Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

Indeed, the seniors with the best “attention management” skills (those good at orienting to and staying fixed on positive material) show the greatest mood enhancement. Those with poor such skills, however, can’t use strong attentional control to extricate themselves from their tri...

1/9/20

grumpy are just more conspicuous than the contented.

They replied in unison, “Oh, we don’t have time for worrying about that.”

Carstensen recognized that the “time” the sisters referred to wasn’t the amount available to them in any one day but in the rest of their lives.

“Which specific activities can we perform to increase our happiness?”

Looking back on those days, she wondered what actions family members could have taken to disempower the dispiriting emotions in favor of the uplifting ones.

2013 book, The Myths of Happiness,

On the one hand, she specified a set of manageable activities that reliably

increase personal happiness. Several of them—including the top three on her list—require nothing more than a pre-suasive refocusing of attention:

1. Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down. 2. Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities. 3. Negate the negative by deliberately li...

On the other hand, the process requires consistent work. “You can make yourself happier just like you can make yourself lose weight,” Dr. Lyubomirsky assured me. “But like eating differently and going to the gym faithfully, you have to put in the effort every day. You have to stay with it.” That last comment seemed instructive about how the elderly have found happiness.

Instead, they’ve elected to stay in those vicinities mentally. They’ve relocated to them psychologically for the same reason they might move physically to Florida or Arizona: for the warming climates they encounter every morning.

Professor Carstensen, who, you’ll recall, found that the elderly have decided to prioritize emotional contentment as a main life goal and, therefore, to turn their attentions systematically toward the positive. She also found that younger individuals have different primary life goals that include learning, developing, and striving for achievement. Accomplishing those objectives requires a special openness to discomforting elements: demanding tasks, contrary points of view, unfamiliar people, and owning mistakes or failures. Any other approach would be maladaptive.

It makes sense, then, that in early and middle age, it can be so hard to turn our minds away from tribulations. To serve our principal aims at those times, we need to be

receptive to the real presence of negatives in order to learn from and deal with them. The problem arises when we allow ourselves to beco...

Even if we’re not ready to take up full-time residence in our most balmy psychological sites, we can use those attention-shifting activities to visit regularly and break the sieges of winter.61

The field of happiness studies has shown us that relatively simple attention-based tactics can help manage our emotional states. Can we use similar methods to manage other desirable states, such as those involving personal achievement and professional success?

He scored in the

top 1 percent of all test takers around the world in each of the three sections of the exam: verbal aptitude, mathematical proficiency, and analytical reasoning. Moreover,

What he was better at was taking standardized tests—in particular the Graduate Record Exam.

Alan realized that by harnessing his speed-reading skills, he could zip through all of the large set of items in any given section of the test and, on a first pass, immediately answer each whose solution was simple or already known to him.

Instead, he spent that crucial time consciously calming his fears and simultaneously building his confidence by reviewing his past academic successes and enumerating his genuine strengths.

“You can’t think straight when you’re scared,” he reminded me, “plus, you’re much more persistent when you’re confident in your abilities.”

he understood where, precisely, to focus his attention but also because as a savvy moment maker, he understood how to do it pre-suasively immediately before the test.

Prior to a mathematics test, researchers asked some Asian American women students to record their gender; others were asked to record their ethnicity. Compared with a sample of Asian American women students who weren’t asked to record either characteristic,

those who were reminded of their gender scored worse, while those reminded of their ethnicity scored better.

The phenomena involved appear to emerge more than automatically. They seem to surface automagically.

READIED AND WAITING The readiness is all. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 5, scene

The answer has to do with a rather underappreciated characteristic of mental activity: its elements don’t just fire when ready; they fire when readied.

This newly enhanced standing in consciousness elevates their capacity to color our perceptions, orient our thinking, affect our motivations, and thereby change our relevant behavior. Second, at the same time, concepts not linked to the opener are suppressed in consciousness, making them less likely than before to receive our attention and gain influence. Rather than being readied for action, they get decommissioned temporarily.

We know from considerable research that playing violent video games incites immediate forms of antisocial behavior.

How early in life can we expect an opener to create such a privileged moment?

Indeed, compared with other subjects who’d seen photographs of two individuals standing apart or of one person alone, those shown the togetherness images were three times more likely to assist the researcher in picking up some items she “accidently” dropped.

data we’ve already reviewed showing that routing initial attention to a depiction of fluffy clouds leads to a preference for comfortable furniture, and that routing it to a depiction of a runner winning a race leads to more workplace achievement, and so on.

Two elements of the togetherness experiment strike me as newly instructive, though. The first got me to whistle under my breath when I read it: the study’s subjects, whose helpfulness tripled, were eighteen months old—hardly able to talk, barely able to review or reflect or reason. Yet the mechanism involved is so fundamental to human functioning that even these infants were powerfully mobilized by it.

Second, its effect on...

spontaneous. Prior exposure to the idea of togetherness sent them rapidly to the researcher’s aid with no...

In one set of studies, giving people “cues of togetherness” increased their enjoyment of working simultaneously on a task, which led to greater persistence and better performance. Thus, when unity is made focal, all kinds of desirable concepts besides helpfulness are readied for action.)

How far? There’s a second question that, if answered confidently, would help us gauge the scope of pre-suasive processes. It concerns the strength of the connections involved: Can any link between two concepts, no matter how distant or tenuous, trigger a privileged moment for the second after the first has been brought to mind? No. There’s an important limit to pre-suasive effects.

A preliminary survey revealed three social norms that people rated as close to, moderately far from, and far from the norm against littering. They were, respectively, the norms for recycling, for turning off lights to conserve energy at home, and for voting.

At random, the vehicles got a handbill with one of four messages: (1) against littering, (2) for recycling, (3) for turning off lights, and (4) for voting.

A message focusing people specifically on the anti-littering norm best equipped them to resist the tendency to litter.

the strength of the association between an opener concept and a related concept will determine the strength of the pre-suasive effect. Therefore, an aspiring pre-suader wishing to prompt an action (helping, let’s say) should find a concept already associated strongly and positively with the action

How manufacturable? But there is another approach that doesn’t require finding a strong existing connection. In fact, it doesn’t require an existing connection at all. Rather, it involves creating a connection from scratch.

Transfer of attraction.

Advertisers know that linking their products to popular celebrities makes the products more popular.

But besides the fact that the device works nonetheless, the takeaway here is that an effective linkage between concepts doesn’t have to be located in prevailing reality. It can be constructed.

Recall that for Pavlov’s dogs, there was no natural connection between the sound of a bell and food;

The evidence is overwhelming that, like Pavlov’s dogs, we can be susceptible to such strategically fashioned pairings and just as clueless about our susceptibility. For instance, to the delight of advertisers, simply superimposing a brand of Belgian beer five times on pictures of pleasant activities such as sailing, waterskiing, and cuddling increased viewers’ positive feelings toward the beer.

Subliminally exposing thirsty people eight times to pictures of happy (versus angry) faces just before having them taste a new soft drink caused them to consume more of the beverage and to be willing to pay three times more for it in the store.