Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter

by Scott Adams

disapproving of Trump’s style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world.

When it comes to complicated issues about economics and foreign affairs, my opinion is that I never have enough data to form competent opinions. Neither does anyone else. My opinion of my own limitations doesn’t match that of any politician. They pretend they have enough information to make informed decisions.

A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.

The ideas that you think about the most are the ones that automatically and irrationally rise in your mental list of priorities.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

As long as people were talking about the wall, Trump was the most important person in the conversation. The Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most.

Some mistakes are just ordinary mistakes. But when you see a consistent stream of “mistakes” from a Master Persuader, be open to the possibility that some of those mistakes are about controlling your focus and energy.

A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.

Remember, filters are not about knowing reality. The role of a filter is limited to making you happy and helping you predict the future. Humans don’t always need to know the true nature of reality in order to live well.

having lots of different explanations is usually a clear tell for cognitive dissonance. Having multiple explanations—no matter how reasonable they sound after the fact—means people are trying to make sense of their observations, and they are generating different illusions to do it.

It is easy to fit completely different explanations to the observed facts. Don’t trust any interpretation of reality that isn’t able to predict.

When your debate opponents retreat to analogies, it is because they have no rational arguments. You won.

There’s a reason your plumber never describes the source of your leak with an analogy. He just points to the problem and says it needs to be repaired or replaced. No one needs an analogy when facts and reason can do the job.

When people realize their arguments are not rational, they attack the messenger on the other side. If you have been well behaved in a debate, and you trigger an oversized personal attack, it means you won.

Being an ordinary jerk might not be a tell for cognitive dissonance. But when you see an attack that seems far angrier than the situation calls for, that’s usually cognitive dissonance.

If your debate opponents retreat to magical thinking about their abilities to detect secret motives and mental problems in strangers from a distance, you won.

People don’t change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense. Humans aren’t wired that way.

Those facts that you think you know from the past might be confirmation bias, and not facts at all.

Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system.

Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality. It only cares that you reproduce.

mass delusions are the norm for humanity, not the exception.

With science, you never know if you are halfway to the truth or already there. Sometimes it looks the same.

People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.

Trump is the best persuader I’ve ever seen. A big reason for his persuasion effectiveness is that he has accumulated a remarkable talent stack.

He wasn’t the smartest person in the race. He wasn’t the most experienced. He wasn’t the best communicator (in traditional terms.) For more than half of the country, he wasn’t even likable. But it didn’t matter. What he did have is one of the best talent stacks you will ever see.

Trump’s talent stack is so strong that I believe he could make almost any basket of policies sound good to the public. I will go so far as to say that Trump could have run as a Democrat, embraced Bernie Sanders’s entire platform, and won the election that way.

persuasion was more important to the outcome than policies; we just perceive it to be the other way around.

Our brains did not evolve to understand reality. We’re all running different movies in our heads. All that matters is whether or not your filter keeps you happy and does a good job of predicting.

Trump’s response to Kelly was funny, strategic, smart, memorable, visually persuasive, thick skinned (he didn’t seem bothered), provocative, and perfectly on brand.

visual persuasion is stronger than oral persuasion. And most of the persuasion stack can be communicated either way.

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words.

Word-thinking usually happens when people are bad at logic but don’t realize it. And that’s most of us, most of the time.

the other side is unlikely to change their opinions just because someone adjusted the definition of a word. Word-thinking simply isn’t persuasive.

Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces others to join you or be framed as the small thinkers.

in terms of persuasion, facts and policies and reason are almost useless.

As long as you have no emotional investment in the topic, reason and facts can be quite persuasive.

But most topics in the real world are emotional.

even our most objective and simple choices acquire emotional dimensions over time because of the people around us.

When you attack a person’s belief, the person under attack is more likely to harden his belief than to abandon it, even if your argument is airtight.

When a decision involves lots of facts, and we have access to all the facts, we are more likely to hallucinate that we used our powers of reason to reach a decision. But when we recognize that we don’t have all the facts, we hallucinate that we used our gut feeling to bridge the gap. In both cases we acted irrationally, and we tried to rationalize it to ourselves after the fact.

In my opinion, change as a stand-alone concept was not a persuasive element in the election. The active part of the persuasion is the change to what. Trump offered the more aspirational persuasion.

A big fear is more persuasive than a small one. A personal fear is more persuasive than a generic national problem. A fear that you think about most often is stronger than one you rarely think about. A fear with a visual component is scarier than one without. A fear you have experienced firsthand (such as a crime) is scarier than a statistic.

Most people think they are good people, even if they sometimes do bad things. If you remind them of their identity, and their aspirations for their identity, you will usually be met with cognitive dissonance and an implied promise to change.

Obviously this method won’t work with kids, or with adults who have cultivated a brand around doing all the wrong things.

voters respond to contrast more than they do to facts and reason.

People are more persuaded by contrast than by facts or reason. Choose your contrasts wisely.

As the old saying goes, people won’t always remember what you said, but they almost always remember how you made them feel.

When you associate any two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time.

having a system instead of a goal. A goal is, by definition, one way to win and infinite ways to lose. A good system gives you lots of ways to win and far fewer ways to fail.

If you can frame your preferred strategy as two ways to win and no way to lose, almost no one will disagree with your suggested path because it is a natural High-Ground Maneuver.