Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

who in the advertising community would have thought that the absence of memory for a commerci...

seemingly dismissible information presented in the background captures a valuable kind of attention that allows for potent, almost entirely uncounted instances of influence.

Environmental noise such as that coming from heavy traffic or airplane flight paths is something we think we get used to and even block out after awhile. But the evidence is clear that the disruptive noise still gets in, reducing the ability to learn and perform cognitive tasks.

Thus, parents whose children’s schools or homes are subjected to intermittent automotive, train, or aircraft noise should insist on the implementation of sound-baffling remedies. Employers, for the sake of their workers—and their own bottom lines—should do the same.

Classrooms with heavily decorated walls displaying lots of posters, maps, and artwork reduce the test scores of young children learning science material there.

Inviting Favorable Evaluation

Any practice that pulls attention to an idea will be successful only when the idea has merit. If the arguments and evidence supporting it are seen as meritless by an audience, directed attention to the bad idea won’t make it any more persuasive. If anything, the tactic might well backfire.

Indeed, a lot of research has demonstrated that the more consideration people give to something, the more extreme (polarized) their opinions of it become. So attention-capturing tactics provide no panacea to would-be persuaders.

Because these means of differentiation are so costly, their expense might be too burdensome for many organizations to bear.

Could resolving the dilemma lie in finding an inexpensive way to shift attention to a particular product, service, or idea? Well, yes, as long as the spotlighted item is a good one—a high scorer in customer reviews, perhaps.

conclusion: if you agreed to participate in a consumer survey regarding some product, perhaps 35-millimeter cameras, the survey taker could enhance your ratings of any strong brand—let’s say Canon—simply by asking you to consider the qualities of Canon cameras but not asking you to consider the qualities of any of its major rivals, such as Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, or Minolta. More than that, without realizing why, your intention to purchase a Canon 35mm camera would likely also jump, as would your desire to make the purchase straightaway, with no need to search for information about comparable brands.

Thus, to receive the benefits of focused attention, the key is to keep the focus unitary.

Some impressive research demonstrates that merely engaging in a single-chute evaluation of one of several established hotel and restaurant chains, consumer products, and even charity organizations can automatically cause people to value the focused-upon entity more and become more willing to support it financially.

Each was asked to evaluate the wisdom of only one of four worthy possible solutions: (1) increasing the advertising budget, which would raise brand awareness among do-it-yourself painters; (2) lowering prices, which would attract more price-sensitive buyers; (3) hiring additional sales representatives, who could press for more shelf space in retail stores; or (4) investing in product development, to boost quality so that the brand could be promoted to professional painters as the best in the market. It didn’t matter which of the four ideas the decision makers evaluated: the process of targeting and evaluating one, by itself, pushed them to recommend it among the options as the best remedy for the company to adopt.

Second, for any decision maker, a painstaking comparative assessment of multiple options is difficult and stressful, akin to the juggler’s task of trying to keep several objects in the air all at once. The resultant (and understandable) tendency is to avoid or abbreviate such an arduous process by selecting the first practicable candidate that presents itself. This tendency has a quirky name, “satisficing”—a term coined by economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—to serve as a blend of the words satisfy and suffice.

The combination reflects two simultaneous goals of a chooser when facing a decision—to make it good and to make it gone—which, according to Simon, usually means making it good enough.

in the real world of mental overload, limited resources, and deadlines, s...

Decision scientists who have studied this consider-the-opposite tactic have found it both easy to implement and remarkably effective at debiasing judgments.

The Bush administration’s initial justification for the war—to rid the region of Saddam’s cache of “weapons of mass destruction”—was debunked (the weapons never materialized) and was revised regularly to incorporate such new purposes as eliminating Saddam’s humanitarian abuses, terminating Iraq’s support of Al Qaeda, safeguarding the world’s oil supply, and establishing a bulwark for democracy in the Middle East.

The “embedded reporter program” of the war in Iraq was the product of a joint decision by US officials and major media bureau chiefs to place reporters directly within combat units—to eat, sleep, and travel with them—during the course of military operations.

With their personnel functioning alongside the troops in almost every sense, they would be able to convey to their audiences the experience of combat with levels of detail and currency rarely available to them before.

Besides a window into the reality of soldiering, their live-in status would allow embedded reporters special access to the soldiers themselves and, thus, to the personal circumstances of these men and women.

Because the media chiefs were so attracted to the idea of an embedded reporter program, they made concessions that slanted the coverage more favorably to the military, which was allowed to play a role in the training, selection, and dismissal of reporters as well as to review their reports prior to publication.

“Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment . . . Overall, we were very happy with the outcome.”

Embedded reporters’ accounts were focused almost entirely on the troops: their daily activities, food, clothing, and supplies, how they prepared for battles, the tactics they employed, and the bravery they showed in battle. Indeed, 93 percent of all stories filed by embedded journalists came from the soldiers’ perspectives, compared with less than half of that from

their unembedded counterparts.

were not reporting in any meaningful way on the broader political issues involved, such as the justifications for the war (as an example, the absence of weapons of mass destruction was mentioned in just 2 percent of all stories) or the operation’s impact on US standing and power abroad.

Thus, with the vast

majority of front-page war stories never addressing the whys of the fight but instead its whos and hows, the predominant media message to the public was evident: the thing you should be paying attention to here is the conduct of the war, not the wisdom of it.

Some of that same research demonstrates that if people fail to direct their attention to a topic, they presume that it must be of relatively little importance.

Because frontline combat factors represented a prime strength of the war, whereas larger strategic ones represented a prime weakness, the effect of the embedded

reporter program was to award center stage import to the main success, not the main failure, of the Bush administration’s Iraq campaign.

As we’ve seen, the persuasive consequences of managing background information and inviting singular evaluation went unrecognized by individuals subjected to those procedures, too. Through this cloaked influence, techniques designed merely to channel temporary attention can be particularly effective as pre-suasive devices. But there’s another driving reason.

What’s Focal Is Causal

It’s no wonder that we assign elevated import to factors that have our attention. We also assign them causality.

Therefore, directed attention gives focal elements a specific kind of initial weight in any deliberation. It gives them standing as causes, which in turn gives them standing as answers...

if we see ourselves giving such attention to some factor, we become more likely t...

The highly visible incentives caused the obtained effects due to their direct links to personal monetary gain, right? Nothing surprising occurred here, right? Well, right, except for an additional finding that challenges all this thinking: almost no one took the money.

Indeed, a number of oddities appeared in his data, at least for adherents to the idea that the ultimate cause of human action is one’s own financial interest.

richer deals increasingly caused people to sacrifice their places in line but without taking the greater compensation.

Oberholzer-Gee stepped away from a consideration of salient economic factors and toward a hidden factor: an obligation people feel to help those in need.

The obligation comes from the helping norm, which behavioral scientists sometimes call the norm of social responsibility. It states that we should aid those who ...

The payment offers stimulated compliance because they alerted recipients to the amount of need present in the situation. This account explains why larger financial inducements increased consent even though most people weren’t willing to pocket them: more money signaled a stronger need on the part of the requester. (“If this guy is willing to pay a lot to jump ahead of me, he must really need to get to the front fast.”)25

Conversely, there are many other factors—social obligations, personal values, moral standards—that, merely because they are not readily observable, are often more determining than they seem.

Yet many thousands of those minds responded to something about the numbers that lifted expectations of lottery success. What? Our previous analysis offers one answer: Because of all the publicity surrounding them, they had become focal in attention; and what is focal is seen to have causal properties—to have the ability to make events occur.

“It’s always just one person who drives the decision in those kinds of debates, isn’t it?” You laugh and nod because you noticed that too: although the man was trying to be diplomatic about it, he clearly was the one who determined the couple’s movie choice. Your amusement disappears, though, when your friend observes, “She sounded sweet, but she just pushed until she got her way.”

knows why you and your friend could have heard the same conversation but come to opposite judgments about who determined the end result. It was a small accident of seating arrangements: you were positioned to observe the exchange over the shoulder of the woman, making the man more visible and salient, while your friend had the reverse point of view.

The outcomes were always the same: whomever’s face was more visible was judged to be more causal.

what’s-focal-is-presumed-causal phenomenon.

No matter what they tried, the researchers couldn’t stop observers from presuming that the causal agent in the interaction they’d witnessed was the one whose face was most visible to them.