The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others

by Tali Sharot

As I’ll explain in this book, inducing fear is often a weak approach to persuasion; in fact, in most cases, inducing hope is more powerful.

However, under two conditions, fear works well: (a) when what you are trying to induce is inaction and (b) when the person in front of you is already anxious.

The principal idea of this book is that an attempt to change someone’s mind will be successful if it aligns with the core elements that govern how we think.

seven critical factors—priors (as in prior beliefs), emotion, incentives, agency, curiosity, state of mind, and other people—

presenting people with information that contradicts their opinion can cause them to come up with altogether new counterarguments that further strengthen their original view; this is known as the “boomerang effect.”

the greater your cognitive capacity, the greater your ability to rationalize and interpret information at will, and to creatively twist data to fit your opinions.

Let’s explore another possibility—the idea that interpreting information in light of what we already think we know is often the correct approach. On average, when you encounter a piece of data that contradicts what you already know about the world, that piece of data is, in fact, wrong.

We should, generally speaking, evaluate information in relation to what we already know.

What we are about to see is that in order to affect

another person, we need to overcome our own instinct for control and consider the other’s need for agency.

This is because when people perceive their own agency as being removed, they resist. Yet if they perceive their agency as being expanded, they embr...

When we are stressed, we

become fixated on detecting dangers; we focus on what can go wrong. This then creates excessively pessimistic views, which, in turn, can cause us to become overly conservative.