Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

by deciding to persist through the interview on my own, I might subject myself to a set of techniques perfected by interrogators over centuries to get confessions from suspects.

Those who confess are much more likely to be charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to harsh punishment.

The role of confessions in Miller’s plays can be seen in The Crucible, the most frequently produced of all his works.

A scary implication arises from Miller’s story. Certain remarkably similar and effective practices have been developed over many years that enable

investigators, in all manner of places and for all manner of purposes, to wring statements of guilt from suspects—sometimes innocent ones.

It’s a good idea in theory, but there’s a problem with it in practice: the point of view of the video camera is almost always behind the interrogator and onto the face of the suspect.

As we know from the experiments of Professor Taylor, a camera angle arranged to record the face of one discussant over the shoulder of another biases that critical judgment toward the more visually salient of the two.

A camera angle from behind the interrogator fines even more credibility to a false confession.

Nothing could change the camera angle’s prejudicial impact—except changing the camera angle itself.

Nothing can change the camera angle's prejudicial impact.

Manifestly here, what’s focal seems causal.

First, find the camera in the room, which will usually be above and behind the police officer. Second, move your chair. Position yourself so that the recording of the session will depict your face and your questioner’s face equally.

Don’t allow the what’s-focal-is-presumed-causal effect to disadvantage you

Say that, although you’d like to cooperate fully on your own, you once read a book that urged you to consider extensive police questioning unsafe, even for innocent individuals. Go ahead, blame me. You can even use my name.

Leaders, for example, are accorded a much larger causal position than they typically deserve in the success or failure of the teams, groups, and organizations they head.

yet the leader is assigned outsize responsibility for company results.

In sum, because what’s salient is deemed important and what’s focal is deemed causal, a communicator who ushers audience members’ attention to selected facets of a message reaps a significant persuasive advantage:

recipients’ receptivity to considering those facets prior to actually considering them. In a real sense, then, channeled attention can make recipients more open to a

message pre-suasively, before the...

Perceptions of issue importance and causality meet this challenge exquisitely.

Commanders of Attention 1: The Attractors

When I was first sending around the manuscript of my book Influence to possible publishers, its working title was Weapons of Influence.

To ensure that bookstore aisle browsers would notice and reach for it, he recommended changing the title to Weapons of Social Seduction. “Then,” he pointed out, “they’d register both sex and violence in the same glance.”

Certain cues seize our attention vigorously. Those that do so most powerfully are linked to our survival.

Advertisers and marketers know it and use it in their commercial appeals. Behavioral scientists know it, too. What’s more, they’ve shown how easy it can be to sneak a sexual association into things and have it direct conduct.

being asked about Valentine Street led the men to thoughts of a sexually linked lovers’ holiday: Valentine’s Day. It was the sexual connections to the word Valentine that triggered their bravado, propelling them to win the favor of a pretty ingénue no matter the risks.

The attractiveness of the young woman requesting assistance with her phone was not enough, by itself, to accomplish it. Something crucial to the process had to be put into place first. The men had to be exposed to a sexually linked concept, Valentine’s Day, before she could prompt them to act. An opener was needed that rendered them receptive to her plea prior to ever encountering it. In short, an act of pre-suasion was required.

Using sex to sell a product works only for items that people frequently buy for sexually related purposes.

Using sex to sell only works for items that have a sexual purpose. Don't stretch the concept of purpose.

Soft drinks, laundry detergents, and kitchen appliances do not, despite the occasionally misguided efforts of advertisers who don’t appreciate the point.

In any situation, people are dramatically more likely to pay attention to and be influenced by stimuli that fit the goal they have for that situation.

Individuals who weren’t looking for a new partner didn’t spend any more time locked on to the photos of good-looking possibilities than average-looking ones.

Something else—in this case, the goal of finding a new partner—had to be in place first to make that happen. There is a strong connection, then, between a person’s current romantic/sexual goals and that person’s tendency to pay concentrated attention to even highly attractive others.

Remarkably, the best indicator of a breakup was not how much love they felt for their partner two months earlier or how satisfied they were with their relationship at that time or even how long they had wanted it to last. It was how much they were regularly aware of and attentive to the hotties around them back then.

In our relationships, then, we might want to be sensitive to any sustained upswing in our partner’s (or our own) attentiveness to attractive alternatives, as it might well offer an early signal of a partnership in peril.33

Violence, with its associated threat to safety, has always been able to draw human attention.

There are, for instance, dread risks, which involve risky steps that people take to avoid harm from something that is actually less risky but that they happen to be focused on at the time and have thereby come to dread.

As a result, many thousands of Americans with long-distance travel plans abandoned the dreaded skies for the roads. But the fatality rate for highway travel is considerably higher than for air travel, making that choice the more deadly one.

It’s estimated that about 1,600 Americans lost their lives in additional auto accidents as a direct result, six times more than the number of passengers killed in the only US commercial plane crash that next year.

Dread risks turn out to be risky—and dreadful—indeed.

As a rule, communications that present the most frightening consequences of poor health habits work better than milder messages or messages that present the positive consequences of good habits. Plus, the more prominent and attention grabbing the fearsome appeals are, the better they work.

What’s the persuasive alchemy that allows a communicator to trouble recipients deeply about the negative outcomes of their bad habits without pushing them to deny the problem in an attempt to control their now-heightened fears?

has only to add to the chilling message clear information about legitimate, available steps the recipients can take to change their health-threatening habits. In this way, the fright can be dealt with not through self-delusional baloney that deters positive action but through genuine change opportunities that mobilize such action.

Present the medicine for the cure with the disease. With shaving, technique can be the cure for worser equipment.

and they used that new belief, rather than denial, to manage their anxieties. This approach, then, is how public health communicators can best deploy truthful yet frightening facts: by waiting to convey those facts until information about accessible assistance systems—programs, workshops, websites, and help lines—can be incorporated into their communications.35

Identify a problem a shaver has, and then sell the onl

With their complexities in mind, it becomes possible to understand how employing those stimuli can lead to great successes in some influence situations but to reversals in others. When several research teammates and I thought about the matter, we recognized that advertisers often ignore these complexities and, consequently, can produce expensive campaigns that actually undermine product sales.

Our analysis made us think that the popularity-based message would be the right one in any situation where audience members had been exposed to frightening stimuli—perhaps in the middle of watching a violent film on TV—because threat-focused people want to join the crowd. But sending that message in an ad to an audience watching a romantic film on TV would be a mistake, because amorously focused people want to step away from the crowd.

(“Stand out from the crowd”)—had the opposite effect. The distinctiveness ad was exceedingly successful among individuals who’d been watching the romantic film, and it was particularly unsuccessful among those who’d been viewing the violent one.

Although the data pattern seems complex, it becomes simplified when viewed through the prism of a core claim of this book: the effectiveness of persuasive messages—in this case, carrying two influence themes that have been commonly used for centuries—will be drastically affected by the type of opener experienced immediately in advance. Put people in a wary state of mind via that opener, and, driven by a desire for safety, a popularity-based appeal will soar, whereas a distinctiveness-based appeal will sink.

Instead, most often in the role of log editor, this individual positions advertising spots so that any given ad is spaced appropriately at various times throughout the day and is not aired too closely to an ad for a direct competitor.

“America’s largest-selling truck for thirty-nine years” (as some ads do), they never consider favoring placements during crime dramas, scary movies, and news programming, while shunning romantic comedies and love stories. Conversely, I’d bet that if they plan to purchase slots for F-150 ads touting the distinctive FX Appearance Package to prod buyers to “Get ready to stand out!” (as some ads do), they never consider prioritizing those placements in the opposite fashion. Too bad for Ford.36

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT: CHANGE-O, PRESTO Whenever we first register a change around us, our attention flies to it. We are not alone in this regard. The reaction appears widely across the animal kingdom.

When some new stimulus in the lab drew the dog’s attention, the conditioned response vanished. Courtesy of Rklawton

Yet when visitors were invited to his institute to observe a demonstration, it usually failed. The same happened when one of his assistants would condition a dog in one of the institute’s experimental rooms and would then ask Pavlov to view the results. All too frequently, the dog wouldn’t respond, leaving the assistant crestfallen and his boss mystified.