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September 25, 2018
One conclusion from research we’ve covered in this chapter is that issues that gain attention also gain presumed importance.
The tendency to presume that what is focal is causal holds sway too deeply, too automatically, and over too many types of human judgment.
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.
The communicator 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. Consider how a
In other words, cuts are crucial to persuasive success because they can be manipulated to bring into focus the feature of a message the persuader believes to be most convincing—by shifting the scene to that feature.
They insert novelty into the appeal—that is, something designed to appear distinctive (original or unfamiliar or surprising) which also works well to attract attention.
they ask us in some type of questionnaire to evaluate the quality of their offerings without asking us to evaluate their rivals’ comparable offerings.
There is no question that information about the self is an exceedingly powerful magnet of attention.
when you have a good case to make, you can employ—as openers—simple self-relevant cues (such as the word you) to predispose your audience toward a full consideration of that strong case before they see or hear it.41
instructors advise participants that to convince others to accept a message, it is necessary to use language that manages the recipients’ thoughts, perceptions, or emotional reactions.
Gün Semin,
the main purpose of speech is to direct listeners’ attention to a selected sector of reality. Once that is accomplished, the listeners’ existing associations to the now-spotlighted sector will take over to determine the reaction.
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
employing language that orients recipients to those regions of reality stocked with associations favorable to our view.
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
particular wordings that link to targeted thoughts.
“Your presentation is not to include bullet points, and you are not to tell us how to attack our influence problems.”
“Oh, you can keep them in; you just have to call them something else.”
“We’ve replaced business targets with business goals.
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.
Since Aristotle’s Poetics (circa 350 BCE), communicators have been advised to use metaphor to get their points across.
the use of metaphor has its critics, complaining that it is often misleading.
Recall that new psycholinguistic analysis suggests that the main function of language is not to express or describe but to influence—something
persuasion, 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.
the crime surge as a spreading virus infecting the city that must be stopped.
