Reading Notes For:
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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. What’s focal is causal. It’s no wonder that we assign elevated import to factors that have our attention.
We also assign them causality. Therefore, directed attention gives focal elements a specific kind of initial weight in any deliberation. It gives them standing as causes, which in turn gives them standing as answers to that most essential of human questions. Because we typically allot special attention to the true causes around us, if we see ourselves giving such attention to some factor, we become more likely to think of it as a cause.
Take monetary payments. Because the amount of money is so salient in the exchanges, I’ll pay you x when you do, you would tend to infer that the payment spurred the act when in fact it was often some other. Economists, in particular, are prone to this bias because the monetary aspects of a situation dominate their attentions and analyses.
Thus, when Harvard Business School economist Felix Oberholzer Gee approached people waiting in line at several different venues and offered them money to let him cut in, he recognized that a purely economics based model would predict that the more cash he offered, the more people would agree to the exchange.
And that’s what he found. Half of everyone offered 1 let him cut in line. 65 percent did so if offered them 3, and acceptance rates jumped to 75 percent and 76 percent when he proposed the larger sums of 5 and S10. According to classical economic theory, which enshrines financial self interest as the primary cause of human behavior, those greater incentives convince people to take the deal for their own fiscal betterment.
Well, right. Except for an additional finding that challenges all this thinking. Almost no one took the money. To explain his findings, Oberholzer G. stepped away from a consideration of salient economic factors and toward a hidden factor, an obligation people feel to help those in need. The obligation comes from the helping norm, which behavioural scientists sometimes call the norm of social responsibility.
It states that we should aid those who need assistance in proportion to their need. Several decades worth 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 the more likely we are to provide it.
When viewed through this lens, the puzzling findings make perfect sense. The payment offers stimulated compliance because they alerted recipients to the amount of need present in the situation. This account explains why larger financial inducements increased consent, even though most people weren’t willing to pocket them.
More money signaled a stronger need on the part of the requester. 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. Elements such as money that attract notice within human exchanges don’t just appear more important, they also appear more causal,
taking a chance. In the autumn of 1982, someone went into supermarkets and drugstores in the Chicago area, injected packaged capsules of Tylenol with cyanide. Owing to the rapid, customer centered steps taken by Tylenol’s maker, Johnson Johnson, which recalled 31 million of the capsules from all stores, it produced a textbook approach to proper corporate crisis.
Management that is still considered the gold standard. One widely communicated sort of warning alerted consumers to the Production Act lot numbers on the affected bottles. Because they were the first to be identified, two of the numbers received the most such publicity. Lots 2, 880 and 1, 910. Immediately and bewilderingly, U.
S. residents of states that ran lotteries began playing those two numbers at unprecedented rates. In three states, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, officials announced that they had to halt wages on the numbers because betting on them shot above maximum liability levels. Our previous analysis offers one answer.
Because of all the publicity surrounding them, They had become focal in attention, and what is focal is seen to have causal properties to have the ability to make events occur, taking a life. A series of experiments in which observers watched and listened to conversations that had been scripted carefully, so that neither discussion partner contributed more than the other.
Some observers watched from a perspective that allowed them to see the face of one of the parties over the shoulder of the other, while other observers saw both faces from the side equally. All the observers were then asked to judge who had more influence in the discussion based on tone, content, and direction.
The outcomes were always the same. Whomever’s face was more visible was judged to be more causal. The power of the what’s focal is presumed causal phenomenon. No matter what they tried, the researchers couldn’t stop observers from presuming that the causal agent in the interaction they’d witnessed was the one whose face was most visible to them.
When her results were first published, that videotaped interactions could produce the what’s focal is presumed causal effect was not viewed as an important facet of Taylor’s findings. But circumstances have now changed, because certain kinds of videotaped interactions are used frequently to help determine the guilt or innocence of suspects in major crimes.
All interrogations involving major crimes be videotaped. That way, these commentators have argued, people who see the recordings, prosecutors, jury members, judges can assess for themselves whether the confession was gained improperly. It’s a good idea in theory, but there’s a problem with it in practice.
The point of view of the video camera is almost always behind the interrogator and onto the face of the suspect. The legal issue of whether a confession had been made freely by the suspect, or extracted improperly by an interrogator, involves a judgment of causality, of who was responsible for the incriminating statement.
As we know from the experiments of Professor Taylor, a camera angle arranged to record the face of one discussant over the shoulder of another biases the critical judgment toward the more visually salient of the two. We also know now, from the more recent experiments of social psychologist Daniel Lasseter, that such a camera angle aimed at a suspect during an interrogation leads observers of the recording to assign the suspect greater responsibility for a confession and greater guilt.
The bias disappeared when the recording showed the interrogation and confession from the side, so that the suspect and questioner were equally focal. In fact, it was possible to reverse the bias by showing observers a recording of the identical interaction with the camera trained over the suspect’s shoulder onto the interrogator’s face.
Then, compared with the side view judgments, the interrogator was perceived to have coerced the confession. Manifestly here, what’s focal seems causal. Is there anything you could do to increase the odds that, should you be somehow tricked or pressured into making falsely incriminating comments? External observers would be able to identify the tricks and pressure as the causes.
There is. It comes in two steps. Straight from the research of Professors Taylor and Lassiter. First, find the camera in the room, which will usually be above and behind the police officer. Second, move your chair. Position yourself so that the recording of the session will depict your face and your questioner’s face equally.
Don’t allow the What’s Focal is presumed causal effect to disadvantage you at trial. Evidence that people automatically view What’s Focal as causal helps me to understand other phenomena that are difficult to explain. Leaders, for example, are accorded a much larger causal position than they typically deserve in the success or failure of the teams, groups, and organizations they head.
Business performance analysts have termed this tendency 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 outsized responsibility for company results.
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. Recipients receptivity to considering those facets prior to actually considering them. In a real sense, then, Channeled attention can make recipients more open to a message persuasively before they process it.
It’s a persuader’s dream, because very often the biggest challenge for a communicator is not in providing a meritorious case, but in convincing recipients to devote their limited time and energy to considering its merits. Perceptions of issue, importance and causality meet this challenge exquisitely. 5.
Commanders of attention 1. The attractors. Certain cues seize our attention vigorously. Those that do so most powerfully are linked to our survival. Sexual and violent stimuli are prime examples. Asexual. Consider a small study done in France. The researchers arranged for an attractive 19 year old woman to approach two random samples of middle aged men walking alone and ask them for a hazardous type of help.
Indeed, in one sample, only 20 percent of the men took up the young woman’s cause. But in the other sample, almost twice as many launched themselves into the dispute just as requested. What accounted for the difference? All the men had been approached a few minutes before by a different young woman who asked for street directions, but some had been asked for the whereabouts of Martin Street.
The others, for Valentine’s Street. Although the results are striking regarding the ease with which sexual stimuli provoke middledged male foolishness, the same results point to an instructive complication. The attractiveness of the young woman requesting assistance with her phone was not enough, by itself, to accomplish it.
Something crucial to the process had to be put into place first. The men had to be exposed to a sexually linked concept, Valentine’s Day, before she could prompt them to act. An opener was needed that rendered them receptive to her plea prior to ever encountering it. In short, an act of PreSuasion was required.
Although responses to sexual content can be strong, they are not unconditional. 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.
There’s a wider lesson here as well that goes beyond the domain of advertising. In any situation, people are dramatically more likely to pay attention to and be influenced by stimuli that fit the goal they have for that situation. Just within the realm of sexual stimuli, studies have found that straight, sexually aroused males and females spent more time gazing at photos of members of the opposite sex who were especially attractive.
This inclination seems natural and hardly newsworthy. The surprise was that the tendency appeared only if the gazers were in the market for a romantic sexual relationship. Individuals who weren’t looking for a new partner didn’t spend any more time locked onto the photos of good looking possibilities than average looking ones.
There is a strong connection then between a person’s current romantic sexual goals and that person’s tendency to pay concentrated attention to even highly attractive others. Remarkably, the best indicator of a break up was not how much love they felt for their partner two months earlier, or how satisfied they were with their relationship at that time, or even how long they had wanted it to last.
It was how much they were regularly aware of and attentive to the hotties around them back then. The threatening, dread risks, which involve risky steps that people take to avoid harm from something that is actually less risky but that they happen to be focused on at the time, and have thereby come to dread.
After the terrorizing events of September 11, 2001, many thousands of Americans with long distance travel plans abandoned the dreaded skies for the roads. But the fatality rate for highway travel is considerably higher than for air travel, making that choice the more deadly one. It’s estimated that about 1, 600 Americans lost their lives in additional auto accidents as a direct result.
Six times more than the number of passengers killed in the only US commercial plane crash that next year. Most of the data on the effectiveness of such information come from the messages of communicators trying to steer us away from unhealthy lifestyle choices. As a rule, communications that present the most frightening consequences of poor health habits work better than milder messages or messages that present the positive consequences of good habits.
Plus, the more prominent in the tension grabbing the fearsome appeals are, the better they work. In over a dozen countries, placing large, scary images and warnings on cigarette packages has had the double barreled effect of convincing more non smokers to resist and more smokers to stop the practice.
What’s the persuasive alchemy that allows a communicator to trouble recipients deeply about the negative outcomes of their bad habits without pushing them to deny the problem in an attempt to control their now heightened. Fears? The communicator has only to add to the chilling message clear information about legitimate available steps the recipients can take to change their health threatening habits.
In this way, the fright can be dealt with not through self delusional baloney that deters positive action, but through genuine change opportunities that mobilize such action. A Dutch team redirected the behaviors of individuals who, after undergoing tests, were informed of their especially high vulnerability to hypoglycaemia.
A blood glucose disorder, also known as chronic low blood sugar, 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 they could attend to improve their diets and hence their chances of avoiding the disease.
Most of them sought out further information about the diet workshop 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. That was because they believed the workshop would have a favourable impact on their health.
And they used that new belief, rather than denial, to manage their anxieties. One member of our research team urged us to take an evolutionary perspective. We realised that humans encountering threatening circumstances would have developed early on a strong tendency to be part of a group. We’re there. Is safety and strength in numbers?
and to avoid being separate, where there is vulnerability to a predator or enemy. The opposite would be true, however, in a situation with sexual possibilities. There, a person would want distance from the pack in order to be the prime recipient of romantic consideration. We also realize that these two contrary motivations, to fit in and to stand out, map perfectly onto a pair of long time favorite commercial appeals.
One, of the Don’t Be Left Out variety, 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 the minds of prospects? Our analysis made us think that the popularity based message would be the right one in any situation where audience members had been exposed to frightening stimuli perhaps in the middle of watching a violent film on TV because threat focused people want to join the crowd.
But sending that message in an ad to an audience watching a romantic film on TV would be a mistake, because amorously people want to step away from the crowd. Experiment! The results stunned me. An advertisement we created stressing the popularity of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, visited by over a million people each year, supercharged favorability toward the museum among people who had been watching a violent movie at the time.
Yet among those who’d been watching a romantic movie, the identical ad deflated attraction to the museum. But a slightly altered ad formulated to emphasize the distinctiveness rather than the popularity of museum attendance, stand out from the crowd, Had the opposite effect. The distinctiveness ad was exceedingly successful among individuals who’d been watching a romantic film, and it was particularly unsuccessful among those who’d been viewing the violent one.
Put people in a wary state of mind via that opener, and, driven by a desire for safety, a popularity based appeal will soar, whereas a distinctiveness based appeal will sink. Burr use it to put people in an amorous state of mind, and driven by a consequent desire to stand out, the reverse will occur. I’d bet, for instance, that if Ford Media buyers plan to purchase TV slots for ads trumpeting the Ford F 150 pickup as America’s largest selling truck for 39 years, As some ads do.
They never consider favoring placements during crime dramas, scary movies and news programming, while shunning romantic comedies and love storieS
