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, inviting favorable evaluation.
Relevant Cohen’s observation about press coverage that it doesn’t so much tell people what to think as what to think about. Any practice that pulls attention to an idea will be successful only when the idea has merit. If the arguments and evidence supporting it are seen as meritless by an audience, directed attention to the bad idea won’t make it any more persuasive.
A lot of research has demonstrated that the more consideration people give to something, the more extreme, polarized, their opinions of it become. Still, if you have a good case to make, There are certain places where those tactics will give your persuasive appeals special traction. One such place is in a field of strong competitors.
Easily copied advances in development technologies, production techniques, and business methods make it hard for a company to distinguish the essence of what it offers. Bottled water, gasoline, insurance, air travel, banking services. Industrial machinery, from what other contestants for the same market can deliver, to deal with.
The problem? Alternative ways of creating separation have to be tried. Retailers can establish multiple, convenient locations. Wholesalers can put big sales staffs into the field. Manufacturers can grant broad guarantees. Service providers can assemble extensive customer care units, and they all can engage in large scale advertising and promotional efforts to create and maintain brand prominence.
But there’s a downside to such fixes. Because these means of differentiations are so costly, their expense might be too burdensome for many organizations to bear. Could resolving the dilemma lie in finding an inexpensive way to shift attention to a particular product, service, or idea? Well, yes, as long as the spotlighted item is a good one a high score in customer reviews, perhaps.
Critical here would be to arrange for observers to focus their attention on that good thing, rather than on rivals equally good options. Then its favorable features should gain both verification and importance from the scrutiny. Already some data show that these twin benefits can produce a substantial advantage for a brand when consumers focus on it in isolation from its competitors.
Although the data have come from different settings, shopping malls, college campuses and websites, and different types of products, cameras, big screen TVs, VCRs and laundry detergents, the results all point to the same conclusion. If you agreed to participate in a consumer survey regarding some product, perhaps 35mm cameras, the survey taker could enhance your ratings of any strong brand.
Let’s say Canon, simply by asking you to consider the qualities of Canon cameras, but not asking you to consider the qualities of any of its major rivals, such as Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, or Minolta. However, all of these advantages for Canon would drop away if you’d been asked to consider the qualities of its cameras, But, before rating those qualities, to think about the options that Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and Minolta could provide.
Sometimes I am to evaluate a single experience such as a recent hotel stay. My focused attention to their mostly favorable facets, with no comparable attention to the mostly favorable facets of their ablest rivals. But surely the typical highly placed decision maker wouldn’t settle on an important course of action without evaluating all viable alternatives fully.
And he or she certainly wouldn’t make that choice after evaluating just one strong option, right? Wrong and wrong for a pair of reasons. First, a thorough analysis of all legitimate roads to success is time consuming, requiring potentially lengthy delays for identifying vetting. And then mapping out each of the promising routes.
And highly placed decision makers didn’t get to their lofty positions by being known as bottlenecks inside their organizations. Second, for any decision maker, a painstaking comparative assessment of multiple options is difficult and stressful, akin to the juggler’s task of trying to keep several objects in the air all at once.
The resultant, and understandable, tendency is to avoid or abbreviate such an arduous process by selecting the first practicable candidate that presents itself. This tendency has a quirky name, satisficing a term coined by economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon to serve as a blend of the words satisfy and suffice.
The combination reflects two simultaneous goals of a chooser when facing a decision to make it good and to make it gone, which, according to Simon, usually means making it good enough. Although 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.
Shifting the task at hand. On March 20th, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq by US led forces. After a series of rapid military strikes that crushed the government of Saddam Hussein, it eventuated in an extended, agonizing, and brutal slog that cost the United States dearly in blood, money, prestige, and global influence.
The Bush administration’s initial justification for the war To rid the region of Saddam’s cache of weapons of mass destruction was debunked, the weapons never materialized, and was revised regularly to incorporate such new. Purposes is eliminating Saddam’s humanitarian abuses, terminating Iraq’s support of Al Qaeda, safeguarding the world’s oil supply, and establishing a bulwark for democracy in the Middle East.
Nonetheless, 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 U. S. 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.
Those human interest stories are also highly coveted by news media for their audience drawing powers. Also, the personal observations of journalists from around the world, nearly 40 percent of embedded slots went to non U. S. news agencies, provided an invaluable kind of risk protection to the military from possible untruths about the war coming from Saddam’s government.
At an academic conference one year after the invasion, Colonel Rick Long, who was head of media relations for the U. S. Marine Corps, was asked why the military advocated for the program. Indeed, 93 percent of all stories filed by embedded journalists came from the soldiers perspectives, compared with less than half of that from their unembedded counterparts.
Something crucial was lost, though, in this deepened but narrowed coverage. The embedded journalists, whose reports received an astonishing 71 percent of front page war coverage during the conflict, were not reporting in any meaningful way on the broader political issues involved. Such as the justifications for the war, as an example.
The absence of weapons of mass destruction was mentioned in just 2 percent of all stories, or the operation’s impact on us standing in power abroad. How could we expect anything else of them? Their eager superiors assigned them to cover what one analysis termed the minutiae of the conflict, which absorbed all of their time, energy, and consideration.
Because front line combat factors represented a prime strength of the war, whereas larger strategic ones represented a prime weakness. The effect of the Embedded Reporter Program was to award center stage import to the main success, not the main failure, of the Bush administration’s Iraq campaign. The focusing illusion ensured it.
The stealthy impact of bringing selective attention to a favorable type of information is not limited to the beneficial shaping of an assigned task. As we’ve seen, the persuasive consequences of managing background information and inviting singular evaluation went unrecognized by individuals subjected to those procedures too.
