Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

An example is in order. A little-recognized truth I often try to convey

to various audiences is that, in contests of persuasion, counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments.

This superiority emerges especially when a counterclaim does more than refute a rival’s claim by showing it to be mistaken or misdirected in the particular instance, but does so instead by showing the rival communicat...

But a counterargument that undermines an opponent’s argument by showing him or her to be dishonest in the matter will normally win that battle plus future battles with the opponent.

1. Pose the Mystery.

2. Deepen the Mystery.

American tobacco companies strongly advocated a proposal to ban all of their own ads from television and radio,

3. Home In on the Proper Explanation by Considering (and Offering Evidence Against) Alternative Explanations.

That appears unlikely, because representatives of the other major US business affected by the ban—the broadcast industry—filed suit in US Supreme Court to overturn the law one month after it

was enacted.

They didn’t reduce their concentrated efforts to increase tobacco sales one whit. They merely shifted their routes for marketing their products away from the broadcast media to print ads, sports sponsorships, promotional giveaways, and movie projects.

If one side purchased broadcast time on these media, the opposing side must be given free time to counterargue.

5. Resolve the Mystery.

As a consequence, in the year following the elimination of tobacco commercials on air, the tobacco companies witnessed a significant jump in sales coupled with a significant reduction in advertising expenditures.

6. Draw the Implication for the Phenomenon Under

S...

But the tobacco executives learned (and profited from) a related lesson: one of the best ways to enhance audience acceptance of one’s message is to reduce the availability of strong counterarguments to it—because counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments.

Think of it: we have something available to us here that not only keeps audience members focused generally on the issues at hand but also makes them want to pay attention to the details—the necessary but often boring and attention-deflecting particulars—of our material.

The Primacy of Associations: I Link, Therefore

I Think

In the family of ideas, there are no orphans. Each notion exists within a network of relatives linked through ...

THINKING IS LINKING

there is a crucial insight to be gained from the underlying structure of mental activity: the brain’s operations arise fundamentally and inescapably from raw associations.

associations can be called the building blocks of thought.

Associations be called the building blocks of thought

We convince others by using language that manages their mental associations to our message. Their thoughts, perceptions, and emotional reactions merely proceed from those associations.

The leader among the group of researchers pursuing this line of inquiry is the renowned psycholinguist Gün Semin, whose conclusion, in my view, comes down to this: the main purpose of speech is to direct listeners’ attention to

selected sector of reality. Once that is accomplished, the listeners’ existing associations to the now-spotlighted sector will take over to determine the reaction.

Instead, we should think of language as primarily a mechanism of influence; as a means for inducing recipients to share that conception or, at least, to act in accord with it.

We can influence simply by directing the listener's attention to something. Then the listener's own associations will take over. influence the listener's associations through the palm-reader method and single chute questions.

We achieve the goal by employing language that orients recipients to those regions of reality stocked with associations favorable to our view.

They include verbs that draw attention to concrete features of a situation, adjectives that pull one’s focus onto the traits (versus behaviors) of others, personal pronouns that highlight existing relationships, metaphors that frame a state of affairs so that it is interpreted in a singular way, or just particular wordings that link to targeted thoughts.

Speak No Evil, Leak No Evil

“Your presentation is not to include bullet points, and you are not to tell us how to attack our influence problems.”

Steve responded, “Oh, you can keep them in; you just have to call them something else.”

“As a health care organization, we’re devoted to acts of healing, so we never use language associated with violence. We don’t have bullet points; we have information points. We don’t attack a problem, we approach it.”

And one of those goals is no longer to beat our competition; it’s to outdistance or outpace them.”

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word.

Instead, it replaced such words possessing menacing associations (target, beat) with comparable words that did not (goal, outdistance).

achievement-laden language could lead to elevated performance and therefore should be retained.

Multiple studies have shown that subtly exposing individuals to words that connote achievement (win, attain, succeed, master) increases their performance on an assigned task and more than doubles their willingness to keep working at it.

It appears, then, that initial incidental exposure either to simple words or simple images can have a pre-suasive impact on later actions that are merely associated with the words or images.

Winners incite winning. This photo increased both the achievement-related thoughts and the productivity of individuals exposed to it. John Gichigi/Getty Images Metaphor Is a Meta-Door (to Change) If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. —Joseph Campbell

Since Aristotle’s Poetics (circa 350 BCE), communicators have been advised to use metaphor to get their points across.

For strategic purposes, they might be choosing a frame designed to depict the failing as external to them, as not of their doing, and, thus, not their fault.

Perhaps, the metaphor should have the appropriate relevance concept.

Recall that new psycholinguistic analysis suggests that the main function of language is not to express or describe but to influence—something it does by channeling recipients to sectors of reality pre-loaded with a set of mental associations favorable to the communicator’s view.

If so, we can see why metaphor, which directs people to think of one thing in terms of their associati...

possesses great potential as a lingu...

More recently, though, emphasis on the transfer of associations inherent in metaphor has generated an eye-opening array of persuasive effects.

your advice could be swift and confident: in any public pronouncements on the topic, she should portray the crime surge as a wild beast rampaging through the city that must be stopped.

In this instance—still on the basis of an understanding of metaphoric persuasion—your advice could also be swift and confident: in all her public pronouncements on the topic, the candidate should portray the crime surge as a spreading virus infecting the city that must be stopped. Why? Because to bring a virus under control, it’s necessary to remove the unhealthy conditions that allow it to breed and spread.

Rarely, though, do they consider the potentially greater predictive power of a pre-suasively deployed metaphor.