Reading Notes For:
📍 My reading notes for PreSuasion by Robert Saldini 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.
And now for something different. Change Zero, presto. Whenever we first register a change around us, our attention flies to it. We are not alone in this regard. The reaction appears widely across the animal kingdom. It is so basic that it was able to overpower the most renowned behavior patterns of perhaps the most renowned group of animals in the history of psychological science.
Pavlov’s Dogs After many tests had convinced Pavlov of the reliability and strength of his momentous discovery of classical conditioning, he wanted to show it to others. Yet when visitors were invited to his institute to observe a demonstration, it usually failed. It finally dawned on Pavlov that he could account for both breakdowns in the same way.
Upon entering a new space, both he and the visitors became novel. New stimuli that hijack the dog’s attention, diverting it from the bell and food, while directing it to the changed circumstances of the lab. The 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. Walking through doorways causes you to forget because the abrupt change in your physical surroundings redirects your attention to the new setting, and consequently from your purpose, which disrupts your memory of it.
More than a century after Pavlov’s characterization, our bodily reaction to change is no longer called a reflex. It’s termed the orienting response, and scores of studies have enlightened us about it. The indication that has attracted recent scientific scrutiny takes place in the brain. where a pattern of electrical activity known as the O wave, for orienting wave, flows across sectors associated with evaluation.
By charting the rise and fall of O waves in people hooked up to brain imaging devices, neuroscientists have identified the kinds of stimuli that most powerfully produce shifts in attention. One such category of cues, associated with change, deserves our consideration, as it possesses intriguing implications for the psychology of influence.
A persuasion oriented producer, writer or director needs to be concerned principally with shots and cuts. You use your cuts to get people to swing attention to the parts of your message you really want them to focus on. That cut will instigate an orienting response to the winning feature in audience members brains before they even experience it.
TV advertisers have chosen instead to increase indiscriminately and dramatically the overall frequency of scene shifts within their ads by more than 50 percent over the years. Predictably, viewers end up confused as to the point of the ad, and irritated by having their focus whipped around so often, and so haphazardly.
As a result, even though cut heavy TV commercials draw more total attention, they produce significantly less memory for the ad’s persuasive claims, and significantly less persuasion. Newspapers, magazines, books, handbills, window signs, billboards, e mails, and so on, are deemed, consequently, Can’t use cuts to capture and direct audience attention strategically.
To leverage the power of difference when employing these vehicles, persuaders typically resort to a more traditional tactic. They insert novelty into the appeal, that is, something designed to appear distinctive, original or unfamiliar or surprising, which also works well to attract attention. Researchers gave online participants information about a pair of sofas we’ll call the Dream and the Titan.
The Dream and the Titan The two, manufactured by different furniture companies, were comparable in all respects except for their cushions. The Dream’s cushions were softer and more comfortable than the Titan’s but less durable. In this one on one comparison, the potential customers preferred the Titan’s sturdier cushions to the Dream’s softer cushions.
58 percent to 42%. But that changed when the researchers sent the same information to another sample of online participants, The Along with information about the features of three other sofa models. The added sofas were not strong competitors, being weak on a variety of dimensions, but they all had durable cushions like the Titan.
Within that set of comparisons, the Dream vaulted over all the other models, this time winning 77 percent of the preferred. Adding three models with durable cushions, made the Dream stand out as distinct from the other four possibilities on the feature of cushion softness and comfort and distinctiveness, as we’ve seen, swings attention to the distinguishing factor.
6. Commanders of Attention 2. The Magnetizers. Besides the persuasive 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 attention as a consequence.
Certain kinds of information do, in fact, combine initial pulling power with staying power. Information about oneself, for example, packs that potent one to two punch. 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.
Purely from an effectiveness standpoint, any health communicator who has not fully investigated the potential use of such tools should be embarrassed. Suppose you are a persuasion consultant approached to help market a new underarm antiperspirant to NASCAR dads. Let’s call it Pit Stop. Suppose further that the product has concrete.
Convincing scientific evidence of its superior effectiveness, which the manufacturer’s advertising agency plans to feature in its launch ads. But the agency is unsure about what to say first to draw audience attention to the rest of the ad, and its compelling case. That’s why it has come to you, to get your opinion on the lead in lines of ad copy, which read, After all these years, people might accept that antiperspirants just aren’t going to get any better.
They might even accept the ugly stains on clothes from both days and hard work. They won’t have to anymore. What seemingly minor wording change could you suggest improving the odds that the Pit Stop campaign will be a big success? It would be to replace the externalizing words people and they in the opener with the personalizing pronoun you.
Your small modification will enhance audience attitude toward the product. Of course, because self relevant cues only bring attention, not automatic approval to a message. A strong subsequent case for Pit Stop was necessary within your ad to make the switch to use outperform the original ad. As the Ohio State study also demonstrated, if the rest of your ad had provided feeble evidence for Pitstop’s effectiveness, the switch to a personalized introduction would have made the now more attentive audience less favorable to the product as a result.
Here then, is another lesson in persuasion available for your use, when you have a good case to make. You can employ as open as simple self relevant cues such as the word you to predispose your audience toward a full consideration of that strong case before they see or hear it. 41. There’s another type of setting in which the attention gripping quality of self relevant cues can affect persuasive success.
Let’s say that because you have a terrific plan in mind, you are looking forward to attending a meeting at work designed to attack a recurring staffing problem. Let’s also say that the group meets often enough that everyone is familiar with the other participants and the basic format of the meeting.
Each member around the table is supposed to take a turn providing an initial position and recommendation statement. Finally, let’s say you’ve noticed that one of those turn takers is Alex, a manager who reliably wields the most influence at the meetings. He usually determines the problem solving path the group eventually takes.
How might you sail the waters of your meeting more expertly than your first inclination suggested? I’d propose charting a course that takes into account both the next in line effect and the what’s focal is presumed causal effect. Take a spot at the table across from Alex where One, he’ll be sufficiently distant from his own presentation to hear yours fully, and two, because of your visual prominence, he’ll see you as fully responsible for the insights within your fine recommendation for resolving the problem.
Of course, if you haven’t come up with a creditably reasoned solution to the problem, you might want to grab a chair right next to his, so that in his self focus induced bubble, he won’t likely register the fact. The unfinished. Unfinished tasks are the more memorable, hoarding 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 underway, a heightened level of cognitive focus must be reserved for it. The Zeigarnik effect. For me, two important conclusions emerge from the findings of now over 600 studies on the topic.
First, and altogether consistent with the Beer Garden series of events, 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 the chance to finish, because our attention will remain drawn to it. Second, 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. In one set of studies, people either watched or listened to television programming that included commercials for soft drinks, mouthwash, and pain relievers.
The greatest recall occurred for details of ads that the researchers stopped five to six seconds before their natural endings. What’s more, better memory for specifics of the unfinished ads was evident immediately, two days later, and especially two weeks later, demonstrating the holding power that a lack of closure possesses.
Perhaps even more bewildering at first glance are findings regarding college women’s attraction to certain good looking young men. The women participated in an experiment in which they knew that attractive male students whose photographs and biographies they could see had been asked to evaluate them on the basis of their Facebook information.
The researchers wanted to know which of these male raters the women in turn would prefer at a later time. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the guys who had rated them highest. Instead, it was the men whose ratings remained yet unknown to the women. An additional piece of information allows us to understand this puzzling result.
During the experiment, the men who kept popping up in the women’s minds were those whose ratings hadn’t been revealed, confirming the researchers view that when an important outcome is unknown to people, they can hardly think of anything else. And because, as we know, regular attention to something makes it seem more worthy of attention, The women’s repeated refocusing on those guys made them appear the most attractive.
One of my colleagues always impressed me with the quantity of her written output in a consistent stream of commentaries, articles, chapters and books. She never lets herself finish a writing session at the end of a paragraph or even a thought. She assured me she knows precisely what she wants to say at the end of that last paragraph or thought.
She just doesn’t allow herself to say it until the next time. The Mysterious. I was preparing to write my first book for a general audience. Before beginning, I decided to go to the library to get all the books I could find that had been written by academics for non academics. My strategy was to read the books, identify what I felt were the most and least successful sections, photocopy those sections, and arrange them in separate piles.
I then re read the entries looking for particular qualities that differentiated the piles. The most successful of the pieces each began with a mystery story. The authors described a state of affairs that seemed perplexing, and then invited the reader into the subsequent material as a way of dispatching the enigma.
When presented properly, mysteries are so compiling that the reader can’t remain an aloof outside observer of story structure and elements. In the throes of this particular literary device, one is. Not thinking of literary devices, one’s attention is magnetized to the mystery story because of its inherent, unresolved nature.
Besides mystery stories being excellent communication devices for engaging and holding any audience’s interest, I encountered another reason to use them. They were instructionally superior to the other, more common forms of teaching I had been using, such as providing thoroughgoing descriptions of course material, or asking questions about the material.
A little recognized truth I often try to convey to various audiences is that, in contests of persuasion, counter arguments 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 communicator to be an untrustworthy source of information, generally.
Issuing a counterargument demonstrating 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 counter argument that undermines an opponent’s argument by showing him or her to be dishonest in the matter will normally win that battle plus future battles with the opponent.
