strong supportive arguments (safety equipment, software packages) – that is, for which hard thinking is likely and instructive – background music undercuts ad effectiveness.
People who have built items themselves come to see ‘their amateurish creations as similar in value to expert’s creations’.
Managers led to believe that they’d had a large role in developing the end product (an ad for a wristwatch) rated the ad 50% more favourably than did mangers led to believe they’d has little developmental involvement – even though the final ad they saw was identical.
In a standard classroom, students tend to coalesce along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, finding friends and helpmates mainly within their groups. However, this pattern declines significantly after they have engaged co-creatively with students from other groups within ‘cooperative learning’ exercises, in which each student has to teach a portion of the information to the others so that they can all get a good score.
Companies struggle to get consumers to feel bonded with and therefore loyal to their brands: it’s a battle they’ve been winning by inviting current and prospective customers to co-create with them novel or updated products and services, most often by providing the company with information as to desirable features. However, within such marketing partnerships, consumers input must be framed as advice to the company, not as opinions about or expectations for the company. The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s utilisation goal.
Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one’s own identity with another party’s. Providing an opinion or expectation, on the other hand, puts a person in an introspective state of mind, which involves focusing on oneself. These only slightly different forms of consumer feedback – and the nonetheless vitally different merging-versus-separating mind-sets they produce – can have a significant impact on consumer engagement with a brand. This also clinches for me the wisdom (and the ethicality, if done in an authentic search for useful information) of asking for advice in face-to-face interactions with friends, colleagues and customers. It should even prove effective in our interactions with superiors.
Novelist Saul Bellow once observed, “When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.” Id only add that, if we get that advice, we usually get that accomplice. And what better abettor to have on a project than someone in charge.
The consequence of being together and acting together, by installing one or another of these two unitizing experiences in people pre-suasively, we can arrange to solidify support from company’s shareholders as well as its customers, and to help ensure that soldiers will stand and fight rather than flee in wartime.
XIII. Post-suasion – Aftereffects
Successful pre-suasion can occur when audience members’ attention is channelled temporarily to a psychological concept favourable to a follow-on message.
Pre-suasive openers can produce dramatic, immediate shifts in people, but to turn those shifts into durable changes, it’s necessary to get commitments to them, usually in the form of related behaviour.
In a large measure, who we are with respect to any choice is where we are, attentionally, in the moment before the choice.
We can be channelled to that privileged moment by (choice-relevant) cues we haphazardly bump into in our daily settings; or, of greater concern, by the cues a knowing communicator has tactically placed there; or, to much better and lasting effect, by the cues we have stored in those recurring sites to send us consistently in desired directions.
In each case, the made moment is pre-suasive. Whether we are wary of the underlying process, attracted to its potential, or both, we’d be right to acknowledge its considerable power and wise to understand its inner workings.