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Trump is what I call a Master Persuader. That means he has weapons-grade persuasion skills.
Keep in mind that disapproving of Trump’s style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world.
I saw a scary extremism in Trump’s language and policy preferences during the campaign.
I wasn’t invested in Trump’s stated policies because I assumed he would drift toward the acceptable middle once he was elected.
Wrong assumption!
The voters consuming conservative news were convinced that Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate.
I’m already rich. No one owns me. The common business term for that situation is having F-you money. And I have it.
I also have one more thing going for me: I don’t feel shame or embarrassment like normal people. I wasn’t always this way. It’s a learned skill.
Persuasion is all about the tools and techniques of changing people’s minds, with or without facts and reason.
You saw Trump use the intentional wrongness persuasion play over and over, and almost always to good effect.
Adams is assuming Trump was doing this intentionally. Adams’ cognitive dissonance?
It also sucked up media energy that might have focused on political topics he didn’t understand at the same depth as his competitors. Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.
During the presidential campaign, it seemed that candidate Trump was making one factual error after another.
It was mind-boggling. No one was quite sure if the problem was his honesty, his lack of homework, or some sort of brain problem.
FACTS ARE WEAKER THAN FICTION If you have ever tried to talk someone out of their political beliefs by providing facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s because people think they have their own facts. Better facts. And if they know they don’t have better facts, they change the subject. People are not easily switched from one political opinion to another. And facts are weak persuasion.
Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient.
The average consumer of political news can hold only a handful of issues in his head. Any of the lesser topics get flushed out of memory. So Trump can invent any reality he wants
Keeping a flood of lies is part of Trump’s tactics
A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.
I encourage you to remain skeptical about any details in this book,
The truth is that facts and reason don’t have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.
After the election results came in, both halves of the country accused the other half of being irrational. As a trained hypnotist, I can tell you with confidence that both halves were right.
my How to Fail book was about persuading yourself, and this book is about persuading others.
Hypnotists see the world differently. From our perspective, people are irrational 90 percent of the time but don’t know it.
you must understand two concepts: cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. These two concepts explain almost everything that puzzles you about why people act the way they do.
The Persuasion Filter’s view of the world is that we’re irrational 90 percent of the time. And one of the biggest sources of this irrationality is cognitive dissonance.
I had over 100,000 social media followers, and they tweeted and retweeted anything interesting I said. For a year I had been one of them, gaining their trust. When I was ready to lead, they were primed to follow. All the elements were in place for my persuasion to make a huge dent in the national consciousness,
It is nearly impossible to measure one person’s persuasion in this sort of situation. All I know for sure is that I did my best.
the most frequent tells for cognitive dissonance on Twitter take this form: [A mocking word or acronym] + [an absurd absolute] or . . . [A mocking word or acronym] + [a personal insult that is more aggressive than the situation seems to warrant]
when you see an attack that seems far angrier than the situation calls for, that’s usually cognitive dissonance.
You can sometimes spot your own cognitive dissonance via the same set of tells you would observe in others. But that is harder because the nature of cognitive dissonance is that the person experiencing it can’t see it for what it is.
Confirmation bias is the human reflex to interpret any new information as being supportive of the opinions we already hold. And it doesn’t matter how poorly the new information fits our existing views.
Trump’s supporters are just as delusional. They see a lack of evidence as proof of innocence.
Most people know what confirmation bias is, if not by its name, then certainly by personal experience. We all know how hard it is to change a person’s mind about anything important, even when all of the facts are on our side.
Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system.
your brain takes the path of least resistance and instantly interprets your observations to fit your existing worldview. It’s just easier.
mass delusions are the norm for humanity, not the exception. Don’t believe me? It is easy to check. Just ask your neighbors about their religious and political views.
Do you remember when millions of Americans believed President Obama was a secret Muslim? That was a mass delusion.
To be clear, I am not saying the majority of scientists are wrong about climate science.
if an ordinary idiot doubts a scientific truth, the most likely explanation for that situation is that the idiot is wrong.
I’ll concede that citizen Trump did not understand the science of climate change. That’s true of most of us.
Once you see with your own eyes the power of persuasion, and how easily people can be reprogrammed, it changes everything you do.
Love, romance, and sex are fundamentally irrational human behaviors, and it helps to see them that way.
Once I established that trust and credibility, I started to lead them to a new way of viewing Trump’s capabilities.
With that pacing behind me, I could lead my readers even further.
Notice I started by fully embracing the criticism from the other side. If you debate the criticism, you stay in a child frame. If you accept it and make a case for learning and improving, you move to the adult high ground and leave the children behind. Whenever you see claims of hypocrisy, you are also likely to see an opportunity for the High-Ground Maneuver.
We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t.
facts and policies and reason are almost useless. The exception to this rule is when there is no emotional content to a decision and you have all the information you need. In those cases, we can use our capacity for reason.
As long as you have no emotional investment in the topic, reason and facts can be quite persuasive. Once you remove emotion from the decision, reason and facts are all you have to go on.
most topics in the real world are emotional.
Your illusion of being a rational person is supported by the fact that sometimes you do act rationally. All the little things you do every day are probably rational. You brush your teeth to avoid cavities, you set your alarm clock to wake up on time, and so on. So your daily experience of living involves making one rational decision after another. You also believe—incorrectly—that you are rational when you make the big decisions about love and money and lifestyle. But that’s mostly a result of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.
If the details of the policies mattered to people’s decisions, I have a hard time imagining Trump getting elected.
It literally didn’t matter what policies either person brought to the table. People made up their minds based on biases alone.
