Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

Although there are several reasons that scarcity drives desire, our aversion to losing something of value is a key factor. After all, loss is the ultimate form of scarcity, rendering the valued item or opportunity unavailable.

“If you wake a multimillionaire client at five in the morning and say, ‘If you act now, you will gain twenty thousand dollars,’ he’ll scream at you and slam down the phone. But if you say, ‘If you don’t act now, you will lose twenty thousand dollars,’ he’ll thank you.” But the scarcity of an item does more than raise the possibility of loss; it also raises the judged value of that item.

Follow-up studies showed why. In the consumer’s mind, any constraint on access increased the worth of what was being offered.84

Normally, we want to be (and to be seen) as consistent with our existing commitments—such as the previous statements we’ve made, stands we’ve taken, and actions we’ve performed.

Therefore communicators who can get us to take a pre-suasive step, even

a small one, in the direction of a particular idea or entity will increase our willingness to take a much larger, congruent step when asked. Th...

If one romantic partner agrees to pray for the other’s well-being every day for an extended period of time, he or she becomes less likely to be unfaithful while doing so. After all, such behavior would be inconsistent with the daily, actively made commitment to the partner’s welfare.

Sometimes all that’s necessary is to remind others of a commitment they’ve made that fits with the practitioners’ goals.

At the first stage, the main goal involves cultivating a positive association, as people are more favorable to a communication if they are favorable to the communicator. Two principles of influence, reciprocity and liking, seem particularly appropriate to the task.

At the second stage, reducing uncertainty becomes a priority.

Under these circumstances, the principles of social

proof and authority offer the best match. Pointing to evidence that a choice is well regarded by peers or experts significantly increases confidence in its wisdom.

At this third stage, motivating action is the main objective.

The friend would do well to include in his appeal the principles of consistency and scarcity by reminding me of what I’ve said publicly in the past about the importance of my health and the unique enjoyments I would miss if I lost it.

It seemed upon reflection that, although the rule for reciprocation might have started the process, it was the ten-year resultant relationship between the families that compelled the Harrisons

to open their home to an eighteen-year-old they’d never met.

Relationships not only intensify willingness to help but also cause it.

There’s a lesson here. Our ability to create change in others is often and importantly grounded in shared personal relationships, which create a pre-suasive context for assent.

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, “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.

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.

From a genetic point of view, being in the same family—the same bloodline—is the ultimate form of self-other unity.

individuals do not so much attempt to ensure their own survival as the survival of copies of their genes. The crucial implication is that the self in self-interest can lie outside of one’s body and inside the skin of another who shares a goodly amount of genetic material.

From an evolutionary perspective, any advantages to one’s kin should be promoted, including relatively small ones.

But is there any way that individuals with no special genetic connection to us could employ the power of kinship to gain our favor? One possibility is to use language and imagery pre-suasively 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.

Could a lone genetically unrelated communicator harness the concept of kinship to obtain agreement?

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 pre-suaded to trust in them more deeply than before.

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.”

Mr. Buffett had pre-suasively done something that made me judge them as even more convincing: he had claimed that he was going to advise me about them as he would a family member. Because of everything I knew about the man, I believed that claim.

In his letter, Mr. Buffett had me at family.

he did employ the trustworthiness-enhancing procedure of describing certain mistakes that management had made in the past.

In the world of hard-minded, fact-based financial investing, the default is to focus on the merit of the message. And, of course, it’s true that the merit (of the arguments) can be the message. But at the same time, there are other dimensions of effective communication that can become the essential message.

Place 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.