Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

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.

The statements have various names in scholarly usage, but I’m going to call them if/when-then plans.

They are designed to help us

achieve a goal by readying us (1) to register certain cues in settings where we can further our goal, and (2) to take an appropriate action spurred ...

“If/when, after my business lunches, the server asks if I’d like to have dessert, the...

“When it is eight in the morning, and I finish brushing my teeth, then I will take my prescribed pill dose”—adherence rose from 55 percent to 79 percent.

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 instal...

vigilance for certain cues that we have targeted previously, and we get to employ a strong association that we have constructed previously between those ...

These prefetched 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 prefetched sources of information and direction that have been placed on standby, waiting t...

Especially for goals we are highly committed to reaching, we’d be foolish not to take advantage of the pre-suasive leverage that if/when-then plans can provide.68

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.

We can do so by engineering into our everyday settings cues to actions associated strongly with our greater goals.

Often, simply recognizing these undesired influences will be enough to block their effects. That recognition can come to us in more than one way.

Mere Reminders

for instance, the awareness that on sunny days we don’t just wear dark-colored glasses but rose-colored ones as well. In the realm of self-correction mechanisms, then, we can find another source of validation for a core tenet of pre-suasion: immediate, large-scale adjustments begin frequently with practices that do little more than redirect attention.

Signs of Stealthy Persuasive Intent: A Nudge Too Far

Standard product placements—the sneaky insertions of consumer products into the plotlines of movies and TV shows—have been with us for a long time.

A belief among many product-placement practitioners is that the

more perceptible the constructed connection, the more effective it will be.

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. Guess what? It turned out that the survey

respondents were least likely to select the products that had been inserted most prominently.

Whereas the most subtly placed brands were chosen by 47 percent of the audience, only 27 percent picked the most prominently placed ones.

Noteworthy is the operative reason that the only thing necessary to trigger the correction was a reminder: it becomes evident when we deconstruct the word remind into its constituent parts. All that’s required to arrange for people to act in accord with a piece of already-held knowledge is to get them to put their minds on it again immediately before the act—literally, to remind

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, we can 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.

analysis requires more time, energy, and motivation. As a consequence, its impact on our decisions is limited by the rigor it requires.

When

any of these requirements isn’t met, we typically resort to decision-making shortcuts.

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.

I’d assumed that the sole reason they commonly place ads in late-hour slots was the lower broadcast fees charged at those times. I quickly learned differently. Although that started out as the main reason most such programming begins far into the night, there is a more important reason: 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

Similarly, in criminal interrogations, even innocent suspects often can’t resist interrogators’ pressure for them to confess after hours of mentally exhausting questioning. That’s why, although the typical interrogation lasts for less than an hour, interviews generating false confessions average sixteen hours.

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.

The majority opted for the brand with the greater number of unimportant advantages.

It wasn’t until a final set of observers was allowed unlimited

time to consider the feature information that the pattern reversed itself, and the majority (67 percent) favored the camera with fewer but more significant advantages.

Does the idea of having insufficient time to analyze all the points of a communication remind you of how you have to respond to the rapid-fire presentation of many messages these days? Think about it for a second. Better yet, think about it for an unlimited time: Isn’t this the way the broadcast media operate, transmitting a swift stream of informa...

Nor are we able to respond mindfully to a news clip of a speech by a politician. Instead, we’re left to a focus on secondary features of the presentations, such as the attractiveness of the advertising spokesperson or the politician’s charisma.72

The sheer amount of information today can be

overwhelming—its complexity befuddling, its relentlessness depleting, its range distracting, and its prospects agitating. Couple those culprits with the concentration-disrupting alerts of devices nearly everyone now carries to deliver that input, and careful assessment’s role as a ready decision-making corrective becomes sorely diminished.

A highly related question naturally arises: on which concepts, then, should an audience’s attention be focused for the broadest pre-suasive effect?

We’ve seen how it’s possible to move others in our direction by saying or doing just the right thing immediately before we want them to respond: If we want them to buy a box of expensive chocolates, we can first arrange for them to write down a number that’s much larger than the price of the chocolates. If we want them to choose a bottle of French wine, we can expose them to French background music before they decide. If we want them to agree to try an untested product, we can first inquire whether they consider themselves adventurous.

If we want to convince them to select a highly popular item, we can begin by showing them a scary movie. If we want them to feel warmly toward us, we can hand them a hot drink. If we want them to be more helpful to us, we can have them look at photos of individuals standing close together. If we want them to be more achievement oriented, we can provide them with an image of a runner winning a race. If we want them to make careful assessments, we can show them a picture of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.

This specificity fits with the way that successful openers operate for a communicator. They pre-suasively channel recipients’ attention only to those concepts that are associated

favorably with the communicator’s particular goal.