Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

But more telling for me as a persuasion scientist attuned to pre-suasive approaches was how Mr. Buffett began that all-important section. In characteristic fashion, he reestablished his trustworthiness by being up front about a potential weakness: “Now let’s look at the road ahead. Bear in mind that if I had attempted 50 years ago to gauge what was coming, certain of my predictions would have been far off the mark.” Then he did something I’d never seen or heard him do in any public forum. He added, “With that warning, I will tell you what I would say to my family today if they asked me about Berkshire’s future.”

We learned via Marshall McLuhan that the medium can be the message; via the principle of social proof that the multitude can be the message; via the authority principle that the messenger can be the message; and now via the concept of unity that the merger (of self and other) can be the message.

“Because,” he said calmly, “we are Asian, like you.”

When people act in unison, they not only see themselves as more alike, they evaluate one another more positively afterward. Their elevated likeness turns into elevated liking.

Just as it is difficult to think hard about an occurrence while experiencing it emotionally, fully experiencing the occurrence is difficult while parsing it logically.

The first, a quote from Voltaire, is contemptuous: “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.”

tactical: “If you can’t make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them.”

The Arons and their coworkers helped explain this kind of willing assent by showing how extended reciprocal exchanges bind the transactors together.

I helped conduct to investigate the effects of managers’ degree of personal involvement in the creation of a work product. I’d expected that the more involvement managers felt they’d had in generating the final product in concert with an employee, the higher they would rate its quality, which is what we found: managers led to believe that they’d had a large role in developing the end product (an ad for a new wristwatch) rated the ad 50 percent more favorably than did managers led to believe they’d had little developmental involvement—even though the final ad they saw was identical in all cases. In addition, we found that the managers with the greatest perceived involvement rated themselves more responsible for the ad’s quality in terms of their much greater perceived managerial control over their employee, which I’d also expected.

The more the managers attributed the success of the project to themselves, the more they also attributed it to the ability of their employee. I recall, data table in hand, experiencing a moment of surprise—perhaps not as striking as Leopold’s ax-in-hand moment, but a moment of surprise nonetheless. How could supervisors with greater perceived involvement in the development of a work product see themselves and a single coworker on the project as each more responsible for its successful final form? Only 100 percent of personal responsibility can be distributed, right? And if one party’s perceived personal contribution goes up, by simple logic, the work partner’s should go down, not up. I just didn’t get it at the time, but now I think I do. If co-creation causes at least a temporary merging of identities, then what applies to one partner also applies to the other, distributional logic notwithstanding.

Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one’s own identity with another party’s. Providing an opinion or expectation, on the other hand, puts a person in an introspective state of mind, which involves focusing on oneself.

This set of results also clinches for me the wisdom (and the ethicality, if done in an authentic search for useful information) of asking for advice in face-to-face interactions with friends, colleagues, and customers. It should even prove effective in our interactions with superiors.

Honesty ratings by customers and clients of employees they interact with should be part of the employees’ incentive structures. In addition, the ethical reputation of the company as a whole should be measured and included in assessments of yearly performance. Finally, ratings by employees of the firm’s ethical orientation should be a component of senior management’s (and especially the CEO’s) compensation package.

Modern life is becoming more and more like that bus hurtling down the highway: speedy, turbulent, stimulus saturated, and mobile. As a result, we are all becoming less and less able to think hard and well about what best to do in many situations.

Hence, even the most careful-minded of us are increasingly likely to react automatically to the cues for action that exist in those settings. So, given the quickening pace and concentration-disrupting character of today’s world, are we all fated to be bozos on this bus? Not if, rather than raging against the invading automaticity, we invite it in but take systematic control of the way it operates on us. We have to become interior designers of our regular living spaces, furnishing them with features that will send us unthinkingly in the directions we most want to go in those spaces. This approach provides another way (besides making immediate, forceful commitments) to arrange for initially formed preferences to guide our future actions. By assuring that we regularly encounter cues that automatically link to and activate those preferences, we can commission the machinery in our behalf.

The sign that reminded the doctors to protect themselves had no effect on soap and gel use. But the one reminding them to protect their patients increased usage by 45 percent.

(1) other-oriented individuals, strongly motivated to enhance the well-being of their patients and (2) not of the sort we’d have to worry would ever serve their own interests at their patients’ expense.

That result—plus the fact that a reciprocity-based rationale caused the majority to embrace gift taking—implicates the temporarily surfaced rule for reciprocation as a major culprit here. Lastly, these findings tell me that the answer to the question of whether, as a group, MDs are primarily patient-serving or self-serving is . . . yes. They are each, depending on their attentional focus at the time. That’s a conclusion that applies to far more than physicians, whose remarkably elastic preferences serve to illustrate how top-of-mind factors operate on all of us.

It’s also a conclusion that provides a fitting close to this book: In large measure, who we are with respect to any choice is where we are, attentionally, in the moment before the choice. We can be channeled to that privileged moment by (choice-relevant) cues we haphazardly bump into in our daily settings; or, of greater concern, by the cues a knowing communicator has tactically placed there; or, to much better and lasting effect, by the cues we have stored in those recurring sites to send us consistently in desired directions. In each case, the made moment is pre-suasive. Whether we are wary of the underlying process, attracted to its potential, or both, we’d be right to acknowledge its considerable power and wise to understand its inner workings.112