Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

In contrast to Influence, one aim of this book is to help satisfy that hunger directly, but with a pair of dietary restrictions. The first concerns the ethics of persuasive success. Just because we can use psychological t...

those practices will lend themselves to the attraction and retention of employees who find cheating acceptable and who will ultimately cheat the organization as a consequence.

Researchers have been applying a rigorous scientific approach to the question of which messages lead people to concede, comply, and change.

And, if persuasion is lawful, it is—unlike artistic inspiration—learnable.

If there are "Laws of Persuasion," the persuasion is learnable. All we need to do is learn the laws.

it is possible to learn scientifically established techniques that allow any of us to be more influential.

Importantly different from Influence is the science-based evidence of not just what best to say to persuade but also when best to say it.

Whether operating as a moment monitor or a moment maker, the individual who knows how to time a request, recommendation, or proposal properly will do exceedingly well.

“Well, there’s something you could do for me. We’ve just experienced the need for someone to teach a specialized marketing class for our MBA students. I’m in a bind, and it would really help me out if you could do it.”

I agreed anyway. I couldn’t see any other appropriate option, not in the instant after expressing my sincere thanks for everything this moment maker had just provided.

Because of what he had just done for me, there was no socially acceptable alternative to saying yes.

Second, the associate dean’s extraordinarily effective maneuver illustrates perfectly another major assertion of this book:

pre-suasive practices create windows of opportunity that are far from propped open permanently.

Persusive influences create a perishable windo of opportunity.

privileged moments. The meaning of the word privileged is straightforward, referring to special, elevated status.

Privileged moments have an elevated status. They refer to time as well as leverage.

One connotes a time-limited period: in this case, the window of opportunity following a pre-suasive opener, when a proposal’s power is greatest. The other connotation comes from physics and refers to a unique leveraging force that can bring about unprecedented movement. These yoked dimensions, temporal on the one hand and physical on the other, have the capacity to instigate extraordinary change in yet a third, psychological, dimension.

PART 1: PRE-SUASION: THE FRONTLOADING OF ATTENTION

Chapter 2. Privileged Moments

Why Stick with Slick? Slickness and scent are the most sought after attributes of a shaving soap. Scent, I understand. But what's the big deal about slickness? There doesn't seem to be an industry standard for slickness, which is understandable because manufacturers seldom advertise an industry-standard as they can be proven wrong. Slick seems to be the ease that the razor glides over the skin. Granted, it feels good, but have our arms become so weak we can't apply a bit of pressure? Besides, except for water, the ingredients most likely to create slick stick to the skin. Advertisers "pre-suade" us to buy through focusing our attention on slick and through falsely associating slick with a great shave. When the time and leverage are right, they strike by asking for the order.

Chapter 3. The Importance of Attention . . . Is Importance

channeled attention leads to pre-suasion: the human tendency to assign undue levels of importance to an idea as soon as one’s attention is turned to it.

Chapter 4 adds a second reason for why channeled attention leads to pre-suasion. In the same way that attentional focus leads to perceptions of importance, it also leads to perceptions of causality. If people see themselves giving special attention to some factor, they become more likely to think of it as a cause.

Chapter 5. Commanders of Attention 1: The Attractors

If elevated attention provides pre-suasive leverage, are there any features of information that automatically invite such attention and therefore don’t even require a communicator’s special efforts?

Chapter 6. Commanders of Attention 2: The Magnetizers

Besides the advantages of drawing attention to a particular stimulus, there is considerable benefit to holding it there. The communicator who can fasten an audience’s focus onto the favorable elements of an argument raises the chance that the argument will go unchallenged by opposing points of view, which get locked out of the attentional environment as a consequence.

covers certain kinds of information that combine initial pulling power with staying power: the self-relevant, the...

Chapter 7. The Primacy of Associations: I Link, Therefore I Think

Chapter 8. Persuasive Geographies: All the Right Places, All the Right Traces

Thus, it becomes possible to send ourselves in desired directions by locating to physical and psychological environments prefit with cues associated with our relevant goals. It’s also possible for influencers to achieve their goals by shifting others to environments with supportive cues.

Chapter 9. The Mechanics of Pre-suasion: Causes, Constraints, and Correctives

A communicator pre-suades by focusing recipients initially on concepts that are aligned, associatively, with the information yet to be delivered.

But by what mechanism? The answer involves an underappreciated characteristic...

elements don’t just fire when ready, they fir...

Chapter 10. Six Main Roads to Change: Broad Boulevards as Smart Shortcuts

Attention should be channeled to one or another of the universal principles of influence treated in my earlier book, Influence: reciprocity, liking, authority, social proof, scarcity, and consistency.

Chapter 11 reveals an additional (seventh) universal principle of influence: unity. There is a certain type of unity—of identity—that best characterizes a We relationship and that, if pre-suasively raised to consciousness, leads to more acceptance, cooperation, liking, help, trust, and, consequently, assent.

main ways to build We relationships: by presenting cues of genetic commonality associated with family and place.

Chapter 12. Unity 2: Acti...

We relationships can result from acting together synchronously or collaboratively. When people act in unitary ways, they become unitized; and when such activity is arranged pre-suasively, it produces mutual liking and support.

Chapter 13. Ethical Use: A Pre-Pre-Suasive Consideration

But they also have to make an even earlier decision: whether, on ethical grounds, to employ such an approach. Often, communicators from commercial organizations place profit above ethics in their appeals.

However, chapter 13 argues against unethical use, offering data from studies indicating that such tactics undermine organizational profits in three potent ways.

Chapter 14: Post-Suasion: Aftereffects Pre-suaders want to do more than create temporary changes via momentary shifts in attention; they want to make those changes durable.

Yet, during those few years, I recognized something remarkable about the palm-based information I provided: it was almost always true.

The first relies on paranormal mechanisms that can be mastered fully by only a select few; the second involves decidedly normal processes that can be commissioned by anyone.

On the one hand—no pun intended, honest—it’s conceivable

that there is a real connection between the features of a human hand and its owner’s character, history, and future. This type of explanation is often offered...

In each case, we are assured that an expert practitioner, using special information from the system, can read our personality, past, and prospects.

After each of the opposing depictions, he thought for a second and admitted that I was absolutely right about who he really was.

NOT HOCUS, NOT POCUS, BUT FOCUS

I will have focused you on the trait of stubbornness, sending you down a single psychological chute constructed unfairly to confirm my judgment.