Reading Notes For:
My reading notes for Pre suasion by Robert Cialdini Unity one, being together, the relationships that lead people to favor another most effectively are not those that allow them to say, Oh, that person is like us. They are the ones that allow people to say, Hey, Oh, that person is of us. The experience of unity is not about simple similarities, although those can work too, but to a lesser degree via the liking principle.
It’s about shared identities. It’s about the categories that individuals use to define themselves and their groups, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and family, as well as political and religious affiliations. A key characteristic of these categories is that their members tend to feel at one with, merged with, the others.
They are the categories in which the conduct of one member influences the self esteem of other members. Put simply, we is the shared me. The evidence for overlapping self and other identities within We based groups is varied and impressive. People often fail to distinguish correctly between themselves and in group members unduly assigning their own characteristics to those others.
Repeatedly failing to recall which personal traits they had rated previously for, in group members or for themselves. And taking significantly longer to identify traits that differentiated in group members from themselves, all of which reflects a confusion of self and other. Neuroscientists have offered an explanation for the confusion.
Mental representations of the concepts of self and of close atbers emerge from the same brain circuitry. Activating either of those concepts can lead to neuronal cross excitation of the other concept, and the consequent blurring of identities. Kinship. From a genetic point of view, being in the same family, the same bloodline, is the ultimate form of self other unity.
One possibility is to use language and imagery persuasively to bring the concept of kin to our consciousness. For example, Collectives that create a sense of we ness among their members are characterized by the use of familial images and labels, brothers, sisterhood, forefathers, motherland. Heritage which lead to an increased willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the welfare of the group.
Because humans are symbolizing creatures, one international team of researchers found that these imagined, fictive families produce levels of self sacrifice associated typically with highly interrelated clans. Could a lone, genetically unrelated communicator harness the concept of kinship to obtain agreement?
Berkshire Hathaway has a compelling case to make for its future valuation, but having a compelling case to make is not the same as making a case compellingly something that Buffet does invariably in the company’s annual reports, for instance, to establish his credibility early. Usually in the first one or two pages of text, he describes a mistake he’s made or a problem the company has encountered during the past year and examines the implications.
For future outcomes, rather than burying, minimizing, or papering over difficulties, which seems to be the tack taken all too frequently in other annual reports, Buffett demonstrates that he is, first, fully aware of problems inside the company, and second, fully willing to reveal them. The emergent advantage is that when he then describes the formidable strengths of Berkshire Hathaway, readers have been persuaded to trust in them more deeply than before.
After all, they are coming from a discernibly credible source. In his letter, Mr. Buffett addressed the issue head on, specifically, in the section labelled The Next 50 Years at Berkshire, in which he laid out the affirmative, forward reaching consequences of Berkshire Hathaway’s proven business model, its nearly unprecedented bulwark of financial assets, and the firm’s already completed identification of the right person to take over as CEO when appropriate.
Burmore telling for me as a persuasion scientist attuned to pre suasive approaches was how Mr. Buffett began that all important section. In characteristic fashion, He re established his trustworthiness by being upfront about a potential weakness. Now let’s look at the road ahead. Bear in mind that if I had attempted 50 years ago to gauge what was coming, certain of my predictions would have been far off the mark.
Then he did something I’d never seen or heard him do in any public forum. He added, With that warning, I will tell you what I would say to my family today if they asked me about Berkshire’s future. We learned via Marshall McLuhan that the medium can be the message, via the principle of social proof, that the multitude can be the message, via the authority principle that the messenger can be the message, and now via the concept of unity that the merger of self and other can be the message.
It’s worth considering then, which additional features of a situation besides direct kinship lend themselves to the perceived merging of identities? Noteworthy is how many of these features are nonetheless traceable to cues of heightened kinship. Obviously, no one can look inside another and determine the percentage of genes the two share.
That is why, to operate in an evolutionarily prudent fashion, people have to rely on certain aspects of another that are simultaneously detectable and associated with genetic overlap the most evident being physical and personal similarities. Inside families, individuals are more helpful to kin they resemble.
Outside of the family unit, people use facial similarity to judge, fairly accurately, their degree of genetic relatedness to strangers. However, they can be tricked into misplaced favoritism in this regard. Observers of a photograph of someone whose face has been modified digitally to look more like them come to trust that person to a, a greater extent.
If the Palmore similar face is of a political candidate, they become more willing to vote for him or her. There is another usually reliable cue of heightened genetic commonality. It has less to do with physical similarity than with physical proximity. It is the perception of being of the same place as another, and its impact on human behavior can be arresting.
Humans as well as animals react to those present in their homes while growing up as if they are relatives. The longer the length of residing together in the home, the greater its effect on individual’s sense of family, family, And accordingly, their willingness to sacrifice for one another. Locality.
Because humans evolved as a species from small but stable groupings of genetically related individuals, we’ve also evolved a tendency to favor the people who, outside the home, exist in close proximity to us. Region. Even being from the same general geographical region can lead to we ness. Around the globe, sports team championships stimulate feelings of personal pride in residents of the team’s surrounding zones, as if the Residents had won.
Citizens agreed to participate in a survey to a greater extent if it emanated from a home state university. Readers of a news story about a military fatality in Afghanistan became more opposed to the war there upon learning that the fallen soldier was from their own state. High ranking members of Japan’s military government called upon the Jewish refugee community to send two leaders to a meeting that would influence their future significantly.
After the two entered the meeting room, they and their translators stood before a tribunal of powerful members of the Japanese high command. Who would determine their community’s survival? And who wasted little time in asking a pair of fateful questions? Why do our allies, the Nazis, hate you so much? And why should we take your side against them?
It did so by implicating the Nazis own racial claim that the superior Aryan master race was innately different from the peoples of Asia. Within a single penetrating observation, it was the Jews who were aligned with the Japanese and the Nazis who, self proclaimed, were not. The older rabbi’s response had a powerful effect on the Japanese officers.
Unity too, acting together, All human societies have developed ways to respond together, in unison or synchrony, inside songs, marches, rituals, chants, prayers and dances. What’s more, they’ve been doing so since prehistoric times. Another study showed that synchronous responding between two people doesn’t have to be movement based to produce this perception.
It can involve sensory responding as well. Participants watched a video of a stranger, whose face was being stroked with a soft brush, while their own faces were being brushed either for some participants in an identical way, or for other participants in a different way in terms of the direction and sequence of the strokes.
The results were remarkable. Those given the matched sensory experience rated themselves and the depicted stranger as more alike in both looks and personality. Even more remarkably, a blurred sense of self other identity emerged, with matching participants reporting more intensely, it felt as if my face was turning into the face in the video.
If acting together in motoric, vocal, or sensory ways can serve as a surrogate for being together in a kinship unit, we ought to see similar consequences from both forms of togetherness. And we do. Two of these consequences are especially important for individuals seeking to become more influential.
Enhanced liking and greater support from others, both of which can be accomplished persuasively. Liking. When people act in unison, they not only see themselves as more alike, they evaluate one another more positively afterward. The elevated likenase turns into elevated liking. The actions can involve finger tapping in a laboratory, smiling in a conversation, or body adjustments in a teacher student interaction, all of which, if synchronized, cause people to rate one another more favorably.
Thank you. The researchers noted that although we normally try to resonate, harmonise with members of our in groups, we typically don’t, with out group members. They speculated that the consequent differences in feelings of unity might be at least partially responsible for an automatic human tendency to favour the in group.
If so, then arranging for people to harmonise their actions with those of out group members might reduce the bias. To test the idea, they conducted an experiment in which white subjects watched seven video clips of black individuals taking a sip of water from a glass and then placing it down on a table.
Some of the subjects merely observed the clips and actions. Others were asked to imitate the actions by sipping from a glass of water in front of them in exact coordination with the movements they witnessed on the clips. Later, in a procedure designed to measure their hidden racial preferences, the subjects who had merely observed the black actors showed the typical white favoritism for whites over blacks.
But those who had synchronized their actions with those of the black actors exhibited none of this favoritism. Support. Okay, fine, there’s good evidence that acting together with others, even strangers, generates feelings of unity and increased liking. In the first study, participants listened to an array of recorded audio tones on headphones while tapping a table to the beats they heard.
Some listened to the same tones as a partner, and therefore saw themselves tapping in concert with that person. Others listened to a different array of tones than their partner, and thus the two did not act in synchrony. The results left no doubt about pre suasive coordinated activities capacity to escalate self sacrificial supportive conduct.
While only 18 percent of the participants who did not initially tap the table in synchrony with their partners chose to stay and help, of those who did initially tap in synchrony, 49 percent gave up their free time to provide assistance to their partners. It appears, then, that groups can promote unity, liking, and subsequent supportive behavior in a variety of situations by fiest arranging for synchronous responding.
But the tactics we’ve reviewed so far, simultaneous table tapping, water sipping, and face brushing, don’t seem readily implementable, at least not in any large scale fashion. Marching in unison might be better in this regard, but only marginally. Isn’t there some generally applicable mechanism that social entities could deploy to bring about such synchrony to influence members toward group goals?
There is. It’s music. There is a good explanation for why the presence of music stretches both from the start of human recorded history, and across the breadth of human societies. Because of a unique collection of detectable regularities, rhythm, meter, intensity, pulse and time, music possesses rare synchronizing power.
Listeners can easily become aligned with one another, along motoric, sensory, vocal and emotional dimensions of state of affairs, That leads to familiar markers of unity such as self other merging, social cohesion, and supportive conduct. That jointly experienced music and movement increased later self sacrifice so impressively has to be a revelation to any parent who has tried to alter the characteristically selfish choices of a four year old at play.
The children’s personal sacrifice didn’t arise from any rational weighting of the reasons for and against providing assistance. Behavioural scientists have long asserted the existence of two ways of assessing and knowing. The most recent such assertion to gain widespread attention is Daniel Kahneman’s treatment of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking.
The first is fast, associative, intuitive, and often emotional, whereas the second is slower, deliberative, analytical, and rational. Support for the separateness of the two approaches comes from evidence that activating one inhibits the other. Just as it is difficult to think hard about an occurrence while experiencing it emotionally, fully experiencing the occurrence is difficult while passing it logically.
There’s an implication for influence persuaders would be wise to match the system 1 versus 2 orientation of any appeal to the corresponding orientation of the recipient. Research suggests that even merely saying, I feel this is the one for you, will be more successful. But if you are considering the purchase primarily on rational grounds, fuel economy and trade in value, I think this is the one for you would be more likely to close the sale.
Music’s influence is of the system one variety in their sensory and visceral responses. Rarely do Thev think analytically while music is prominent in consciousness. An adage from the advertising profession is tactical. If you can’t make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them. Equipping themselves with music and song, they can move their campaign to a battleground where rationality possesses little force.
And where sensations of harmony, synchrony, and unity win. Why are young women so attracted to musicians? There’s no logic to it, right? Precisely dot it. Doesn’t matter that the probabilities of a successful relationship with most musicians are notoriously low. Those are rational probabilities. Besides, because of their common grounding in emotion and harmony, Music and romance are strongly associated with one another in life.
What would you say is the percentage of contemporary songs with romance as their subject? According to a recent systematic count, it’s 80%, the vast majority. The far larger lesson involves the importance of matching the system by versus to character of a persuasive communication with the system, versus mindset of its intended audience.
Recipients with non rational, hedonistic goals should be matched with messages containing non rational elements such as musical accompaniment, whereas those with rational. Pragmatic goals should be matched with messages containing rational elements such as facts. 2008 analysis of 30 second TV commercials.
87 percent incorporated music. For products that have high personal consequences and strong supportive arguments, safety equipment software packages. That is, for which hard thinking is likely and instructive background music undercuts ad effectiveness. Continuing reciprocal exchange. The Ahrens and their co workers helped explain this kind of willing assent by showing how extended reciprocal exchanges bind the transactors together.
They did so by employing a particular unifying type of reciprocal exchange strong enough to unify people into love with each other personal self disclosure. The procedure was not complicated. In pairs, participants took turns reading questions to their partner who would answer and who would then receive their partner’s answer to the same item.
Advancing through the 36 questions required participants to disclose progressively more personal information about themselves, and in turn, to learn more personal information about their partner. An early question would be, What would constitute a perfect day for you? Whereas later in the sequence, a question would be, What do you value most in a friendship?
And near the end of the list, a question would be, Of all the people in your family, whose death would be the most disturbing? Relationships deepened beyond all expectations. The procedure generated feelings of emotional closeness and interpersonal unity, that are unparalleled within a 45 minute span.
Especially among complete strangers in an emotionally sterile laboratory setting. Interviewed Dr. Aron described two aspects of the procedure that she felt are key to its effectiveness first. The items escalare in personal disclosure. Thus when responding, participants increasingly open themselves up to one another in a trusting way representative of tightly bonded pairs.
Second, and in keeping with the overarching theme of this chapter, participants do so by acting together, that is, in a coordinated back and forth fashion, making the interaction inherently and continuously synchronous. Company creation Leopold was not unique in feeling a special affinity for something he had a hand in creating.
Would people who had a hand in creating something band in band with another come to feel a special affinity not only for their creation, but also for their company creator? The results of a study one helped conduct to investigate the effects of managers degree of personal involvement in the creation.
Managers led to believe that they’d had a large role in developing the end product, an ad for a new wristwatch, rated the ad 50 percent more favorably than did managers led to believe they’d had little developmental. Involvement, even though the final ad they saw was identical in all cases. But I didn’t expect a third finding at all.
The more the managers attributed the success of the project to themselves, the more they also attributed it to the ability of their employee. Asking for advice is good advice. Co creation doesn’t only reduce the problem of getting supervisors to give more credit to employees who’ve worked productively on a project.
IR can lessen a host of other traditionally hard to diminish difficulties. In the standard classroom, students tend to coalesce along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. Finding friends and helpmates mainly within their own groups, however, this pattern declines significantly after they’ve engaged co creatively with students from the other groups within cooperative learning exercises, in which each student has to teach a portion of the information to the others so that they can all get a good score.
Consumer input must be framed as advice to the company, not as opinions about or expectations for the company. The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s unitization goal. Providing advice puts a person in an emerging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one’s own identity with another party’s not providing.
An opinion or expectation, on the other hand, purrs a person in an introspective state of mind, which involves focusing on oneself. These only slightly different forms of consumer feedback. And the nonetheless vitally different merging versus separating mindsets they produce can have a significant impact on consumer engagement with a brand.
Splash! Restaurant. Those participants who provided advice reported wanting to eat at a Splash! Significantly more than participants who provided either of the other sorts of feedback. So it wasn’t that those who gave advice felt connected with the brand because they thought they had aided it more.
Instead, having to give advice put participants in a togetherness state of mind, rather than a separateness state of mind, just before they had to reflect on what they would say about the brand of finding that, I have to admit, pleases me because it implicates the persuasive character of the psychological process acting on those advice giving participants.
It should even prove effective in our interactions with superiors. Of course, it is reasonable and rational to worry about a potential downside that, by asking a boss for advice, you might come off as incompetent or dependent or insecure. While one see the logic of such a concern, I also see it as mistaken because, as the study of supervisors estimation of collaborators contributions indicated, The effects of co creation are not well captured by reason, rationality, or logic.
My reading notes for Pre suasion by Robert Saldini. Pre suasion 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. Getting together ethical use. A pre pre suasive consideration three features of a commercial organization known to ravage its health are poor employee performance, high employee turnover and prevalent employee fraud and malfeasance.
Poor employee performance. Places of work can be stressful. We all know it. There is yet another type of cost carrying workplace stress that went unexamined in this analysis but is related directly to the issue of organizational misconduct. We can call it moral stress, and it comes from a conflict between an employee’s ethical values and the perceived ethical values of the organization.
Only moral stress predicted both of two performance degrading outcomes, employee fatigue, low emotional spirit and physical energy, and job burnout, loss of enthusiasm for and interest in one’s work. These two outcomes weren’t chosen for study offhandedly by the researchers. Each is a serious managerial problem by itself.
Combined, They’re a managerial nightmare, robbing workers of the vigor, desire, and capacity to do their jobs well. According to their reports, first, the more unethical the climate, the poorer the workers job performance. Second, the more unethical the climate, the more stress they felt at work. And third, that particular stress caused their poor performance.
Employee turnover. Depending on the type of employee lost in the process, charges to the bottom line range from large to eye wateringly large estimates of direct expenses associated with turnover, severance pay, recruitment. Hiring and training of the replacement can extend from 50 percent of the employee’s annual compensation package for lower level positions to over 200 percent of the total package for executive level positions.
Employees of unethically rated organizations, more likely to feel stressed, and more likely to want to quit. It was this stress that was pushing them to leave, and to leave their employers with financially draining turnover costs as a consequence. Strike two. Employee fraud and malfeasance the exodus is launched by the stress from conflicting moral values, it will be specific to employees with high ethical standards.
Those comfortable with the use of trickery to achieve financial gains should be happy to stay. And therein lies the source of our third specified tumor of organizational dishonesty. Phrased in terms of a caution to any leader responsible for shaping the ethical climate of an organization, it is as follows.
Those who cheat for you will cheat against you. If you encourage the first form of deceit, you will get the second, which will cost you dearly in the bargain. Individuals comfortable enough with cheating to want to stay in a dishonest work unit were especially willing to cheat the members of that unit.
As a set of general recommendations that all commercial organizations might want to adopt, three appear worth the effort. Honesty ratings by customers and clients of employees they interact with should be part of the employee’s incentive structures. In addition, the ethical reputation of the company as a whole should be measured and included in assessments of yearly performance.
Finally, ratings by employees of the firm’s ethical orientation should be a component of senior management, and especially the CEO’s compensation package. Postsuasion. After Effects. If persuasion is indeed based on temporarily directed attention, there’s an important question all persuaders must confront.
When rival communicators or even everyday events divert that attention to some other concept, what can be done to prevent the favorability from evaporating? Two effective strategies are available, each arising from a different approach to social influence one old school and one new school. Creating lasting change by installing strong commitments.
Post suasion. After effects. If pre suasion is indeed based on temporarily directed attention, there’s an important question all pre suaders must confront. When rival communicators or even everyday events divert that attention to some other concept, What can be done to prevent the favorability from evaporating?
Two effective strategies are available, each arising from a different approach to social influence of one old school and one new school. Creating lasting change by installing strong commitments. Traditionally, behavioral scientists have offered a straightforward answer to the question of how to make a person’s initially affirmative response persist.
Arrange for the individual to make a commitment to that response, usually in the form of an active step. If instead the patients are asked to fill in the card, the active step gets them more committed to keeping the appointment. When this costless procedure was tried in the British Medical Clinic study, the subsequent no show rate dropped by 18%.
In 2008, shortly before the presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain, Americans in several states were surveyed online regarding their political attitudes and beliefs. Half saw a small American flag at the top left corner of the survey questionnaire as they began to answer its questions.
The other half saw no flag. Exposure to the American flag in this subtle way caused participants to become more favorable to McCain’s Republican Party And it’s politically conservative ideology. Moreover, when participants were resurveyed after the election, the researchers learned that those who had encountered a U.
S. flag on the prior questionnaire had voted for McCain at a significantly greater rate than the other participants. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, a full eight months after the election, participants who had made contact with their flag during the long pass survey We’re still embracing more Republican Party oriented attitudes, beliefs, and judgments.
A pilot study done by the researchers showed that, in 2008 anyway, Americans reliably made that link between the flag and Republicanism. Such an encounter with the American flag made people temporarily more disposed toward Republican Party candidates and positions, so much for the flag’s immediate effects.
But how can we explain their surprising persistence? The survey researchers think they know, after coming across the American flag and becoming temporarily more inclined toward republicanism. Participants were asked to act on that inclination by registering it in the survey, thereby committing to it behaviorally.
Their commitment led to an even more committing form of activity when they subsequently voted in the election, which in turn led to a solidified Republican Party orientation when measured eight months later. The implication for effective pre suasion is plain. Pre suasive openers can produce dramatic, immediate shifts in people, but to turn those shifts into durable changes, it’s necessary to get commitments to them, usually in the form of related behavior.
Not all commitments are equal in this respect, however. The most effective commitments reach into the future by incorporating behaviours that affect one’s personal identity. They do so by ensuring that the commitment is undertaken in an active, effortful and voluntary fashion, because each of these elements communicates deep personal preferences.
For instance, if through someone’s pre suasive manoeuvre of showing me images of people standing together, I become temporarily inclined toward an inclusive social policy, say. Thank you. Raising the minimum wage for all workers, and I see myself acting on that preference, by making a quickly requested financial contribution to the cause, I will become more committed to the idea on the spot.
In addition, if the action was both made freely, it was entirely my choice, and difficult or costly to perform, the size of my donation was substantial, I’m even more likely to view it as indicating what I favour as a person. It’s this behaviorally influenced self perception that would anchor and align my later responding on the issue.
Modern life is becoming more and more like that bus hurtling down the highway. Speedy, turbulent, stimulus saturated, and mobile. As a result, we are all becoming less and less able to think hard and well about what best to do in many situations. Hence, even the most careful minded of us are increasingly likely to react automatically to the cues for action that exist in those settings.
We have to become interior designers of our regular living spaces, furnishing them with features that will send us unthinkingly in the directions we most want to go in those spaces. This approach provides another way, besides making immediate forceful commitments, to arrange for initially formed preferences to guide our future actions.
By assuring that we regularly encounter cues that automatically link to and activate those preferences, we can commission the machinery in our behalf. Want to apply to a specific task? If When then plans provide yet another way to harness the power of associative connections for our long term advantage.
It’s something they do by associating desirable goals and actions with cues that we will experience in regularly occurring future situations. If, after my business lunches, the server asks for dessert choices, then I will order mint tea, or when it’s eight in the morning, then And I’ve finished brushing my teeth, then I’ll take my prescribed dose of medicine.
Persuasive Geographies 2 Who we are is, where we are. Grant and Hoffman thought they could do better just by bringing physicians attention upon entering an examination room to one of two powerful motivations. Concern for themselves or concern for their patients. To channel attention to the self centered concern, the researchers placed signs above some examination room soap or gel dispensers that read, hand hygiene protects you from catching diseases.
To channel attention to the patient centered concern, they placed signs over a different set of dispensers that read, hand hygiene protects patients from catching diseases. Despite only a single word of difference, the effect of the two types of signs was dramatically one sided. The sign that reminded the doctors to protect themselves had no effect on soap and gel use.
But the one reminding them to protect their patients increased usage by 45%. That study of 301 resident physicians in the United States began with a pertinent question. What might cause doctors to become more versus less accepting of industry sponsored favors? One sample of the physicians was simply asked in an online survey whether and to what extent taking gifts and payments from industry representatives was acceptable to them.
In the researcher’s analysis, only about one fifth, 21. 7%, found the practice acceptable. But when a second sample was asked the same question, Proceeded by items inquiring into how much they had sacrificed personally and financially to become MDs, nearly half, 47. 5%, thought gift taking acceptable. Finally, when a third sample was both reminded in the same way of their prior sacrifices, and asked whether the resources they’d previously expended justified taking gifts, a clear majority, 60.
3%, came to see the practice as acceptable. It’s also a conclusion that provides a fitting close to this book. In large measure, why as we are with respect to any choice is where we ate attentionally in the moment before the choice. We can be channeled to that privileged moment by choice relevant cues we haphazardly bump into in our daily settings.
Or, of greater concern, by the cues a knowing communicator has tactically placed there. Or, to much better and lasting effect, by the cues we have stored in those recurring sites to send us consistently in desired directions. In each case the made moment is pre suasive. Whether we are wary of the underlying process, attracted to its potential, or both, we’d be right to acknowledge its considerable power and wise to understand its inner workings.
