Reading Notes For:
📍 My reading notes for PreSuasion by Robert Cialdini. PreSuasion seeks to add to the body of behavioral science information that general readers find both inherently interesting and applicable to their daily lives. It identifies what savvy communicators do before delivering a message to get it accepted.
Their sharp timing is what is new here. Sun Tzu declared, every battle is won before it is fought. There’s a drawback. Days, weeks or months of prior activity are required. Communicators can elevate their success by knowing what to say or do just before an appeal. Part 1. PreSuasion. Front loading of attention.
1. PreSuasion and introduction. PreSuasion. The highest achievers spend 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 fullest fruit in poorly prepared ground.
Of course, the best performers also considered and cared about what, specifically, they would be offering in those situations. But much more than their less effective colleagues, they didn’t rely on the legitimate merits of an offer to get it accepted. They recognized that the psychological frame in which an appeal is first placed can carry equal or even greater weight.
To accomplish that, they did something that gave them a singular kind of persuasive traction. Before introducing their message, they arranged to make their audience sympathetic to it. The best persuaders become the best through PreSuasion, the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it.
An essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication, what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. Consider how a small procedural difference has improved the bottom line of the consulting business of a Toronto based colleague of mine. For years, when bidding on a big project, it wasn’t unusual to get price resistance from the client, who might propose a 10 percent or 15 percent reduction.
After his standard presentation, and just before declaring his 75, 000 fee, he joked, as you can tell, I’m not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this. The client looked up from the written proposal he’d been studying and said, Well, I can agree to that. The meeting proceeded without a single subsequent reference to compensation, and ended with a signed contract.
My friend is not alone in experiencing the remarkable effects of merely launching a large number into the air, and, consequently, into the minds of others. Researchers have found that the amount of money people said they’d be willing to spend on dinner went up when the restaurant was named Studio 97, as opposed to Studio 17, and that observers estimates of an athlete’s performance increased if he wore a high versus low number on his jersey.
In fact, the impact of what goes first isn’t limited to numerics at all. Customers in a wine shop were more likely to purchase a German vintage if, before their choice, they’d heard a German song playing on the shop’s sound. System, similarly, they were more likely to purchase a French vintage if they’d heard a French song playing.
2. Trust is one of those qualities that leads to compliance with requests, provided that it has been planted before the request is made. Despite the mountains of scientific reports and scores of books that have been written making that point and suggesting ways to achieve trust, Jim accomplished it in a fashion I’ve not seen in any of them.
He did it by pretending to be a bit of a screw up. He would wait until a couple had begun taking the knowledge test, when he’d slap his forehead and say, Oh, I forgot some really important information in my 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?
He answer was always some form of, sure, go ahead. Often times it required giving him a door key. Think, Bob. 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 Cho’s family’s minds. I will forward the argument that all mental activity arises as patterns of associations within a vast and intricate neural network.
And that influence attempts will be successful only to the extent that the associations they trigger are favourable. To first become associated with the concept of trust, the intensely positive, other associations of which would then become linked to him and his advice. Even Jim’s unorthodox method of connecting himself to the concept of trust was purely associative.
They can be called frames, or anchors, or primes, or mindsets, or first impressions. We will encounter each of those types in the remainder of these pages, where throughout, I’m going to refer to them as openers because they open up things for influence in two ways. In the first, they simply initiate the process.
They provide the starting points, the beginnings of persuasive appeals. But it is in their second function that they clear the way to persuasion by removing existing barriers. In that role, they promote the openings of minds and for would be persuaders like Jim, of protectively locked doors. 3. It wasn’t long after I began operating undercover in the training classes of influenced practitioners that I encountered something curious.
Participants in the sessions were nearly always informed that persuasion had to be approached differently in their particular profession than in related professions. They didn’t focus enough on an extraordinarily useful other question. What’s the same? I identified only six psychological principles that appeared to be deployed routinely in non prospering influence businesses.
I’ve claimed that the six reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, and consistency represents certain psychological universals of persuasion. And I’ve treated each, one per chapter, in my earlier book, Influence. Importantly different from influence is the science based evidence of not just what best to say to persuade, but also when best to say it.
From that evidence, it is possible to learn how to recognize and monitor the natural emergence of opportune moments of influence. It is also possible, but more perilous from an ethical standpoint, to learn how to create to make those moments. Whether operating as a moment monitor or a moment maker, The individual who knows how o time a request, recommendation, or proposal properly will do exceedingly well.
Suasive practices create windows of opportunity that are far from propped open permanently. It’s because of the only temporary receptiveness that pre suasive actions often produce in others that I’ve introduced the concept of. The meaning of the word privileged is straightforward, referring to special, elevated status.
The word moment, though, is more complex, as it evokes a pair of meanings. One connotes a time limited period, in this case, the window of opportunity following a pre suasive opener, when a proposal’s power is greatest. The other connotation comes from physics and refers to a unique leveraging force that can bring about unprecedented movement.
The concept of privileged moments, identifiable points in time when an individual is particularly receptive to a communicator’s message. The factor most likely to determine a person’s choice in a situation is often not the one that offers the most accurate or useful counsel. Instead, it is the one that has been elevated in attention, and thereby in privilege, at the moment of decision.
Channeled attention leads to PreSuasion. The human tendency to assign undue levels of importance to an idea as soon as one’s attention is turned to it. In the same way that attentional focus leads to perceptions of importance, it also leads to perceptions of causality. If people see themselves giving special attention to some factor, they become more likely to think of it as a cause.
Besides the advantages of drawing attention to a particular stimulus, there is considerable benefit to holding it there. The communicator who can fasten an audience’s focus onto the favourable elements of an argument raises the chance that the argument will go unchallenged by opposing points of view, which get locked out of the attentional environment as a consequence.
All mental activity is composed of patterns of associations, and influence attempts, including persuasive ones, will be successful only to the extent that the associations they trigger are favourable to change. Both language and imagery can be used to produce desirable outcomes such as greater job performance, more positive personnel evaluations, and, in one especially noteworthy instance, just as words and images can prompt certain associations favorable to change, so can places.
Thus, it becomes possible to send ourselves in desired directions by locating to physical and psychological environments pre fit with. Cues associated with our relevant goals. It’s also possible for influencers to achieve their goals by shifting others to environments with supportive cues. For instance, young women do better on science, math and leadership tasks if assigned to rooms with cues, photos for example, of women known to have mastered the tasks.
Additional, 7th universal principle of influence, unity. There is a certain type of unity, of identity, that best characterizes a we relationship and that, if persuasively raised to consciousness, leads to more acceptance, cooperation, liking, help, trust, and, consequently, assent. The chapter describes the first of two main ways to build we relationships, by presenting cues of genetic commonality associated with family and place.
Beside the unitizing effect of being together in the same genealogy or geography, The We relationships can result from acting together synchronously or collaboratively. When people act in unitary ways, they become unitized. And when such activity is arranged pre suasively, it produces mutual liking and support.
Two privileged moments. Its obtuse scientific name is positive test strategy. But it comes down to this. 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.
This was the outcome when members of a sample of Canadians were asked either if they were unhappy or happy with their social lives. Those asked if they were unhappy were far more likely to encounter dissatisfactions as they thought about it, and consequently, were 375 percent more likely to declare themselves unhappy.
There are multiple lessons to draw from this finding. First, if a pollster wants to know only whether you are dissatisfied with something, it could be a consumer product, or an elected representative or a government. Policy. Watch out. Be suspicious as well of the one who asks only if you are satisfied.
Single shoot questions of this sort can get you both to mistake and misstate your position. I’d recommend declining to participate in surveys that employ this biased form of questioning. Much better are those that use two sided questions. How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with this brand? Are you happy or unhappy with the Mayor’s performance in office?
Decidedly more worrisome than the pollster whose leading questions usher you into a less than accurate personal stance though. Is the questioner who uses this same device to exploit you in that moment, that privileged moment. I’m convinced that the, are you unhappy, question is more than a screening device.
It’s also a recruiting device that stacks the deck by focusing people unduly on their dissatisfactions. The truth is, the cults don’t want malcontents within their ranks. They are looking for basically well adjusted individuals, whose positive, can do style can be rooted to cult pursuits. Profitable commercial organizations recognize the advantages of having good information.
The prevailing problem for these organizations is that the rest of us can’t be bothered to participate in their surveys, focus groups. And taste tests. Even with sizable inducements in the form of cash, payments, free products or gift certificates, the percentage of people agreeing to cooperate can be low.
The scientists success was dismal. Only 29%, but Balkan and Anderson thought they could boost compliance without resorting to any of the costly payments that marketers often feel forced to employ. They stopped a second sample of individuals and began the interaction 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 their survey. Now 77. 3 percent volunteered. In Chapter 10, we’ll explore the particular psychological mechanism, a desire for consistency, that led people to become more than twice as likely to comply under these circumstances, but for now.
Let’s derive a broader insight, one that is a 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, but It is one that has been elevated in attention, and thereby in privilege, at the time of the decision.
If you wish to change another’s behavior, you must first change some existing feature of that person, so that it fits with the behavior. 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 it’s the fastest growing new beverage on the market, or to change their attitudes by connecting it to a well liked celebrity, or to change their experiences with it by offering free samples in the supermarket. 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.
Are you adventurous enough to consider a revolutionary model of influence? According to this non traditional, channeled 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.
In a companion study, the two scientists found that it was similarly possible to increase willingness, this time asking people if they considered themselves adventurous. Only 33 percent volunteered their contact information. The other subjects were asked initially, Do you consider yourself to be somebody who is adventurous and likes to try new things?
Almost all said yes, following which, 75. 7 percent gave their email addresses to Eleven. Two features of these findings strike me as remarkable. First, of the subjects who were asked if they counted themselves adventurous, 97%, 70 out of 72, responded affirmatively. The idea that nearly everybody qualifies as an adventurous type is ludicrous.
Moreover, the narrowed perspective, though temporary, is anything but inconsequential. For a persuasively privileged moment, it renders these individuals highly vulnerable to aligned requests. The ruthlessness of channeled attention, which not only promotes the now focal aspect of the situation, but also suppresses all competing aspects of it, even critically important ones.
We are said to pay attention, which plainly implies that the process extracts a cost. Research on cognitive functioning shows us the form of the fee. When attention is paid to something, the price is. Attention lost to something else. Indeed, because 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.
Even though there are always multiple tracks of information available, any other arrangement would leave us overloaded and mongrelized input. 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. Have you ever had a phone conversation with someone you can tell is engaged in another task? Maybe because you can hear newspaper pages turning or computer keys clicking? I hate that. 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.
But I’m not the only one it advises. It notifies my conversation partner of the same thing. Because people rightly believe that what they choose to attend to, or away from, reflects what they value at the 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.
Consider, for instance, a device used Erickson when dealing with patients who, over the course of treatment, Had been unwilling to consider a point that Erikson felt was crucial to their progress perhaps, that failure to choose is a form of personal choice. Rather than inviting more resistance by amplifying his voice the next time he made this point, he recognized the wisdom of doing the opposite.
True to his reputation as a master moment maker, Dr. Erickson would wait for a heavy truck to begin climbing the hill outside his office window. Then, while timing his reintroduction of the crucial insight to coincide with the worst of the noise, he would lower his voice. To hear what Erickson was saying, patients had to lean forward into the information and embodied signal of focused attention and intense interest.
When asked about the tactic, Erickson, who was famous for orchestrating the non verbal elements of affective therapy, attributed its success to the leaning in posture that patients assumed when trying to hear the information he wanted them to see as important. Plenty of research shows that reducing the distance to an object makes it seem more worthwhile.
Three, the importance of attention. Is importance what’s salient is important? Anything that draws focused attention to itself can lead observers to overestimate its importance. When Daniel Kahneman talks, people listen. I am invariably among them. He was asked to specify the one scientific concept that, if appreciated properly, would most improve everyone’s understanding of the world.
Although in response he provided a full 500 word essay describing what he called the focusing illusion, his answer is neatly. Summarized in the essay’s title, Nothing in life is as important as you think it is W. B. I. L. you are thinking about it. Because a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message preloads it with importance.
This form of PreSuasion accounts for what many see as the principal role, labelled agenda setting, that the news media play in influencing public opinion, the central tent 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.
As the political scientist Bernard Cohen wrote, 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. A similar effect appeared more recently in the United States, as the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, approached.
9 11 related media stories peaked in the DA immediately surrounding the anniversary date, and then dropped off rapidly in the weeks thereafter. Surveys conducted during those times asked citizens to nominate two especially 70 years. Two weeks prior to the anniversary, before the media blitz began in earnest, about 30 percent of respondents named 9 11.
But as the anniversary drew closer, and the media treatment intensified, survey respondents started identifying 9 1sts in increasing numbers to a high of 65%. Two weeks later though, after reportage had died down to earlier levels, once again only about 30%, of 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. Limited attentional resources on what does indeed possess special import 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. Acted 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.
After recognizing the extent of our vulnerability to the focusing illusion, I’ve come at last to appreciate a standard saying of Hollywood press agents. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Powerful publicity of any sort spares them the 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. Thus, the persuader who artfully draws outsized attention to the most favorable feature of an offer becomes a successful pre suader. That is, he or she becomes effective not just in a straightforward, attention based way, by arranging for audiences to consider that feature fully, but also by arranging for them to lend the feature exaggerated significance, even.
Before they have examined it. When audience members do then consider it fully, they experience a double barreled effect. They are likely to be convinced that the attribute is especially desirable by the one sidedness of the evidence they’ve been directed toward and to view that attribute as especially important besides.
Back roads to attention. It is rousing and worrisome, depending on whether you are playing offense or defense, to recognize that these persuasive outcomes can flow from attention shifting techniques so slight as to go, unrecognized as agents of change. Let’s consider three ways communicators have used such subtle tactics to great effect, managing the background.
A traditional problem that the business savvy students in our marketing courses raise all the time, she said. We always instruct them not to get caught up in a price war against an inferior product because they’ll lose. We tell them to make quality the battleground instead, because that’s a fight they’ll most likely win.
Yeah. But how in an article largely overlooked since it was published in 2002, they described how they were able to draw website visitors attention to the goal of comfort, merely by placing fluffy clouds on the background wallpaper of the site’s landing page. That manoeuvre led those visitors to assign elevated levels of importance to comfort when asked what they were looking for in a sofa.
To make sure their results were due to the landing page wallpaper, and not to some general human preference for comfort, Mandel and Johnson reversed their procedure for other visitors, who saw wallpaper that pulled their attention to the goal of economy by depicting pennies instead of clouds. These visitors assigned greater levels of importance to price.
Search the site primarily for cost information. and preferred an inexpensive sofa. Additional research has found similarly sly effects for online banner ads, the sort we all assume we can ignore without impact while we read. While reading an online article about education, repeated exposure to a banner ad for a new brand of camera made the readers significantly more favorable to the ad when they were shown it again later.
Tellingly, this effect emerged even though they couldn’t recall having ever seen the ad, which had been presented to them in five second flashes near the story material. Further, the more often the ad had appeared while they were reading the article, the more they came to like it. This last finding deserves elaboration, because it runs counter to abundant evidence that most ads experience a wear out effect after they have been encountered repeatedly.
With observers tiring of them or losing trust in advertisers who seem to think that their message is so weak that they need to send it over and over. Why didn’t these banner ads, which were presented as many as 20 times within just 5 pages of text, suffer any wear out? The readers never processed the ads consciously, so there was no recognized information to be identified as tedious or untrustworthy.
Indeed, it looks to be this third result, lack of direct notice, that makes banner ads so effective in the first two strong and stubborn ways. Seemingly dismissible information presented in the background captures a valuable kind of attention that allows for potent, almost entirely uncounted instances of influence.
The influence isn’t always desirable, however. Environmental noise such as that coming from heavy traffic or airplane flight paths is something we think we get used to and even block out after a while. One study found that the reading scores of students in a New York City elementary school were significantly lower if their classrooms were situated close to elevated subway tracks on which trains rattle past every four to.
Five minutes. When the researchers, armed with their findings, pressed NYC transit system officials and board of education members to install noise dampening materials on the tracks and in the classrooms, students scores jumped back up. Employers, for the sake of their workers and their own bottom lines, should do the same.
Classrooms with heavily decorated walls displaying lots of posters, maps, and artwork reduced the test scores of young children learning science material there. For more UN videos visit www.UN.org
