Reading Notes For:
My reading notes for Persuasion by Robert Cialdini There are various ways to structure a mystery story based case for the potency of counter arguments. One that has worked well in my experience involves supplying the following information in the following sequence. 1. Pose the mystery. After a 3 year slide of 10 percent in tobacco consumption in the United States during the late 1960s, Big Tobacco did something that had the extraordinary effect of ending the decline and boosting consumption, while slashing advertising expenditures by a third.
What was it? 2. Deepen the mystery. The answer also seems extraordinary. On July 22, 1969, during U. S. Congressional hearings, Representatives of the major American tobacco companies strongly advocated a proposal to ban all of their own ads. 3. Home in on the proper explanation by considering and offering evidence against alternative explanations.
4. Provide a clue to the proper explanation. In 1967, the US Federal Communications Commission, 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 television, solely radio and television, to all sides of important and controversial topics.
If one side purchased broadcast time on these media, the opposing side must be given free time to counter argue. 5. Resolve the mystery. For the first time, anti tobacco forces such as the American Cancer Society could afford to air counter arguments to the tobacco company messages. During the three years that they ran, those anti tobacco spots slashed tobacco consumption in the United States by nearly 10%.
When the logic of the situation hit them, the tobacco companies worked politically to ban their own ads. but solely on the air where the Fairness Doctrine applied. 6. Draw the implication for the phenomenon under study. One of the best ways to enhance audience acceptance of one’s message is to reduce the availability of strong counter arguments to it because counter arguments are typically more powerful than arguments.
Notice that this type of explanation offers not just any satisfying conceptual account. Owing to its intrigue fueled form it carries a bonus 6. Draw the implication for the phenomenon under study. It’s part of a presentational approach constituted to attract audiences to the fine points of the information.
Because to resolve any mystery detective story properly, observers have to be aware of all the relevant details. Think of it. We have something available to us here that not only keeps audience members focused generally on the issues at hand, but also makes them want to pay attention to the details, the necessary but often boring, and attention deflecting particulars of our material, Albert Einstein claimed.
The most beautiful thing we can experience and the source of all true science and art. His contention, the mysterious, part two, processes, the role of association, seven, the primacy of associations, I link therefore I think, in the family of ideas there are no orphans. Each notion exists within a network of relatives linked through a shared system of associations.
Just as amino acids can be called the building blocks of life, associations can be called the building blocks of thought. We convince others by using language that manages their mental annunciations to our message. Their thoughts, perceptions, and emotional reactions merely proceed from those associations.
The main purpose of speech is to direct listeners attention to a selected sector of reality. Once that is accomplished, the listeners existing associations to the now spotlighted sector will take over to determine the reaction. No longer should we think of language, see, dot primarily, a mechanism of conveyance as a means for delivering a communicator’s conception of reality.
Instead, we should think of language as primarily a mechanism of influence. When describing our evaluation of a film, for instance, the intent is not so much to explain our position to others as to persuade them to it. We achieve the goal by employing language that orients recipients to those regions of reality stocked with associations favorable to our view.
Especially interesting are the linguistic devices that researchers have identified for driving attention to one or another aspect of reality. They include verbs that draw attention to concrete features of a situation, Adjectives that pull one’s focus onto the traits versus behaviors of others.
Personal pronouns that highlight existing relationships. Metaphors that frame a state of affairs so that it is interpreted in a singular way or just particular wordings that link to targeted thoughts. Speak no evil, leak no evil. SSM Health, a not for profit system of hospitals, nursing homes, and related entities.
First healthcare provider to be designated a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winner. Your presentation is not to include bullet points, and you are not to tell us how to attack our influence problems. When I protested that removing these elements would weaken my talk, Steve responded, Oh, you can keep them in.
You just have to call them something else. My cleverly phrased comeback, I believe it was, Um, WR2, Steve, to elaborate. As a healthcare organization, we’re devoted to acts of healing, so we never use language associated with violence. We don’t have bullet points, we have information points. We don’t attack a problem, we approach it.
We’ve replaced business targets with business goals. And one of those goals is no longer to lead our competition, it’s to out distance or out pace them. He even offered an impassioned rationale. Can’t you see how much better it is for us to associate ourselves with concepts like goal and out distance than target and beat?
In the study, subjects completed a RASC requiring them to arrange 30 sets of scrambled words to make coherent sentences. For half of the subjects, when the words they were given were arranged correctly, they resulted mostly in sentences associated with aggression. For example, Hit he then became he hit them.
For the other half of the subjects, when the words they were given were arranged correctly, they resulted mostly in sentences with no connections to aggression. Thank you Later, all the subjects participated in another task in which they had to deliver 20 electric shocks to a fellow subject, and got to decide how painful the required shocks would be.
The results are alarming prior exposure to the violence linked words led to a 48 percent jump in selected shock intensity. Multiple studies have shown that subtly exposing individuals to words that connote achievement, Win, attain, mecede. Master increases their performance on an assigned task and more than doubles their willingness to keep working at it.
I’ve since become aware of a project those researchers undertook to influence the productivity of fundraisers who operated out of a call centre. At the start of callers work shifts, all were given information designed to help them communicate the value of contributing to the cause for which they were soliciting, a local university.
Some of the callers got the information printed on plain paper. Other callers got the identical information printed on paper, carrying a photo of a runner winning a race. It was a photo that had previously been shown to stir achievement related thinking, remarkably by the end of their three hour shifts.
The second sample of callers had raised 60 percent more money than their otherwise comparable co workers. Metaphor is a meta door to change. If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Joseph Campbell. Suppose, for instance, that you are a political consultant who has been hired by a candidate for mayor of a nearby city.
To help her win an election in which a recent surge in crime is an important issue. In addition, suppose that this candidate and her party are known for their tough stance on crime. In any public pronouncements on the topic, she should portray the crime surge as a wild beast rampaging through the city that must be stopped.
Why? Because to bring a wild beast under, control, it’s necessary to catch and cage it. In the minds of her audiences. These natural associations to the proper handling of rampaging animals will transfer to the proper handling of crime and criminals. Now imagine instead that the candidate and her party are known for 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. In all her public pronouncements on the topic, the candidate should portray the 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 unhealthy conditions that allow it to breed and spread.
Ben Feldman sold more light insurance by himself than 1, 500 of the 1, 800 insurance agencies in the United States. According to chroniclers of that success, he never pressured reluctant prospects into a sale. Instead, he employed a light and enlightened touch that led them smoothly toward a purchase. Mr.
Feldman was a master of metaphor. In his portrayal of Life’s End, for instance, people didn’t die. They walked out of life a characterization that benefited from associations to a breach in one’s family responsibilities that would need to be filled. He was then quick to depict life insurance as the metaphorically aligned solution.
When you walk hour, 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. For instance, in English and many other languages, the concept of weight heaviness is linked metaphorically to the concepts of seriousness, importance, and effort.
For that reason, one, raters reading a job candidate’s qualifications attached to a heavy versus light clipboard come to. See the applicant as a more serious contender for the job. Raters reading a report attached to a heavy clipboard come to serve the topic as more important. And three, Raters holding a heavy object, requiring more effort of them, put more effort into considering the pros and cons of an improvement project for their city.
This set of findings raises the spectre that manufacturers drive to make e readers as light as possible will lessen the seeming value of the presented material, the perceived intellectual depth of its author, and the amount of energy readers will be willing to devote to its comprehension. Comparable findings have appeared in studies of another
Where individuals who have held a warm object briefly, for example, a cup of hot versus iced coffee, immediately feel warmer toward, closer to, and more trusting of those around them. Hence, they become more giving and cooperative in the social interactions that follow shortly afterward. For a fundamentally related reason, used car salespeople are taught not to describe their cars as used, which links to notions of wear and tear, but to say pre owned, which bridges to thoughts of possession.
During a flight, the scary sound in your final destination is to be trimmed to your destination. is to be replaced with gate whenever possible. The concept preloaded with associations most damaging to immediate assessments and future dealings is untrustworthiness, along with its concomitants, such as lying and cheating.
On the upside of things, though, The factor with most favorable impact in the realm of human evaluation is one we have encountered before, the self, which gains its power from a pair of sources. Not only does it draw and hold our attention with merely electromagnetic strength, thereby enhancing perceived importance.
Therefore, anything that is self connected, or can be made to seem self connected, gets an immediate lift in our eaves. People who learn that they have a birthday, birthplace, or first name in common come to like each other more, which leads to heightened cooperativeness and helpfulness toward each other.
Potential customers are more willing to enroll in an exercise program if told they have the same date of birth as the personal trainer who’ll be providing the service. Finally, researchers studying this general tendency to value entities linked to the self, called implicit egoism, or implicit egoism.
have found that individuals prefer not just people, but also commercial products, crackers, chocolates, and teas with names that share letters of the alphabet with their own names. To take advantage of this affinity, in the summer of 2013, the British division of Coca Cola replaced its own package branding with one or another of 150 of the most common first names in the United Kingdom.
Million packs of their product. What could justify the expense? Similar programs in Australia and New Zealand had boosted sales significantly in those regions the year before. When finally tried in the United States, IR produced the first increase in Coke sales in a decade. When considering the persuasive implications of implicit egoism, there’s an important qualification to be taken into account.
The overvalued self isn’t always the personal self. You It can also be the social self, the one framed not by the characteristics of the individual but by the characteristics of that individual’s group. The conception of self as residing outside the individual and within a related social unit is particularly strong in some non Western societies, whose citizens have a special affinity for things that appear connected to a collectively constructed self.
In July 2007, the Afghan Taliban kidnapped 21 South Korean church sponsored aid workers. Kim replaced his head negotiator, whose appeals had been transmitted through an Afghan translator, with a South Korean representative who spoke fluent Pashtun, according to Kim, who won the hostage’s swift release.
When our counterparts saw that our negotiator was speaking their language, Pashtun, they developed a kind of strong intimacy with us, and so the talks went well. There is much positivity associated with getting something with ease, but in a particular way. 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.
Researchers in the field of cognitive purists have even found that the fluency producing properties of rhyme lead to enhanced persuasion. The statement, Caution and measure will win you riches, is seen as more true when changed to Caution and measure win you treasure. Tellingly, when people can process something with cognitive ease, they experience increased neuronal activity in the muscles of their face that produce a smile.
The harder an attorney’s name was to pronounce, the lower he or she stayed in the firm’s hierarchy. When observers encounter hard to pronounce drugs or food additives, they become less favorable toward the products and their potential risks. Researchers reveal that the food detailed in difficult to process descriptions is seen as less tempting.
And that difficult to read claims are, in general, seen as less true. Pre suasion by Robert Cialdini. 8. Persuasive geographies. All the right places, all the right traces, when I began writing my first book for a general audience. My campus office was located on an upper floor. It was possible to arrange my desk so that, as I wrote, I could look out the window at an array of imposing buildings housing various academic institutes, centres and departments.
On either border of this outside window to the academic world, I’d line shelves with materials that provided an inside window to that world. My professional books, journals, articles and files. In town, I’d lease an apartment and would try to write at a desk there. I’d see the flow of passers by, mostly pedestrians, on their way to work or to shop.
The work I’d done at home was miles better than what I’d done at the university, because it was decidedly more appropriate for the general audience I’d envisioned. Indeed, in style and structure, the output from my campus desk was poorly suited to anyone but professional colleagues. Job of developing employee incentive programs.
Glass walled conference room. Months later, she called in an upbeat mood to tell me about the great success. Before traveling to any working meeting, the team now downloads photos of program eligible employees from the client’s website and internal publications. They then enlarge the pictures, put them on big poster boards, and lean them against the walls in whichever conference room they work.
They believe they’ve found that action shots of employees at work produce better results for the program design team than simple headshots. Most impressively, they haven’t allowed themselves to be disadvantaged by an existing reality that relegates them to task environments with suboptimal cues and associations.
Instead, they’ve changed that reality by infusing their task environments with more helpful varieties that automatically activate a preferred way of responding. What’s already in us? It’s easy for some feature of the outside world to redirect our attention to an inner feature to a particular attitude, belief, trait, memory, or sensation.
As I’ve reported, there are certain consequential effects of such a shift in focus. Within that moment, we are more likely to grant the focal factor importance, assign it causal status, and undertake action associated with it. Have you ever attended an arts performance disturbed by another audience member’s loud coughs?
It can become contagious. In one case, 200 attendees at a newspaper editorial writers dinner were overcome by coughing fits after the problem began in one corner of the room and spread so pervasively that officials had to evacuate everyone. Learn No physical cause for the coughing spasms could be found.
In Germany, audience members listening to a lecture in dermatological conditions typically associated with itchy skin immediately felt skin irritations of their own and began scratching themselves at an increased rate. Medical Student Syndrome Research shows that 70 percent to 80 percent 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 the time.
Lying in low level weight within each of us are units of experience that can be given sudden standing and force if we just divert our attention to them. But those units of experience waiting within us also include advantageous attitudes, productive traits, and useful capacities that we can energize by merely channeling attention to them instead.
The Positivity Paradox The undesirable outcomes of aging vary from person to person, but on average, elderly individuals experience significant losses in both physical and mental functioning. Yet they don’t let the declines undermine their happiness. In fact, and here’s the paradox old age produces the opposite result, the elderly feel happier than they did when younger, stronger, and healthier.
The question of why this paradox exists has intrigued camps of lifespan researchers for decades. A surprising answer. When it comes to dealing with all the negativity in their lives, seniors have decided that they just don’t have time for it, literally. They take deliberate steps to achieve it, something they accomplish by mastering the geography of self influence.
The elderly go more frequently and fully to the personal experiences. To a greater extent than younger individuals, seniors recall positive memories, entertain pleasant thoughts, seek out and retain favorable information, search for and gaze at lappy faces, and focus on the upsides of their consumer products.
Seniors with the best attention management skills Those good at orienting to and staying fixed on positive material show the greatest mood enhancement. From that perspective, allocating much of their remaining time to unpleasant events didn’t make sense. By choosing to investigate a key question, what are the factors associated with happiness?
Instead, it’s a procedural one. Which specific activities can we perform to increase our happiness? She specified a set of manageable activities that reliably increase personal happiness. Several of them, including the top three on her list, require nothing more than a persuasive refocusing of attention.
1. Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down. 2. Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities. Please. Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.
There’s even an iPhone app called Live Happy that helps users engage in certain of these activities, and their greater happiness correlates with frequent use. You can make yourself happier just like you can make yourself lose weight, Dr. Lubomirsky assured me. But like eating differently and going to the gym faithfully, you have to put in the effort every day.
Elderly have decided to prioritize emotional contentment as a main life goal, and therefore to turn their attention systematically toward the positive. She also found that younger individuals have different primary life goals that include learning, developing, and striving for achievement. Accomplishing those objectives requires a special openness to discomforting elements, demanding tasks, contrary points of view, unfamiliar people, and owning mistakes or failures.
Any other approach would be maladaptive. 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 aims 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. I was struck that he could create an ideal state of mind for himself, not just because he understood where, precisely, to focus his attention, but also because as a savvy moment maker. He understood how to do it persuasively immediately before the test.
So, Alan Mass smarter than the rest of us in a meaningful way, His was a particular type of smart, a kind of tactical intelligence that allowed him to trun common general knowledge for example, but fear worsens test. Taker’s performance but earned confidence improves it into specific applications with desirable outcomes.
That’s a useful sort of intelligence. Let’s follow Alan’s lead and see how we can do the same, this time to move others rather than ourselves toward desired outcomes. Imagine yourself as a regional school superintendent in the following predicament. Your district is applying for a large federal grant.
You have to provide evidence that the high schools under your supervision have made recent progress in readying women students for STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There is a societal stereotype, which many girls believe, that women aren’t as good at math as men are. Research has demonstrated that almost anything you do that causes women to focus up front on this belief reduces their math performance in several ways.
It increases their anxiety. with their ability to remember what they know, it diverts their attention from the test itself. Fortunately, there is an easy research based fix for each. 1. Assign test takers to a room on the basis of a relevant factor. Their gender, not an irrelevant one, the first letter of their last names.
Why? When girls are taking a math test in the same room as boys, They are more likely to be reminded of the mathematics and gender stereotype. 2. Don’t assign teachers randomly to monitor the tests. Assign them tactically, on the basis of gender and teaching specialty. Girls monitors should be female science and mathematics teachers.
Why? Evidence that other women have defied the stereotype deflates the stereotype’s impact. 3. Eliminate the 10 minute period when their thoughts about how to respond to the test items students collect likely to give them. Trouble, because to focus on the daunting aspects of the RASC will undercut their success.
Instead, ask the girls to pick a personal value of importance to them, such as maintaining relationships with friends or helping others, and to write down why they find that value important. Why? This sort of self affirmation procedure directs initial attention to an interpersonal strength and reduces the effects of threatening stereotypes.
Do not instruct students to record their gender at the start of the math exam, as that will likely remind female test takers of the mathematics and gender stereotype. In its place, ask students to record their year in school, which in your SAMPL would always be graduating senior. Why? In keeping with the power of mere attention shifts, that change will supplant a pre suasive focus on a perceived academic shortcoming, with a pre suasive focus on a perceived academic accomplishment.
Of all the demonstrations of how steering attention from one feature of a person’s inner geography to another can affect performance, I have a cleat favorite. Besides the belief that women don’t do well in math, there is the belief that Asians do. Prior to a mathematics test, researchers asked some Asian American women students to record their gender.
Others were asked to record their ethnicity. Compared with a sample of Asian American women students who weren’t asked to record either characteristic, those who were reminded of their gender scored worse, while those reminded of their ethnicity scored better. 9. The mechanics of pre suasion causes constraints and correctives.
The basic idea of persuasion is that by guiding preliminary attention strategically, it’s possible for a communicator to move recipients 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, a rather underappreciated characteristic of mental activity.
It’s elements don’t just fire when ready, they fire when readied. After we attend to a specific concept, those concepts closely linked to it enjoy a privileged moment within our minds, acquiring influence that non linked concepts simply can’t match. That is so for a pair of reasons. First, once an opener concept, German music, wait, receives our attention, closely associated secondary concepts, German wine, substance, become more accessible in consciousness, which greatly improves the chance that we will attend and respond to the linked concepts.
This newly enhanced standing in consciousness elevates their capacity to color our perceptions, orient our thinking, affect our motivations, and thereby change our relevant behavior. Thank you. Second, at the same time, concepts not linked to the opener are suppressed in consciousness, making them less likely than before to receive our attention and gain influence.
Rather than being readied for action, they get decommissioned temporarily. This mechanism, in which an open secondary concept becomes more cognitively accessible, appears to account for the consequences of a controversial, relatively recent phenomenon video game participation. We know from considerable research that playing violent video games incites immediate forms of antisocial behavior.
For instance, such games make players more likely to deliver loud blasts of noise into the ears of someone who has annoyed them. The reason? The games plant aggression related thoughts in players heads, and the resulting easy contact with those thoughts provokes aggressiveness. A tellingly similar but mirror image effect occurs after participating in prosocial video gamestos that call for protecting, rescuing, or assisting characters in the game.
Studies have found that after playing such games, players became more willing to help clean up a spill, volunteer their time. In an interesting twist, newer research shows that sometimes violent video gameplay can decrease later aggressive behavior, provided that the participants have to cooperate with one another in the game to destroy an enemy.
Remaining questions. Surprising answers. Useful implications of this basic mechanism of pre suasion come from research answering three additional questions about the reach of the process. How soon? The first concerns its primitiveness. How early in life can we expect an opener to create such a privileged moment?
Subjects who were shown a series of photographs that included a pair of individuals standing close together. Because togetherness and helpfulness are linked in people’s minds, Observers of these photos were three times more likely to assist the researcher in picking up some items she accidentally dropped.
The first got me to whistle under my breath when I read it the study’s subjects, whose helpfulness tripled, were 18 months old second, its effect on them was spontaneous. How far? Can any link between two concepts, no matter how distant or tenuous, trigger a privileged moment for the second after the first has been brought to mind?
No. There’s an important limit to persuasive effects. Attention to the first concept readies the second for influence in proportion to the degree of association between the two. A preliminary survey revealed three social norms that people rated as close to, moderately far from, and far from the norm against littering.
They were, respectively, the norms for recycling, for turning off lights to conserve energy at home, and for voting. The next step was much more interesting. We went to a public library parking lot and put a handbill on the windshield of each car. At random, the vehicles got a handbill with one of four messages.
One against littering, two for recycling, three for turning off lights, and four for voting. As a control group communication, we included a fifth handbill that contained a message that didn’t refer to any social norm. It promoted the local arts museum. When the owners returned to their cars and read a handbill, we watched to see if they dropped them on the ground.
The behavior pattern we observed could not have been clearer. A message focusing people specifically on the anti littering norm best equipped them to resist the tendency to litter, but directing their attention to opener concepts progressively distant from the anti littering norm made them less able, at each remove, to resist that impulse.
Therefore, an aspiring pre suader wishing to prompt an action, helping, let’s say, should find a concept already associated strongly and positively with the action. Togetherness would be a good choice, and bring that concept to mind in potential helpers just before requesting their aid. The stronger the link between a handbill message and the norm against littering, The less littering there was, how manufacturable.
But there is another approach that doesn’t require finding a strong existing connection. In fact, it doesn’t require an existing connection at all. Rather, it involves creating a connection from scratch. Advertisers have been using the tactic for more than a century. They present something that attracts their target audience.
A beautiful vista, a good looking model, a popular celebrity, and then link it to the product through nothing more than a simultaneous presence inside the ad. There, observers of advertisers handiwork might experience, and indeed, have experienced, a connection between Tiger Woods and Buick. Beyonce and Pepsi, Brad Pitt and Chanel No, Five or, unsettlingly to me, Bob Dylan and Victoria’s Secret.
The hope, of course, is that viewers attraction to the celebrity will transfer to the product by virtue of the no accident connection. The takeaway here is that an effective linkage between concepts doesn’t have to be located in prevailing reality. It can be constructed. The concepts only have to be experienced as linked directly in some way for the subsequent presentation of one to prepare the other for pertinent action.
Recall that for Pavlov’s dogs, there was no natural connection between the sound of a bell and food. Indeed, there was no link of any sort until the two were experienced as occurring together. For instance, to the delight of advertisers, simply superimposing a brand of Belgian beer five times on pictures of pleasant activities, such as sailing, water skiing, and cuddling increased viewers positive feelings toward the beer.
Subliminally exposing thirsty people eight times to pictures of happy versus angry. Faces just before having them taste a new soft drink caused them to consume more of the beverage, and to be willing to pay three times more. For it in the store. If, when, then plans. From time to time, we all set objectives for ourselves.
Targets to hit, standards to meet and exceed. But too often, our hopes go unrealized as we fail to reach the goals. First, besides sometimes forgetting about an intention, let’s say. To exercise more, we frequently don’t recognize opportune moments or circumstances for healthy behaviors. Such as taking the stairs rather than the elevator.
Second, we are often derailed from goal strivings by factors such as especially busy days that distract us from our purpose. Fortunately, there is a category of strategic self statements that can overcome these problems persuasively. The statements have various names in scholarly usage, but I’m going to call them if when lesson plans.
They are designed to help us achieve a goal by readying us to register certain cues and settings where we can further our goal. And, two, to take an appropriate action spurred by the cues and consistent with the goal. Let’s say that we aim to lose weight. An if, when, then plan might be if, when, After my business lunches, the server asks if I’d like to have dessert, then I will order mint tea.
Other goals can also be effectively achieved by using these plans. When epilepsy sufferers who were having trouble staying on their medication schedules were asked to formulate an if when then plan, for example, When it is 8 in the morning and I finish brushing my teeth, then I will take my prescribed pill dose.
Adherence rose from 55 percent to 79%. Merely stating an intention to reach a goal or even forming an ordinary action plan is considerably less likely to succeed. There are good reasons for the superiority of if when then plans. The specific sequencing of elements within the plans can help us defeat the traditional enemies of goal achievement.
The if when then wording is designed to put us on high alert for a particular time or circumstance when a productive action could be performed. We become prepared first, to notice the favorable time or circumstance and second, to associate it automatically and directly with desired conduct. Noteworthy is the self tailored nature of this pre suasive process.
We get to install in ourselves heightened vigilance for certain cues that we have targeted previously. And we get to employ a strong association that we have constructed previously between those cues, and a beneficial step toward our goal. Just as the designers of our information technology software have installed rapid access to particular sources of information within our computer’s programming, The designers of our lives, parents, teachers, leaders, and eventually, we ourselves have done the same within our mental programming.
These pre fetched sources of information have already been put on continuing standby in consciousness, so that only a single reminder cue, click, will launch them into action. This recognition highlights the potential usefulness of if, when, then plans for accomplishing our main goals. These goals exist as pre fetched sources of information and direction that have been placed on standby, waiting to be launched into operation by cues that remind us of them.
Chronically unsuccessful dieters eat fewer high calorie foods, and lose more weight after forming if when then plans, such as if when I see chocolate displayed in the supermarket. Then I will think of my diet. Correction. Minding the gap. To this point, we’ve covered a lot of data showing that 1. What is more accessible in mind becomes more probable in action.
And 2. This accessibility is influenced by the informational cues around us and by our raw associations to them. The section on if when then plans and the chapter on the geography of influence provided welcome evidence that we can derive higher order benefits from these elementary processes. Mere reminders.
We all know that when we are in a good mood, the people and items around us seem better somehow. One study showed that a man who complimented young women and then asked for their phone numbers to arrange a date was considerably more successful when he asked on a sunny morning versus a cloudy morning 22.
4 percent and 13. 9 percent success rates respectively. Sunny days don’t just inflate how we feel about what we own, and the people we meet. They do the same for how we feel about our lives. Individuals surveyed by phone reported themselves 20 percent more satisfied with their existence as a whole, when asked on sunny days compared with rainy days.
Hence, the unappealing leaf in the wind, and it appears, rain, lamentably well. Fortunately, there’s an optimistic side to the findings. The labels fit differed dramatically when respondents were reminded of the weather before the survey began. If the interviewer asked first, By the way, how’s the weather over there?
The sunny versus rainy day effect didn’t materialize at all. Simply being focused on the weather for a moment, Reminded the survey participants of its potentially biasing influence, And allowed them to correct their thinking accordingly. A quote from Hollywood director Gregory Ratov who said, Let me ask you a question for your information.
Although the book’s authors consider Rotoff’s quote nonsensical, I disagree. Posing a question can provide invaluable information to its recipient. In the realm of self correction mechanisms, then, we can find another source of validation for a core tenet of persuasion. Immediate, large scale adjustments begin frequently with practices that do little more than redirect attention.
A belief among many product placement practitioners is that the more perceptible the constructed connection, The more effective it will be. This view stems from the seemingly inescapable logic that the prominence of a piece of information increases the chance that audience members will notice it and thereby be influenced by it.
The opinion is bolstered by evidence that more prominent product placements are, in fact, more effective, as judged by the standby advertising industry measures of success. Recognition and recall, which gauge memory for what was encountered, But besides assessing recognition and recall, the study’s authors did something that prior researchers had not done.
They obtained a third measure of placement success that undercut conventional wisdom. From a list of brands, audience members indicated which ones they would be likely to choose when shopping. It turned out that the survey respondents were less likely to select the products that had been inserted most prominently.
It seems that the conspicuousness of the placements cued viewers to the advertisers, sly attempts to sway their preferences, and caused a correction against the potential distortion. Whereas the most subtly placed brands were chosen by 47 percent of the audience, only 27 percent picked the most prominently placed ones.
People recognize that advertisers practices can influence their judgments unduly, but it’s not until they are reminded of the source of the possible bias that they act to rebalance the system. In this instance, the reminder took the form of a nudge too far and overly exposed version of the trick. of fictionally established linkages.
Sometimes the adjustments we make to counteract unwarranted influences take place without much forethought or delay. The recalibrations that occur when we are reminded of current weather conditions are a good example. Other times, the correction mechanism works much more painfully and slowly. This second kind of mechanism operates through deliberative reasoning, which can be used to overcome biases that flow from rudimentary psychological tendencies.
If we go to the supermarket with the idea of purchasing healthy, nutritious, and inexpensive foods, Neutralize the draw of heavily advertised, attractively packaged, or easy to reach items on the shelves by weighing our choices on the basis of caloric, nutritional, and unit pricing information on the labels.
On the other hand, 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, we’re unlikely to deliberate deeply.
When any of these requirements isn’t met, we typically resort to decision making shortcuts. This approach doesn’t necessarily lead to poor outcomes, because in many situations the shortcuts allow us to choose rapidly and effectively. But in many other situations, they can send us to places we didn’t want to go, at least not if we thought about it.
When we don’t have the ability to think properly, perhaps because we are tired, we can’t rely on a balanced assessment of all the pros and cons to correct for an emotionally based choice. We might regret later. Infomercial. Producers commonly place ads in late hour slots. The ads perform better. Then at the tail of a long day, viewers don’t have the mental energy to resist the ads, emotional triggers, likable hosts, enthusiastic studios, dwindling supplies, and so on.
Such foolish tendencies are likely to predominate when a person is rushed, overloaded, preoccupied, indifferent, stressed, distracted, or, it seems, a conspiracy theorist. When we are rushed, we don’t have the time to take into account all of the factors at play within a decision. Instead, we are likely to rely on a lone shortcut factor to steer us.
It might be the belief that when selecting among options for a purchase, we should buy the item with the largest number of superior features. Isn’t this the way the broadcast media operate? Transmitting a swift stream of information that can’t be easily slowed or reversed to give us the chance to process it thoroughly.
We’re not able to focus on the real quality of the advertiser’s case in a radio or television spot. Nor have we been able to respond mindfully to a news clip of a speech by a politician. In addition to its time challenge, character, other aspects of modern life undermine EER ability and motivation to think in a fully reasoned way about even important decisions sorely diminished.
Thus a communicator who channels attention to a particular concept in order to heighten audience receptivity to a forthcoming message via the focus based automatic crudely associative mechanisms of won’t have to worry much about being defeated.
