Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

if I were right, you’d automatically begin searching your memory for times when you’d acted stubbornly—only for those times—and you’d almost certainly come upon a ready instance, as mulishness under pressure is a frequent personal failing.

I’d have focused you oppositely this time, sending you down a different chute: one rigged to ensure that you’d find occasions in your past when you embraced change.

The brilliant Holmes was as unrelenting in his attention to what didn’t occur as to what did.

“Silver Blaze,” Holmes realizes that a theft under investigation is an inside job (and could not have been committed by the stranger police had under arrest) because during the crime a guard dog didn’t bark.

In a song by Jimmy Buffett, a former lover has to be informed—five separate times!—that the lack of something can convey the telling presence of something: “If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.”8

If I inquired whether you were unhappy in, let’s say, the social arena, your natural tendency to hunt for confirmations rather than for disconfirmations of the possibility would lead you to find more proof of discontent than if I asked whether you were happy there.

First, if a pollster wants to know only whether you are dissatisfied with something—it could be a consumer product or an elected representative or a government policy—watch out. Be suspicious as well of the one who asks only if you are satisfied. Single-chute questions of this sort can get you both to mistake and misstate your position. I’d recommend declining to participate in surveys that employ this biased form of questioning. Much better are those that use two-sided questions: “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with this brand?”

“To what extent do you agree or disagree with this country’s current approach to the Middle East?” These kinds of inquiries invite you to consult your feelings evenhandedly.

Cult recruiters often begin the process of seducing new prospects by asking if they are unhappy (rather than happy). I used to think this phrasing was designed only to select individuals whose deep personal discontent would incline them toward the kind of radical change that cults demand. But now I’m convinced that the “Are you unhappy?” question is more than a screening device. It’s also a recruiting device that stacks the deck by focusing people, unduly, on their dissatisfactions.

“Well, if you’re unhappy, you’d want to change that, right?”10

The prevailing problem for these organizations is that the rest of us can’t be bothered to participate in their surveys, focus groups, and taste tests.

They stopped a second sample of individuals and began the interaction with a pre-suasive opener: “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Following brief reflection, nearly everyone answered yes.

frequently the factor most likely to determine a person’s choice in a situation is not the one that counsels most wisely there; it is one that has been elevated in attention (and, thereby, in privilege) at the time of the decision.

For much of the thirty-plus years that I have been studying the ways that people can be persuaded to choose and change, my thinking has been governed by the dominant scientific model of social influence.

According to this nontraditional—channeled attention—approach, to get desired action it’s not necessary to alter a person’s beliefs or attitudes or experiences. It’s not necessary to alter anything at all except what’s prominent in that person’s mind at the moment of decision. In

To get a desired action, it's only necessary to alter what's prominent in the person's mind at the moment of decision.

a marketer could greatly increase the chance of finding survey participants by beginning with a particular pre-suasive opener: asking people if they considered themselves helpful.

In a companion study, the two scientists found that it was similarly possible to increase willingness to try an unfamiliar consumer product by beginning with a comparable but differently customized pre-suasive opener—this time asking people if they considered themselves adventurous.

Two features of these findings strike me as remarkable. First, of the subjects who were asked if they counted themselves adventurous, 97 percent (seventy out of seventy-two) responded affirmatively. The idea that nearly everybody qualifies as an adventurous type is ludicrous. Yet when asked the single-chute question of whether they fit this category, people nominate themselves almost invariably.

The other noteworthy feature of the soft-drink experiment is not that a simple question could shunt so many people into a particular choice but that it could shunt so many of them into a potentially dangerous choice. In recent years, if there is anything we have been repeatedly warned to safeguard against by all manner of experts, it’s opening ourselves to some unscrupulous individual who might bombard our computers with spam, infect them with destructive viruses, or hack into them to sting us with the protracted misery of identity theft.

Research on cognitive functioning shows us the form of the fee: when attention is paid to something, the price is attention lost to something else. Indeed, because the human mind appears able to hold only one

thing in conscious awareness at a time, the toll is a momentary loss of focused attention to everything else.

Even though there are always multiple “tracks” of information available, we consciously select only the one we want to register at that moment.

The best we can do to handle multiple channels of information is to switch back and forth among them, opening and closing the door of mindfulness to each in turn.

Although it might seem that we are concentrating on more than one thing simultaneously, that’s an illusion. We are just rapidly alternating our focus.

However, just as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it: For about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot,

called an attentional blink, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously. It’s for this reason that I am so annoyed when I’m interacting with an individual who is trying to do something else at the same time.

Attentional blink: The dead spot caused by shifting our attention from one thing to another.

It shows me that my conversation partner is willing to lose contact with the information I’m providing to make contact with some other information. It always feels like a form of demotion. It advises me that my input is considered relatively unimportant.15

Here’s the point for the influence process: whatever we can do to focus people on something—an idea, a person, an object—makes that thing

seem more important to them than before.

as plenty of research shows that reducing the distance to an object makes it seem more worthwhile.

WHAT’S SALIENT IS IMPORTANT

anything that draws focused attention to itself can lead observers to overestimate its importance.

Numerous researchers have documented the basic human inclination to assign undue weight to whatever happens to be salient at the time.

“When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.”17

“the focusing illusion,” his answer is neatly summarized in the essay’s title: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”18

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

because a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message pre-loads it with importance.

The central tenet of agenda-setting theory is that the media rarely produce change directly, by presenting compelling evidence that sweeps an audience to new positions; they are much more likely to persuade indirectly, by giving selected issues and facts better coverage than other issues and facts.

Agenda setting: The media convinces the audience by giving selected issues more coverage than others. The public considers the issues given the most coverage to be the most important.

The press may not be successful in telling people what to think, but they are successful in telling them what to think about.

Clearly, the amount of news coverage can make a big difference in the perceived significance of an issue among observers as they are exposed to the coverage.19

Why do we typically assume that whatever we are focusing on in the moment is especially important? One reason is that whatever we are focusing on typically is especially important in the moment.

This sensible system of focusing our limited attentional resources on what does indeed possess special import has an imperfection, though: we can be brought to the mistaken belief that something is important merely because we have been led by some irrelevant factor to give it our narrowed attention.

A successful pre-suader draws outsize attention to the most favorable feature of an offer.

Managing the Background

The other matter that had piqued Mandel’s interest is one that has vexed merchandisers forever: how to avoid losing business to a poorer-quality rival whose only competitive advantage is lower cost.

“We always instruct them not to get caught up in a price war against an inferior product, because they’ll lose. We tell them to make quality the battleground instead, because that’s a fight they’ll most likely win.

they described how they were able to draw website visitors’ attention to the goal of comfort merely by placing fluffy clouds on the background wallpaper of the site’s landing page.

While reading an online article about education, repeated exposure to a banner ad for a new brand of camera made the readers significantly more favorable to the ad when they were shown it again later. Tellingly, this effect emerged even though they couldn’t recall having ever seen the ad, which had been presented to them in five-second flashes near the story material.

Why didn’t these banner ads, which were presented as many as twenty times within just five pages of text, suffer any wear-out? The readers never processed the ads consciously, so there was no recognized information to be identified as tedious or untrustworthy.

In the new studies, frequently interjected banners were positively rated and were uncommonly resistant to standard wear-out effects, yet they were neither recognized nor recalled. Indeed, it looks to be this third result (lack of direct notice) that makes banner ads so effective in the first

two strong and stubborn ways.