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November 22, 2016
era of “evidence-based decision making”
they didn’t rely on the legitimate merits of an offer to get it accepted; they recognized that the psychological frame in which an appeal is first placed can carry equal or even greater weight.
I’d recommend declining to participate in surveys that employ this biased form of questioning. Much better are those that use two-sided questions: “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with this brand?” “Are you
frequently the factor most likely to determine a person’s choice in a situation is not the one that counsels most wisely there; it is one that has been elevated in attention (and, thereby, in privilege) at the time of the decision.
Research on cognitive functioning shows us the form of the fee: when attention is paid to something, the price is attention lost to something else.
as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it: For about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an attentional blink,
anything that draws focused attention to itself can lead observers to overestimate its importance.
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message pre-loads it with importance. This
It’s this coverage that leads audience members—by virtue of the greater attention they devote to certain topics—to decide that these are the most important to be taken into consideration when adopting a position.
the amount of news coverage can make a big difference in the perceived significance of an issue among observers as they are exposed to the coverage.
After recognizing the extent of our vulnerability to the focusing illusion, I’ve come at last to appreciate a standard saying of Hollywood press agents: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Managing the Background Suppose you’ve started an
to receive the benefits of focused attention, the key is to keep the focus unitary.
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
In the excitement of a looming opportunity, decision makers are infamous for concentrating on what a strategy could do for them if it succeeded and not enough, or at all, on what it could do to them if it failed. To combat this potentially
“What future events could make this plan go wrong?” and “What would happen to us if it did go wrong?” Decision
Because we typically allot special attention to the true causes around us, if we see ourselves giving such attention to some factor, we become more
Well, right, except for an additional finding that challenges all this thinking: almost no one took the money.
The outcomes were always the same: whomever’s face was more visible was judged to be more causal.
The idea that no innocent person could be persuaded to confess to a crime, especially a serious one, is wrong.
Nothing could change the camera angle’s prejudicial impact—except changing the camera angle itself. The bias disappeared when the recording showed the interrogation and confession from the side, so that the suspect and questioner were equally focal.
consider extensive police questioning unsafe, even for innocent individuals.
rendered them receptive to her plea prior to ever encountering it. In short, an act of pre-suasion was required.
likely to pay attention to and be influenced by stimuli that fit the goal they have for that situation.
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. But use it to put people in an amorous state of mind, and, driven by a consequent desire to stand out, the reverse will occur.
the investigatory reflex. He understood that in order to survive, any animal needs to be acutely aware of immediate changes to its environment, investigating and evaluating these differences for the dangers or opportunities they might present.
termed the orienting response, and scores of studies have enlightened us about it. It isn’t limited to the senses,
She claimed that, in both those arenas, a persuasion-oriented producer, writer, or director needs to be concerned principally with shots and cuts. All else, she said, is just variations and refinements
The communicator who can fasten an audience’s focus onto the favorable elements of an argument raises the chance that the argument will go unchallenged by opposing points of view, which get locked out of attention as a consequence.
Here, then, is another lesson in pre-suasion available for your use: 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
victim of what behavior scientists call the next-in-line effect, and, as a consequence, I have since figured out how to avoid it and even use it on my behalf. You might be able to do the same.
confirming the researchers’ view that when an important outcome is unknown to people, “they can hardly think of anything else.” And
by beginning each lecture with a special kind of unfinished story: a mystery.
the most successful of the pieces each began with a mystery story.
Whereas descriptions require notice and questions require answers, mysteries require explanations. When I challenged students
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.
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.
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.
what Albert Einstein claimed was so remarkable it could be labeled as both “the most beautiful thing we can experience” and “the source of all true science and art.” His contention: the mysterious.
manages their mental associations to our message.
Semin, whose conclusion, in my view, comes down to this: 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.
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.
linguistic devices that researchers have identified for driving attention to one or another aspect of reality. 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,
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
