Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

“You have never heard true condescension until you have heard academics pronounce the word popularizer.”

truth!

“Think, Bob: Who do you let walk in and out of your house on their own? Only somebody you trust, right? I want to be associated with trust in those families’ minds.”

The answer has to do with the ruthlessness of channeled attention, which not only promotes the now-focal aspect of the situation but also suppresses all competing aspects of it—even critically important ones.

Monkey colonies aren’t the only environments where residents

The “embedded reporter program”

the thing you should be paying attention to here is the conduct of the war, not the wisdom of it. One conclusion

attention; and what is focal is seen to have causal properties—

Manifestly here, what’s focal seems causal.

I’d been the 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. Let’s say that

conference. The pulling and holding power of my heightened self-focus within those underprivileged moments prevented me from appreciating the event’s merits.2

She never lets herself finish a writing session at the end of a paragraph or even a thought.

In addition, there was something about this discovery that struck me as more than a little curious—something I’ll tee up, unashamedly, as a mystery:

But in this instance, not only were there no such preparations but also after the bell rang, no one moved. In fact, when I tried to end the lecture there, students pelted me with protests. They would not let me stop until I had given them closure on the mystery. I remember thinking, “Cialdini, you’ve stumbled onto dynamite here!”

counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments.

Metaphor Is a Meta-Door (to Change) If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. —Joseph Campbell

raters reading a report attached to a heavy clipboard come to see the topic as more important; and

At the time of this writing, I checked ten comparable lists of the greatest rock-and-roll songs, and none listed either of Rolling Stone’s picks as its number one or number two choice.5

Knowing what to do next wasn’t difficult. Toil on the book was routed home, while I consigned colleague-targeted work to my university office.

There was a type of working space at client headquarters that lent itself to crafting programs that had later turned out particularly well: centrally located rooms with glass walls.

Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down. Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities. Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.

He had taken a course the year before that taught him how to move rapidly through written material without missing its important features.

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

enumerating his genuine strengths.

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.

There are good reasons for the superiority of if/when-then plans:

reaching, we’d be foolish not to take advantage of the pre-suasive leverage that if/when-then plans can provide.5